Conservatives in coalitions

I previously looked at how the Liberals have fared in past coalitions, but what of the Conservatives? Well the answer is that the Conservatives didn't suffer any long term damaging splits, but did find themselves in governments that not everyone was terribly happy with particularly the right (or "die-hard") wing of the party.

The first major coalition was that of the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists, a group of Liberals who broke away over Gladstone's proposals for Home Rule for Ireland. Although the first appointment of a Liberal Unionist as a minister was at the start of 1887, it was not until 1895 that a ministry fully combining the two was formed. The Unionists governed for ten years and increasingly became a single entity. When they split over proposals for tariff reform there were Conservatives and Liberal Unionists on both sides of the divide. Eventually in 1912 the parties formally merged, long after they had practically done so already.

The next was formed during the First World War when Herbert Asquith formed a multi-party administration in response to criticism of the conduct of the war. The Conservatives did rather badly out of the distribution of offices - there were Liberals as Prime Minister, Chancellor, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Minister of Munitions and more. The Conservative leader was given the Colonial Office and his leading lieutenant the India Office. The one significant office held by a Conservative was the Admiralty. It was not exactly the best share of offices (and not just for the Conservatives - the Labour leader got Education!) and it contributed to the unhappiness that lingered throughout the remainder of Asquith's premiership.

Eighteen months later Asquith's failure to vigorously prosecute the war led to his being forced out by a high level rebellion, and David Lloyd George took his place. Lloyd George's government had a very different spread of ministers and this time round the Conservatives received most of the top posts. The government led the UK to victory and many Conservatives were willing to continue the coalition after the war, riding the coattails of Lloyd George's popularity.

However the peacetime coalition found itself riven with infighting, both between its separate parties and within them. The cartoonist David Low famously represented the coalition as an ass with two separate heads, often at odds with one another. It was a caricature not far off the truth but perhaps the legs should have been given an independence of their own. The government struggled with the problems of post war reconstruction, and did have some successes such as over Irish independence (to the ire of hardline Conservatives), but found it difficult to balance demands for action with demands to scale back public expenditure, especially with huge "anti-waste" campaigns waged both in the media and at by-elections. The right of the Conservative Party agitated more and more for an end to the coalition. Eventually at a famous meeting at the Carlton Club in October 1922 Conservative MPs voted to leave the coalition, even though it meant repudiating their own leader, Austen Chamberlain. Former leader Andrew Bonar Law was persuaded to return to the leadership and become Prime Minister of an independent Conservative government even though he was not in the best of health. Chamberlain and most of the other leading coalition Conservatives were temporarily cast into the political wilderness, but within a couple of years the party was reunified under Law's successor, Stanley Baldwin. There was no substantial breakaway alternative Conservative party that competed at the polls.

Baldwin claimed to dislike coalitions, but the events of 1931 propelled him into another. Perhaps the situation was eased by Lloyd George being ill at the time and thus unable to take part. But what began as an emergency National Government to balance the budget and restore confidence in the currency soon became a permanent entity, holding power until the Second World War. Curiously the government was led for the first four years by Ramsay MacDonald despite his National Labour party having only 13 MPs compared to the Conservatives' 473. But then such an arrangement suited Baldwin. More significantly the National Government proved very willing to take on the die-hard wing of the Conservatives over Indian Home Rule. Over four years the government passed the Government of India Act 1935 despite fierce opposition from the likes of Winston Churchill. The National Government allowed first Baldwin and then Neville Chamberlain to govern more from a more moderately position than a single party Conservative government would have done so. The right of the Conservative party found its influence limited but it had little alternative option than to acquiesce.

The National Government eventually fell in 1940 in the circumstances described in my previous post The Norway Debate. Churchill formed an all party coalition which fought the war until breaking up after the defeat of Germany. For the most part this was the end of coalitionism until this month. But there were two possible additions.

The first was the "caretaker" government Churchill formed in May 1945, combining the Conservatives, Liberal Nationals and various non-party ministers who had been recruited during the war. This government lasted only two months but had the notable success of introducing child allowances. Being composed of nominally multiple parties it was still a coalition, even if the Conservatives and Liberal Nationals would start a formal amalgamation in opposition in 1948. As with the Unionist coalition of an earlier generation the National Government coalition proved the means by which the Conservatives ultimately absorbed a large chunk of the Liberal party.

The other was Churchill's 1951-1955 government. Whilst supported exclusively by the Conservative party it was broader than a single party administration. A number of the wartime "non-party" ministers was once more appointed and there was even an offer to Clement Davies, the leader of the Liberal Party. It may have been a coalition, it may have been a personalist government but it was certainly not a party government.

The Conservative record from coalitions is thus mixed. On the one hand they have been the means by which the party has absorbed recruits from the left and broadened its political base. They have also suffered no significant electoral breakaways or disasters simply from being in a coalition. On the other hand the governments produced have usually been significantly different from the single party Conservative orthodoxy of the relevant generation and key sections of the party have found themselves isolated. Is the pattern being repeated now?

Coalition forming

No party wields a majority in the House of Commons. The incumbent Labour government is tired. Labour has offered to change the voting system to the Alternative Vote in order to stay in office. The Prime Minister has been rushing back to London from his home in Scotland. There is a major market crisis and the public spending deficit desperately needs to be cut. Political and financial speculation is strong. The leaders of the parties enter negotiations. And then...

Yes August 1931 was an interesting time in this country. What, did you think I was talking about something else?

What was different was the government that emerged. A special "National Government" that drew together politicians from all three parties was formed under Ramsay MacDonald with the Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, and the acting Liberal leader, Herbert Samuel, both putting partisan considerations aside (including the bill for the Alternative Vote being allowed to quietly die) and serving under them. The politicians put country before party and the government slowly managed to turn the country round.

The election count - get it right not get it first

I have just seen Iain Dale's Diary: Election Night Bill Needed in which he's now calling for legislation to have all the counts done immediately on the night. You'd think from all this "Save Election Night" campaigning that things have been done this way since time immemorial.

But as some my readers will remember, there have been many parliamentary elections when the votes haven't been counted until the next day. In 1945 the votes weren't counted for a whole three weeks. I have no idea if the 1945 equivalent of the blogosphere got worked up about this. (The reason for such a lengthy delay was that time was needed to collect the votes of servicemen overseas.) At most other elections there have been many constituencies that have not counted on the night, usually because of the time it takes to bring all the ballot boxes together - has this caused uproar and fraud? Seats in Northern Ireland have almost always counted the next day after all!

Nor have governments always changed immediately on the day after polling. In 1929 polling day was on May 30th but Ramsay MacDonald didn't kiss hands until June 5th - was there widespread outrage at Stanley Baldwin still being in office for a few days?

And in many other countries the final result, and the change of leadership, often takes days on end. In the last Australian election polling was on November 24th but the formal result took nearly two weeks to finalise, and Kevin Rudd's government wasn't sworn in until December 3rd. In the last US Presidential election some of the counting went on into December.

Counts in Australia, the United States and many other countries take so long for one main reason - postal votes (and other forms of distant voting) do not reach the count by the end of polling day. The requirement is usually that the vote be sent by polling day, not that it be received by then. There are also other arrangements for remote voting in various countries, including one provision that allows a voter to walk into any polling station in the country on polling day, provide proof of their address and receive valid ballot papers for their local polling station that they are away from. Again these votes take time to make it back to the relevant count.

The way the count is done in many countries differs from our methods. Instead of taking all the ballot boxes to a central location and counting them on one site, they are often counted at the polling station and the individual results declared. The ballot papers can, of course, be recounted at a central location if the result is close and/or there are disputes over the rulings on questionable papers. This isn't so different from the European Parliament or devolved parliaments or Greater London Authority elections where for all the list elections and the London Mayoralty the votes are counted at several different locations.

Now in none of these cases did civilisation collapse just because the final election result wasn't available on the night. And in all of them the provision for postal/overseas/absent ballots meant that it wasn't possible.

Which brings us to the UK counts. Whilst simple cost and travel logistics are and always have been reasons for some seats not counting on the night, there is a new factor - the massive increase in postal voting on demand. With postal votes arriving even at the end of polling day the system going to come under a much greater strain than before in order to carry out accurate verification. That is going to make the whole thing take longer, increasing the risk of mistakes because the counting staff are ever more tired.

Speedy, sloppy election results benefit no-one. And if the election is incredibly close and hinges on one or two very tight seats, is it really in anyone's benefit if there are disputes and questions about the results in those seats because of the judgement calls made in a hurry to get the result out on the night?

If this means a lameduck government leaves office on a Saturday or Sunday rather than a Friday, so what? And yes it will mean political junkies don't get the full fun of results at 3 o'clock in the morning, but democracy should not be run as a spectator sport.

(And we've barely touched on the cost. Are the "Save Election Night" campaigners willing to personally stump up for the overtime rates? Or do they expect it to come out of our council taxes?)

So let's stop worrying about whether the vote is counted on the night or the next day and put election accuracy first. It may take a little longer but it will be well worth it.

Ming says he was a eunuch

Sir Menzies Campbell has given an interview declaring his party is not "fit for 24-hour-a-day news". (BBC News: Lib Dems 'not fit for 24hr news') It's clear that he's still bitter about the huge number of off-the-record briefings from members of his party that undermined him. And his irritation with comments about his age is all too clear. But I feel he brought this on himself - nobody ever made an issue of Michael Howard's age and Howard is only two months younger than Campbell. However Howard never tried to make anything of his age.

But what stands out the most are his comments about being leader:

"One of the things I learned very early on is that the leader of the party - the opposite of the harlot - has the responsibility but not the power."

He may not have mentioned Tom Stoppard by name, but it's hard to avoid thinking of Stoppard's classic reverse of Stanley Baldwin's famous quote. Where Baldwin spoke of "Power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages", Stoppard said "responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages".

So does Ming realise what he's said he is?

When Labour was even more flappable

Courtesy of YouTube, here is one the first predecessors of the party political broadcast - Stanley Baldwin addressing voters in this newsreel from the 1931 general election. This was when the Labour Party backed away from making an important decision - some things never change!

Oh and the result was the biggest landslide in British history.

An end to the Oxbridge dominance of Downing Street?

Who was the last Prime Minister to go to a university that wasn't Oxford or Cambridge? I hear many of you rushing to Wikipedia to work this out. The answer (until Wednesday) is Neville Chamberlain (who went to Mason Science College, later the University of Birmingham). In fact he's the last university educated Prime Minister to have not gone to Oxford - the last from Cambridge was Stanley Baldwin. (The other graduate non Oxbridge Prime Ministers were the Earl of Bute who went to the University of Leiden, Lord John Russell who went to the University of Edinburgh and Ramsay MacDonald who went to Birkbeck College). There have of course been Prime Ministers who went to the "university of life" (John Major, James Callaghan, Winston Churchill and others) but the Oxbridge dominance has been there for a long time. But this week the numbers will change - Gordon Brown is an alumnus of the University of Edinburgh.

Now does this matter, many will ask? After all many non-Oxbridge graduates have headed both main parties for decades now. Gordon Brown is not known for walking away from a fight - even if he had been Oxbridge educated I suspect he would still be willing to take on the universities if the situation arises. This could have interesting ramifications for funding.

However anyone hoping that Brown will support the campaign to end Oxbridge using "MA" to sell degrees may be disappointed - Edinburgh uses "MA" for the first degree, but it is a substantial qualification, not one purchased with no academic work.