The most challenging election of modern times lies ahead, but the main parties are not spelling out what their policies mean to voters
Everyone seems to agree that we are heading for one of the least predictable general elections of modern times (although that seems to stop few pundits trying to call it). But are we also heading for one of the least democratic?
Democracy is a lot more than merely voting every four or five years. It involves many things, not least that the parties standing for election give us a reasonably clear idea of what our choices are. On this front, things do not look good.
Although we are getting some idea of the main parties’ policies on what is fairly unanimously agreed to be the central issue - Public finances - we are getting these in headlines only. As best we can decipher, there’s about £50bn a year difference between the spending plans of the Conservatives and Labour by 2020, although even this is uncertain.
Both main parties have committed to delivering ‘balanced budgets’ by the end of the next parliament, although with different definitions of what that means. Why we need a balanced budget neither really explains, which is odd given that we haven’t had balanced budget politics in the UK for most of the past century.
Labour has said it will cut less, the Tories promise to cut more. The Tories are also promising £7bn of tax cuts, although it’s unclear where these will come from.
What neither has said is where they will cut spending and, crucially, what the impact will be. Both keep pretending that you can carry on hacking away at spending on services and welfare with no consequences. The Tories occasionally let the mask slip and admit that what they are after is a permanently smaller state ñ more like the United States than Europe.
But there is a deeper problem with the upcoming election. In the five elections between 1945 and 1959 the winning party took an average of 48% of the vote. For the five elections between 1964 and 1974 and 1979 and 1997 that had dropped to just under 43% in both cases. In the last three elections it was down to just over 37% (excluding the Liberal Democrats’ vote in 2010).
Neither main party is saying anything about their ‘red lines’. They are still locked into a majority government mindset.
There is a definite possibility, given the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system, that we could get a majority single party government with close to 35% of those voting in May. We could even get a majority government with fewer popular votes than the defeated party. The last time this happened was 1951, when the Tories won with 48.0% to Labour’s 48.8%.
(Compare this to the Tory proposal that strike ballots would need at least 40% of those eligible to vote to be legitimate. No government since 1945 has been elected with 40% of the electorate backing it ñ the average is 32%. The Tories managed 23.5% in 2010).
It’s unclear where the ‘tipping point’ is for public acceptance of the legitimacy of a single party majority government, but 35% of the vote must surely be very close to the edge.
The alternative is, and is increasingly likely to be, a coalition of some sort. The current two parties in government took 59% of the votes between them, but still only 39% of the electorate.
Whatever the make-up of a coalition in 2015, its policies will be an amalgam of its constituent parties’ programmes. But neither main party is saying anything about who they will, or will not, go into coalition with or what their ‘red lines’ will be on policy. This means voters have no idea what will happen in reality after May 7.
In countries with regular coalition governments, parties are more open about who and what sort of coalition they might form ñ but our main parties are still locked into a majority government mindset. So our choices in May will be more uncertain than at any point in my lifetime. Good luck making your decision, voters.
Colin Talbot is professor of government at the University of Manchester
