Chief Executive’s Blog: Who’s Afraid Of A Hung Parliament?

I promised myself I wouldn’t blog about the Election.  I think about politics far more than is healthy for a man of my age, weight and family responsibilities.  And I know from the disconcerted expressions that cross faces when I start to talk about polls, marginal seats and likely swings, that the majority of people don’t share my obsession.  Since none of my preferred candidates (Clement Attlee, Bill Clinton, Jed Bartlet, Jim Hacker) are standing, I felt my views were best kept to myself. This week’s TTJ report that the timber industry feared a hung parliament and wanted “dynamic and decisive government” drove me to break my promise.  I’ve listened and read as the media have repeated the mantra that a hung parliament will result in weak and indecisive government as if it’s a divine truth, and it seems that the timber industry has bought this hook, line and sinker. The fear of a hung Parliament is as much as anything else the fear of the unknown.  For the last thirty years, General Elections have produced governments with a clear majority – and four out of seven of those were of more than 100.  The post-Thatcher generations have never known a close-run Election, and have no real experience of what it would be like. The last Election to result in a hung Parliament was in February 1974, when the Labour Party, two short of a majority in the Commons, formed a minority Government when Ted Heath couldn’t put together a coalition with the Liberals.  Harold Wilson went back to the country as soon as he could, in October that year, and got a majority of three.  Within two years, that majority had gone (as indeed had Wilson, to be replaced by Jim Callaghan yet the Labour Government lasted another two and half years through a pact with the Liberals and one of the most ruthlessly effective Whips’ Offices in history.  And in that time, it nationalised the aircraft and shipbuilding industries, passed the first equal pay and race relations legislation and made the first attempt at devolution for Scotland and Wales, not to mention driving through its economic policies to bring down inflation in the face of opposition from within its own membership and the unions.  Regardless of whether you agree with these measures, they are not the actions of the weak, and they were achieved with a non-existent parliamentary majority. Majorities are no guarantee of strong government.  John Major was returned to office in the April 1992 with a majority of 21.  But the disagreement over Europe and the simmering resentments over the dethronement of Margaret Thatcher divided the governing party.  The open divisions sapped its authority and weakened the Prime Minister.  The assumption that Government only works if one party has a complete monopoly of power is a peculiarly English-centred point of view.  When was the last time anyone described the German government as weak, in a system which is almost designed to deliver coalitions?  Scotland has managed with a Labour-Liberal administration and an SNP minority administration; Labour has shared power with Liberals and Plaid Cymru in the Welsh Assembly; even the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein, less than fifteen years away from being two sides of a blood feud, co-operate in government in Northern Ireland and take tough decisions like that recently on policing in the face of potential terrorist opposition.  Does that strike you as weak?   I’ve heard the argument that our politicians are too tribal, too partisan to work together.  Of course they fight their own cause in elections.  I suspect that they will be much more pragmatic than anyone expects when push comes to shove and they’re forced to choose between a chance to get something done or five years of impotence and hope for the best next time. The last Prime Minister to be elected with a majority of the popular vote was Stanley Baldwin in 1935.  Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979 with 44% of the vote.  More people didn’t vote at all in 2005 than voted for Tony Blair.  Would a hung parliament do anything more than reflect a hung electorate, split more or less  three ways equally between Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats?  Or should I have titled this post “Three Cheers for Elective Dictatorship”?