British Elections 2010: Will Britain’s Third Party Make a Difference?

Gerald A. Dorfman, Hoover Institution, Stanford University



One of the major differences between the British and American political systems is the presence of a third major political party in Britain. The Liberal Democratic (nicknamed “Lib Dems”) Party inherited the role of Britain’s third party in 1988 when it emerged from the merger of Britain’s historic Liberal Party and the then 8-year old Social Democratic Party. At the last British General Election in 2005 the Liberal Democrats won 62 seats of the 646 in the House of Commons, and more importantly 22% of the total vote cast. Thus somewhat more than one of every five voters supported the Liberal Democrats rather than the two major parties, the ruling Labour Party or the Conservative Party. Moreover, the Lib Dems as they are called have been an importance force in local elections holding a large number of the local government council seats and controlling a number of municipal governments. So the Lib Dems are a real third party compared to the occasional and fleeting mostly protest third parties in the American electoral experience.

That said, Lib Dems have never won or even come close to winning enough seats in the House of Commons to create a majority and form a government or even close enough to cobble together a Coalition government with the participation of one of the other parties. Historically the last time the old Liberal Party (then still one of the two main parties) formed a government was about a hundred years ago, and shortly thereafter David Lloyd George served as the last Liberal Prime Minister heading a Coalition Government during World War One.

The key question about the Liberal Democrats at this point, with Britain approaching another General Election to be held whenever the Prime Minister decides but no later than June 2010, I what impact the Liberal Democrats will have ?

Current public opinion polls show the opposition Conservative Party in the clear lead over the other main and currently ruling party of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the Labour Party by about 43% to 31%--and Lib Dems at about 20%. If these numbers carried over to the election, Lib Dems would likely come out with just about the same percentage of the vote as before, and therefore would be still distant from holding office. But the situation is more uncertain then these figures show. Indeed the Lib Dems, while unlikely to win the election , just might be a make-weight factor in the election outcome as well as in the makeup of the next government. This makes speculation at this point, still months before the election, so interesting and fun.

The starting point for thinking about what factor the Lib Dems may be in the next election is to look at the way seats are distributed in a British election. Britain has a first past the post system similar to the election for the House of Representatives. Candidates with the most votes are the winners. This works against third parties because they can accumulate a relatively large national vote but come in second or third in elections for individual seats most everywhere and thus have little to show for their effort. That is exactly what has tended to happen to the Lib Dems and before them during the 20th century to the Liberal Party as a third party. Even now, though the Lib Dems have enjoy their highest number of seats for nearly 80 years, their 22% of the vote , distributed by a proportional arrangement would have netted them about 170 seats in the House of Commons. But, on the other side of the coin, the current system does yield a stable government with a disproportionate large number of seats. So, for example, the current ruling Labour Party won 35% of the seats in the 2005 election but won 330 seats or well more than 50% of the total of 646 seats in the House of Commons.

A second feature of the British election system is that the other bias built in to the next election’s outcome at this time is that the Labour Party enjoys a more favorable distribution of their supporting electorate around the country than is the case for either the Conservatives or the Lib Dems. In fact, very importantly that the Conservatives need to win about 43% of the vote to secure a majority of the seats, but Labour needs only about 37% ! WOW ! What a big disparity! But it is also an important opening for the Lib Dems even while continuing to be at a disadvantage in getting a “fair” share of its seats compared to its total vote.

In short, it is easy to imagine that the next British election which currently looks like a win, even an easy win, for the Conservatives could produce instead a situation in which the Conservatives are the leading vote getters but end up with a minority of seats. That is where the Lib Dems come in. Even if they win a reduced number of seats they could emerge as the make-weight, holding the leverage, leading to a significant bargaining position with the other parties.

All of this speculation about a “hung” Parliament ( meaning no clear winner to form a government on its own without a Coalition) is reminding of the 2000 presidential election in the United States which was decided by the Supreme Court. It was either Gore or Bush, no third party candidate or third party to be the make-weight in the outcome. It was the court, not elements of the political system that decided or negotiated the outcome which means the political leadership that followed was not democratically elected but decided by jurists who were not elected. The presence of the Liberal Democratic third party in Britain thus creates a real contrast in the potential way that a disputed election would be decided.

In such a scenario, which has occurred in Britain before, the two main parties would again undoubtedly bid for Lib Dem support in order to decide the election outcome. This would likely involve a great deal of political bargaining, that is perhaps inviting some leaders of the Liberal Democrats to sit in the Cabinet and manage government ministries with the largest party taking the leading post of Prime Minister and a majority of Cabinet seats. Short of that (if the leading party turns out to have done better in the election) there might be a set of policy agreements about what the new government would do in exchange for Lib Dem support, or some agreement with the Lib Dems to allow for changes in the election system that would produce a more proportional outcome in the future which would benefit a third party. In sum, the shape of an arrangement to settle the election would depend on the configuration of election support between the political parties and crucially how many seats each party held.

This discussion might seem at first glance to be mere fanciful speculation. But it is rooted in British election history which has occasionally produced a “hung” Parliament. It is also rooted in the history of election campaigns and their dynamics. Overall, most election campaigns in Britain produce a tightening of support for all parties as the election day approaches-- even in landslide election contests, and the Lib Dems in particular have a record of improving their percentages as the election nears. So that reality coupled with the Conservative’s need to win a much higher share of the votes than Labour in order to form a majority government makes the upcoming election quite intriguing even though the Conservatives continue to hold a significant public opinion lead.

Why Is Britain Fighting In Afghanistan?

British forces are currently engaged in a bloody fight against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. They are once again joining with their American allies ( including this time some of their EU partners) in a tough struggle. In fact, as has the American side the British have been ramping up their troop numbers and taking on, also again, the second leading position in this fight.

What is so surprising about the British effort in Afghanistan is that they are there at all, or in at least such comparatively large and increasing numbers---all while suffering casualties at a faster rate than they suffered in Iraq. After all, Prime Minister Tony Blair frankly ruined his political career by taking Britain into the Iraq War and then following President Bush’s lead through some very bad times for several years. He was frequented derided as “Bush’s poodle”.

Gordon Brown has, of course, now replaced Tony Blair as Prime Minister. But his political stature is no higher than Blair’s at the end of his ten years as PM. In fact, the Labour Government overall, in its twelfth year in power, is politically bankrupt and seemingly headed for a massive defeat by the middle of next year when its third straight 5 year term of office (Prime Ministers in Britain can decide when the next election occurs but no longer than 5 years from the previous election which was in 2005).

So what’s going on? Why has such a deeply unpopular Labour government headed by a deeply unpopular Prime Minister Brown taken such a political risk. At bottom joining the war in Afghanistan is really not much more popular than Iraq, and we all know how little support that war had at its end.

The answer, it would seem, lies in some unusual political realities. First of all, though British voters dislike Iraq and Prime Minister Blair’s commitment to George Bush, they still like the United States, and most importantly regard the alliance with the United States as of paramount importance to maintain.

Second, while they generally want British Governments to be more careful in their commitments to American leadership, they do buy into the notion of fighting terrorism, which has touched the British people in very personal ways. There was the thirty years of trouble with IRA bombing at times in Britain and even in the Houses of Parliament and then there have been several terrorist incidents in London and around the United Kingdom over the last several years. These all highlight importantly a sense of terrorist danger, worth fighting against.

Finally, there is the issue of political support: the opposition Conservative Party which is likely to win the next election is even more supportive of the fight in Afghanistan then Gordon Brown’s Labour Party. So Brown can count on Conservative help to bolster British participation in the War, and in fact, creates a political necessity for Brown to be doing everything he can in support of British security.

So, in the end, British action in Afghanistan is another example of the fundamental special relationship between Britain and American that has persisted to some degree or another since after the War of 1812 when the British burned down the White House.

A MODEST PROPOSAL

The media has been full of articles about the difficulty the Obama administration has had filling jobs at the cabinet and sub-cabinet level. The Treasury has been the object of greatest concern because it is obviously on the front line of the new administration's frantic effort to deal with the gathering deep recession.

This problem for incoming American administrations is not new. It usually takes more than a year to fill all of the political appointments in a new administration. We just don't usually notice or read many articles about the trouble filling jobs. This time the spotlight on this problem is so much greater.

Comparing the British system, as always, is interesting and in this case perhaps provides a good contrast which American political leaders might consider when taking up promised reforms over the next few years.

To start with, the British don't experience months of sometimes paralyzing "lame duck" government between the "long goodbye" of the outgoing administration and the arrival in office of the new. The new British Prime Ministers takes office within hours, yes hours, of his parties' victory in the election. Moving trucks taking the outgoing Prime Minister's household possessions literally leave the Prime Minister's residence and office, Number Ten Downing Street within hours. The new Prime Minister's moving truck has unloaded by the following morning.

How can this be possible? First of all, Prime Ministers are much more experienced than new American presidents in the duties of government when they take office. On average, British Prime Ministers arrive at Number Ten with more than a dozen years and sometimes much more in the House of Commons. Further, most of them have been Cabinet ministers in major departments in earlier governments. Also, Prime Ministers almost always name as Cabinet colleagues and sub Cabinet colleagues individuals who also have had many years of experience in the House of Commons and as ministers at some level.

The second reason is that the British system builds in a high level of continuity by tasking its highly trained civil service with high level policy jobs. In fact, a new Prime Minister names only about 150 or so political party colleagues to the total of all ministerial jobs in the numerous departments of governments. This compares to about 10,000 political appointments in the Washington governmental structure.

While a new President enters a nearly empty White House, a new British Prime Minister by contrast is greeted by a very large staff of civil servants when he or she enters Number Ten. Yes, a Prime Minister does bring along several dozen political advisers, but the group of civil servants is much larger: ready and willing to work diligently as is their tradition, for the new Prime Ministers as they worked only hours before for the outgoing administration on the business of governing.

The point about all this is to wonder and perhaps consider whether the American system is less effective than it might be if we had a British style continuity featuring a highly trained civil service and a smaller cadre of politial appointees? It is no advantage, especially in challenging times as now, for a new administration to arrive to nearly bare walls and no staff in the White House. Obviously new administrations want to enjoy great latitude and leverage in crafting their own policies, but that does not need to be at the expense of greater continuity, expertise and institutional memory.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown Probably Didn’t Want to Go Home

Prime Minister Gordon Brown must have wished that he could just stay in Washington, and not go back to London. The joint session of Congress, which he addressed, gave him either 17 or 18 standing ovations, depending on who was doing the counting. Of course his critics pointed out that Tony Blair received a couple of more! But for the Prime Minister this was the best moment he’s had since he took over from Tony Blair more than a year an a half ago.

To be fair Brown had a 3 month political honeymoon at the beginning and a good couple of months last fall when the economic and financial crisis first hit Britain, and he successfully argued that as a former Chancellor of the Exchequer for ten years under Blair he was the man to steer Britain through the crisis.

But since roughly early December Brown’s popularity and that of his Labour Government have been tracking downward at a steady pace in every public opinion poll. The problem has been really twofold. After gaining early support for his “expertise” in financial and economic matters (he is also a Ph.D economist) the steep decline in the British economy has made the electorate fearful and impatient, especially about rising unemployment. Second, and more recently, Brown’s years as Chancellor are now being seen as a liability rather than an asset. In fact, the general growing view is that Brown participated no less even lead the failure of this Labour Government to exercise good oversight over Britain’s banking and financial industry so in some way is complicit and even responsible for the crisis. Further, there are even his own Cabinet colleagues who are calling for Brown to apologize (some of them have even apologized themselves) for his and the Blair government’s mistakes. To that Brown says no, there is no need to apologize because the origins of the current crisis were really in the United States and that Britain is suffering the consequences.

What is also plaguing Brown, and not President Obama at this point, is the problem of leading an “old” government plagued by the accumulated problems of nearly 12 years in power. Although Brown himself has been Prime Minister for less than two years, he was a part of this Labour Government for the other nearly 10 and as such has to carry the burden of what might be called geriatric politics. Governments age as do humans, and in terms of political longevity, Brown government is really equal to a senior citizen with all the aches and pains of old age. Out of ideas and out of first line political leaders, and indeed the further burdened of inevitable accumulated mistakes, scandals, etc, the Labour Government is suffering the same kind of symptoms and troubles that older governments always suffer beginning somewhere after four or five years and which get progressively worse.

Public opinion polls in Britain are now settling down to a historically familiar pattern showing the opposition Conservatives a dozen or more points ahead. It is likely that Brown will not call an election until he must, which is not for another 16 months unless he has the good fortune, as he did at the beginning of the crisis last fall, to get a sudden boost in popularly. But the odds are that Labour will soldier along and hope its losses are not too great in the next election, leading to not too a long stretch in opposition.

Being Bipartisan is Not a British Concern

The Congressional struggle over President Obama's stimulus bill involved charges and countercharges about excessive partisanship. Republicans complained that the Democratic majority including the new President did not fulfill his promise to be more bipartisan, while the Democrats complained that the Republicans are just a party of "no". For observers of the British system, however, the question of partisan behavior looks very different than the argument heard in Washington.

The starting point for a comparison between the British and American systems is to keep in mind that they are very different, even though both are among the world's oldest democracies. The British have a unitary Parliamentary system . The United States is a Presidential system with divided powers of checks and balances between Congress and the President. By contrast, the Executive and Legislative branches in Britain are in effect fused together. The Prime Minister in Britain actually sits in the House of Commons . A Prime Minister wins office by first being chosen to lead a political party which either currently holds or subsequently wins a majority in the House of Commons . Thus, Prime Ministers are not directly elected by British voters. British voters only cast a vote for one national office when they go to the polls: for their local Member of Parliament ( the House of Commons). Notice therefore the contrast between the British procedure and the American system in which the President is specifically chosen by the electorate from all the federally based states. Presidents thus owe their election directly to the voters, while Prime Ministers owe their selection to members of their political party.

Once chosen, Prime Ministers lead their majorities in the House of Commons with "discipline". They can count on the vote of their colleagues on nearly every issue they regard as important in the work of Parliament. By the same token, the leader of the opposition party can count on an equally disciplined group of members in the House of Commons nearly always voting with him or her against the Government of the day.

Thus, political combat on the national level is clear cut and between the parties with little complaining about partisanship. Partisanship is indeed the name of the game as an elected majority party is expected to, with discipline, implement the program they offered to the electorate in order to attract votes in national elections. So the question of being bipartisan, or in the way American politicians are condemned for being "too" partisan, really does not arise in Britain. Votes in the House of Commons on important issues are nearly always predictable in that the government wins nearly every time. In short, the British Government has been elected to do what it thinks best in terms of policy making and policy implementation.

This might suggest that the British system is actually a form of dictatorship rather than the democracy we always attach to Britain. In fact, much of the notion of British democracy is bound up in the free and clean elections that give British voters a real choice in deciding who will govern them. But there is more than that which is democratic: governments of each party carry out a longstanding tradition of consultation with both interest groups and political party oppositions about the details of policy in drafting, legislating and even implementing laws. Further, in the case of opposition political parties, there are clear times set aside in Parliament when the opposition gets the chance to fully state and debate their views on every piece of legislation, and when bills are examined in committee before final passage opposition politicians have the chance, with a serious hearing from the government to criticize and offer amendments to even the most important government bills.

But even though parties can criticize and even get an influential hearing from the government it does not mean that British governments negotiate the terms of policy per se or indeed worry about bipartisan relations with their opposition, including agreements about the details and style of government. Its just "not on", as governments are still expected to proceed to do what they think best in the end. Thus, by comparing the British experience, we learn that there can be important and real democracy without bipartisanship.

What's Happening to our British Friends in the Current Crisis?

What’s Happening to Our British Friends in the Current World Crisis?

The old saying about the British economy is that when the United States gets an economic and/or financial cold, Britain gets the same but it becomes pneumonia. Over recent years, that old saying has been mostly wrong. Britain didn’t get a cold when the dot com collapse set off a recession in the United States at the turn of the century. In fact the British economy went through nearly a dozen years after 1997 without a serious turndown. It was their best and longest economic prosperity for more than a century!!

But the good times are no longer rolling. In fact, the British economy today seems to be following its old ways, and indeed may well be on its way to a pneumonia—as is the United States? Whatever, both economies seem to be tracking downward at a rapid pace and both are now in recession and gathering more trouble by the day. Furthermore, the reasons and patterns for the trouble, which have become global, includes a very similar collapse of the banking and investing sectors that Americans hear and talk about everyday.

There are, however, a couple of distinctly British reactions to this crisis that are noteworthy. First, the British feel themselves very much a victim of imported problems from the United States. For many British this is just the “other shoe” to drop as a consequence of the George W.Bush years. Ever since former Prime Minister Tony Blair took Britain into the Iraq War, the great majority in Britain has been angry that Blair succumbed to Bush’s pressure to join as a junior partner ( Blair is still called “Bush’s poodle”) in the Iraq invasion. Now comes the economic and financial crisis, and the overwhelming British impression is that this is just another example of how American policy spills over into Britain without its participation in the decision making leading to the troubles—in this case a kind of Boston Tea Party in reverse.

It needs to be added quickly however, that none of this should be taken as indicative of the rise of anti-Americanism in Britian. Quite the contrary, the British sense of kinship, and alliance with the United States remains as strong as ever. In fact, the election of Obama has renewed British enthusiasm for their American connection. But the events of recent years have added a sense of being the junior partner, and certain wariness about automatically saying “yes” to any kind of American policies especially in the area of foreign affairs.

The other noteworthy consequence of the recent economic and financial crisis is that British policymakers are again showing that Britain’s different (from the United States) economic history over the last century produces today a somewhat different policy response and a very different view of government responsibility.

It has been widely accepted for some years now that the Thatcher Revolution for the most part displaced the Keynesian Social Democratic approach of the post World War II in Britain. The current crisis has reawakened the earlier debate on both sides of the Atlantic on that question but even more so in Britain. The general public reaction in Britain has been to look firmly to government for protection against the recession and to be more willing than in the United States to endorse government intervention including even government ownership of the banking sector as well. How government ultimately fares in its stewardship of its renewed intervention to deal with the current crisis will largely determine whether Britain is moving on to a post Thatcher Revolution period in policy terms featuring a much more engaged government than in the recent years .In short, is this a watershed moment? Of course the same kinds of questions are being raised in the United States as well, but the British have shown a far greater interest in collectivism and social democracy than was ever the case in the United States. We live in interesting times.