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Are all voters equal?

By
Richard
 – 02/09/2010Posted in: Blog, UK

Julia Gillard, attempting to be returned as Australian prime minister

One of the basic tenets of federalism is that all citizens should be equal.  People living in different member states within a federation might have different rights and duties with respect to those states, but they have equal rights and duties with respect to the federation.  This insistence on equality among the citizens is one of the ways of characterising the difference between a federation and a confederation, and is a reason why democratic states cannot share a federation with undemocratic ones: democracy at the federal level must be practised freely and equally throughout the federation, uninhibited by the actions of the governments of the member states. 

This aspect of the theory of federalism is relevant to the debate about electoral reform in the UK, with the proposal to move from First Past The Post (FPTP) to the Alternative Vote (AV) for the election of members of the House of Commons. 

Both systems are based on single-member constituencies, the difference being that under FPTP the voter indicates a single choice, while AV permits the voter to list all the candidates in order of preference.  The least popular candidate is eliminated from the election first, and the votes are transferred to the voters’ second choices.  This procedure continues until one of the candidates has more than 50 per cent of the votes cast, either as first preferences or as transfers. 

A feature of both electoral systems is the safe seat.  These are constituencies where one political party is so obviously dominant that it is certain to win the seat without any campaigning.  The voters who live in such a seat are effectively deprived of choice over how they are to be represented in parliament, and their votes do not determine the result of the election.  A few votes more or less in a marginal seat are much more likely to influence the results than the same number of votes in a safe seat, so electoral activity is concentrated in the marginal seats where the result could be influenced by the campaign. 

It is evident that the contrast between safe seats and marginal seats does not treat all voters equally and thus is in conflict with the principle that all citizens should have equal rights regardless of where they live. 

In practice, this matters because political parties tailor their policies to be persuasive in the marginal seats rather than in the safe seats.  It is often argued that the rise of BNP in working class communities can be put down to the neglect of the people in those areas by the Labour party, because it took their votes for granted and designed its policies to be attractive elsewhere.  If all votes mattered equally, this kind of problem would not arise. 

Furthermore, connoisseurs of the expenses scandal might comment on how many of the errant MPs held safe seats rather than marginal ones.  Fear of the electorate is a corrective to complacency. 

In the UK, it is a substantial factor in the election.  Earlier this year, in the run-up to the general election, the Electoral Reform Society published research claiming that as many as 382 seats were “‘Super Safe’ in that they will not change hands even with a landslide on any conceivable scale.”  The concentration of such seats in a region could reduce the influence of that region within national politics: in fact, the ERS noted: 

“Whole counties such as Cambridgeshire, North Humberside and Northumberland have literally no competitive elections. In many cases a solitary seat is the only area competition such as Surrey, West Sussex, County Durham, Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire.” 

So, what is the difference between FPTP and AV when it comes to safe seats?  We can compare the UK with Australia, which uses AV.  I have not seen any analysis of Australia along the same lines as the ERS analysis of Britain (although the ERS might be well-advised to undertake it) but one can look at how many seats actually change hands at each election.  This gives another measure of how safe seats are in practice. 

The chart below shows the relationship between a change in vote share between government and opposition and the net number of seats that change hands as a result, over the past 12 elections. 

Change in vote share vs change in seats, UK and Australia

(Two health warnings about this chart: (1) the change in vote share in Australia relates only to first preference votes, whereas it might be a change in second or lower preferences than makes the difference in the election, and (2) it does not include seats that changed hands against the national swing, so the number of seats changing hands might in fact be greater.  Furthermore, this analysis does not distinguish between seats that did not change hands because they were successfully defended and those where there was no real challenge at all.) 

In the chart, British election results are largely above and to the left of the Australian results, because fewer seats change hands for any given change in votes.  The circled mark indicates the average result for each country (UK: 8.9% seats, 5.7% votes; Australia: 10.6% seats, 2.9% votes).  The lower average swing in Australia is consistent with health warning (1) above, but the greater proportion of the seats that changes hands – the probability of a seat changing hands is 20 per cent higher in Australia – suggests that AV makes seats more vulnerable and fewer of them safe. 

This finding makes intuitive sense.  In Britain, a candidate who gets more than 40% of the vote is likely to win (in only 27 seats out of 650 did the second-placed candidate also get more than 40% of the vote), whereas in Australia, there is the possibility that the other candidates will agree to exchange second preferences amongst themselves to the detriment of the front-runner (which they can do without harming their own electoral bids). 

A reduction in the number of safe seats, making more votes matter more, would be a considerable improvement in the electoral system.  A change from FPTP to AV would make a modest difference in this respect, and to that extent can be welcomed.

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Keep Cornwall whole!

By
Richard
 – 26/08/2010Posted in: Blog, UK

The River Tamar, "one of the oldest borders in Europe" (picture Michael Parry)

One of the planks of the coalition government’s platform is to reduce the number of members of the House of Commons and redraw the boundaries so that each constituency has roughly the same number of voters.  At present, the largest constituency – the Isle of Wight – has around 5 times the number of the smallest, Na H-Eileanan An Iar (the Western Isles).

Three seats in the north of Scotland will be spared this equalisation – they have large geographical areas already (and two of them have potentially troublesome Liberal Democrat MPs) – but otherwise the Boundary Commission will equalise remorselessly on.

But there is a reason other than geography why different seats are of different sizes, namely identity.  One of the crucial building blocks of democracy is not only that the citizens must be represented, but that they must be represented in ways that they themselves can understand.

Imagine if, rather than geographically, we were all represented in the House of Commons alphabetically, with MPs elected by all the people with surnames beginning with A, with B, with C and so on.  Who would suppose that such MPs could meaningfully represent the people who voted for them?  What would the voters have in common?  The self-identification of the citizens matters.

However, citizens do not neatly imagine themselves into equally-sized groupings, which makes drawing up realistic parliamentary constituencies hard.  Trade-offs have to be made between identity and size.  Most of the city of Cambridge, for example, is in the Cambridge constituency, but there is one ward of the city that spills over into neighbouring Cambridgeshire South, a constituency that stretches 10 miles into the countryside rather than 2 miles into the centre of town.

The determination of the government to reduce the disparities in size is going to make the disparities in identity worse.  In Cornwall, for example, there is concern that a constituency will be created that straddles the border with Devon: despite “the Tamar being one of the oldest borders in Europe” (say the campaigners).

Multi-member parliamentary constituencies could reduce the scale of this problem considerably, as they would be much more tolerant of different sizes of community, but that idea has been specifically excluded by the coalition government.  The only two electoral systems on offer in the referendum next spring both rely on single member constituencies.

This conflict between equality of the citizens – making all the constituencies the same size – and respecting their identities will occur again and again as the boundaries are redrawn.  Cornwall today is merely the start of something big.

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EU taxes: who decides?

By
Richard
 – 11/08/2010Posted in: Blog, Europe

Janusz Lewandowski

Janusz Lewandowski, member of the European Commission responsible for the budget, has floated the idea of introducing a new tax to finance the European Union independently of the member states.  The tax base, that is, would be independent, not the decisions about whether and how much to raise.  Carbon taxes, for example, or a levy on financial transactions might yield revenue that is not currently available to member states’ finances and might never be so, but which nevertheless could be harnessed for the common good.

Mr Lewandowski introduced his suggestion with the observation that some member states’ finance ministries are encouraging him to think exactly along these lines.  If the EU could raise more of its own revenue, it could ask for less from the member states directly.  National finance ministry officials might welcome this, as this would give them more room to manoeuvre domestically.  (A rare instance, this, of national official welcoming European initiatives: normally, they are in the forefront of those who resist them.)  The assumption therefore is that EU taxation would not increase the expenditure of the EU, merely change its source.

A second point is that any EU taxation, even if raised from an independent source, would still be approved by the usual EU institutional mechanisms.  Specifically, the agreement of the member states would be necessary.

Christopher Booker writes, in the Daily Mail this morning,

“If the EU is given the power to impose its own taxes, without having to battle with member states each time it wants to increase its own budget, the likelihood is that our contribution could go through the roof.”

There is no suggestion, nor should there be, that EU taxation or expenditure might be decided without the involvement of the member states.  To suggest otherwise is irresponsible and ill-informed.  The British people deserve better from their newspapers.

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Incoherence

By
Richard
 – 03/08/2010Posted in: Blog

The proposal to hold the AV referendum on the same day as local and devolved elections next year has put Labour in a spin. One Labour politician is quoted in the Guardian saying:

“I am going to be put in the impossible position next May of campaigning to remove the Liberal Democrats on my local council three days of the week, and then join forces with the same Liberal Democrats to call for a change in the voting system for the Commons for the remaining days of the week. It is totally incoherent.”

The logic of this position is that if another political party must be criticised and attacked, it must be criticised and attacked without reservation, on every issue, everywhere. But, in an era of multi-level governance, is this really sustainable?

After all, in Scotland, Labour has sided with the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats against the nationalists, in Wales, it is formed up against the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats but with the nationalists, and in Westminster after the recent general election, Labour’s plan was to go into coalition with the Liberal Democrats and secure the tacit support of the nationalists from Scotland and Wales in order to keep the Conservatives out. Confused? You will be.

The reality is that different political parties do agree with each other on some issues, and it is absurd to deny it. The absurdity of the statement “all of the other parties are all bad” is even more pronounced in a multi-level system where political parties have to form all kinds of different coalitions and arrangements for all kinds of different reasons from time to time. For example, the ease with which a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition at Westminster has addressed economic and commercial matters is no surprise to those people who had noted their respective MEPs working very constructively together on such matters in the European Parliament for years.

Of course, the reason why political parties have to adopt the pretence that “all of the others are all bad” is because that is what the First Past The Post electoral system requires. It rewards candidates that refuse to acknowledge the strengths of others and punishes those that do. In a two party system, such as in the United States, this characteristic of FPTP might not matter – because it is true that all of the others are all bad – but once there are more than two parties, and thus the expectation of shifting coalitions, it does not work in a multi-level democracy. (It is arguable that it does not work for a single tier of democracy, too, but that would be outside the scope of a blog on federalism.)

The irony is that the Labour politician I quoted above is a supporter of AV, an electoral system whose chief advantage over FPTP is that it does away with the “all of the others are all bad” philosophy and acknowledges the reality that party X might prefer party Y to party Z. It is the need to play by the culture of FPTP that brings about the incoherence of which he complains.

It would be a pity if this unwelcome aspect of British political culture might serve to prevent change to the electoral system that in turn sustains that unwelcome aspect of British political culture. It is a vicious circle which we need to break out of.

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Sandals or jackboots?

By
Richard
 – 25/07/2010Posted in: Blog

Last Thursday’s blog post about Daniel Hannan’s view of Iceland has provoked a response. The Conservative MEP has replied in his blog on the Telegraph website (read it here).

Aside from selectively quoting from this blog to distort its argument, he describes Federal Union as having “a whiff of benign 1930s dottiness about its campaign: of handbills and sandals, Esperanto and vegetarianism, decimalisation and naturism.” I think these echoes of the 1930s are worth exploring.

The thrust of Daniel Hannan’s original blog entry was that individual countries should have opted out of the defence of the global financial system and allowed their own parts of it to fail. They themselves would have accrued some benefits and avoided the costs to fall on to others. Iceland, he says, has benefited this way: why could Britain not have done the same?

In the 1930s, there was the same debate. Should countries try to make their way through the economic downturn at the expense of others? Different countries set about devaluing their currencies against each other, with a net result of standing still. Trade barriers were erected against each other’s exports. Some countries repudiated their foreign debts: it was only foreigners who lost out so that did that matter?

This is the economic strategy of the pickpocket. If one person does it, they might make some money. If everybody does it, they merely end up stealing from each other, and nobody is better off.

It would have been, and remains, much better to address common problems together rather than with separate policies that actively undermined each other.

But the breakdown of the economic system also led to the breakdown of the political system. Jeffry Frieden, in his book “Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century”, observes that:

“One only needs to know one thing to determine whether a country moved toward autarky and authoritarianism or remained economically open and democratic: whether it was an international debtor.”

Economic freedom and political freedom were inseparably tied up in that decade. A country that put, it thought, its own economic interests first and was prepared to pursue them at the expense of others in fact sacrificed both economic and political freedoms at home. Federal Union was resolutely in favour of free trade and against protectionism, for political reasons as much as for economic ones.

If I may use Daniel Hannan’s reference to footwear, it wasn’t the sandal that was associated with the “my country first” approach, but the jackboot.

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Nick Clegg: a blunder, not a crime

By
Richard
 – 22/07/2010Posted in: Blog

Nick Clegg

It seems that Nick Clegg is still adapting to government. Describing the Iraq war as “illegal”, as he did in the House of Commons yesterday, may have made sense as part of his election campaign messaging, but not something to be said by someone deputising for the prime minister at the despatch box unless it is the official government view.

Given that many of his cabinet colleagues voted for that war – one of them, work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith was leader of the opposition at the time and a committed supporter of the war – this is unlikely to be the case.

It also seems that he is still adapting to coalition politics. He demanded that Jack Straw, for Labour, account for his support for the “illegal invasion of Iraq”, but less than three months previously, he had been considering Labour as a potential governing partner. Was this demand of the Labour party part of his negotiating position at the time?

In an era of coalition politics, today’s opponents might be tomorrow’s partners, and it is unwise to erect barriers too high in front of them. It is not only between the governing parties that coalition requires a change in the style of politics.

But my real concern about the use of the word “illegal” by a member of the government is not one of politics but of substance. What does it mean to declare that a war is, or was, illegal?

It puts me in mind of those European bishops who used to bless their respective national armies as they went off to war, telling them that they had God on their side, even though those armies were going to off to fight each other. The notion of the legality of a war is currently an incantation designed to make people feel better about what they are about to do. In the absence of a legal system, the notion of legality is essentially meaningless.

The proceedings of the Chilcot enquiry have already seen Jack Straw standing by his view that the Iraq war was legal and further, in a note of 29 January 2003 to his Legal Adviser, he declared that “There is no international court for resolving such questions in the manner of a domestic court.” This is precisely the problem.

Unlike God, though, international law has the virtue of being an entirely human creation and therefore can be changed and amended as needed. Creating the kind of court whose absence Jack Straw noted is perfectly possible.

If there is any advantage in a statement from a member of the government, it is that the government has the power to make things happen. It can propose laws, and change policies, and establish precedents on behalf of the country. One such action it should champion now is the creation of a court, or the endowment of the relevant on powers on one of the existing international courts, to rule on the legality of war. This would not arise as the result of a legal action between states, but from an action against the government of a state by its own citizens.

If anything could truly be described as the new politics, it is this. It would turn Nick Clegg’s pious platitudes about the war into a solid achievement.

Personally, I do not believe that Nick Clegg went into politics intending to be satisfied by pious platitudes alone, but I accept that he may yet prove me wrong.

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A politician thinking small

By
Richard
 – 21/07/2010Posted in: Blog

Conservative anti-European MEP Daniel Hannan writes from Iceland that, rather than bailing out the banks, they should have been allowed to crash. The apparent health of the Icelandic economy is proof that this would have been a better thing to do. Financial assets may have lost value, but real assets are as robust as ever.

This is a tragic example of a politician thinking small. Just because one country does something does not mean that every other country can do it too.

First, think about the banking bailout. What actually did it consist of? Some banks and insurance companies were propped by public money to prevent their collapse, a collapse which would have led their trading counterparties also to collapse, with bankruptcy rippling throughout the financial system. One might argue that there is a cost to the public purse of this bailout, but there would have been a greater cost if widespread bankruptcy had been allowed to proceed instead.

A major reason why the Icelandic economy appears health despite the bankruptcy of its major banks is that other countries did not go down the same route. They remain viable trading partners, able to buy Icelandic exports and to continue to supply Iceland with the imports it needs. If the credit crunch had been allowed to become worse – governments provided large amounts of money as emergency loans to otherwise solvent banks that were facing a liquidity crisis – trade credit would have dried up and with it the trade upon which a small, specialised economy such as Iceland’s depends. If the other countries had seen their economies collapse, many fewer of their citizens would be able to afford to travel abroad as tourists.

Which brings me to the second reason, the exchange rate. One of the ways in which the Icelandic economy has bounced back is the collapse in its exchange rate. Imports become more expensive and exports cheaper: this is Nature’s way of rebalancing the economy. Iceland used to be an expensive tourist destination but has now become a cheap one.

However, this is only true in the eyes of people whose own currency has not devalued. The generalisation of the Icelandic economic model would require everyone to devalue, which is of course not possible. Devaluation all round leaves nobody better off.

So while a particular economic strategy might make sense for a small country, it is another thing to say that it make sense for a larger one or for the global system as a whole. Iceland has been able to follow its own particular policies against the backdrop of a global economy stabilised and guaranteed, for better or worse, by the United States. Iceland’s economic fortunes would be very different if the US had followed the same model.

And this leads to a very serious problem, namely the inability of the United States to maintain this stabilisation role indefinitely. For most of the 19th century, this was played by Britain, with America taking over after the first world war. A central part of the settlement after the second world war was the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions which enshrined American hegemony, and particularly economic hegemony, at their heart. However, that era of hegemony is coming to an end.

While America remains the world’s largest single economy, it is no longer massively so. It represented about 50 per cent of world GDP in 1945, and only 25 per cent today. The limits of military power have been displayed in Iraq and Afghanistan: it is not as powerful as it thought it was.

If the US is to give up this role as anchor of the global economy, what might replace it? This is where Europeans have got to stop thinking small.

After all, the eurozone represents 21 per cent of world GDP, and the EU as a whole 28 per cent. It could have just as great a claim as the US to anchor the world economic system, if it had the political means of doing so, but would face just the same limitations if it tried to do so alone. As part of a consortium, however, it might have a chance.

A partnership between America, Europe and some other economic powers could establish a new means of regulating the world economy and guaranteeing its trade flows, in a way that none of them could do on its own. And if Europe is to play a part in this, it must do so as a united whole. The individual European countries are too small to exercise influence in such a system, but the EU together can do so.

The question for European countries is whether they wish to take part in creating such a system, or prefer instead to be at the mercy of whoever in the end does so. They can think big, or they can think small.

It would be much better for Europe if America, have taken over leadership of the world economy from Britain 90 years ago, passed it on to an international consortium rather than to another single country, for that other country could only be China. And a world following China’s rules could be a rather less congenial place for liberal politics and economics.

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It’s a federal system, stupid

By
Richard
 – 20/07/2010Posted in: Blog, Federalism

James Kirkup in the Daily Telegraph politics blog today describes very well the background to the decision to release the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi. Specifically, he explains why the UK system of government means that David Cameron is not to blame.

“What’s really odd is that this misunderstanding is taking place in country that has a federal system. How can US politicians steeped in the concept of states’ rights and the limits to federal authority not grasp the concept of Scottish devolution?

“Devolution means power over – and legal responsibility for – certain issues rests in Edinburgh with the administration elected by the people of Scotland. And not, repeat not, with the Government in London. One of those issues was the release of Megrahi. That’s because Scotland has its own legal system, quite distinct from that of England, and over which ministers in London have precisely no influence.”

Read the whole article here.

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Britain and its allies

By
Richard
 – 16/07/2010Posted in: Blog

Nick Harvey

Having criticised the new government’s policy on Afghanistan earlier in the week, this blog can also praise it, too. Specifically, the speech by armed forces minister Nick Harvey to the Royal United Services Institute, and his comments about the UK’s allies (read the speech here).

He said that “we should have less duplication of capabilities held in large numbers by our NATO allies.” If money is short, as it normally is and certainly is right now, we should spend it on the things that add to our security the most.

Such a statement ought to be obvious and pass without comment, but in the eyes of the nationalists it does not. Here is Con Coughlin in the Daily Telegraph:

“that sounds fine in theory, but where are these allies? Can we really rely on the French, the Germans or the Italians to protect our national interests? When the going gets tough, only the British can be relied upon to defend Britain. The sooner the likes of Mr Harvey grasp this simple truth, the better.”

Well, Britain has had an understanding with France about mutual defence and the sharing of roles since the Entente Cordiale was first signed in 1904. The whole point of that first treaty was to share the load of confronting a rapidly arming Germany: both Britain and France realised that they could no longer do it alone, nor were they the only country wanting it to be done. Since then, in two world wars, when one might copy Con Coughlin’s language and say that the going got tough, there was a great dealing of divvying up of tasks, rather than assuming that each country should do everything itself. Those countries that did not subscribe to this approach, such as the United States in the first world war, paid a heavy price.

One of the themes pursued by Liam Fox, now the secretary of state for defence, when he was in opposition was the duty that Nato allies owed to each other to continue properly to the collective defence. (This blog has remarked before on the collision between that idea and the belief in national sovereignty.) The ability of the UK to express this view in Nato circles will be strengthened if Britain itself obviously subscribes to the idea that defence is indeed collective and not a matter for each country on its own.

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Who speaks for Europe?

By
Richard
 – 15/07/2010Posted in: Blog

More of the fruits of Lisbon treaty: there is a proposal that the European Union should get the right to speak at the United Nations General Assembly. At present, the EU is merely an observer: the change will not make it a full member but will give its representatives the opportunity to express their views. The proposal has been agreed by the EU and will be submitted for approval at the UN itself later this year.

The policies expressed by the EU representative will be those agreed by the member states, and agreed by unanimity. The suggestion that there will be things said that a member state disagrees with is therefore not correct. However, because unanimous decision-making tends to result in lowest common denominator outcomes, there will undoubtedly be things not said that a member state thinks ought to be expressed. However, without an EU presence, nothing will be said of a European view, not even the good bits.

This view of the EU depends, of curse, on one’s view of the member states. If you think that the world still revolves around them, then maybe an EU voice is not for you. But if, like this website, you recognise that Europe represents a declining proportion of the world’s population and the world’s trade, and that power backed up by military force is increasingly less relevant than power backed up by other means, then an EU foreign policy has the potential to be more credible and more effective than a collection of 27 national foreign policies. The word “potential” in that previous sentence is important: the EU is not entitled to assume its own importance, it has to earn it.

But who will the EU representative be? For most of the time, it will be someone from the new External Action Service, to be the official eyes and ears (and mouth) of the EU. The head of the External Action Service, Catherine Ashton, will be in overall charge of the EU position, but for the big set-piece occasions it will be President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy who represents the EU.

It is good that there is an EU representative, but I can’t help thinking that it would have been better had it been the president of the European Commission. We summarised the arguments for a powerful voice in the world and an accountable president back in March 2003, during the European Convention. (Read the briefings here and here.) President Barroso, who leads the Commission, is accountable in public to the European Parliament, and took office after the elections to the EP. President Van Rompuy is accountable only to the heads of government meeting in private in the European Council, and was chosen not after a campaign involving the voters but following a series of discussions among the prime ministers. I prefer the accountability and mandate of the Commission president, and most federalists will do too.

However, I am a great believer in being grateful for what we have got. The president of the European Council (and this is not a personal reflection on President Van Rompuy) is better than nothing. “Not enough” is rarely an argument against an improvement in the constitutional system, whether we are talking about the limited devolution of the Scottish Parliament or the way in which the EU works: “not enough” is still more than we had before.

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