Let us suppose it’s July 2005 and we have just had a General Election in the U.K. which has resulted in a hung Parliament. Let us further suppose that the Tories and the LibDems are willing to work together to form a coalition, the price of which is at least a referendum on Proportional Representation (PR) if not actual implementation thereof.
One of the benefits of the current system is that each MP is personally accountable to their constituents. Can we keep that and have PR? Well, we could reform the Upper House (the House of Lords) which each successive government endeavours to stuff with their own people. Suppose we had an Upper House elected by PR. Would the LibDem’s bite? What about the Parliament Act? What about other ramifications?
“Personal accountability” is lost under PR only if it is done on a straight party-list basis, as in Israel and Ireland (and Russia, before too long). It’s my understanding (correct me if I’m wrong) that proposals being considered to elect the House of Commons by PR would use a multi-member-district system. Five boroughs, each returning one member, would be merged into one borough returning a five-member delegation – and at least one of them almost certainly would be somebody of your own party, whom you, as a borough resident, could feel comfortable approaching with your problems.
Ireland, which has a highly complex PR system, does indeed have accountability - as far as I can tell, there is more than one TD (MP) per constituency.
IMO, the idea that MPs are personally responsible to their constituents is overstated and overrated. So, even if that was further diluted, it would not be a great loss.
I don’t know is it has other aspects to it, but the reason that the Parliament Act has been in the news recently is that it allows the (elected) House of Commons to force through legislation, even if the (unelected) House of Lords does not assent. This is very rarely invoked, but will be used to pass the law banning fox hunting which has been consistently voted down by the Lords. Presumably, if the upper chamber was an elected body, this would need to be amended.
The Parliament Act of 1911 was the result of a series of impasses between the Houses of Lords and of Commons over controversial Bills, notably the Budget of 1909, and over Home Rule for Ireland. This culminated in a threat by the Prime Minister, Asquith, that he would, if necessary, call upon the King to create a large number of Liberal Peers and swamp the Conservative majority in the Lords unless they agreed to accept statutory limitations on their power to reject Bills passed by the Commons. Faced with the prospect of a permanent Liberal majority in their midst the House surrendered and accepted the Parliament Act.
In 1949 the Attlee Government forced through a second Parliament Act, using the first Parliament Act to do it, limiting their powers further, in order to get through its nationalisation of the steel industry.
Apart from this the Parliament Acts were little used until 1990, since when they have been used repeatedly to force through government Bills.
see http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Parliament_Act
Some time soon after the 1997 victory, the government commissioned a very detailed report into electoral reform, which would include a significant PR base while retaining the link between MPs and constituencies. I can’t remember the details, but they’re out there somewhere. Funnily enough, a 179-seat majority was enough to make the Labour party forget about it completely.
Personal accountability is a big issue, at least for me. When we vote in an election, we don’t vote for a party but a candidate who becomes a MP. That candidate is usually a member of a major party. But by this means we keep them focussed on their core responsibility - their constituents. There have been several high-profile cases of high-ranking politicians who lost their own seats through not paying enough attention to their own constituents - Portillo comes to mind - and having a party list system as we had for the Euro elections would mean that such would be unlikely to be ousted.
The single-member-district system is naturally bipolar – its mechanics favor big parties, so everyone who wants to be involved in politics has an incentive to join one, with the result that the major parties become “big tents” housing a wide range of political viewpoints. If that were to change in the UK – is it possible Labour would split up? Perhaps into a neoliberal wing led by Blair (or someone similar) and an old-style socialist wing led by Livingstone (or someone similar)?
UK MPs are not particularly accountable to their constituents. Because each constituency returns only one MP, and because the MP with the largest number of votes is returned even if a clear majority of the voters have actually voted for other candidates, there are a large number of “safe seats” in the UK parliament – possibly more than half the seats are safe seats. Constituents who are unhappy with their MP are unable to express this, except by voting for a party with whose policies they may disagree. They are forced to give a single composite answer to two unrelated questions. This puts a barrier in the way of voters expressing unhappiness with the personal qualities of their MP by voting against him.
Whoever is selected as the candidate by the dominant party in a safe seat will become the MP; this is a sure a thing as anything can be in the world of politics. A large proportion, and possibly a majority, MPs are therefore accountable primarily to the party officials who select candidates, and only secondarily to their constituents.
Despite what Brainglutton says, Ireland does not have a party list system. There are multi-member constituencies, but voters vote for individual candidates in the order of their preference, not for party lists, and they can and do split their votes between parties – i.e. I give my first preference to a candidate from party A, then my second preference to a candidate from party B, my third to a candidate from party A, etc.
Even if a party can be confident of winning at least (say) two seats in a particular constituency, it can never dictate which of its candidates will win the seats (except by running only two candidates, which it will never do if there is even the remotest prospect of winning three seats). The result is that candidates from a particular party are competing among themselves for votes, and this makes them extremely attentive to the needs and wishes of the constituents. Irish parliamentarians spend a much greater amount of time in their constituencies than do their UK counterparts, and they receive vastly more mail from constituents.
Whether this is good or bad is debateable, but it is certainly not the case that the UK electoral system makes MPs accountable to their constituencies more effectively than a PR system like Ireland’s.
Of course the reason for this is that the Irish parliament doesn’t sit as many days as the UK parliament does, which is one of the most common criticisms of it.
It’s true that there’s nothing in the UK system that forces MPs to be accountable once elected - but in the vast majority of cases, they do take seriously their moral obligation to represent all their constituents on local issues.
They may take it seriously as a moral obligation, but there’s no practical incentive to do so, and no sanction for failing to do so.
I recall - some years ago - seeing a senior British politican interviewed. It was a kind of respectful retrospective of his career. He made the point that he had always been attentive to constituents, and that he had tried to spend at least one weekend every month in his constituency. He evidently felt that this was a considerable favour to his constituents (and so, apparently, did they; they returned him election after election).
Any Irish parliamentarian who “tried” to spend as little as one weekend a month in his constituency would certainly have a very short career.
Irish parliamentarians (ratio: about 1 parliamentarian to 25,000 citizens reportedly receive roughly <i>ten times</I> the constituency mail that UK parliamentarians (ratio roughly 1:60,000) do.
Of course, political and parliamentary culture isn’t necessarily all down to the electoral system, but I do think it plays a large part. And, whatever else we can say, the British electoral system certianly doesn’t <i>require</I> most parliamentatians to be attentive or accountable to constituents in the way that the Irish system does. qts asked if the UK could keep accountability to constintuents and have PR; the answer is that - if you want it - you can have much, much more accountability to constituents with PR than with the current UK system.
This is disingenuous. A MP may pay scant attention to his constituency once elected, but he’s going to have some real explaining to do to get re-elected. Remember Portillo.
Not necessarily. An MP who is inattentive to his constituents risks losing his seat, but only if his consituents are so upset with him that they will vote in large numbers for a party to which they are politically opposed in order to register their disapproval. This is a considerable hurdle for most voters which offers the MP a signficant degree of protection, and it is rare for a sitting MP to lose a “safe seat” through inattention to the constituency. That’s why they’re called “safe seats”.
Contrast the position in Ireland, where a voter who is angry at a TD from (say) Fianna Fail for being inattentive to the constituency can vote for another candidate from the same party. No sacrifice of principle, no wrestling with conscience is involved. There is no danger that the vote well help to elect a government to which the voter is politically opposed. This is a much easier protest to register with a vote. Naturally, in these circumstances, Irish voters are much more willing to vote against a sitting member from a party which they generally support.
I note your Portillo example, but the occasional counter-example doesn’t disprove the generality. It should be remembered that Portillo lost his seat in an election which saw a historic swing against the Conservative Party nationally, and quite a number of seats considered to be safe turned out not to be. It is also possible that some at least of those who voted against him did so not because he was inattentive to the constituency, but because he was widely seen as disloyal to his own party leadership, and because he had been almost univerally demonised in the press.
The danger to a MP is not just from his constituents but also his local party. The MP must have the support of his local party and committee. Which means he has to do things for his constituency - or they’ll deselect him and choose someone else because they want to stay in power too.
A better example would be the Wyre Forest result last time where the electors bucked the trend and tossed out their Labour M.P. who had dismissed their campaign to keep the local hospital open, electing an Independent on the ‘keep-our-hospital-open’ ticket instead.
What is the likelihood that the LibDems will be able to acquire enough seats to hold the balance of power?
I know it’s happened a number of times over the years (not sure exactly when or how often, but more than once).
Do they still have a substantial following, even though a very small Parliamentary representation, as was the case back in the late 70s and early 80s when I was reading up on British politics?
They currently have 55 out of 659 seats, which they will point out doesn’t reflect their share of the popular vote, but nobody else gets very excited about this. They propped up a lame-duck Labour administration at the end of the '70s for a time. Other than that they haven’t had a hand in government since the wartime coalition.
