Jill Stephenson
Let them hang

With a general election imminent, it seems that a great many British people fear that the result will be a hung parliament. Politicians, political pundits and members of the public express horror at the prospect of the next general election resulting in no single party having an overall majority. For my part, I have for decades cast my vote effectively for a hung parliament.
     What is so wonderful about 'strong government' by a single party with a clear majority? What is so wonderful about a single party 'winning' a clear majority by attracting a minority of the vote? Indeed, a single party can wrest victory from its adversary in an election by winning a relatively small number of votes in a few marginal constituencies. That is in the nature of the 'first past the post system', where a constituency candidate who wins a minority of the votes cast (to say nothing of the votes withheld by those who didn't bother to vote) can 'win' the seat.
     In Scotland, of course, we worry less about this. We currently have a hung parliament in Edinburgh, although in this case a minority government has been able to function, up to a point. We have a hung parliament because we have proportional representation (PR), better described as fairer voting. Curiously, there are even Conservative MSPs (well, one has expressed a strong view about this to me) who are opposed to PR. How odd. The 'first past the post' system virtually obliterated the Conservative Party as a parliamentary party in Scotland. Only PR for the Scottish Parliament has made Conservatives politically visible here again, allowing them a significant representation at Holyrood, with 16 seats – the same as the Lib Dems, who have rather more Scottish seats at Westminster than the Conservatives as a result of 'first past the post'.

Yet people still demonise PR by raising the spectre of the Weimar Republic. It is true that Weimar's political system became paralysed after 1930, but the true cause of that was not PR. In the first national election in the new Republic, in 1919, three parties, which were known at the time as the 'Weimar coalition' – the Social Democrats (SPD), the (liberal) Democrats and the Catholic Centre Party – commanded about 75% of the vote and therefore of the seats in the Reichstag. They formed a viable governing coalition, which was remarkable given that the SPD was still nominally a Marxist party and the Centre party was Catholic.
     The problems which beset this system, once it was established, began with the irresponsibility of SPD and Centre Party chancellors, who resigned, respectively, over the imposition of the peace treaty, the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919 and the result of the plebiscite to divide Upper Silesia between Germany and Poland in 1921. What on earth was the point of that? There was also political radicalism at both ends of the spectrum, with attempted coups by both communists on the one hand and ultra-nationalists and Nazis on the other. Then an increasing number of parties emerged and contested elections, fragmenting the political infrastructure and leading to there being about five parties in a governing coalition, which was a recipe for instability.
     Economic problems plagued the Republic, and in 1930 Heinrich Brüning's government formed a government without a parliamentary majority and including parties – the Economic Party and the Bavarian People's Party – which would support the government only as long as their special interests were satisfied. Thereafter, no chancellor could command a majority without the National Socialists, who were, as Alan Bullock said long ago (1952), 'jobbed into office by a backstairs intrigue': the conservative establishment invited Hitler to lead a government, in the deluded belief that they would provide the leaders and Hitler the mass support of voting footsoldiers.
     There was much that was wrong with Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, but the blame for it cannot be laid squarely on the system of proportional representation. Germany was a politically polarised country, with a flight to extremes in the depression and the collapse of the parties of the centre ground. It was regionally polarised between north and south. There was intergenerational conflict. And there were two major competing religions, Evangelical (Protestant) and Catholic, whose political influence was expressed through the German National People's Party and the Centre Party, respectively.
     Above all, there were far too few politicians who understood the concept of a 'loyal opposition' where parties not in government accept the constitution but campaign against the government of the day. And by 1932, the two parties who openly opposed the constitution of the Weimar Republic, the Communists and the Nazis, commanded a narrow majority of the vote – not that they were prepared to work together in coalition.
     After the war, the German Federal Republic's founders sought to learn the lessons of the fragmented system of Weimar. When its new leaders created the postwar democratic system in 1949, they did not abandon PR. But they put in place a safeguard, so that the dozens of tiny parties that had disfigured the Weimar system and claimed seats in the Reichstag would not be replicated. That safeguard was and remains the 5% rule. To be represented in the Bundestag, a party must attract 5% of the total vote. This rule prevented the neo-Nazi National Democrats from achieving representation in the Bundestag, although they came close in 1969 with 4.7%.
     At the same time, it had looked as if the third party – the liberal Free Democrats, after the larger Social Democrats and the Christian grouping (Christian Democrats and Christian Social Union) – would be excluded from the Bundestag, although they had for most of the previous 20 years been governing coalition partners. But they scraped in, with 5.3% of the vote. There are, then, ways of mitigating the perceived 'evils' of PR.
    
It would be beneficial for political life in Britain if the power of the big party machines was hobbled, much as breaking up the large banks would be beneficial. A single party in government uses the whips' office to ensure compliance with the executive on the part of members of parliament who are the elected representatives of their constituents but who carry pagers so that they are electronically tagged by the whips and instructed on how to vote – and threatened, sometimes savagely, if they show signs of independent-mindedness. The main opposition party does much the same.
     That the executive has become far too powerful in recent decades owes much to the 'first past the post' system where the winner takes all and majorities are jealously guarded. If there is to be a real reform of parliament – that is, if pigs become airborne – it will recoup the evident democratic deficit in our Westminster system only if a system – and there are several to choose from – of proportional representation is introduced.