It’s sometimes said that Scots are more naturally “left wing” than voters in England. It’s widely believed, but it is nevertheless a myth. However, exploring the reasons the myth arose is a good way of understanding why it is that the Westminster system is dysfunctional, and why the Union is broken.
First let’s put to bed the idea that Scots are “naturally” left wing. If that were the case, why did a majority of Scots (50.1%) vote Tory in 1955 (returning 36 Conservative and Scottish Unionist Party MPs to Labour’s 34)? That is an outright majority of the popular vote, not just the largest party.
The party of Scotland
It’s true that in that same year the Conservatives won an outright majority of the popular vote in England, but in that same year in Wales an outright majority voted for Labour (57.6%), something that has never happened in Scotland. That’s right: Labour has never had an outright majority of the popular vote in Scotland.
It wasn’t until 1964 that Labour began to overtake the Conservative and Unionists in Scotland in terms of share of the vote. In that year, though, the Conservatives still managed 40.6% of the Scottish vote, compared with 44% in England.
So what happened? Why the apparent divergence between Scotland and England that we see today?
Well, first of all it is worth remembering that just as Labour has never had an outright majority of the popular vote in Scotland, so the Tories never had an outright majority of the popular vote in England after that 1955 general election. Thatcher never once had a majority of the popular vote in England. In each of her general elections, a majority of English voters voted against her party.
True, the Tory percentages in England during the Thatcher era were in the 40s, while in Scotland they began at 31.4% in 1979, and began to slip into the 20s. But even in 1992, more than a quarter of Scots were still voting Tory. (By 2010, it was only 16.7%).
The Tories have never had a majority in England in more than 50 years
However, hold onto one salient point here: in more than half a century, the Tories have never managed more than half of the votes cast either in the UK as a whole or in England alone.
First Past the Post
The reason that they have had government majorities (that is, a majority of seats in Westminster, as opposed to a majority of votes) is the first past the post electoral system (FPTP). It’s seats that count, not votes.
There are a huge number of seats in Westminster that are safe seats. It’s around 400, give or take, depending on various factors. They tend not to change hands. And even then, some don’t “matter” as their MP will not form part of a government majority (eg SNP seats). In 2010 there were 650 constituencies, but only upwards of 150 seats – 23% of seats or so – were “marginal”. The average Westminster seat has not changed hands since the 1960s; fewer than one-in-ten seats has changed hands in 12 of the last 17 general elections since 1950.
Furthermore, marginal seats are not evenly spread. I don’t want to get into the complicated algorithms, but there are more marginal seats in the South of England than there are total seats in Scotland. It is in the handful of marginal seats that Westminster elections are really fought.
It is thought that there will be around 190 marginal seats in the 2015 general election; 29% of constituencies. Nor are all of these as hotly contested, with only a tiny proportion seeing the highest campaign spending, usually in three-way marginals.
Nor is that the end of the matter. Within each constituency in that handful, only a small margin separates the first placed party from the second placed. And it is influencing those margins that Westminster politics tailors itself towards.
Keeping the centre-right orthodoxy
The majority of seats can be relied upon, so the policies are tailored towards placating those swing voters in that handful of marginal seats. Traditional Westminster wisdom holds that these represent “Middle England”, and all three Westminster parties calibrate their policies towards not offending them. The media, especially press, but also broadcast, plays its part in perpetuating this traditional, individualist, centre-right “common sense” orthodoxy. The New Labour phenomenon was built on that. As is Miliband’s promise to ape Tory austerity ideology.
However, although no party will step out of line for fear of losing those swing voters, the funding of big business, or being called “loony” by the press, the majority British public - including the majority of Conservative voters – hold very different views to those of the parties. The vast majority of the British public, including English voters, wants the NHS to stay in public ownership. They also support re-nationalising the energy and rail companies, and they opposed the sale of Royal Mail. However, there is no party with a chance of winning offering those policies that English voters can vote for. There is a democratic deficit in England as well.
People of England not out of Step with Scots
The people of England are not so out of step with the people of Scotland. It is the Westminster political classes that are out of step with the people. There is a perfect storm of inter-party ideological homogeny, business funding, media manufacture of consent, and neoliberal consensus in the ruling classes. The UK public has no choice at elections but neoliberal a, b or c. The parties are all vehicles of the neoliberal project.
This is an important point for two reasons: first it exonerates the British public: whichever party they vote for is “right wing”; secondly, it begs the question of how accurately we can describe Scottish votes as being for “left wing” parties. In the 2005 Westminster general election, for example, 39.5% of Scottish votes cast were cast for Labour.
How left wing is Labour anyway?
However, by what measure was Tony Blair’s Labour government “left wing”? It was a government that had two years previously led us into an illegal war in Iraq, along with the US. Blair had an easy alliance not just with George W Bush, but also with Berlusconi and Aznar. Blair preached across Europe about selling off public services. The Blair government accelerated the demonization of the disabled, the poor, and the unemployed, not least with the rhetoric around welfare-to-work. Labour in government spent 13 years consolidating Toryism.
So that 39.5% was not cast for a left wing party. Nor were the 22.6% of votes that Scottish voters cast for the Liberal Democrats. Already that is more than 62% of votes cast for non left wing parties, and we haven’t yet added the Scottish Tory vote, or dissected the policies of the SNP.
So, this idea that Scots were voting for left wing parties is looking a bit shaky. However, the same mitigation applies: what were the choices on offer?
That the choices in a parliamentary democracy are limited ought not to surprise us. As one of America’s Founding Fathers, John Jay – head of the Constitutional Convention and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court - used to say, “The people who own the country ought to govern it” (quoted in Chomsky, Understanding Power, 2002, p315). The purpose of government is not therefore to represent the interests of the working class, but of the owning class. That is why choice in elections is limited to a narrow band of “acceptable” opinion in the US, as it is in Westminster.
No wonder, then, that Howard Zinn said of voting that it was “a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens”.
So why bother?
Why, then, should we hope for better in an independent Scotland? Well, first of all, the 19th of September is not the end of a process, but the beginning of one. It must be the beginning of a process where we seek out and understand the self-activity of the people, and articulate it in ways which contribute to community empowerment. We will also be dealing with a government of a much smaller state, with the levers of power therefore closer to the people. And it will provide us with the opportunity to force our political leaders to listen to us, to respect the social democratic consensus that is bringing them to government, and understand that a new consensus is being demanded. (I have talked about this at greater length in another blog post).
We have, in short, a rare opportunity to break that Westminster neoliberal log jam, not just for ourselves, but for our English neighbours. If we pass up this opportunity, then we condemn both Scottish and English working people to continue in the same faux democracy, with the illusion of choice, and the interests of the owning class thrust upon us by the Westminster charade.
http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/11/04/nationalise-energy-and-rail-companies-say-public/
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp2003/rp03-059.pdf
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/images/dynamicImages/file/ERS_Penny%20for%20your%20vote_Final.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment