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Hannan: Let’s Preserve Unrepresentative Government for the Sake of Representative Government

The single most important feature of democracy is this: that voters regularly get a chance to turn the rascals out. Think for a moment about the countries that don’t enjoy representative government – Cuba, say, or Iran – and you’ll see why it matters. Conversely, the chief argument against coalitions, and electoral reforms that give […]

The single most important feature of democracy is this: that voters regularly get a chance to turn the rascals out. Think for a moment about the countries that don’t enjoy representative government – Cuba, say, or Iran – and you’ll see why it matters.

Conversely, the chief argument against coalitions, and electoral reforms that give rise to coalitions, is this: that they tend to ensure that most parties are in power most of the time. ~Daniel Hannan

Granted, I haven’t had much interest in Hannan’s views since he declared his devotion to the cause of Oliver Cromwell. Pardon me if I tend not to take seriously lectures on democracy and representative government from an admirer of the Lord Protector, especially when he tries to cast the argument for coalition government as the beginning of the path to dictatorship!

Leave all that aside and just consider whether it makes sense to say that coalition governments are poor examples of representative government. In reality, coalition governments represent a broader cross-section of the electorate and include a greater variety of political perspectives than a majority government formed by one party. For that reason, they tend to be weaker and less effective governments, which makes them poor candidates for paving the way to despotism. The present British system rewards the major parties disproportionately because of the concentrated nature of their support and their established advantages as the two largest parties, even though at the present time the three largest parties apparently have almost equal levels of support from the electorate.

Hannan is attacking European PR systems for producing the result of the revolving-door of governments that are always headed by one of the two major parties, but this is actually the result he would very much like to see in Britain under a different system. As the second-largest party, the Tories are supposed to form the next government if the electorate has rejected Labour, and that’s all there is to it. Hannan is defending a fairly unrepresentative electoral system in the name of representative government, and he would like to see the wishes of millions of voters frustrated in the name of democracy.

Hannan mentions European protest parties, but fails to acknowledge that in Britain it is the Liberal Democrats who are filling the role of the protest parties in the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and elsewhere. The current enthusiasm for the upstarts is the result of profound disgust and weariness with the major parties, just as we have seen all over Europe in the last ten years. Hannan also stresses the importance of a clear division between government and opposition in order to have accountability and to keep the “state small and the citizen free.” He must think that his audience has been asleep for the last decade. On matters of opposing government policy on the trampling of civil liberties and recklessly committing their country to war, it has not been the Conservative leadership that has done very much to resist the excesses of the Blair-Brown years. Indeed, concerning the invasion of Iraq the supposed opposition party was even more supportive of government policy than many of the members of the governing party. How will the electorate be holding politicians accountable if the next government is filled entirely with Tory supporters of the Iraq war? Is it not a telling sign of Tory acquiescence in Labour’s encroachments on liberties that it is only now in a last-minute appeal to Lib Dem voters that the Tories have started taking a stronger stand on undoing some of those encroachments?

Many of the ills Hannan ascribes here to PR systems are already present in the Westminster system, and many of the things he claims that the Westminster system helps to protect have been trampled on with the support or acquiescence of his own party. As approximately a third of the electorate has found the major parties seriously wanting, Hannan would like to keep that third as underrepresented as possible to ensure that British political duopoly survives in spite of its manifest failures.

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