The FishTank

After a lengthy sabbatical, the FishTank is back, attempting to go beyond other blogs by daring to be constructive about as well as critical of our society. Since the political landscape of the last few weeks has been somewhat littered with the corpses of Westminster’s cosy assumptions, it’s a little hard to know which particular beast to bury first. Should I assault the duck houses and lay siege to the moated manors of the Conservatives, flip my lid about Labour’s taxpayer-funded attempts to profit from the property market or run with Vince Cable’s hunt as he calls for the head of Alistair Darling? Perhaps that’s too easy. I start today, therefore, with a look at Nick Clegg’s new old idea – proportional representation. Is it, as some believe, a panacea for all our political ills, or is it just a cynical ploy by a party who see it as their only way into power?

One thing it certainly isn’t is an obvious way out of the expenses fiasco. It’s hard to see how the representative balance of Wesminster could influence the venality of its incumbents. So why bring it up now? It’s clear that in shifting the debate, Nick Clegg has displayed an opportunism of which – let’s be honest – none of us believed him capable. And he has led the reform agenda: Cameron was quick to follow with his own initiatives, Brown slowly followed with his vague aphorisms about commitees to investigate possible future reform; everybody has taken the chance to leap onto the passing bandwagon in the hope it might bear them out from the dangerous country in which they find themselves.

Of course it won’t do that either. Wesminster may be blind to the fact, but the nature and intensity of public anger over the expenses is a new and dangerous thing. People who never even batted an eyelid over the Iraq war, who may not have even bothered to vote in 1997; these people are talking politics as never before. And they aren’t happy.

Yes, most people already suspected MPs of being dodgy, but to have it confirmed – and on such a scale – is like having suspicions about your daughter’s sex-life confirmed by finding her blue movie debut in the local Blockbuster. And whilst even if an MP did admit fault, apologise and give the money back it might not quiet the clamour, the insistences of MPs that everything was ‘within the rules’ serves only to intensify it. People are livid. And these are people who, whilst hardly political sophisticates, nonetheless fail to see any connection between how their MPs are elected and how deeply their snouts are in the trough.

But that’s not to say it’s a bad time to look at the issue. Certain ideas, such as the right of recall, do have a certain attraction at a time when people are desperate to wreak revenge on people who see political office as little more than an expense account. Redressing the balance of power between the Prime Minister and Westminster, as David Cameron suggests, also sounds positive in the light of the presidential Blair and Brown tenures.

Proportional Representation is not quite so obvious. For those who don’t know the system, it works something like this: people cast their votes at election not for a person, but a party. On the surface this doesn’t seem much different to what happens now: most people have little engagement with their local MP and vote based on what they see or read about the more prominent party members – usually the leadership. Where PR differs is that, when the votes are counted, it is not the local MP who benefits. Instead, parties operate lists either regionally or nationally, and MPs are selected from these lists to serve in accordance with the proportion of votes cast. If voters are allowed to cast more than one preference, their second and third choices may also have some impact on the numbers elected.

And this is why it’s attractive to Nick Clegg. In election after election, the Lib Dems have come second in seats up and down the country, whether because people want to protest at the sitting member, or because they genuinely want the Lib Dems to win. On paper, PR would increase the number of Lib Dem MPs significantly, possibly even creating a semi-permanent Lib Dem majority.

On paper. Because voting intentions are a bit more complicated than that. Like particles in quantum physics, people alter their actions based on how those actions are observed. Someone who might vote Lib Dem in protest might reconsider if they thought it could actually make a difference. In all likelihood the Lib Dems would see significant gains in their first election under PR; it’s what they did with that advantage determines whether the advantage would remain.

But even that would, we are told, be an improvement. Under ‘First Past the Post’ we have had nothing but Conservative and Labour governments, after all. This can’t be representative of the will of the people. People living in safe seats do nothing to alter the stability of the government, whilst those few in marginals have all the say.

Only that’s not strictly true, of course. The reason we appear to have a two-party system is simply that the debate of the age is generally fairly one-dimensional, whether it is Protestant against Catholic, as in the Seventeenth Century, landed gentry against mercantile interests as in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth or the working masses against oppressive industry as in the early to mid-twentieth. In all of these cases the era’s politics have been very much them and us. Even in the last few years, the debate has been mostly framed in terms of upholding public services against reducing the tax burden. In such a system any third party would struggle to find an unique voice.

Which is why it took the Labour Party so long to achieve government. The collapse of the Liberal Party – Nick Clegg’s forebears – in the 1920’s created a climate in which the political axis could be blown over. Suddenly, the opposition were the Labour Party with an empowerment agenda for the working class. The Tories were forced to change their own approach to deal with it or risk appearing irrelevant. When Labour went into the wildnerness in 1979, a Lib Dem party who managed to frame a relevant debate could have been the party to take office in 1997 instead of Tony Blair’s rebranded New Labour juggernaut. Even four years ago, when the Conservatives had just lost another election and were being treated as irrelevant; if, then, the Lib Dems had gone on the offensive over civil liberties and political reform, they could have caught the public mood and, by now, be on course for number 10.

So would things be better under PR? Probably not. If you have a government of factions and interest groups what tends to happen is that the issue lacks narrative. Shifting coalitions based on internal politicking lead not to constructive policy based on a central idea, but to a weather-vane following whichever way the political wind seems to be blowing. Europe, where PR is a more potent force, has attempted to address this by finding bigger issues that can seize the narrative voice by the jugular (one of the reasons for climate change politics in the EU), but even this has failed to override the various conflicting interests and what little consensus there was has fallen apart under the bigger issue of global recession.

Nick Clegg probably knows all this. PR is, for him, a means to an end and, if Labour do follow the polls into third place after the next general election, you can guarantee the subject will slowly die away. Cynical? Perhaps. But consider this: the right of recall is another Clegg attempt to steal headlines. It sounds great: if five percent of an MPs constituents are unhappy they can demand a bye-election. Now consider this: if we have PR and MPs are chosen from shortlists by party leadership based on votes across the country, which five percent of the people need to vote to get which MP out? The Lib Dems are often criticised for their inconsistency, but this must be the first time they’ve tried to sell us a policy that is actually mutally contradictory.