John Humphrys asks: are the Lib Dems coming close to ending the two-party system?
‘One down, two to go.’ That, if they’re honest, is what most political journalists would say at this stage of the party conference season: a marathon they have to endure rather than enjoy. In the past, the first of the three main conferences, the Liberal Democrats’, has seemed to many of them little more than a limbering up for the main events that follow. But this year may be different. In Glasgow this week Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, claimed that his party was ‘a step closer’ to ending the two-party system. Is he right? Is it what we want? And how should the other parties respond over the next fortnight?
It is hardly a surprise that Mr Clegg should have made his claim. It’s what Lib Dem leaders have been saying for donkey’s years. Given the electoral system we have, the party’s only hope of ever being anything other than an also-ran is a general election result that produces a hung parliament and the need for a coalition government to be formed. The election of 2010 gave the Lib Dems that chance and they seized it. But then they failed to persuade the British people in a referendum to change the voting system and that means a hung parliament remains their only route to staying a party of government.
The thing that haunts the Lib Dems is the fear that the 2010 election result was a one-off aberration that will be followed by a return to normal business – the power alternating between the two other parties, each governing alone until it’s kicked out by the other lot.
A casual look at history would suggest that that is indeed the most likely thing to happen. Over the last century or so the first-past-the-post electoral system has usually produced single-party majority government, reducing third parties (however large their popular vote) to holding only a small number of seats in the House of Commons. Coalition government, outside wartime, has been rare. Indeed, the nineteenth-century Tory Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, famously said: “England does not love coalitions”.
So when Mr Clegg told his party faithful on Wednesday, “We’re not here to prop up the two-party system; we’re here to bring it down,” some observers might well have thought: “Dream on!”
Yet maybe history is not so reliable a guide. Maybe things are changing and maybe Mr Clegg was not merely trying to cheer up his party workers by claiming they were “a step closer” to ending the two-party system. Maybe he was right. How strong are the reasons to think this?
In the first place, current electoral arithmetic suggests another hung parliament in 2015 is far from improbable. It’s true that, as things now look, an outright Labour victory is the most likely outcome. Not only does Labour have a reasonable lead in the opinion polls but the Lib Dems scuppered the Tories’ plans to change the existing constituency boundaries. That means Labour has a huge advantage over its rivals. It can win an outright majority with between 5% and 7% less of the popular vote than the Tories need to achieve the same result. That’s why Labour is favourite to win the next election with a working majority. But it’s far from a dead certainty. Continuing doubts about Ed Miliband’s leadership and his party’s competence over the economy could well see Labour’s lead slip before the next election and the prospects of a majority Labour government dim.
As for a majority Conservative government emerging, that seems even less likely. Not only do the Tories suffer from the way the boundaries are drawn but (another lesson from history) the dominant party of government finds it hard to increase their share of the vote. Governments tend to lose support rather than gain it.
So Mr Clegg’s claim that he is a step closer towards smashing the two-party system may not be so far-fetched. And it may be too that Disraeli is no longer right (whatever the truth back in 1852). If it were really the case that the British loathed coalitions, then one might expect the opinion polls to be registering huge disapproval of any parties that had had the effrontery to form one. The opposition parties would be storming ahead. But that’s not the case.
Perhaps the British people look around the world and see coalition governments working perfectly adequately. This very weekend the Germans go to the polls. There is little doubt that Angela Merkel will remain the Chancellor afterwards; her party will certainly form the biggest bloc in the new Bundestag. But she will not be able to govern alone. She will have to form a coalition either with the small Free Democrat Party (as she did after the last election) or with her main rivals, the Social Democrats (as she did the time before). British voters may reflect that Germany hasn’t done so badly with these coalition governments and conclude that we shouldn’t be too bothered if they become a feature of political life here.
If, then, Mr Clegg’s claim that his party is now a party of government is not so fanciful, how should the other parties respond?
Next week, at its own conference, Labour is likely to go hammer and tongs at both parties in the coalition. It will seem to many the best way to persuade voters to trust Labour alone. But some in the party are likely to advocate some caution in attacking the Lib Dems as vociferously as they are bound to attack the Conservatives. That’s because they know that a Labour majority is most certainly not yet in the bag and that the public’s appetite for coalition government may be growing. Since most Lib Dems would prefer to govern with Labour rather than the Conservatives after the next election, there is no point in Labour’s gratuitously alienating them.
The following week will be even more fascinating. Many Tories have still not forgiven David Cameron for failing to win an outright majority at the last election and loathe the Lib Dems for clipping their wings in government. So the Prime Minister will have to pay lip-service to this anti-Lib Dem feeling in his party. But he is unlikely to be as vituperative about his coalition partners as Nick Clegg was about his. Stories are circulating that Mr Cameron is already laying plans for a continuing coalition with the Lib Dems as the best hope the Tories have of staying in government after 2015: he can do the electoral sums as well as anyone else. But he must also guess (if he doesn’t know it explicitly) that that is probably Mr Clegg’s preference too. For it seems likely that Mr Clegg’s head would be a price Labour would demand for going into coalition with the Lib Dems. So we can expect a rather more nuanced attack on the Lib Dems from Mr Cameron than the Tories suffered this week from Mr Clegg.
Once the conference season is over it’s likely we’ll see less mutual finger-pointing between the coalition parties since the fortunes of both depend on persuading voters of the successes they have achieved together. The next two weeks, then, will see a revival of the old party political tribalism but in the longer term our system may indeed be changing. Perhaps coalition government is going to become more the norm. Is this what we want? And how should the political parties adapt their way of doing things to accommodate it?
