David Cameron celebrates the first anniversary of his election as Conservative leader today, having spent the past week warning of the 'huge mountain' the Tories still have to climb if they are to win back power, but promising 'real grit' to get them there. Yet there is something of a contradiction in his professed strategy of both seeking to appeal to an electorate "crying out for change" and trying to reclaim from Labour the 'centre ground' of British politics. From the perspectivce of traditional Tory voters, changing the Conservatives into Labour-lite offers no real choice of change at all, and Lord Saatchi last month implicitly criticised Cameron's first year in charge by warning of the electorate's potential alienation. "One direct result of this convergence on the centre ground is a super-cynical British electorate and low turnouts at election time", said he. "In Britain, the centre ground has ground the ideology out of politics", and "without ideology, political discourse is reduced to claim and counter claim about actual 'delivery'".
Unsuprisingly for a man of Saatchi's analytical intellect his diagnosis is acurate. Unlike him, however, I do not bemoan the passing of a calcific ideological divide in British politics; that all parties recognise the realities of relative poverty and climate change and are seeking proposals to tackle them is no bad thing. But I do worry that marginalising views beyond the centre is weakening British democracy. The Big Three British parties are obliged to contest the centre ground by a first-past-the-post electoral system which forces them to appeal only to the same 'swing-voters' in key marginal seats; according to the Electoral Reform Society 70% of cast ballots in the 2005 General Election were essentially irrelevant. Only with an element of proportionality in British elections will political parties gain from forging a distinctive position for themselves and giving a voice to voters whose sentiments lie outside the mainstream. Pursuing 'big-tent' politics will always be a sensible electoral strategy, and that the Big Three are fighting and debating over the same ground is not in itself a bad thing. What is lamentable is that it is not the electorate as a whole which gets to define where the political 'centre' truely lies.
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But with proportional representation the electorate rarely determines the government - various parties haggle with each other to form a viable coalition instead
It may not prescribe any given majority's actual composition, but a fully proportional system at least ensures that a majority of seats represents a majority of votes, and in this sense it is very much the electorate which determines the government. Labour currently hold 55.1% of the seats in the Commons on the basis of only 35.2% of the votes cast in 2005 - just one in five of the electorate, who only determined the present government by dint of system which distorted the weight of their votes.
Haggling is also not the exclusive preserve of PR, and compromise in politics is not necessarily a bad thing. Divided government would be a much more common feature of British politics if it were not for the tyranny of the Commons as America's similarly unproportional, but democratically balanced, system shows. Between a Democratic Congress and a Republican President it will indeed be factional haggling rather than the electorate which ultimately determines the substance of legislation. At least in a simple proportional system, it is the parties with the most reconcilable platforms who co-operate.
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