Isn’t coalition politics fun? Nick is angry that those few genuine Tories still remaining in the Commons haven’t let him wreck the Lords more than it’s wrecked already. That was tat, and now comes Nick’s tit: he’ll whip his party into scuppering the Tory gerrymandering bill.
Actually, ‘gerrymandering’, with its negative connotations, is an unfair way of describing a perfectly sensible idea. As long as we’re committed to the counterintuitive notion of every vote being as weighty as any other, we must agree that every parliamentary seat should represent a constituency of roughly the same size.
That, alas, isn’t the case. At present, some of the constituencies are twice as large as some others, effectively making each vote cast in the larger groups weigh half as much. Considering Labour had its hand on the tiller for 13 years, the boundaries were drawn in such a way that Tories would need an 11-percent popular majority to win a national election, to Labour’s three percent.
The Tory bill aimed at redressing this balance is thus fair, just and constitutionally sound – which is more than one can say for most of their other recent ideas. The proposal is to reduce the number of seats from 650 to 600, each representing a similar-size electorate. Even the 600 number sounds excessive, considering that the lower chamber in the US Congress makes do with a mere 435, for a population five times the size of ours. But since, our foreign policy notwithstanding, we’re still separate from the USA, there isn’t much wrong with the boundaries bill.
This is so obvious that even Nick had to go along. In September, 2010, he thundered: “To the people we serve it is patently obvious that individuals’ votes should carry the same weight, and if that means reforming the rules for drawing boundaries, that is what we must do. That unfairness is deeply damaging to our democracy.” Spoken from the heart.
But that was two years ago, and that’s a lot of water under Westminster Bridge. Nick’s heart has changed, and what’s ‘patently obvious’ now is that he wants to blackmail his Coalition partners, and never mind the ensuing deep damage ‘to our democracy’. You see, Dave knows that without having the boundaries redrawn he’ll have to float from British to European politics or, perish the thought, private life sooner than he’d like. That makes him a soft touch for blackmail, and Nick knows it.
This whole thing raises many questions. Some of them would concern the personal qualities of our leaders, but, even if asked, such questions don’t really require answers. We all know what they would be.
More interesting are questions relating to the very nature of coalition politics. I’d suggest that coalitions in general run against the grain of first-past-the-post (FPP) elections. Just as proportional representation encourages numerous parties and therefore coalitions, FPP naturally gravitates towards elections contested by two or, at most, three main parties. In a way, by forming this coalition the two parties have put us on a slippery slope towards PR elections, so dear to every LibDem heart.
In the USA, where there are two major parties, a coalition is a self-evident theoretical impossibility, at least in peace time. In the UK, with our three major parties, it’s possible for two of them to gang up against one even under FPP. Yet in practice such a coalition can work only if the two parties are broadly similar in their fundamental principles at the grassroots.
I specify grassroots here for the leadership of all three parties manifestly have no fundamental principles other than craving for power. But for as long as we continue to play at democracy, party leaders have to pay lip service to their voters’ beliefs and sometimes, when they can’t help it, even act accordingly.
It’s reasonably clear that at least a third of the Tory parliamentary party don’t see Dave as a fellow Conservative and resent everything he stands for. They have to play ball most of the time, for they too are politicians and therefore can’t let principles get in the way of their careers. But occasionally they’ll rise in revolt, if only because they don’t want to upset their true-blue Tory constituencies enough to lose the next election.
These 100-odd MPs may feel, rightly or wrongly, that they can find common ground with most of the other Tory parliamentarians, for old times’ sake. But they haven’t got a single belief their share with Nick and his jolly friends. For them the coalition with the leftmost party in Parliament is a daily egregious insult, and they can take it only for so long.
In other words, the Coalition is unworkable. Or rather it would be if those who entered into it had been driven by anything other than the urge to form a government, any government. As it is, both parties will describe it as a marriage of convenience, even though they know it’s nearer a one-night stand.
I don’t know if the Tories can chuck the LibDems and limp to the next election as a minority government. They certainly wouldn’t be able to govern effectively. But those who think they do so now, raise your hands. No, Dave and George, you can’t vote for this one, put your hands down. So it’s unanimous: the nays have it.