Two-Party to Multi-Party Politics - Vernon Bogdanor

this lecture is on a modern British party system an attempt to draw together the threads of the previous five lectures but I have to begin with a confession I first outlined my program for these lectures before last year's general election and that is why I called it from a two-party to a multi-party system the election appears superficially to contradict that thesis for in the election eighty-four percent of those voting supported either the conservative or Labour Party's the largest level of support for the two major parties since the general election of 1970 but it is not yet wholly clear in my view that the 2017 general election does contradict the thesis that we have moved from a two-party system to a multi-party system indeed if we look more closely I believe we will see the generalization that Britain has returned to a two-party system it needs to be very severely qualified there must be some doubt as well as to whether the election last year is the beginning of a trend or an aberration as a brexit election more of this later on but still what happened in 2017 is a salutary warning against seeing as trends what might be no more than contingent developments a trend someone said is a trend only until it ends now the traditional picture of British politics was well summed up by WS Gilbert in the comic opera that he wrote with Sir Arthur Sullivan Isle anthe and in that opera private willis who is guarding the Palace of Westminster sings are I'm not going to sing you'll be pleased to hear he sings I often think it comical how nature always does contrive but every boy and every girl that's born into this world alive is either a little liberal or a little conservative now since the 1920s of course you'd have to say a little socialist or a little conservative but until the 1970s identification with the two main parties was extraordinarily high when the first study of party identification was carried out around the time of the 1964 general election eighty-one percent said they identified either with the conservative all the labor parties while around 40% 2/5 said their identification with their preferred party was very strong now only around 15% are strong identifies the basis of the two-party system was social and geographical homogeneity that is not say of course there were not deep and profound differences within British society primarily divisions of social class indeed during the heyday of the two-party system between 1945 and 1974 it was the division between the classes which structured the party system in 1967 one student of electoral behavior declared that class is the basis of British politics all else is embellishment and detail and that was certainly true at the time that he said it roughly speaking around two-thirds of working-class voters would support the Labour Party while an even higher proportion around 90% of the middle class would support the Conservatives British politics was the politics of democratic class conflict yet paradoxically this democratic class conflict provided for stability the conflict was to put it very crudely one concerning how the cake should be shared out between the classes a conflict of this sort is open to being resolved by bargaining each party could seek to win over supporters from the opposing party by judicial concessions the Conservatives could show they were not the enemies of the working class by supporting and indeed improving the welfare state while maintaining full employment as indeed they did during the 1950's under the leadership of Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan labor could show that the middle classes had little to fear from a Labour government and that indeed they might gain if Labour could fulfill its promise of raising the rate of economic growth which would benefit all in society whatever their class if only the rate of economic growth could be increased there would be no class war since all would gain there was a floating vote in the centre composed disproportionately of the so-called sea twos the skilled working class these were the so-called swing voters which each party could hope to convert so long as it adopted moderate policies one can contrast this sort of politics based on class with the politics based on identity and religion in Northern Ireland where there was no central ground and no floating vote where political differences are tribal based on religion or national identity there is nothing to bargain about one cannot change one's national identity and very few are prepared to change their religion Karl Marx the bicentenary of whose birth we have just been commemorating regarded class conflict as destabilizing and is likely to undermine what he thought of as bourgeois democracy which operated in means of the ruling class in fact and this I think is true of most of Marx's predictions the opposite of what he predicted has come true class conflict within a democratic state has proved a stabilizing influence it is the conflicts over religion and national identity that are destabilizing and threatened the state moreover the class allegiances of voters alter at a glacially slow rate there will not be much change in the class Allegiance of voters from one election to the next therefore there will be comparatively little electoral volatility and that is another reason why class politics is a politics of stability the system was also held together ideologically the agenda of the post-war period was set by the reforms of the wartime coalition government and the athlete government which followed it these government set up a mixed economy based primarily on private ownership but with the nationalization of the public utilities and welfare state providing a safety net against severe hardship in addition both labor and conservative governments succeeded in maintaining full employment in fact the Conservatives returned to office in 1951 reversed hardly any of the policies of the at key government there was a high degree of ideological continuity between the one nation Toryism of Churchill and Macmillan and the moderate socialism of Atlee and Harold Wilson and British political culture was such but whatever the difference is in British society and they were as I have said quite profound most people felt themselves with a significant exception of Northern Ireland where the British party system never really took root both people felt themselves as one nation we felt that we all belong to the same country and this was well summed up in an essay in 1941 written by George Orwell as a socialist who said that Britain resembled a family a rather stuffy Victorian family we've not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons it has rich relations who have to be cowards to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the sources of the family income it is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts still it is a family it has its private language and it's common memories and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks and he concluded a family with the wrong members in control that perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase and that that is not too bad a description of early post-war Britain a family with the wrong members in control so even those on the Left who felt the wrong men was written control still felt that it was their family and that they belonged to it and the most obvious sign of this social homogeneity was at the same two parties competed in the whole of England in Scotland and Wales on the same basis though not as I've said in Northern Ireland general election campaigns were broadly similar in England Scotland and Wales and the is suitable broadly the same but competition was primarily between the same two major parties no nationalist MP was elected in a general election until 1970 and in general elections there were national swings older members of the audience may remember a machine on the BBC's election night programme called a swing emitter often attributed to Robert McKenzie it was in fact the intervention of David Butler and that machine enabled you to predict from the first few results the final outcome because there was a broad national swing which was similar across the whole country so that once it had settled down after the first constituency declaration had been made you could be confident in predicting the final result and finally of course the two-party system was buttressed by the first past the post electoral system which made it so difficult for a new party to break through far better to try and influence one of the existing parties than to take the risk of striking out on one's own a stance which still appears to be the case even in the very different conditions of the 21st century to those Labour MPs the majority in fact who have no confidence in the corgin leadership for then the failure of the SDP constitutes an awful warning toward anyone seeking to buck the two-party system but the social and geographical homogeneity which sustain the two-party system no longer exists class lines are far more fluid than they were instead of a polarized system of two classes we have a series of complex gradations and few are now prepared to vote on class lines or vote the same way as their parents did 50 years ago it was quite common to hear people say we've always been labour or my family have always been conservative statements of this kind I heard much less often now society is much more fluid and so are the voters that makes for more volatile behavior in elections more switching between elections geographically there are now very wide differences between the different parts of United Kingdom there are in particular differences in party competition in the four parts of the United Kingdom until 1970s the same parties competed on the same basis in England Scotland and Wales that is no longer true in England the competition is primarily between the Conservatives and labour were the Liberal Democrats and you kept also-rans in Wales a system is tilted more towards labour than it is in England and there is also of course competition from the Welsh nationalists in Scotland the Conservatives were until the 2017 general election very weak and the main competition was between labour and the Scottish nationalists in Northern Ireland the British based parties have had no success since 1970 in 2015 for the first time vote was to be repeated in 2017 a different party won the election in each part of the United Kingdom in England the Conservatives won in Wales labour won in Scotland the SNP won and in Northern Ireland the Democratic Unionist Party this is clear evidence that Britain is no longer a geographically homogeneous society but a multinational state in which voting behavior depends in part on which area of the country who happen to live instead of a single nationwide general election as in the 1950s and 1960s there were four separate general actions in different parts of the United Kingdom the issues particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland were quite different from those in England in Scotland the main issue was whether there should be a second independence referendum in Northern Ireland the main issue was as always the border and whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom or be joined with the Republic but there was also an additional issue the future of devolved institutions in the province institutions which are temporarily in abeyance due to an unresolved quarrel between the unionists and the Nationalists the outcome in Scotland in 2015 was particularly notable in the general election of 2015 the SNP won 50 percent of the vote and 56 of the 59 Scottish seats they won more seats in 2015 than they had won in all the previous general elections put together in 2017 the Party fell back and won just 35 seats out of 59 on 37% of the vote most commentators remarked on the decline of the SNP and the revival of Labour and even more of the resurrection of the Scottish Conservatives under the leadership of Ruth Davidson and most unionists heaved aside relief even so the SNP remains the largest party in Scotland and its performance in 2017 was far better than at any previous general election except for 2015 and as a result of advances made in particular by the SNP it is now customary for the nationalist leaders as well as the Liberal Democrat leader to participate in television debates between the party leaders these debates can no longer be confined to the leaders of the two major parties now perhaps one reason for this fragmentation a fragmentation reversed perhaps temporarily in 2017 is that the political parties have seemed less successful than in the past at resolving complex national problems although it may be that voters expectations of politicians and demands they make on politicians are greater than they were 50 years ago nevertheless until the late 1960s there seems to have been a belief that the government in power could resolve Britain's economic problems and that if it could not then the opposition would be able to do so that belief started to collapse with the failure of the heath government in the early 1970s to govern against the wishes of the trade unions and it is no coincidence that the first clear sign of the decline of the two-party system came in the who governs election of 1974 a snap election called by Edward Heath to secure a mandate for a stronger policy against the trade unions the public declined to give their confidence to either major party and just 75% of those voting supported labor or the Conservatives the rest voting for Liberals or the nationalist parties and that was a precipitous fall from the 89% who had voted conservative or Labour in the previous general election in 1970 while the peak of the two-party system had come in 1951 when 97% voted for one of the two major parties indeed in none of the four general elections during the 1950's were more than 12 MPs elected who did not belong to one of the two major parties and that includes Northern Ireland elections now this decline in support for the two major parties was of course masked by the first past the post electoral system which meant that single party majority government continued even when that government was supported by just over two fifths of the voters a far cry perhaps from majority rule British government was becoming no longer ruled by the majority but ruled by the strongest minority since 1974 the highest vote gained by a winning party in a general election was 44 percent by Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives in 1979 the overall figures are very striking in the seven elections between 1945 and 1970 the average support for the two major parties was 90 percent and in no election during that period did it fall below 87 percent in the 12 elections from February 1974 to 2017 and I'm including 2017 the average supports the two major parties was 74 percent and in only two elections those of 1979 and 2017 was it over 80 percent confidence in political leadership seemed to increase during the long Premiership of Margaret Thatcher from 1979 to 1990 but her landslide victories were one on comparatively low proportions of the national vote 44% in 1979 and 42% in 1983 and 1987 just over two fifths of the national vote in other words even at the height of Margaret Thatcher's power nearly three-fifths voted against her were opposed to her something that historians should bear in mind when they claim that Margaret Thatcher enjoyed hitherto unexampled levels of popularity the same was true of Tony Blair whose landslides of 1997 and 2001 were gained on just 43 percent and 41 percent respectively of the national vote but they gave him very large majorities of over 160 on each occasion but Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair did succeed in establishing a new ideological consensus to replace the Ackley one nation consensus and this was built around market liberalism the Blair government in practice accepted the market economy pioneered by Margaret Thatcher and it did not seek to reverse the privatisation measures and all the trade union reforms of the previous conservative administration's market Thatcher and Tony Blair created a new consensus based on a much more restricted role for the state van had been apparent in the earlier period and there was more reliance on the mechanisms of the market in the public services including the welfare services but the credit crunch of 2008 has undermined that consensus and so far nothing new has replaced it but during the 2017 general election both major parties distanced themselves from it jeremy corbyn's outlook had hardly anything in common with the new Labour years of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in deeds and supporters of Corbin the term Blair right is almost the worst possible insult that you can imagine the Conservatives for their part distance themselves from a neoliberalism of a fattier years their manifesto declared the 2017 manifesto we must reject the ideological templates provided by the socialist left and a libertarian right thus as it were equating Margaret Thatcher and perhaps even David Cameron with Jeremy Corbyn the socialist left and the libertarian right and the manifesto went on to say and instead embrace the mainstream view that recognises the good that government can do not I think sentence you would have got in any of Margaret Thatcher's manifestos later the manifesto said the government's agenda will not be allowed to drift to the right Teresa may was as far away from Margaret Thatcher as Jeremy Corbyn walls from Tony Blair this is surely the clearest sign but in Britain as indeed in much of the continent social democracy and economic liberalization are Greg Thatcher Blair consensus is now very much on the defensive Jeremy Corbyn reacted against the one to resume against the other the 2017 election must marked a movement away from the consensus on economic liberalism and social democracy to internationalist doctrines which had ruled Britain from the time of Margaret Thatcher to that of David Cameron now of course the first-past-the-post system still survives as a factor inhibiting the chances of the minor parties but over the past 20 years proportional representation has been introduced in other elections elections to the devolved bodies in Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland elections to local authorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland also in elections to the London Assembly and elections for European Parliament's it can no longer be complained with any plausibility that proportional representation is too complex so voters to understand or that it has no relevance to British conditions and the introduction of proportional representation has probably encouraged voters to consider voting for parties other than the two major ones you cave had a great electoral success in 2015 when it won 1/8 of the vote though just one seat in the House of Commons but before that it had come first in the 2014 European Parliament elections under a system of proportional representation the SNP had tremendous success in the election of 2015 where it won 56 out of 59 seats but before that he'd had gained control of the Scottish Parliament first in 2007 and then again in 2011 in elections under a system of proportional representation moreover in Scotland and Wales proportional representation had sometimes led to hung Parliament's and coalition or minority governments without any obvious ill effects now is it not possible that we have taken a brief period of British political history the years from 1945 to 74 as the norm when they are in fact the exception and that this is excessively influenced our view these years of how the party system works and also and perhaps no coincidence the period when political science developed as a discipline in fact the two-party system has been much less prevalent in Britain than many suppose if we go back to the beginning of the 20th century from the great liberal victory of nineteen six to the outbreak of the first world war in 1914 there were three general elections in these elections the left was represented by two separate parties liberals and labour but right by a coalition between two parties the conservatives and liberals you know NIST's and there was also the Irish nationalist party so there were two large parties and three smaller parties but each of the smaller parties was aligned with one of the larger ones labour and the Irish nationalists were the Liberals the liberal unionists were the Conservatives so there was a two-block system but not a two-party system and two of the three elections in this period resulted in hung Parliament's after the first world war between 1918 and 1931 there were six general elections fought between three independent parties conservatives liberals and labour / liberals were split until 1923 between the squit endure brawls and the lloyd-george lipples two of the six elections result in minority governments and two yielded coalition governments during the whole period from 1886 to 1931 the liberal governments of nineteen six to 1910 and the conservative governments of 1923 to four and 1924 to nine were the only single party majority governments all other governments were coalition's or minority governments so while single party majority government was certainly the pattern after 1945 it was not the pattern in the 60 years before 1945 so it's a myth that the two-party system with its concomitant single party majority government has been the norm in Britain that's the conventional wisdom the facts show something quite different but even though reality is different from the myth the facts have not proved sufficient to destroy the myth for we continue to treat a relatively brief period of British history from 1945 to 1970 as a norm from which other periods are a deviation and this has perhaps excessively influenced our view not only about how the party system works but how it ought to work the interesting question is whether we are in fact returning to the pre 1945 condition a period of multi-party politics in which single party majority government was no longer the norm certainly until the 2017 general election it appeared the trend was in fact in that direction even so the last three elections have resulted in two hung Parliament's and a very small overall majority of 10 in 2015 for the Conservatives a majority that might well not have lasted for the full 5 years of a parliament the first past the post electoral system is often defended with the argument that it produces strong government which is generally equated with single party majority government but the outcome of the last three elections must raise serious doubts that's whether the electoral system is still capable of performing this function labour has not won a general election since 2005 thirteen years ago when it had a majority of 66 on just 35 percent of the vote in other words nearly 2/3 of those voting supported other parties the Conservatives have not won a comfortable majority since 1992 26 years ago when they had a majority of 21 though even that was not enough to last the whole Parliament by the beginning of 1997 it had disappeared through by-elections and defections and we will back into a hung parliament now for 2017 elections certainly saw a trend towards the resurrection of the two-party system and the combined vote for the two major parties was 84 percent as I said the highest figure since 1972 resume was widely criticized after the election for calling a snap election which many thought unnecessary yet her Conservatives won a higher percentage of the vote the market patter did in her landslide in 1987 Jeremy Colvin though he did not win the election won a higher percentage of the vote than a Tony Blair did in 2005 when he had a comfortable majority indeed Labour secured the highest percentage increase in its vote between one election another an increase of around 10 percent since its victory under Clement Attlee in 1945 and that of course came after an interval of 10 years since the previous election and a world war now perhaps one main reason for the seeming revival of the two-party system in 2017 is that it was a brexit election and this polarized the voters according to their view of brexit the British election study asked as far as you are concerned what is the single most important issue facing the country at the present time a dominant answer was brexit more than one in three mentioned brexit as compared to fewer than one in ten who mentioned a National Health Service and one in twenty who suggested that it was the economy now in 2015 the favored parties for those who were to vote leave in in the 2016 referendum had been either the Conservatives or UK but the absence of Nigel Farage from the UK of leadership and it believes that for the Conservatives in two resumes famous words brexit means brexit in other words our so-called hard brexit ment of the bulk of leave voters supported the Conservatives in 2017 over half of 2015 you Kipp voters swung to the Conservatives in 2017 just 18% swung to labour of 18% remain with you Kipp taking leave voters as a whole over 60% supported the Conservatives in 2017 labour by contrast one remain votes from the Greens and remarkably perhaps from the Liberal Democrats even though the Liberal Democrats were more obviously a remain party than labour since the Liberal Democrats unlike labour were proposing a second referendum on Europe so as to undo the consequences of the first nearly a quarter of those who voted Liberal Democrat in 2015 supported labour in 2017 and so did nearly two-thirds of those who had voted green in 2015 around half of those who had voted remain in 2016 voted labour in 2017 1/4 conservative and just 15% for the Liberal Democrats perhaps all this is a sign that the Liberal Democrats are once again being seen as a minor party and the fall of the gains they made since the general election of 1997 when the number of seats had increased from 20 to 46 reaching a peak of 62 in 2005 following the Iraq war that all these gains had now been lost perhaps they were suffering from being seen once again as a party with no chance of being in government and that's also suffering from the aftermath of their coalition with the Conservatives from 2010 to 2015 and alignment which seemed unnatural to many of those who'd voted for the party Tony Blair had said that if one attacked a Labour government from the left for 13 years and then joined a coalition with the Conservatives one had some questions to answer the Liberal Democrats never did succeed in answering those questions but the election of 2017 showed that the Conservatives are increasingly being seen as a leave party with labour being seen as a remain party despite the fact that Theresa May and a majority of her cabinet were remain errs while Jeremy Corbyn and his allies have always been to say the least somewhat equivocal on the virtues of the European Union referendums were once seen as a threat to the British constitution but in reality they are a threat to the party system they shake it up the 1975 referendum on Europe prefigured the split in the labour party in the 1980s and the formation of the SDP the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence prefigured the SNP electoral landslide of 2015 and the clips of labour in Scotland the 2016 referendum proved disruptive for both of the major parties realigning voters along the remain leave axis and that is ironic because both the 2016 referendum and the 2017 general election were intended to exercise Europe from British politics David Cameron in hopes that the referendum would legitimize Britain's membership of the European Union and stop the Conservatives from to use his word banging on about Europe instead the referendum had the opposite effect ejecting Britain from the European Union and emphasising the divisions within the Conservative Party on that issue Theresa May called the general election a snap election to resolve the issue breaks it once and for all but her failure to retain her overall majority has only served to reopen it and some of you may remember a famous comment of Ernest Bevin about Europe but once you open that Pandora's box you never know what Trojan horses will fly out and it seems to me there are many Trojan horses flying out when we're trying to close the box as there were when we were trying to open it and that it's proved almost impossible to exercise the issue from British politics and everyone who's tried I'm sorry to mixed metaphors everyone who's tried has found it a boomerang now the election helped the Labour Party because in a sense it could finesse the issue of Europe but labour manifesto declared that the party accepted the outcome of the referendum it said that a Labour government would leave the European Union that it would Institute a policy of managed immigration in place of free movement and it would seek to retain the benefits of a single market and the customs union but membership of the single market requires acceptance of free movement labor never made precisely clear how it would square this circle but perhaps that did not matter labor was able to win the support of areas that had voted remain in the referendum even in seemingly safe conservative seats such as Kensington and Chelsea and Canterbury and neither which had ever gone labor before while retaining support of leave voters in its working class strongholds the Conservatives on the other hand secured a higher share of the vote in 2017 than they I won in 2015 in areas of the country that are devoted to leave the European Union and indeed the six seats the Conservatives gained from labour Copeland Derbyshire northeast Mansfield Middlesbrough south Stokes health and Walsall north were all areas with heavy lead majorities in 2016 and this new constituency alignment shows very clearly how class has come to be so much less important in voting behavior Kensington and Chelsea and Canterbury are after all middle class areas won by labour and remarkably by a Labour Party far more left-wing and it had been in the past constituency such as Mansfield Middlesbrough Stoke and Walsall on the other hand are located in post-industrial Britain areas hollowed out by the processes of industrial change and deserted by many of the ambitious who have moved the large conurbations yet these areas were gained by the Conservatives brexit was as we've seen a major factor age was another just 27% of 18 to 24 year-olds voted conservative while 61% of those aged 65 or over voted conservative education was also a factor those with educational qualifications were much more likely to be remained supporters and labour voters those without or more likely to be leave supporters and conservative voters of those with no educational qualifications 52 percent voted conservative and 35 percent labour of those were the degree or higher educational qualification 33 percent voted conservative and 48 percent labour one might perhaps expect that the erosion of class ties shown in this election would in the long run lead to an erosion of the two-party system but of course that is a speculative argument now the brexit issue overcame the traditional class alignment the Conservatives made a net gain over labour of four percent amongst skilled working class and six percent amongst the semi skilled and unskilled working class but a net loss of nine percent amongst classes a and B a striking outcome labour whose policy was perhaps the most left-wing the party has ever seen gain votes amongst the more affluent classes and lost them among the poorer classes in total amongst manual workers 44 percent voted conservative and 41 percent labour while amongst non manual workers 42 percent voted conservative and 39 percent labour so it is crass to say as many commentators have done that the 2017 election was a protest against austerity for those who might be presumed to be the victims of austerity swung to the Conservatives while those who have suffered least or even benefited swung to labour brexit has helped to turn class politics upside down now the general election of 2017 therefore was a brexit election and there's some evidence also that the recent local elections were also brexit elections even though of course local authorities had no responsibility for Britain's membership of the European Union the fact that 2017 was a brexit election is the clearest indication possible of the extent to which questions of identity have replaced questions of economic ideology in British politics during most of the 20th century the political debate was one essentially about the role of the state and on the distribution of income did voters want a greater or a lesser degree of state control did they want a redistribution of income or a retention of incentives for the better off but the general elections of 2015 and 2017 were elections in which the primacy was one of identity how British are you or perhaps how English are you and is being British or being English compatible with being European in Scotland the questions were how Scottish are you and is being Scottish compatible with being British the parties of identity you kept and the SNP attacked their political opponents not for being too left-wing or to right-wing but for being insufficiently British or insufficiently Scottish and that marked a sea change in British politics these elections also showed that the strength of identity politics who was greatest in the areas that were not strongly connected to global growth suburban communities post-industrial towns and decaying coastal areas in contrast to the large conurbations which on the whole benefit from globalization and which are the center of the new knowledge and creative economy the former areas tend to have stronger community ties than the large conurbations ties which globalization have undermined and they have found emigration more unsettling than those living in London or other conurbations they are likely to be more pessimistic and fearful of the future precisely because their communities are being undermined by change their errors who have benefited from globalization those areas which have not benefited from globalization voted to leave the conurbations largely for remain Labour's strength is increasing in the conurbations and the university towns while the strength of the Conservatives paradoxically is increasing in provincial England and amongst those struggling to manage many of whom voted the u-clip in 2015 but returned to the Conservatives in 2017 it is the contrast as one journalist working for The Economist has put it between placton and Cambridge now two political scientists will Jennings and Gerry Stoker who have analyzed this new cleavage have called it a tilting of Britain's political axis and a bifurcation of Britain a bifurcation resulting from the uneven impact of globalisation on different parts of the country perhaps one should be careful about drawing too many conclusions from the 2017 election precisely because of the brexit factor the obvious question to ask therefore is whether the 2017 election signifies a new pattern or whether it was an untypical election a one-off election on a single issue will brexit be an issue still in 2022 or could they even be another brexit election before 2022 and how will brexit continue to affect the parties will it continue to be disruptive might we see a resurrection of you Kip if it appears the Conservatives failed to produce a hard brexit to all these questions there is an obvious answer it is that neither I nor anyone else can have the faintest idea and we also need to qualify the conclusion that the general election of 2007 and 17 entirely restored a two-party system for third parties still retain a considerable base of support in the House of Commons a total of 70 out of 650 seats larger than at any general election since the war before 1997 part of the reason for this is that all those smaller parties that of the Liberal Democrats are underrepresented they're seven percent of the vote one them just 2 percent of the seats while you kept 2 percent 1 the no vote seats at all the Scottish National Party found itself over-represented and it is now by far the largest of the minority parties in the House of Commons even though it's vote was under half that of the Liberal Democrats the large number of third party seats in the House of Commons means it will become increasingly difficult for one of the major parties to secure an overall majority but there is a second reason why the hung Parliament's of 2010 and 2017 may not be aberrations and this is because of a trend first noticed by to students of elections John Curtis and Michael steed in the 1980s they pointed out there had been a dramatic fall since the 1950s in the number of marginal seats they defined a marginal seat as a seat won by either of the conservative or Labour Party's contested by both parties where the Conservatives share the two party vote lay between the range 45 and 55 percent in other words a 5 percent swing will switch it from one major party to another now in terms of that definition there were 166 such seats in 1955 but only 89 in 2017 a reduction of nearly 50% the result of a consistent trend and this means that any given swing will shift just over half as many seats from one main party to another been the case in 1955 so the consequence ISM that a major party needs a much larger lead over its main competitor to have an overall majority why is this shift that's the most important in Britain's post-war electoral history occurred the cause in the view of Curtis is they have been a long-term change in the geography of construction and labor support beginning with local elections in the late 1950s conservative support became increasingly concentrated in areas where they were already strong the south of the Midlands and rural areas while labour perform better in areas where it was already strong Scotland the north and inner-city constituencies though that was partly counteracted as we've seen in 2017 but the reason for this long-term change is unclear and its effect was first very small but small and cumulative shifts gradually resulted in a fundamental change the creation of more safe seats for each of the two major parties and this means that labour is less well represented in rural areas and the South of England than it was in the 1950s while the Conservatives are less well represented in Scotland or the inner cities than it was in the 1950s in 1955 remarkably the Conservatives enjoyed a dominant position in Scotland with an overall majority of both seats and votes the only time apart from the SNP victory in victories in 2015 on 2017 this has been achieved by any party in the first four years so by contrast for the 1950s when Britain appeared are geographically a modern society it now seemed divided Britain now appears bifurcated between two different halves all this means that a larger part that a party now needs a larger gap between its main rival to enjoy a working majority from this point of view the Conservatives were unlucky they enjoyed a two and a half percent lead over labour that is the same leave that Clement at his labour party enjoyed in 1950 which gave them a small overall majority of 5 admittedly probably insufficient to to hold Parliament but a majority all same in 2010 David Cameron enjoyed a 7% lead over labour a larger lead an independent obtained by Anthony Eden in 1955 Harold Macmillan in 1959 Harold Wilson in 1966 or Edward Heath in 1970 yet all these elections yielded comfortable majorities for the winners Cameron's margin over labour in 2010 was roughly similar to Margaret Thatcher's margin over labour in 1979 but she had a majority of 43 seats Cameron had a hung parliament so for these two reasons the rise in the representation of third parties and the decline in the number of marginal seats the hung Parliament's thoughts were the outcomes of the 2010 and 2017 elections may not be an aberration or an accident but a harbinger of things to come it is just possible that the era of single party majority government which characterized the immediate post-war period has come to an end and the future will see an era of multi-party politics despite the outcome of the 2017 election but who knows there's a salutary warning against making Seth illogical predictions which was well put as long ago as 1959 by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan having won an election too many people surprised he said one of the latest so-called Sciences is one called psychology the study of how the people voted last time how they will vote next time all apparently capable of mathematical calculation irrespective of the electoral campaign or the issues at stake this sort of political Calvinism is only redeemed by the recent discovery that their predetermined anticipations are generally proved wrong the election the electors do show from time to time a regrettable outbreak of political free will now I began this lecture with the confession I end with the warning on the limitations of the subject men and women always tried to achieve certainty about the future and they've always been disappointed the ancients consulted the Oracles at Delphi later it was thought that history might give the answers but more we knew about the past the better we could predict the future but as the Oxford historian AJP Taylor once said we learned from history not to make the old mistakes and that leaves us free to make new ones instead in our time it is the academic students of politics or as they call themselves political scientists who have taken over the role once enjoyed by the Oracles and then by the historians at any rate physical scientists do not seem to have been much more successful than the Oracles all the historians and certainly the political scientists were a month for losers of the election of 2017 which confirmed there are no iron laws of politics consider the supposed iron laws which have been shown to be no longer iron laws first of all the apathy of the young who each was said was simply not interested in politics the second was the unimportance of the electoral campaign at the beginning of the 2017 campaign the Conservatives were 22% ahead in the polls in the election they had a lead of just 2% Theresa May had no doubt called the election after looking at the opinion polls but they were just as little use of the Oracle at Delphi the opinion polls give a snapshot of the present they cannot be used to predict the future the third iron law was an elections of one on the center ground and the Labour Party firmly on the Left could not make electoral games the third fourth iron law of the Party ahead in voter surveys on the issues of economic competence would win the election the fifth law was that the party whose leader is thought to be the best candidate for prime minister would win the election but conservatives were ahead both on economic competence and on the best prime minister much good it did them the sixth law in which I was complicit was at Britain with inevitably moving from a two-party system to a multi-party system in facts as we have seen the 2017 election yielded the largest two-party vote since 1970 the seventh iron law was of social class is the most fundamental determinant of voting behavior and that politics was based mainly on class instead labour made large gains in middle class errors and university seats while the concerns he did best in the manufacturing areas of the East Midlands among less privileged their own and are no doubt others supposed armed laws which I have not noticed all these iron laws predicted a massive conservative victory which I have to confess I believe myself would occur a conservative victory was as it were over determined but it did not happen the truth is that politics can never be a predictive science and we all make make ourselves foolish when we seek to make predictions ambition despite the very sophisticated work being done by students of elections I do not believe we can ever have firm knowledge of why it is that people vote in the way that they do that perhaps is fortunate for if we did know it would be open to ill wishes to manipulate the way we vote by using that predictive knowledge to our detriment that is why I've tied in these lectures to look at the development of the British party system through historical perspective and I throw out try to bear in mind the quip that the effect that the trend is your friend until the end when it bends so if asked what are the electoral and political trends of the future or even what might happen in the next election I can only answer in the words of the great jazz trumpeter late Humphrey Lyttelton who was once asked whereas modern jazz going he replied if I knew that I'd be there already I confess I find all this very comforting it does show that we do after all have free will and do not have to do what political scientists and others tell us we must do I concluded by referring to another election which caused a surprise that of June 1970 an election which the Conservatives won even though week before the election the polls have put labour 12% ahead at the time the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote to an American correspondent I naturally cock-a-hoop about the refutation of the pollsters anything that upsets careful predictions the general resumption the vast impersonal forces are guiding our faltering footsteps in directions unknown to us but known only to American scientists please me immensely there is no limit in my pleasure in the unforeseen and for charities and in my view it's an insight into the unforeseen and fortuitous that makes a study of politics and history so fascinating thank you you

Channel: Gresham College

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Keywords: gresham, gresham talk, gresham lecture, lecture, gresham college, gresham college lecture, gresham college talk, free video, free education, education, public lecture, Event, free event, free public lecture, free lecture, party politics, politics, political history, labour, conservative, liberal democrats, conservative party, uk politics, post-war politics, uk political parties

Id: AQqvXLLh29k

Length: 56min 2sec (3362 seconds)

Published: Mon May 21 2018