Have this week\u2019s negotiations to form a new government been, to quote the former Conservative Cabinet minister, Lord Heseltine, \u201cparty politics at its most sordid\u201d?\u00a0 Or have they simply been the inevitable working-through of the consequences of a hung parliament \u2013 with parties doing deals to find consensus as is the perfectly seemly process in most European countries, with proportional voting systems, after general elections?<\/p>\n
There has been much talk of this being what the electorate desired. The nation voted for a hung parliament because it wanted to reject the old politics and force our combative politicians into co-operation, moderating their more extreme policies, in the national interest.\u00a0 That is why politicians of all parties have in recent days felt it necessary to preface every statement by saying that what they were about to propose was designed to further \u201ca government which was strong and stable in the national interest\u201d. If it was handy for their party, that was merely a happy by-product.<\/p>\n
The Victorian critic Ruskin came up with the term the \u201cpathetic fallacy\u201d to refer to the rhetorical technique of attributing human feelings to inanimate objects: the wind sighed\u201d and that kind of thing. He was not keen on it, though he meant pathetic as in sympathetic rather than in the modern sense of risibly inadequate. There is something of the fallacy in all the talk about the hung parliament being \u201cwhat people voted for\u201d. The public wanted a \u201cnew kind of politics\u201d and now they\u2019ve got it, as one commentator said grumpily.<\/p>\n
It is not just that it makes no sense to ascribe consciousness to an entity like an electorate. It is that, as a voter in Britain you can do one of two things. You can vote for the candidate you prefer. Or you can vote against the candidate you dislike most.<\/p>\n
It is a nonsense to say that the nation voted for a hung parliament. To do that people in Calder Valley would have had to say to the people of Halifax: \u201cwe\u2019ll vote Conservative and you vote Labour and the people next door in Burnley can vote Lib Dem and that\u2019ll show the ruddy politicians.\u201d That is pretty much impossible under our voting system, as the singer Billy Bragg found at the previous election when he tried to persuade voters round his Dorset home to \u201cfind your voting valentine\u201d in a neighbouring seat and sign a pact to swap votes to keep the Tories out.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t seem to work, which is why he didn\u2019t try the tactic again this time.<\/p>\n
Individuals can vote tactically, but not a nation.\u00a0 All it is safe to say is that this time most voters didn\u2019t want Grouchy Gordon, but most didn\u2019t trust Debonair Dave and most weren\u2019t convinced by the argument of Newboy Nick that a LibDem vote still wasn\u2019t a wasted vote. It was an election that everybody lost because people seemed more clear about what they were against than what they were for.<\/p>\n
It also shows that voters\u2019 choices about what is right for them as individuals do not necessarily aggregate to what is best for the community \u2013 though it may turn out for the best if parties which fought robustly on distinctive policies have to seek common ground if they want to govern.<\/p>\n
Some don\u2019t like this, which is why the Labour veteran David Blunkett was ranting on about the Lib Dems behaving like harlots. It may also explain why David Cameron said during the campaign, but took care not to repeat it while he was in negotiations with the Liberal Democrats, that proportional representation \u201cdoesn’t put power in the hands of the people, it puts power in the hands of politicians\u201d.<\/p>\n
Good or bad, one thing is clear, if we change our voting system we are likely to see a lot more of this after future elections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Have this week\u2019s negotiations to form a new government been, to quote the former Conservative Cabinet minister, Lord Heseltine, \u201cparty politics at its most sordid\u201d?\u00a0 Or have they simply been the inevitable working-through of the consequences of a hung parliament \u2013 with parties doing deals to find consensus as is the perfectly seemly process in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,37],"tags":[56],"class_list":["post-1462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-browns-britain","category-politics","tag-election-2010"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1462"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7608,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1462\/revisions\/7608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}