PR? Be careful of what you wish for.

Understandably enough the clamour for electoral reform in the UK is growing after the election. Why would it not after what the Electoral Reform Society has described as probably the most disproportionate election result in British history? Certainly the electorate looks to have fragmented and the party system with it, so it seems clear that the electoral system should reflect this change. Of course it isn’t going to happen in the near future with a Conservative majority government placed in office by FPTP. The irony has not escaped me and others that it is proposed in the Trade Union Bill that strikes will only be legitimate if 40% of the union membership supports it. So, what price the Conservative 36.9% ‘win’? If we take the 65% turnout into account I think that is 24% of the total electorate so...well work it out for yourself. But wait a minute. If we were to adopt PR we do need a plan to deal with the probable outcome. The Electoral Reform Society published yesterday some notional results had either the d’Hondt List system or STV been used on May 7th. In both cases it would have been impossible to form a stable coalition with two parties. Any majority would need three parties participating. Even the lucid Cabinet Manual by Gus O’Donnell would have difficulty legislating for that. So what to do? It looks a real mess however ‘democratic’ it might be. I suppose that, if AMS were used (AMS has to be the favourite, given its preservation of one member constituencies), we might have more coherence, but it seems to me that only the German model looks acceptable, i.e. a two party system with a smaller party sharing power with one or the other. But this does not pertain currently in the UK, especially with the Liberal Democrat collapse. A closer look at what has happened reveals, however, that we do not really have a multi party system at all. What we do have is three regions of the UK where there is one party dominance. The SNP in Scotland, Labour in the North and the Conservatives in the South. The only places where there is true two or more party competition are London, Wales and the Midlands. Most of the country lives in a one party system. That brings a whole new set of problems, whatever electoral system we use. The main problem concerns legitimacy. Can a government whose representation is concentrated almost exclusively in the South and the Midlands of England be said to be the legitimate government of the North, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? There seems to be only one answer. It’s called federalism.