05.11.1998

Opportunity to fight

The Jenkins report on electoral reform is an important document - not just for the bourgeois parties, but also for us. As communists, we have no illusions about bourgeois democracy. We know it is a sham, an ideological mystification behind which lurks the reality of class rule. Far from empowering the people, parliament serves as an instrument to oppress them - democratic though it may be in form, in content it is no more than an elective dictatorship. Nonetheless, the CPGB has stood candidates in parliamentary and other elections and we shall do so again.

The philistine and immature left sees in this approach a contradiction where there is none. Of course, we treat with contempt all the paraphernalia of parliamentary cretinism, with its pseudo-gladiatorial combat between the establishment parties - all of whom, give or take a few nuances, are in business to promote capitalism. For us, elections and participation in bourgeois parliaments represent a weapon - not only are they valuable instruments of propaganda and agitation, but also a means of getting in touch with the mass of the people and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of our organisation.

It is with these considerations in mind that comrades should study Jenkins and analyse its implications for bourgeois democracy in Britain. In this article we only have space to consider two areas. First, its significance for the major bourgeois parties; second, its likely impact on the disposition of political forces in parliament, if and when it is implemented.

In the first place, Jenkins raises some interesting political dilemmas for all the major parties: Blair needs electoral reform, but not yet - his vision of a ‘radical’ 21st century dominated by the ‘centre-left’ demands it, but to push for it now, given Labour’s invincible majority and excellent prospects for the next election, would mean unnecessarily exposing divisions that run right through the parliamentary party from the cabinet downwards; Ashdown needs it now - to sustain his credibility as leader and to give the Liberal Democrats some hope for the next election, but since Blair has all the cards, Ashdown will not get it; the Tories, who perceive themselves as the most likely losers from any change in the status quo, are dead set against it, but playing King Canute will also exact a political price.

It is Ashdown for whom the Jenkins report represents not only a long-term opportunity, but also an acute embarrassment. What is an undoubted lifeline for his party may turn into a noose for his own political fortunes. After the 1997 election, his principal argument for persuading his party to get into bed with Labour in an informal coalition was that he could induce Labour to honour its unambiguous manifesto commitment to conduct a referendum on electoral reform before the next election. It is pretty clear now that this is not going to happen. The Liberal Democrats must wonder whether the sacrifice of their virtue was worth it after all. More to the point, they will be compelled yet again wearily to march up and down the hill of an inequitable system that has brought them nothing but unfulfilled dreams.

Adept as he is at making the best of a losing position, even Ashdown cannot disguise the poverty and powerlessness of his party’s situation. Obliged by reality to shift his stance, he now maintains that “he would not regard postponement as a breach of faith if there were no good reasons” (Breakfast with Frost November 1). The “good reasons” are already taking shape, in the form of a face-saving plan hatched by Blair and Ashdown to include measures for further reform of the House of Lords in the planned referendum, measures that would inevitably take up a lot of time in discussion and drafting. Ashdown even has the cheek to tell us that he “is not in the business of closing off options” (ibid) - as if he had any options to “close off” - except perhaps that of breaking off the engagement with Blair and taking himself and his party into the wilderness.

Blair and Labour are confronted by challenges of a different kind. Their motive for enshrining a commitment to electoral reform in the 1997 election manifesto was prudential: though he had every reason to be confident of victory, Blair needed to ensure Liberal Democrat support in the event of a close contest. In the event, May 1 1997 changed everything. Labour’s landslide victory and huge parliamentary majority based on a mere 43% of the national vote - itself another eloquent reflection of the inequities of the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system - meant that he could deal with the Liberal Democrats from a position of overwhelming superiority. Another consequence of 1997 was the Tories’ panic-stricken election of a leader so inept that he has managed to open up all their old festering wounds and stoke up what amounts to open civil war in his own party over the question of Europe.

Against this backdrop, it is difficult to conceive of any circumstances in which Blair can lose the next election under FPTP. He will almost certainly find himself with a reduced majority, but the chances of defeat seem so unlikely as to be negligible. Of course, Blair wants and needs the Liberal Democrats in the long term as coalition partners. Hence he will do everything he can - short of implementing Jenkins now - to keep them on board. But he has “good reasons” of his own for procrastination.

Foremost among them is the existence of major divisions in Labour’s ranks over the whole question of FPTP versus some form of PR. It is doubtful whether even Blair could muster a majority in his own cabinet in support of reform: Prescott and Straw are against it and others, like Margaret Beckett, are pronounced ‘sceptics’. In the parliamentary party some 100 members are supposedly prepared to back Stuart Bell’s First Past The Post group, which is already mobilising support for an attempt to overturn Jenkins at the next party conference. According to one report in The Daily Telegraph, Bell has even begun discussions with the Tory chairman, Michael Ancram, in order to coordinate cross-party opposition to reform and has plans to raise a £200,000 war chest for the fight (October 31). As someone with no promotion prospects and a large private fortune, Bell is unlikely to be cowed by the bovver boys of Millbank. He could cause Labour much trouble in the months ahead.

Small wonder, therefore, that Blair’s response to Jenkins was not exactly effusive: earlier he was said to be ‘unpersuaded’ of the case for reform at Westminster (an interesting sidelight on the seriousness of Labour’s manifesto commitment); now he says of the Jenkins report: “I welcome it warmly. The report makes a well-argued and powerful case for the system it recommends” (The Guardian October 30). Straw’s initial assessment, that the well-leaked report was “more complicated than the government had expected”, strained credulity, but it served as a suitable pretext for insisting on a protracted debate about the whole issue. Significantly, the government’s official spokesperson was obliged to brief the press against the cabinet opponents of Jenkins, who were satisfied that the report had been “kicked into the long grass”, but his assurances that “we are not kicking it off into the far distance” rang hollow.

The “collective position” or party line promulgated by Downing Street and Millbank is that

“there must be a debate, whatever people’s different views are ... Nobody is going to shut their mouths, but equally nobody will be raising the banner for one side or the other. This is a united and disciplined government and the cabinet will be united and disciplined behind the line” (The Guardian October 30).

The Tories see the implementation of Jenkins as a serious threat, and Hague has pledged that he will wage ‘the battle of his life’ against what he calls a “dog’s breakfast”. The gist of the Tory case can be found in their house journal, The Daily Telegraph: “The crown of Lord Jenkins’ ambition is to make the 21st century ... one in which Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown can share government until decrepitude, rather than anything so vulgar as voters’ wishes deprives them of it.” The paper goes on to allege that Jenkins, “the grandfather of Blairism”, is seeking to “gerrymander the Conservatives into lasting opposition” (October 30). A similar line is taken by The Times: “There must be the suspicion that the real attraction of an ‘AV top-up’ system for the prime minister is the prospect that the Conservatives could be excluded from power” (October 30).

The Tories and their papers are right, of course. Whether by accident or design, the Jenkins schema is certainly biased against them. Blair’s interest in electoral reform stems not from charity to the poor Liberal Democrats, nor from an idealistic commitment to ‘fairer’ government: it reflects, as we have said, his determination to stay in power as long as possible and realise his own ‘radical’ vision for the future of Britain - ideally alone, but if need be then in coalition with the Liberal Democrats (and/or the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Féin, etc). Evidently the Tories believe that their best chance of one day forming a strong one-party administration is to stick with FPTP. They may even believe it possible that an anti-reform campaign prior to a referendum could enable them to pick up some support from a population wary of politicians messing about with their traditional ways of voting.

So much for the dilemmas which the Jenkins report raises for the major parties. What about its content in terms of ideas and its likely impact on the disposition of forces if it is implemented? The commission’s terms of reference contained stipulations as to the objectives of electoral reform: broader proportionality, stable government, an extension of voter choice and retention of the link between MPs and geographical constituencies. As Jenkins himself remarked, these requirements were “not entirely compatible”.

The outcome of Jenkins’ work was bound to be some kind of fix or fudge, but there is nothing ambiguous about the deficiencies and inequities of the FPTP system, which Jenkins was commissioned to replace. The problems with FPTP are familiar to all of us: it is demonstrably unfair to third parties - in 1992, for example, while polling some 18% of the national vote, the Liberal Democrats gained just three percent of parliamentary seats; FPTP is also capable of producing governments that, in the words of The Economist, are “formed in ways that are hard to square with democratic principles” (October 31) - in 1951 and 1974, for example, the party that got fewer votes nationally went on to form the government; under FPTP, an astounding 312 out of 659 MPs (some 47% of all members) are sitting in the Commons having received the votes of under half those voting in their constituencies; FPTP also produces the anomalous situation in which whole swathes of the country become no-go areas for one or other of the major parties - in 1997, for example, the whole of Scotland, Wales and nearly every significant provincial centre in England became Tory-free zones; perhaps the most depressing aspect of FPTP, however, is the way in which it condemns millions of electors to a lifetime of wasted votes, or at the very best it involves them in the haphazard process of tactical voting.

Jenkins’ blueprint does offer a remedy for these anomalies. Dubbed rather inelegantly ‘Alternative Vote with Top-Up’, it is essentially a two-tier system, with each elector exercising two votes. At least 80% of MPs would continue to be elected in conventional single-constituency seats, but using the alternative vote system, whereby electors vote for candidates in order of preference. If nobody gets 50% of first-preference votes, then the least popular candidate is eliminated and the second preference of those who voted for him or her are redistributed. The process is repeated until a candidate emerges with 50% or more. The second vote is used to elect a ‘top-up’ MP based on a county or equivalent-sized metropolitan area. This vote may be exercised in favour of a party or of a named ‘top-up’ candidate from that party.

The system sounds more cumbrous than it is. Its broad effect would be do away with the glaring deficiencies of FPTP and go some way towards satisfying the demand for “broad proportionality” and “an extension of voter choice”. Projecting the Jenkins schema back on to the outcome of previous elections is a fascinating speculative exercise for psephologists and other anoraks, but, to use a Jenkinsism, it is an “otiose” exercise, thwarted, at least where elections during recent decades are concerned, by the impossibility of disentangling complexities introduced by tactical voting. With a few exceptions, the outcome of recent elections would not have been significantly different, except for the fact that the Liberal Democrats and their forebears would have done consistently better. Contrary to the argument put forward by opponents of electoral reform, AV-Top-Up would not have led to the creation of a succession of weak coalition governments.

What possibilities, if any, does the Jenkins model hold out to the left in British politics? Hilary Wainwright of Red Pepper argues in The Guardian that it represents the left’s big chance. She points to states like Germany, where “with more democratic electoral systems, the radical and green left has achieved independent parties that force social democratic parties to look over their left shoulders ... it has also boosted the left within social democratic parties ... Chancellor Schröder has to treat his left more seriously” (October 30). Perhaps Wainwright’s reference to “independent parties” is intended as a hint that the Labour ‘left’, such as it is, could split and form an independent force? This seems to be indicated by her excited suggestion that “Ken Livingstone could eventually be running the treasury” - a prospect evidently intended to thrill her readers with eager anticipation of a new socialist dawn. Obviously the advent of a new left Labourite party, just like the creation of the SLP, would be an interesting and important development. Although, like the SLP itself, any putative new left party formed in the loins of Labour might end up a vehicle for the kind of reformist social democracy with which we are depressingly familiar, there is nothing inevitable about this outcome. It would offer communists an opportunity for fighting for the kind of organisation that workers could use to achieve a real socialist alternative.

In summary, the recommendations of the Jenkins Commission are to be welcomed insofar as they would bring about some extension of democracy within the bourgeois system. The election of communist MPs could once again become a reality. They are all right as far as they go, but that is a pitifully short way. The sow’s ear of the bourgeois monarchical system can never be transformed into the silk purse of a radical republican democracy, let alone socialism.

That requires not a Lord Jenkins, but mass self-activity from below.

Michael Malkin