Direct elections: another non-issue (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The attitude of the Socialist Party of Great Britain towards the Common Market has been consistent: that it is a political and trading arrangement between capitalist States. Whether Britain should have gone in, should stay in or should withdraw does not concern the working class. Thus, during the 1975 referendum, we urged workers to vote neither “YES” nor “NO” but, if they wanted Socialism, to indicate this by writing the word “SOCIALISM” across their ballot paper.

This attitude distinguished us from all others calling themselves “socialists”, most of whom were urging a "NO” vote on a variety of grounds. For instance, we were urged to oppose the Common Market on the ground that it rules out the possibility of establishing “socialism” in Britain because it infringes “the sovereignty of parliament”. But, in imagining that Socialism could be established in just one country or that “socialist measures” could be taken within the framework of capitalism, those who argue like this show that they don’t know the first thing about Socialism, which can only be world-wide like the system, capitalism, it will be replacing.

What such people in fact stand for is not Socialism at all, but British state capitalism. The sort of anti- Common Market propaganda put out by these people—the left wing of the Labour Party and the so-called Communist Party—is falsely done in the name of Socialism. By waving the Union Jack and playing on British nationalism, they reveal themselves as opponents. Socialism can only come into being when workers throughout the world have, among other things, got rid of all national prejudices and come to regard themselves as citizens of the world.

The Common Market, even if it evolved into a United States of Europe or something similar, does not make the establishment of Socialism any harder. It does not undermine the institutions (the ballot box and parliament) which the working class should use to establish Socialism. It is true that the Common Market does transfer the right to legislate in certain fields to its own law-making body, the Council of Ministers (not the European Parliament which is not a legislative body at all). But the Council of Ministers is made up of representatives from the governments of the Member States, which in turn are responsible to their elected parliaments. Thus, if we argue at this purely constitutional level (which apparently we must when dealing with the arguments of the Eric Heffers and Norman Atkinsons), the Common Market could not hold up the establishment of Socialism, for, if socialist majorities existed in the national parliaments of its Member States, this would automatically mean that the Common Market’s law-making body would also be controlled by socialists.

We are not interested in using parliaments to pass laws dealing with trade, patents, social security, free movement of labour, etc.—in short, laws to administer capitalism—but only in using them for the one revolutionary purpose of abolishing capitalism and establishing Socialism. The diminution of the powers of the British parliament brought about by the Common Market does not mean that it—or the parliaments of the other Member States— can no longer be used as an instrument to establish Socialism.

The so-called European Parliament is not really a parliament in the generally accepted sense of the word. It has no law-making powers (and has a final say as to how money should be spent in a very limited sphere) and plays a purely consultative rôle. Common Market regulations—which really do have the force of law, some being directly applicable in Member States without needing to be enacted by national parliaments as well—are made by the Council of Ministers on proposals from the Commission in Brussels. It is the Council of Ministers, not the European Parliament, which in the Common Market carries out the functions normally associated with parliaments (law-making, approval of the budget).

Nevertheless, it has been agreed (by the Council of Ministers!) that the European Parliament, instead of being appointed as now by the national parliaments from amongst their members, should be directly elected in all-Europe elections to be held in May or June next year. That these elections will take place is not yet absolutely certain since each Member State has to pass legislation to permit them in its country and if any one fails to do so then there will be no elections anywhere.

The “left wing” of the Labour Party, in accordance with its nationalist state-capitalist aim, is trying to stop Britain passing the necessary legislation. Once again we are told that direct elections to the European Parliament is something socialists should campaign against. Once again we disagree. Nevertheless, we can recognize that it is better that political bodies under capitalism should be directly elected instead of appointed from above; this makes it easier for the working class, when they have become socialists, to take them out of the hands of the capitalist class.

This does not mean we advocate direct elections to the European Parliament, but merely that, now this has been offered by our rulers, it is something that can be accepted. Thus, our attitude to the elections when (and if) they take place next year will be the same as to all other elections. We will use them to publicize Socialism; and we shall be urging those who want Socialism to write “SOCIALISM”— or “SOCIALISME” or “SOZIALISMUS” or “SOCIALISMO”, as the case may be—across their ballot papers.

Adam Buick

Polls apart? (2022)

Book Review from the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Polling Unpacked. By Mark Pack. Reaktion Books. 2022.

This is written by the founder of PollBase and traces the history of opinion polls from various ‘straw polls’ in the nineteenth century that were conducted to test public opinion, to the development of what we now know as modern opinion polling. This was pioneered by the US Literary Digest in the early twentieth century, before the game-changing entrance of George Gallup into the sphere, who recognized that the total number of people polled was far less important than how representative these people were.

Opinion polls – as developed over recent decades – have a somewhat mixed reputation, though tend to be more accurate than people often think, at least when the margin for error (typically +/- 3 percent) is taken into account. And of course, sometimes voting systems – especially First Past The Post (FPTP) – throw up vagaries of their own. Trump won the US presidency in 2016 even though he lost the popular vote by a very similar margin to that predicted by the polls, as in 1951 and February 1974 the party with the most votes in the UK did not get the most seats and form the government, which means that even when voting intention polls are broadly right they can sometimes appear ‘wrong’.

But some polling does genuinely go awry, including when Cameron secured a narrow overall Tory majority in 2015 when the polls had predicted a dead heat with Labour and then with the underestimation of the Labour vote in 2017. There are a number of reasons for polling errors and they can be complex, including the wording of key questions, which can provide startlingly differing results based on the smallest nuances (polling on single issues rather than overall voting intention is notoriously problematic for this reason alone). Arguably the most common voting intention issue, however, is the difficulty of getting accurate, weighted national samples when the demographics of society are changing fast. There are also significant allied issues like some types of voters becoming more inclined to turn out (or not) than others, some being disproportionately reluctant to give their real voting intention to pollsters saying ‘don’t know’ or ‘won’t say’ instead, differential willingness among particular party supporters to even participate in polls in the first place, and people being sampled in polls who are not actually on the electoral register for various reasons. Significant polling errors are usually caused not by one factor like this, but by more than one of them working in concert to skew the result.

A new type of polling has recently arisen to address some of these issues for FPTP elections called Multi-level Regression with Poststratification (MRP). This aims to generate constituency-by-constituency predictions from a national poll sample that normally wouldn’t be considered large enough for these purposes. It is based on demographic information in particular seats being used as the basis for projecting a result informed by what the national sample has been indicating about certain types of voters and their probability of voting in particular ways (eg, white men over 65, having say, a 55 percent probability of voting Conservative). Its track record so far – both in 2017 and 2019 in the UK – has been pretty good, including YouGov’s detailed MRP prediction of parts of the Red Wall going Blue, but it is early days.

Pack is clearly an expert and does a good job at unpacking all this (pun intended). How useful polls are is another issue of course, and Pack looks at this too. Echo chambers can have a particular but limited use and many argue that polling is given far too much prominence. There can also be a commercial aspect and a distorting element to polling, especially in the United States where skewed ‘paid for’ polling by political parties and groups is more common. In some countries, polling is banned completely during election campaigns lest it be deemed to influence the result.

Will opinion polling have a use of sorts in socialism? Possibly, though direct democracy and decision-making is likely to feature much more heavily and so the need for polls may well lessen. And hopefully, to paraphrase the late Tony Benn, we will be busy creating signposts rather than following proverbial weather vanes.

Dave Perrin

Sting in the Tail: Jobs for the boys (1993)

The Sting in the Tail column from the June 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jobs for the boys

When capitalism's economy is booming then some sections of the working class can make considerable gains. This, reformists assure us, is proof that their strategy of “getting something now” is more rewarding than our insistence on the need for socialism.

But what happens when the economic climate changes? Then many of the gains inevitably come under attack and will be completely lost.

An example of this is happening in Sweden now. For decades women there benefitted from the job opportunities in the growing public sector and had the highest level of workplace equality in the world:

They entered the labour market in such numbers that the term hemmafru (housewife) became a virtual anachronism within a decade. (Guardian, 13 April).

Now a huge government economy drive means tens of thousands of women are to lose their jobs and there are plans to introduce financial incentives for mothers to stay home and look after the children.

“Getting something now" is difficult enough in capitalism but hanging on to it is the really tricky bit.

Monet and Money

Alfred Barnes was a rich American who was heavily into modern art. His collection, which includes many paintings by Matisse, Cezanne, Renoir and others, is unequalled and is valued at $6 billion.

Late Again (BBC2, 17 April) revealed how Barnes only allowed a select few to see his collection. When he died in 1951 his will instructed the Barnes Foundation that the collection must never be sold, loaned or even moved.

Now, those who control the foundation want to raise money to repair the building where the collection is housed and they have won the courts' permission to take part of the collection on tour.

Even this outraged much of the art establishment. “The integrity of the collection is threatened, it will never come together again", they moaned, but their big argument was that “a dead man's wishes were being flouted".

All of this art was only possible because society provided the artists with the food, clothing, shelter, materials, education and, often, the inspiration they required. Art is a social product and should he freely available to all and not just to an elitist bunch of ’’art lovers" backed by the whim of a man long-since dead.

Cause and effect

Under headlines such as “Italians dance for joy after huge poll victory on reforms”, the newspapers have reported that the anti-Mafia movement are claiming that a new electoral system will stop “decades of waste, corruption and Mafia outrage".

What are these miraculous changes? In future 75 percent of the 315-seat Senate, or upper house, will be decided by the same first-past-the-post system as applies to Britain's House of Commons.

It is interesting to note that reformers in the Labour and Liberal Democrat Parties favour some form of proportional representation in Britain. They decry the first-past-the-post system as undemocratic.

The electoral system makes no difference. No matter which system is favoured, capitalism is a social system that will always cause “waste, corruption and outrage". What is needed is not a change in the electoral system, but a change in the social system from capitalism to socialism.

Royal bricklayers

Amidst universal rejoicing, the government has announced that the Queen's private chapel, which was badly damaged in the Windsor Castle fire last year, is to be rebuilt in a contemporary style. One can hear the shouts of joy ringing out from cardboard city at the news.

Of course, such a prestigious venture must have a steady hand on the tiller. But we can sleep easy in this one too. “The Duke of Edinhurgh will take the lead for the Royal Household in the rebuilding programme. (Independent on Sunday, 25 April).

We hope no naive reader imagines that the Duke will actually be doing any work. No hod carrier he. No, the rebuilding by the Duke of Edinburgh will be like all the “building" that kings, queens, dukes, duchesses and plain old millionaires carry out. They may lay a ceremonial foundation stone or unveil a plaque, but you can be sure all the useful toil will be carried out by members of the working class.

Another patriot

What do the Labour Party really think about military matters? When the Royal Air Force's offer to fly over Bosnia was rejected, we found out.

Commentary on the decision not to deploy UK Tornado fighters, Mr George Foulkes, Labour defence spokesman, said : “I am surprised that, if offered, they were not to he included. We have got probably one of the best strike records of anyone, anywhere, as exemplified by our record in the Gulf. I would have thought it was essential that if there was to be an effective deployment to ensure the no-fly zone that there was a strong British presence. It sounds to me a bit like a snub if British aircraft have been offered and not included. ” (Glasgow Herald, 8 April).

So there you have it. The Labour Party are upset that British workers' lives are not be to risked. It has been said before, but it is worth repeating: “A patriot is someone that wants you to die for his country".

Modern times

Great interest has been expressed by the military about a new heat-resistant plastic that can withstand the heat of a nuclear explosion. Discussing various possibilities of its use the Observer (11 April) mentioned in passing some of the other things that the military are researching at present:

In this sci-fi world, generals are testing the efficacy of frying soldiers’ blood and brains with lasers.

Alternative vote or alternative society? (2011)

From the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

When a magician offers you a choice of cards, it doesn’t matter how you decide to pick one, you’ll always get the card they want you to.

It’s the same with any joker who thinks that capitalism can be made to serve us all. Government is there to make sure that the unequal relations of capitalism are maintained.

Not because of some conspiracy but because any party in power finds itself confronted by the might of the people who own our society. It ends up ruling in their interests, rather than the vast majority who work for a living.

That’s why in the financial crisis we’re being made to pay with lost jobs and wages.

You’re being asked to choose a new way of electing those governments that attack you. It’s something that matters a lot to politicians, because it decides how many of them and their mates get the good jobs.

What matters more is what we use our votes for. If we vote for more rulers and the ownership of the world by a handful of people then it doesn’t really matter how politicians share the spoils. But if workers use the vote to reject the false choices that are framed within the context of an owning class dominating another class, we will be further on the road towards a truly democratic society.

If we vote to make the wealth of the world common property in which we all have an equal say, then we can finally have what we call Socialism. We can put an end to minority rule, and we can organise our affairs in our own interest.

That’s why the real choice before you this May isn’t AV or First Past the Post, but choosing to reject class based society. The best choice you can make this May is to join us in campaigning for common ownership.

Editorial: The side show (1999)

Editorial from the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reform of the House of Lords, changing the voting system, elected local mayors, these are the issues the politicians and media have wanted us to get interested in recently. But why, when a recession is looming, are they trying to get us so worked up about constitutional issues?

The experience of the three previous recessions since 1973 has taught politicians that they can do nothing to stop a recession coming. All they can do is brace themselves and wait for it to pass by. There is, however, one field where a government does have some power to change things—the constitution. The Blair government has been exploiting this to the full, in a bid to avoid losing credibility through appearing to be completely powerless.

The House of Lords is to be reformed. This was an issue when the Socialist Party was formed in 1904. At that time and for many years afterwards the Labour Party campaigned for the abolition pure and simple of the House of Lords. Like the Monarchy this is indeed an anti-democratic relic of feudalism which will have no place in a socialist society. (It may have no place in a modern capitalist society either, but that’s for supporters of capitalism to decide.)

Attlee, as pre-war Labour leader, once unwisely said that if he was ever offered a seat in the Lords he would call himself Lord Love-A-Duck of Limehouse. When the offer came he bottled out, and his son now sits in the Lords as the second Earl Attlee of Walthamstow. As a hereditary he may (or, it now seems, may not) be booted out by Blair and be replaced by some superannuated hack nominated by one or other of the main political parties who will still be entitled to call themselves Baron or Baroness.

As to electoral changes, the unelected but non-hereditary (which, apparently, makes it alright) Baron Jenkins in his Report commissioned by the government recommended a complicated hybrid system whose main aim would seem to be to give his party—the Liberal Democrats—more MPs. In the days when a spade was called a spade this would have been known as gerrymandering.

But this is to fall into the trap of discussing these constitutional reforms seriously. The fact is that they are completely irrelevant as far as the real, social and economic problems people face are concerned. They won’t make any difference to these, and they aren’t even democratic.

Blair’s battle with the Lords is a side-show that should not distract us from the real issue. What is required is not constitutional reform but social revolution—a change in the basis of society from class ownership and production for profit to common ownership by all and production to satisfy people’s needs. This is the only framework—which will end the privileges of wealth and not just of birth—within which the urgent problems of pollution, mass unemployment, transport chaos, a crumbling health service, social breakdown and so on and so on can be solved in a rational way.

Editorial: How Shall We Vote? (1989)

Editorial from the November 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

All the parties, except the Tories, discussed electoral reform at their autumn Conferences. Labour rejected it, but the minor parties—the Liberals, the SDP and the Greens—came out in favour as the only way of getting more of their members into the House of Commons. They also floated the idea of a pact with Labour to oust Thatcher in return for the introduction of proportional representation. Electoral arithmetic is on the side of the anti-Tory parties since at the last election, as indeed in the two previous ones, Thatcher and the Tories were returned even though four out of every seven voters rejected them. So is there a need for electoral reform?

We might as well give our answer straightaway: No, there isn’t. A majority seeking to replace capitalism by socialism only requires one thing of an electoral system under capitalism—that it should allow a majority opinion to reflect itself as a majority of seats in parliament. We are not interested in whether the system ensures a strong and stable government of capitalism nor in whether it ensures a fair representation of capitalist political parties. As the existing electoral system in Britain does allow a majority viewpoint to be translated into a majority of seats, we see no point in diverting our energies from our task of working towards the emergence of a socialist majority towards working for electoral reform within capitalism.

However, since socialism will be a fully democratic society we do have an interest in what is and what is not a fair electoral system since such a system will be an essential part of the democratic decision-making and administrative structure of socialist society.

From the point of view of democratic theory, an electoral system should ensure that the persons elected really are representative. The case against the first-past-the-post system that applies in Britain is that it does not necessarily do this when there are more than two candidates. This is because it allows a candidate to be elected with less than 50 per cent of the votes (that is to say, against the will of a majority of the voters), as were 45 per cent of MPs, of all parties, at the last general election.

There are various ways of avoiding this. Organising a run-off between the top two candidates in a second ballot (as in France) or, what amounts to the same thing, allowing voters to place the candidates in order of preference (as in Australia) and, if no candidate gets 50 per cent, to eliminate the bottom candidates and redistribute their votes amongst the others until one of them does reach this figure. This system, known as the alternative vote, is widely used in trade unions for the election of their officials and is favoured for parliamentary elections by some in Labour Party and even by some Tories. A variant of it, known as the Single Transferable Vote (STV) is applied in Ireland, both North (except for Westminster MPs) and South. Under it voters again place the candidates in order of preference but in a multi-member rather than a single-member constituency. A candidate is not elected unless, and until, after successive redistributions of the votes of the bottom candidates, they obtain a certain quota of votes. This is the system favoured by the Liberals, the SDP and some in the Labour Party. It is frequently described as a system of proportional representation even by its partisans but in fact it is not. It is essentially a system, like the second ballot and the Australian alternative vote, for ensuring that those elected attain a minimum level of representativity. It is only incidentally that, in a context of competing political parties, it ensures the representation of minority parties enjoying a certain minimum, but not necessarily low, level of support amongst voters.

As all these systems are compatible with democratic theory, no doubt they will continue into socialist society for the various delegate bodies that will form part of its democratic decision-making structure. Proportional representation, properly so-called, is a different matter as it presupposes the existence of competing political parties and was in fact devised precisely for such parties. It requires multi-member constituencies (which can be the whole country, as in Holland and Israel) and party lists rather than individual candidates. A great variety of PR systems exist in the various countries which practise it but these are all based on the principle that the seats should be allocated to the party lists in more or less strict proportion to the number of votes obtained.

The essence of democracy is popular participation not competing parties. In Socialism elections will not be about deciding which particular party is to come to “power” and form the government. Politics in socialism will not be about coercive power and its exercise and so won’t really be politics at all in its present-day sense of the “art and practice of government” or “the conduct of state affairs”. Being a classless society of free and equal men and women, socialism will not have a coercive state machine nor a government to control it. The conduct of public affairs in socialism will be about people participating in the running of their lives in a non-antagonistic context of co-operation to further the common good.

Socialist democracy will be a participatory democracy rather than the choice every four or five years, with or without proportional representation, between rival gangs of professional politicians that passes for democracy today.

Votes for some Workers (1968)

From the November 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

November 1868 is a significant date in British working class history. For in that month was held the first general election in which the majority of electors were workers. Most workers, it is true, were still excluded but enough had the vote to elect a majority of socialist delegates had they wanted to. It is true also that the Second Reform Act of 1867 was a miserable compromise between the Tories and the Liberals, both of whom were opposed to democracy and afraid of giving the vote to too many workers.

In 1832 the workers had been tricked into backing their employers' demand for a share with the landed aristocrats, big merchants and bankers in running the government. The First Reform Act was framed so as deliberately to exclude workers and in fact, in some cases, they were actually disfranchised. This was not an experience they easily forgot. The manufacturers had used the threat of a workers' uprising to scare the governing classes into sharing power with them. One of the first acts of the government elected under the new franchise was to reform the Poor Law system: they made it harsher in order to drive people into the factories (or, as they would say today, to encourage “mobility of labour”). Partly as a result of this for the next decade or so the government was, in Chartism, faced with the real threat of a workers’ uprising.

Chartism, the first independent workers’ political party in the world, was an expression of general discontent with early capitalism. Their six-point charter, which included universal manhood suffrage, added up to a demand for a democratic state. They were convinced that with democracy the workers could reshape society in their own interests. This was well expressed in the words of one of their songs: “We will get the land, when we get the Charter”. It was this emphasis on the need for winning political power that commended Chartism to Marx and Engels and it taught them that the workers’ class struggle must become political. The Chartists in fact failed to achieve any of their aims. Their last monster demonstration in 1848 failed ignominiously. Faced with the choice of passively accepting parliament’s rejection of the Charter or insurrection they backed down. The more determined kept up the struggle for a few more years coming to absorb the ideas of the French utopian communists like Babeuf and Blanqui and even those of Marx and Engels.

By the 1860’s the trade unions, after years of syndicalist-type opposition to “wage-slavery”, came to accept the wages system and put forward the conservative slogan of “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.” Their leaders were rejecting violent overthrow of the the government in favour of working for small improvements within the system.

The manufacturers, who were the gainers from 1832, were now eager to push out the old landed aristocracy and have the state machine all to themselves. The successful Anti-Corn Law campaign led by Cobden and Bright had whetted their appetite. They saw as one way of increasing their control to extend the suffrage to their workers who they knew would vote for them. So despite the failure of Chartism the Reform issue was raised from time to time after 1850. However, the restricted franchise did not allow the radicals their due weight inside the Liberal party. The Whigs, themselves landed aristocrats, still had a great say and Lord Palmerston refused to allow a Reform bill. When he died the way was clear and in March 1866 Gladstone introduced a Bill which by lowering the property qualification would have given the vote to many workers. But the Whigs had their last fling. Some forty of them voted with the Tories against the bill. The government resigned and a minority Tory one took over. Almost immediately they were faced with a country-wide Reform agitation. Bright on behalf of the manufacturers’ National Reform Union called for ratepayers’ suffrage while the trade unions and the First International backed the Reform League which, like the Chartists, stood for universal manhood suffrage. It was the League that organised a great demonstration for 23 July at Hyde Park which the government banned. The organisers refused to accept this and the demonstration went on. The crowds pulled down the railings at Hyde Park and swarmed in. The fear of insurrection and a revival of Chartism, suggested by this, scared the government and Disraeli introduced his own Reform bill, more radical even than Gladstone's, in order, as he said, “to dish the Whigs”.

Marx commented favourably on the tactic of playing off one section of the governing classes against another which the workers had used to get factory laws. The passing of the Second Reform Act presented the same spectacle. The Tories proposed to give the vote to all ratepayers in the towns, while the Liberals wanted a steadily falling property qualification. Since the Liberals had a majority in parliament the actual Act, which with similar ones for Scotland and Ireland increased the electorate from 1,350,000 to 2,470,000, was a compromise.

If Disraeli had hoped to gain the new voters' gratitude and so dish the Whigs he must have been disappointed. The 1868 election returned Gladstone with a big majority. The new government then set about stripping the aristocrats of more of their privileges: they reformed the civil service and the universities; they disestablished the Church in Ireland; they brought in compulsory elementary education. Once again the workers had been used by the manufacturing capitalists as tools in their fight against the landed aristocracy. But this time it was voluntary. The workers allowed themselves to be used in this way. The new voters of 1868 set an unfortunate precedent which has been followed at every election since: they used their votes to hand over political power to the capitalist class.

One of three Tory Ministers to resign was Lord Cranbourne (who later as Lord Salisbury was three times Prime Minister). His complaint was that power was being transferred to

those who have no other property than the labour of their hands. The omnipotence of Parliament is theirs.

Marx and Engels took a similar view. Writing on the Chartists in the 1850's they had pointed out that universal suffrage in Britain would amount to political power for a class-conscious working class. They seem to have regarded the Second Reform Act as a “radical sham” and a travesty on democracy, as indeed it was. But, although fearing a “pro-slavery rebellion", Marx knew its significance as he showed in his famous speech at the Hague in 1872 when he stated that in America, Britain and perhaps Holland the workers could win power for Socialism peacefully, by winning a majority in a general election.

The government extended the franchise to workers in Britain under pressure, partly from the workers themselves and partly from some capitalists who saw this was in their interests. The workers' vote is a real gain, a potential class weapon which should, in Marx’s phrase, be used as “an instrument of emancipation". The government could not, as some claim, now suddenly suspend democracy, for besides being essential to the smooth running of modern capitalism, it is part of the political consciousness of the working class. By their past actions, from Chartism to pushing down the railings in Hyde Park, they have forced governments to take their views into account. Nor is universal suffrage a fraud, as these same people claim, a trick to convince us we have some say in the running of social affairs while the real decisions are made elsewhere. Parliament does control how the state machine is used—whether troops stay East of Suez or fight in Aden, what the police should do to control riots outside the American embassy, what laws the Courts should enforce—and universal suffrage does allow workers to choose who shall sit in Parliament..

Adam Buick

The centre sags (1983)

From the January 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is nearly two years since the Social Democratic Party was founded amid the glare of media publicity and rhetorical heights about “mould-breaking" and “new departures". After the heady success of its early by-election victories, the SDP has now come down to earth. Membership is ten thousand down from its peak of seventy-five thousand, and still falling, and its electoral popularity is also in decline.

One thing that has changed little in eighteen months, though, is the difficulty of discovering precisely what the SDP stand for, apart from such helpful slogans as "newness" and "niceness". Fortunately, some of the SDP's Gang of Four fancy themselves as theoreticians, and David Owen’s Face the Future and Shirley Williams' Politics Is For People give us some clues.

Owen’s book (and. to a lesser extent, Williams’) may be taken as having two main themes: the merits of decentralisation and of continuity in government economic policy. Both the Labour and Conservative parties are viewed as deeply centralist. Labour by virtue of their commitment to nationalisation and an active interfering state, and the Tories by dint of their preference for large-scale administrative bodies (such as Area Health Authorities, founded in 1974) and their antagonism towards local-government autonomy. The growth in the powers of government, of bureaucracy, of big business and even of large trade unions illustrates the increased centralisation that has taken place over the last few decades. The result is not just a lack of democracy but also of innovation, as large institutions of any kind are more concerned with maintaining the status quo than with seeking and developing new ideas. Thus centralisation is claimed to be one factor responsible for Britain's economic decline.

The SDP alternative is to argue for greater decentralisation of both government and economy. The powers of local government will be increased, and those of central government correspondingly reduced. There will be a decentralised incomes policy (though the mechanics of this are not spelt out in detail) and “industrial democracy", which seems to mean a few workers being placed on the board of directors. Williams advocates an increase in the number of small firms, which she argues will help to create jobs, promote innovation and (mysteriously) mitigate inflation. On the other hand, the SDP are fervent supporters of British membership of NATO and the EEC, so their opposition to large conglomerates is not always applied consistently.

Issues such as the balance of power between national and local government are concerned with the most efficient (from the capitalist point of view) way of administration. Owen may be right to claim that a shift of power to the local level will increase efficiency, but it is quite wrong to imply that this makes a scrap of difference to the essential characteristics of capitalism or to the working class. At whatever level, government exists to defend the interests of the ruling class. Decentralised governmental power can be just as brutal and oppressive as the centralised variety; witness the police force.

Increased centralisation, however, is seen by the SDP as only part of the cause of Britain's malaise. The other is the fact that the electoral system ensures fairly frequent changes of government and. because of the policies of the two largest parties, correspondingly frequent changes of economic course, with the incoming government undoing the innovations of its predecessor. This continual shifting is viewed as especially pernicious in the area between state and private ownership: the cycle of nationalisation, denationalisation and nationalisation is wasteful and inhibits long-term planning.

The SDP propose that greater continuity and coherence in government economic policy would bring a spurt in economic growth, together with all the benefits of forward planning. But the SDP takes continuity to mean acceptance of a “mixed economy", with the balance between state and private ownership roughly what it is today. Tampering with the present mix by means of either nationalisation or privatisation would mean rocking the boat which would otherwise be set on course for prosperity. In Owen's words:

There will be an open acceptance of the need for profits, to allow for wealth creation in a person's lifetime, to encourage investment and risk-taking and a realisation that our country's prosperity depends on our ability to sell in the markets of the world at a price, design and delivery time that is competitive. Social Democrats, in genuinely championing the mixed economy, must ensure that the mix will become a partnership between the public and the private sectors, devoid of the obsessive dogma of privatisation or nationalisation and the oscillation of policy that has meant uncertainty and discontinuity for many of our basic industries.

The problem is, given the possibility of democratic electoral change, how to ensure continuity? It is here that proportional representation (PR) enters the picture. The SDP-Liberal hope is that, once elected to government, they will introduce PR — which would mean that they will remain in power for ever. Though this may vary according to the exact method of representation chosen, PR tends to produce coalitions, and a "centrist" grouping, even if not the largest party, stands a good chance of being a member of any coalition. In such circumstances, with no one party ever having an overall majority in Parliament, there would be a good chance of economic policy being essentially continuous rather than continually shifting. Thus PR is an important means of achieving continuity of government policy, as well as a way of keeping the SDP in power.

However, changes in government policy are due not so much to the ideas and dogmas of political leaders as to the dictates of the essentially uncontrollable capitalist economy. The wholesale nationalisation carried out by the 1945-51 Labour government, for example, was because the industries concerned were crucial to British capitalism. The Conservatives have taken enterprises into state ownership in their time. From the worker’s point of view, being employed and exploited by private or state capitalists makes no difference whatever.

A recurring theme in SDP literature is the resemblance between themselves and the Social Democratic Party in Germany, the SPD. In 1959, the British Labour Party lost its third general election in succession, and there began an attempt to alter some of its policies; Roy Jenkins attacked the party's commitment to nationalisation, and Hugh Gaitskell tried to alter Clause Four of the party’s constitution. These attempts were unsuccessful, and Labour remained wedded (on paper, anyway) to a programme of increased state ownership. In the same year, the SPD transformed itself into a "modern" party, claiming to appeal to the whole nation rather than just industrial workers.

But recent events in West Germany make this parallel somewhat embarrassing for the SDP. In spite of years of "centrist" government by the SPD in coalition with the Free Democrats (Liberals), the German economy has not escaped the worldwide crisis; unemployment and inflation are both rising. The Free Democrats have deserted the SPD in favour of coalition with the Christian Democratic Union.

The quotation from Face the Future continues as follows:

It is a sad commentary on post-war Britain that this combination of policies has never been unequivocally on offer to the British electorate.

But whatever the proportions of the mixture, the ingredients themselves are the familiar ones of unemployment, profits and markets, with their equally familiar effects of unemployment, poverty and exploitation. The SDP have precisely nothing new to offer, and nothing at all to offer to the working class.

Paul Bennett

Pathfinders: Post-election Blues (2015)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russia has been claiming since late last year that the Scottish referendum on independence was rigged by Westminster in favour of a ‘no’ vote (Guardian, 19 September 2014). Following up this exercise in pots calling kettles black, they have hailed the landslide victory of the SNP in the general election as proof positive that they were right. How, their propagandists want to know, could Scotland be split down the middle on independence one minute, and then vote unanimously for the Scottish National Party the next, if there wasn’t substantial monkey business going on? Many confused UK voters may be wondering the same thing.

Let’s put aside the obvious retort that if Westminster was going to rig the independence referendum why didn’t they rig the Scottish vote in the general election as well? The real answer to this conundrum is not nearly so cloak-and-dagger, though it does remain puzzling to many. Greens and especially UKIP voters woke up wide-eyed with shock and cries of ‘We wuz robbed’ on post-election day upon finding that their votes had gone en-masse down the toilet while only Tory votes had the magical power to produce MPs.

People just don’t seem to get how first-past-the-post works, despite having the whole business out at tedious length in a special referendum in 2011. If your vote isn’t for the winner, it’s the same as if you hadn’t bothered voting at all. The 2014 Scottish referendum was a close-run thing, with a 55.3 percent No vote against a 44.7 percent Yes vote on an 84.59 percent turnout. In the General Election, assuming just a two-horse race between the SNP and Labour and assuming the same voting ratio in each seat, the result would still have been a SNP landslide. That’s not how it was, of course, because there were several horses in the field to split the anti-SNP vote. In the event, Labour had just under 25 percent of the vote, Cons had 15 percent and Lib Dems had 7.5 percent. When you add this lot up and throw in the dreg Other votes it comes to about 50 percent. So the SNP landslide of 56 out of 59 seats was derived from just 50 percent of the votes. Which represents just 5 percent more nationalist fervour (or dislike of Miliband’s pink Tories) than we saw in the referendum.

No need for Kremlin Konspiracies then. But it is still surprising how surprised people are about this FPTP system. It’s as if nobody can remember the debate anymore. Matters seemed clear enough back in 2011. Aside from a lot of guff about fair representation and the hallowed ideals of democracy, the choice was between a political system that was forever locked into a swinging pendulum between two identikit parties which spent their entire decade-long terms undoing each other’s works, and a Euro-style consensus politics where political horse-trading, coalitions and compromises were the order of the day. In the one system you get a periodic rollercoaster of drama and convulsion ultimately culminating in no change, while in the other you get a lot of humdrum sameness culminating in no change. Around 70 percent of British voters chose the drama. And now they act surprised when they get it.

Socialists have varying opinions on this matter. Ultimately though, for socialism to be established across the world, and for it to work, support for it would have to be so massive that it wouldn’t make any difference what voting system was in place. There is the more vexing question of how to do voting in a socialist society, given that mathematically-speaking there is no voting system which can be ‘fair’ to everyone. This sobering fact was first established in 1950 by Nobel prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow, whose ‘impossibility theorem’ surveyed all the possible voting systems then known and found that none could meet all his proposed criteria for fairness. Since then new contenders have come forward, or at least old ones in new livery. One of these is ‘range-voting’, a style of voting used in medieval Venice and more recently to rate YouTube videos, where you give candidates a score out of 10, or give them no score, or the same score, with the highest aggregate score giving the winner (New Scientist, 12 April 2008). But there are downsides to every system. In many, a candidate can win even if they were not most people’s first choice. Plus the systems can be gamed by strategic voting, a tactic quite likely in capitalist elections if not in socialism.

Still, this is not a question for socialists to get bogged down in. People in socialism would choose the system which delivered the greatest fairness to the greatest number. If it turned out not to work, they’d try something else. Formal voting might not even be a large factor in socialist society, since for all we know people might devise more informal ways of operating society which did not require it. How often do you see hands-in-the-air voting systems employed in groups organising a party or a picnic or a volunteer building project, after all? It might be that voting would only occur, on the whole, on the rare occasions when disputes arose, or things went wrong, rather than as a regular and ritualised social institution. How this might work, and work transparently, is not for us to guess. What is true is that we can’t make assumptions about democratic structures in socialism based on structures which exist in today’s capitalist world, where an elaborate apparatus exists mainly for show. Opponents like to caricature socialism as endless meetings getting in the way of real work. Socialists who are accustomed to today’s procedural complexities have sometimes projected similar procedures into the future, scaling them up to the level of global super-conferences and the like and thus inadvertently lending support to the caricaturists. What gets forgotten in all this is the issue of trust. As we have learned to trust scientists to do a good job, and the scientific method to expose those who don’t, so we might learn to trust other socialists to do a good job, and the socialist political method to uncover bad jobs where necessary, rather than set ourselves the impossible task of personally scrutinising every decision, every resource budget and every policy document for signs of weakness. The emancipation of humanity from wage-servitude doesn’t have to mean we all become full-time nit-pickers and bureaucrats. It could just as easily mean a welcome release from obsessing about the democratic process itself.

Paddy Shannon

How shall we vote? (2010)

From the June 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part of the deal for the Tory-LibDem coalition government is that there’s to be a referendum on electoral reform. But is electoral reform really necessary?

We might as well give our answer straightaway: No, it isn't. A majority seeking to replace capitalism by socialism only requires one thing of an electoral system under capitalism – that it should allow a majority opinion to reflect itself as a majority of seats in parliament. Socialists are not interested in whether the system ensures a strong and stable government of capitalism nor in whether it ensures a fair representation of capitalist political parties. As the existing electoral system in Britain does allow a majority viewpoint to be translated into a majority of seats, we see no point in diverting any of our energies from our task of working towards the emergence of a socialist majority to supporting electoral reform within capitalism.

Voting in socialism
However, since socialism will be a fully democratic society we do have an interest in what is and what is not a fair electoral system since such a system will be an essential part of the democratic decision-making and administrative structure of socialist society.

From the point of view of democratic theory, an electoral system should ensure that the persons elected really are representative. The case against the first-past-the-post system that applies in Britain is that it does not necessarily do this when there are more than two candidates. This is because it allows a candidate to be elected with less than 50 percent of the votes (that is to say, against the will of a majority of the voters), as were most MPs, of all parties, in the recent general election.

There are various ways of avoiding this. Organising a run-off between the top two candidates in a second ballot (as in France) or, what amounts to the same thing, allowing voters to place the candidates in order of preference (1, 2, 3, 4, etc) and, if no candidate gets 50 percent, to eliminate the bottom candidates and redistribute their votes amongst the others until one of them does reach this figure. This system, known as the Alternative Vote (the mysterious AV the media talks about), is widely used in trade unions for the election of their officials and is the system that is to be voted on in the proposed referendum.

A variant of AV, known as the Supplementary Vote or Instant Run-off, is already used in England for the election of mayors. Under it voters vote 1, 2 only (or just “1” if they want) and, if no candidate gets 50 percent, then the No 2 votes of the third and other candidates are redistributed between the top two. In other words, there is no chance of the candidate finishing third getting elected, as is possible under pure AV.

The system favoured by the Liberals is neither of these but the Single Transferable Vote (STV), which is used in regional and local elections in Northern Ireland and in local elections in Scotland. Under it voters again place the candidates in order of preference but in a multi-member rather than a single-member constituency. A candidate is not elected unless, and until, after successive redistributions of the votes of the bottom candidates, they obtain a certain quota of votes. It is frequently described as a system of proportional representation even by its partisans but in fact it is not. It is essentially a system, like the Second Ballot and the Alternative Vote, for ensuring that those elected attain a minimum level of representativity. It is only incidentally that, in a context of competing political parties, it ensures the representation of minority parties enjoying a certain minimum, but not necessarily low, level of support amongst voters.

As all the above systems are compatible with democratic theory, no doubt, depending on historically-inherited circumstances and the preferences of people in a particular area, they will continue into socialist society for the various delegate bodies that will form part of its democratic decision-making structure, along with other systems such as choice by lot (as for juries today).

Party Representation
Proportional representation, properly so-called, is a different matter as it presupposes the existence of competing political parties and was in fact devised precisely for such parties. It requires multi-member constituencies (which can be the whole country, as in Israel and in Scotland and Wales for the election of MEPs) and party lists rather than individual candidates. A great variety of PR systems exist (a different version, mixed with first-past-the-post, is used in mainland Britain for the election of regional assemblies in Scotland, Wales and London) but these are all based on the principle that the seats should be allocated to parties in more or less strict proportion to the number of votes obtained.

The essence of democracy is popular participation not competing parties. In socialism elections will not be about deciding which particular party is to come to ‘power’ and form the government. Politics in socialism will not be about coercive power and its exercise and so won't really be politics at all in its present-day sense of the ‘art and practice of government’ or ‘the conduct of state affairs’. Being a classless society of free and equal men and women, socialism will not have a coercive state machine nor a government to control it. The conduct of public affairs in socialism will be about people participating in the running of their lives in a non-antagonistic context of co-operation to further the common good.

Socialist democracy will be a participatory democracy rather than the choice every four or five years, with or without proportional representation, between rival bands of professional politicians that passes for democracy today.

Adam Buick