The stunned aftermath of the Tory election victory was a time for the defeated parties to be composing their excuses. The Labour Party are not yet sure who, or what, they should blame for their collapse but the Liberal/SDP Alliance are quite clear on the matter. They were, they protest, robbed; the electoral system in this country is such that it allowed a party to win power on a minority of votes while a smaller party has only a handful of seats in Parliament to show for the millions of people who supported it. This anomaly, says the Alliance, calls into question the very nature of parliamentary democracy in Britain — it is. they hope to persuade us, time for a change.
In fact this is a long-established argument, which we have been hearing from the Liberal Party ever since they were swept from the position of being the alternative government. It has now been taken up by the SDP. although none of the prominent ex-Labour ministers in the SDP complained about the electoral system when it was working to their advantage. It does not need a mathematical genius to work out, or to understand, the statistics of it. Over the country millions of votes go to unsuccessful candidates, so that when the votes cast for each party are divided by the number of their MPs it emerges that vastly fewer votes are needed overall to elect a Tory or a Labour MP than for one from the Alliance. Put another way, this means that millions of votes are virtually unrepresented in Parliament, which causes much anguish among the self-styled democrats of the Alliance.
This was the argument used by the Liberal Party to support their persistent campaign for proportional representation which, by one method or another, was supposed to produce a Parliament more in line with the votes as they are cast in the election. The Labour and Tory parties always evaded the issue of democracy and attacked the Liberal proposals on the grounds that proportional representation made for a fragmented, and therefore unstable. government. There is no evidence (except to the contrary) that working class interests are bound up with the stability or otherwise of the government, which has the role of protecting the interests of the exploiting class in society. It is important to observe that both sides in this debate are motivated, not by any objective concern for democratic representation but by a concern for their own political advantage. For example the extent of the Liberal concern for democracy can be gauged by the fact that they grant dictatorial powers to their leader on the composition of their election manifesto.
None of this should obscure the fact that democracy is important to the working class. It enables them to organise more freely in trade unions and thereby better protect themselves in the struggles of the industrial field. It makes the existence of a socialist party easier, which means that the case for a new society can be stated more effectively. And there is also the fact that life for workers under capitalism is less stressful in the absence of the type of repression associated with a dictatorship such as Nazi Germany. What is unimportant is which party holds power in a capitalist society; apart from a reshuffling of their programmes and their personalities, they are at core identical. None of them can lay claim to be able to solve the problems typical of this social system, including that of political repression. Votes for all of them — Labour, Conservative, Alliance and the rest — are votes for impotence and those millions of workers who opted for them at the election were wasting their votes.
Democracy matters to the working class because it is not impotent; it is strength. It is more than a five-yearly chance to choose between the competing political clones of capitalism; democracy is a matter of knowledge, consciousness and participation. It is, in other words, an essential part of the case for a socialist society and it is as a means to establish and organise that society that democracy achieves the true measure of its importance.
Socialism will come into existence when the world’s working class, in a conscious political act, have overthrown the class ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution and replaced it with communal ownership. It will be a classless, moneyless society in which human beings will co-operate to produce wealth which will be freely available to all to satisfy their needs. It will be a system which makes all information openly available to enable a full participation in decision-taking. Just as the socialist movement today is made up of conscious socialists, so will socialism be populated by people who are aware of the basic nature of their society and of how it must be operated to the common benefit.
Socialists have good cause to be aware of the defects of the present system of parliamentary elections. We also know that to attempt to change it, while leaving capitalism to continue, will have little effect — certainly not enough to justify a diversion of working class efforts from the struggle for socialism. The capitalist parties are concerned with the issue through an expedient preoccupation with their own fortunes; the paramount issue is not whether there should be fewer Tory MPs. or more Alliance MPs, to run capitalism perhaps slightly differently, but whether the world will continue to suffer a social system which cannot answer to its people’s needs or whether we shall have socialism.
Whatever its faults, the limited democracy in force in places like Britain at present allows a socialist movement to exist and to propagate its ideas. What hampers our progress is a persisting lack of working class consciousness and understanding. When that is remedied — and socialists everywhere work to that end — we shall have the new society of co-operation, abundance and security — the society of true democracy.
That's the October 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
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