Douglas Carswell’s defection to UKIP and his decision to fight a by-election is a reminder that the UK now has a multi-party system – even though Westminster and Whitehall have only partially conceded the shift.
We still largely live in the mindset in English national politics – even if not in European and mayoral elections or elsewhere in the UK – of a first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all electoral system which makes life very hard for smaller parties.
Gilbert and Sullivan’s famous refrain that ‘every boy and every gal…. is either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative’ was only partially correct even in 1882 – it ignored the Irish Nationalists and women did not get the vote for a further 36 years. But the assumption was correct for most of the following 80 years apart from the 1918-29 period when Labour overtook and replaced the Liberals. The 1951 election saw the high point of the Conservative/Labour duopoly which won nearly 97 per cent of the overall UK vote and all but nine MPs.
This dominance began to be eroded in the 1960s but the real change came in the two 1974 elections as a result of the breakaway from the Tories by the Ulster Unionists; the early, though at the time short-lived, success of the Scottish Nationalists; and the Liberals’ upsurge. The two party share of the vote was cut to 75 per cent and other parties gained between 37 and 40 MPs at the two elections. Only once since then, in 1979, has the two party share of the vote risen above 80 per cent and have other parties won fewer than 30 MPs.
This splintering of two party dominance has gone much further at the last two general elections, the Tories and Labour winning barely 65 per cent of the total vote in 2010, a huge relative decline in sixty years. Other parties also gained 86 MPs (down from a peak of 93 in 2005).
Of course, some of this shift reflects both the different party systems in Northern Ireland, Scotland and, to a lesser extent, Wales. But even in England, the two party share of the vote has declined from a peak of 97.6 per cent in 1950 to 67.6 per cent in 2010, while the number of other party MPs has risen from just two to 45. Almost all the increased number of non-Tory/Labour MPs have been Liberal Democrats, but, excluding them, the share of the vote going to other parties has risen from 0.1 to 8.2 per cent in England.
The electoral system makes it very hard for smaller parties to prosper, except in European and other elections under proportional representation. The Lib Dems only started to make substantial gains when they began targeting seats. That is the UKIP dilemma now, though Mr Carswell’s by-election is in one of UKIP’s best prospective seats.
The success of the Lib Dems and other parties makes it harder for a single party to win an outright majority. On current polls, the Tories and Labour will do well to get more than 70 per cent total vote between them next May. Even if the Lib Dems suffer big loses then, the other parties are still likely to have 60 or more MPs.
These trends affect the authority and legitimacy of whoever forms a government in just over eight months, whether with an overall majority, in a minority government, or, possibly least likely, in coalition. In many ways, Whitehall has adapted its working practices remarkably well to the existence of the coalition, but majoritarian attitudes are still ingrained amongst ministers, and at Westminster. These will not be changed by one defection or by-election. But accumulating evidence over the next year of a lasting switch to a multi-party system is bound to raise questions about the familiar duopoly assumptions under which both the Commons and government operate. Both politicians and civil servants in their preparations for the next election need to think about the implications of these trends and about how they may need to be more flexible in accepting a more fluid political system in which power is spread wider.
