Geoffrey Wheatcroft: The Mother of Hung Parliaments?
[Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of “The Strange Death of Tory England” and “Yo, Blair!”]
A reliable rule in politics is that whenever something is decried as an unprecedented innovation, you can be sure that this is a tradition with many precedents.
The British have just experienced a strange election campaign, and then a convulsive few days since Thursday when the votes were cast. But, as ever, there is little new under the sun.
For the first time since 1974, no one party won an absolute parliamentary majority, meaning 326 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. The Conservatives came nearest with 306, followed by 258 for Gordon Brown and Labour, 57 for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats and 29 for others....
All this was dramatic, but not quite so novel. When Disraeli said that “England does not love coalitions,” it was only partly true. The very term “hung parliament” is a recent coining, and would have puzzled the Victorians. In their day, parliaments usually had no one party with an absolute majority.
Allegiances were much more fluid, and pundits would spend a long time trying to compute how many votes any group could count on, before coalitions, loose or formal, were formed. And Parliament was sovereign, dominating the executive — rather than, as latterly and regrettably — the other way round....
Nor is today’s predicament unheard-of. Exactly 100 years ago there was a “hung parliament.” In fact there were not one but two general elections in 1910, with almost identical results. The second election gave both Liberals and Tories exactly the same number of MPs — 272 each when 336 was needed for a majority. So the Liberals continued in office, but with the support of Irish nationalists and Labour, for which concessions were exacted in return.
What was aberrant in hindsight was the two-party dominance in the middle of the 20th century. The story of the first half of the century was the rise of Labour and the fall of the Liberals, so that by 1951 Labour and Tories shared almost 97 percent of the total vote. That has fallen, thanks to the revival of the Liberals, who are now the Liberal Democrats, and the rise of separatist factions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, to the point where last week the Tory-Labour total was a mere 65 percent of the total....
Read entire article at I.H.T.
A reliable rule in politics is that whenever something is decried as an unprecedented innovation, you can be sure that this is a tradition with many precedents.
The British have just experienced a strange election campaign, and then a convulsive few days since Thursday when the votes were cast. But, as ever, there is little new under the sun.
For the first time since 1974, no one party won an absolute parliamentary majority, meaning 326 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. The Conservatives came nearest with 306, followed by 258 for Gordon Brown and Labour, 57 for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats and 29 for others....
All this was dramatic, but not quite so novel. When Disraeli said that “England does not love coalitions,” it was only partly true. The very term “hung parliament” is a recent coining, and would have puzzled the Victorians. In their day, parliaments usually had no one party with an absolute majority.
Allegiances were much more fluid, and pundits would spend a long time trying to compute how many votes any group could count on, before coalitions, loose or formal, were formed. And Parliament was sovereign, dominating the executive — rather than, as latterly and regrettably — the other way round....
Nor is today’s predicament unheard-of. Exactly 100 years ago there was a “hung parliament.” In fact there were not one but two general elections in 1910, with almost identical results. The second election gave both Liberals and Tories exactly the same number of MPs — 272 each when 336 was needed for a majority. So the Liberals continued in office, but with the support of Irish nationalists and Labour, for which concessions were exacted in return.
What was aberrant in hindsight was the two-party dominance in the middle of the 20th century. The story of the first half of the century was the rise of Labour and the fall of the Liberals, so that by 1951 Labour and Tories shared almost 97 percent of the total vote. That has fallen, thanks to the revival of the Liberals, who are now the Liberal Democrats, and the rise of separatist factions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, to the point where last week the Tory-Labour total was a mere 65 percent of the total....