Do we now have a hung parliament?

3rd October 2022

This is not a partisan blog, and long-time readers will recall that I was a fan of the hung parliament of 2017 to 2019.

My sentiments were, however, not shared by many in politics and that parliament came to an abrupt end in December 2019.

This was when the opposition parties – stupidly in my view – agreed to an early general election, which turned out to be on the issue of “getting Brexit done”.

And so the Conservatives got a majority of eighty.

To a large extent all what has happened in British politics since 2019 is not so much the fault of Conservatives, but the fault of the opposition parties in allowing it to happen.

But.

Just over halfway through the maximum length of this parliament, we seem again to have somehow reverted to what some now call a hung parliament.

Chris Bryant has got a point.

The governing party now, in reality, comprises the fifty Conservative Members of Parliament who voted for Elizabeth Truss in the first round of the recent leadership campaign, and about a hundred or so more who have or want ministerial office.

On the government backbenches you have figures such as Michael Gove and Grant Shapps, as well as Rishi Sunak and indeed Boris Johnson, and you also have the European Research Group and the Northern Research Group.

The governing party in the House of Commons is currently an unstable coalition.

This was most obvious in how the U-Turn in the abolition of the 45p rate came about.

Gove and Shapps said they would be against it, and so it was dropped.

Those Truss supporters who fantasised about what they could do with an eighty majority are going to be disappointed and frustrated with the actuality.

Not least because the majority has gone down because of by-election defeats.

Thirty-or-so Conservative backbenchers can now veto government policy – and they know that they can get their way.

*

Johnson warned us against a hung parliament in 2019.

But it looks like we have got one anyway.

Let us hope it lasts, and that the government does not again get carried away with forcing things through just because it can.

Why and how this has come about will fascinate political commentators.

But from a liberal constitutionalist perspective, it is to be welcomed.

We are governed better when there is real parliamentary accountability and scrutiny – when the government cannot just assume it will get legislation through the commons.

Perhaps party discipline will reassert itself in the governing party, bringing this situation to an end.

Perhaps.

But in the meantime, let us welcome what appears to be a hung parliament again.

***

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29 thoughts on “Do we now have a hung parliament?”

  1. If our blogger is a fan of hung parliaments, can I ask what he thinks of PR, which to all intents and purposes ensures one party never has full control of proceedings? (although the SNP may have a view on this).

    I mean, I don’t think PR will happen for parliamentary elections in this country for so long as both Labour and Conservatives think they can win outright but….

  2. I so agree and have been longing for coalition and co-operation for a long time. Enough of the awful, black-and-white, hateful, divisive, blind, fundamentalist poles of opinion.

    On that, I am appalled by the Far Left of the Labour Party again – and incessantly – at war with the its Right wing.

    1. You may not actually LIKE Socialism, but why is it appalling? Socialists generally want things that benefit the majority rather than the minority – as Corbyn had it “For the many and not the few.” I’d love to know what’s appalling about that.

      1. I don’t dislike Socialism. However, under Corbyn’s watch the Party was for the many, not the Jew. What is appalling now is that just when we have a chance of voting the Tories out the Far Left seem to be taking an entrenched position against Keir Starmer’s side. What is the point of a split opposition?

        1. However, under Corbyn’s watch the Party was for the many, not the Jew.

          Do you seriously believe that’s what was happening? Or is it just an attempt at satire?

          I agree with you about the poisonous split between far left and centre left. That has been there since Corbyn was elected Labour leader. It has to stop. It may also have had something to do with the accusations of antisemitism becoming weaponised. However Labour never has been an antisemitic party and wasn’t one under Corbyn’s leadership. Corbyn certainly badly mishandled the complaints procedures. Yet he has always been at the forefront of anti-racist campaigns, condemning antisemitism all his career. So I very much doubt he is antisemitic or was turning Labour into an antisemitic party.

          1. No satire. It was, and is still, happening. I was a campaigning member in my local Labour Party and came across poisonous anti-Semitism, and still hear the same now. Both the EHRC and Forde Report found the Corbynista section of the Party guilty. “Weaponised” is yet another unquestioned cliché, such clichés forming part of the antagonistic warring I detest. One might as well say harsh criticisms of Boris Johnson, or anyone else, were weaponised. Better to follow carefully the history of incidents which led to both the above reports.

          2. I don’t doubt it is still happening. Holding inquiries won’t change how such people think. But that doesn’t mean Labour isn’t a party for Jews.

            As for “weaponised” it is a cliché but even so it does have a meaning.

  3. We’ll find out if Truss commands a majority in parliament soon enough. But it’s hard to imagine a rebellion on a finance bill, as that is effectively a confidence vote.

    1. Recent events might suggest that Truss and Kwarteng didn’t find a rebellion on a Finance Bill hard to imagine.

  4. The gains in accountability and scrutiny are another benefit of voting reform that would likely lead to more seats for minor parties and more coalition in government.

    When the governing party is of a wide enough church to essentially be a coalition in and of itself that has sufficed in the past. But the increased use of previewing policies in friendly press and the complete lack of bipartisanship in favour of party discpline and ramming things through regardless does us all no favours. Hopefully the current state will last until the election.

    I like my governments not able to do things too quickly unless they can convince everyone that something needs doing for some emergency reason. Simply failing to offer sane policy until you have created an emergency through inaction should not be enough to get bad policy enacted.

  5. Compromise is hard for people who want absolute power as they have their own agenda. Democracy as we all know, is power vested in the people enacted by elected representatives. You cannot have 65million people running the country as individuals so we elect them: they are our appointments and answerable to us. The Parliamentary accountability matters as it’s through that “us” millions get our voices heard. In a time of extremist positions it seems the only way for that accountability to function is through a hung Parliament and I am therefore all for it!

  6. UK politicians, at least Tory and Labour ones, decry the coalitions most European democracies require after elections. But with some exceptions (Italy) they produce more stable and less extreme governments because the parties have to compromise. We. On the other hand lurch from an elective dictatorship of the Right to one of the Left. Hung Parliaments / coalitions are to be welcomed as they save us from the pendulum of these extremes. At the exhausted, fag end of this woeful series of Tory administrations which have become every more extreme, there is now probably a majority of Tories who are ex Ministers and placemen / women and those who will never gain preferment. We are fin de siecle indeed. A hung Parliament may be the country’s saviour.

  7. On MPs and general elections.
    To be slightly unkind, there is one thing that parliamentarians do better than (some might argue to the exclusion of) most other things, and that is campaign.
    Like hounds to the horn, they harken to the sound of the ballot box, tightening formerly broad churches toward a single message. As Isabel Hardman identified in her 2019 book, Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, their livelihoods are dependent upon getting (re)elected, As David suggests, the opposition parties were tempted into the election, to the advantage of Mr Johnson.

    For some time, observers have noted the increasing number of special interest groups and constituencies within the parliamentary Conservative party, who made life impossible for Mr Cameron, Mrs May, Mr Johnson and now Ms Truss. The leaders are prisoners of their MPs.
    The Tories are ungovernable. Unless and until somebody stands up to the ERG wing of the party, they will remain in that state.

  8. I must agree most forcibly with your suggestion that they were stupid to agree to a general election, and the only reason that they did that rather than the proper course of a vote of no confidence was that it had already been established that the House had less than no confidence in the Leader of the Opposition.
    I suggest that the fact that the Leader of the Opposition did not have the confidence of the Opposition was a breach of the convention on Human Rights, which requires the “Free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature.”

    Consider where we would be now, if the opinion of the people had been respected and ABC had led the opposition at that time…
    That leader would have become Prime Minister and we would be in an entirely different place…

    Since this was a breach of international law, this point may still be actionable…
    I do not care to predict how that would go…

    1. I’m not really sure I understand this comment. Surely it is inherent in the functioning of the UK’s political parties and of its Parliament that the leader of a party may at any time find him or herself without the backing of his or her MPs, as happened to Corbyn earlier and as is happening to Truss now?

      Are you suggesting that the entire parliamentary system is therefore in some way contrary to international law and that concrete means of redress exist to correct this?

      If that is what you are saying, who would take what legal action against whom, and when and where has this ever happened before?

    2. “I suggest that the fact that the Leader of the Opposition did not have the confidence of the Opposition was a breach of the convention on Human Rights, which requires the “Free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature.”

      Assuming you aren’t writing (and selectively quoting) for comic effect, the applicable law simply requires that the conditions for the free expression of opinion be maintained, which they were.

      The law places no proscription on the alleged incompetence of the opposition.

  9. Looking at the other end of the pendulum swing, this also illustrates the dangers to a nation of having an unreasonably high majority in a parliament.

    What that means is, in essence, that no single (majority party) MP, or even a small coalition of them, would have sufficient influence to be able to sway a cabinet or Prime Minister from their desired course of action.

    In other words, a large majority is dangerous, because it has the net effect of empowering authoritarian tendencies in the centre. Cabinet member and don’t agree? Well, tough, you’re sacked. Committee member and don’t agree? Well, tough, you’re off to the back benches. Back bench MP and don’t agree? Well, tough, the whip is withdrawn and you can go explain yourself to your local party. Oh and we’ll be calling your local party chairman with a few choice words about why you were a poor choice. Good luck with that.

    What do wealth, radioactivity and political power have in common? None are inherently bad, but all become extremely dangerous when concentrated in one place.

    Doubtless Liz Truss entered Downing Street, complete with that inherited huge majority, thinking that she could do pretty much what she wanted. Only to discover that the huge imbalance of power given by the parliamentary majority was actually dangerous.

    And, perhaps like fissile material, it wasn’t long before the concentration was enough to force it to shatter.

  10. PR – ah yes. Did we not very recently have a coalition, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats working harmoniously and constructively together, reaching fine and sensible compromises in the interests of the nation as a whole, providing a solid basis for the country’s progress from 2015 onwards?

    1. You are factually correct, but I think you’ll find that your point is in-related and non-equivalent.

      It is entirely possible to get an outright majority with PR, just as it’s is evidently possible to get a hung parliament with FPTP.

      Unfortunately, both FPTP and PR as solutions fail to address a key underlying problem, which is that the implementation of representative government we have today is tailor-made for corruption.

      Maybe if we sort that out, we’ll see a change in faces and many of the issues we face today will be easier to address…

      1. Of course a majority is possible under PR, but at least that would be a true reflection of popular opinion. It’s also extremely unlikely. Fighting corruption in politics is vital, and PR will help. A truly representative parliament will be better able to regulate corruption among MPs and hold political parties, especially the governing parties, to account. Coalition governments may find it harder to pass laws to reduce scrutiny on donations.

  11. Yes it is a de facto hung parliament, with a loose coalition between the moderate Tories and the extremist Tories, not even on a confidence and supply basis since Kwarteng’s “mini-budget” wouldn’t have passed. As it’s an unofficial Coalition the whole thing is totally unpredictable. One thing I think we can be sure of, the moderates won’t get seats in Truss’s cabinet. Business will be conducted behind closed doors on a vote by vote basis.

    Even Johnson couldn’t split the Tory Party after three years of offesnive bumbling. Truss has managed it in less than a month.

  12. I fully agree that this is the best situation that can be hoped for in the short term. I also agree with the comments that suggest PR is the only way to force our representatives to actually do their job of scrutinising legislation and debating it on its merits. Democracy lovers should be enormously grateful to the millions of people who make the effort to deliberately “waste” their votes by voting for parties that cannot win seats under FPTP.

    Those votes are legitimate democratic voices ignored. Shame on us.

    Truss and Kwarteng are illegitimate vandals who presume to dictate to the people of the United Kingdom. Shame on us again for tolerating this dangerous nonsense.

    A question comes to mind, is it possible to sue ministers of state for wilfully and negligently damaging private interests? If not, why not? It is a fact that they were wilfully irresponsible and the damages bill is so large it’s easy to lose count of the zeroes when one attempts to write it down.

    They have provided no credible explanation for ignoring those who we pay to protect us from that sort of cavalier idiocy. I don’t see how losing your job in due course is anything like deterrent enough to prevent recurrence.

  13. On a separate but (I think) somewhat related note, what’s your view on the current administration’s mandate?

    It’s been pointed out that the Conservative Manifesto committed the Party if elected to Getting Brexit Done, and to a programme of ‘Levelling Up’ with the clearly stated intention of reducing inequality (at least at the regional level).

    The new PM and Chancellor, elected by a democratic vote of (checks notes) Conservative Party members, has declared that inequality is an irrelevance if it stands in the way of their preferred goal of (presumably aggregate) ‘growth’.

    Putting aside the *economic* incoherence of this arguement, many Brexit voters especially but not only in the Red Wall explicitly rejected the Remain campaign’s concern for aggregate GDP with the rallying cry that ‘it’s not *my* National Income’, i.e., that they didn’t believe in trickledown economics and didn’t care how other people were doing or in a system they felt they had no stake in.

    That’s quite a contrast from the new government’s defence that it’s not conducting trickledown economics because if the poor get a bit poorer but the rich get *much* richer, then ‘growth’ will have happened and that that will be Job Done regardless, because they’re not actually concerned about or in the business of addressing inequality.

    Of course, constitutionally there’s little comeback. Is it simply now a given that, so long as party discipline holds and the governing party holds a majority in Parliament, the U.K. is constitutionally an elective dictatorship and a governing party can if it wishes actively work against the interests and intentions of those who voted it in to power?

  14. Alas, there is no power superior to that of Parliament both able and willing to remove all division bells from the environs of Westminster.

  15. I didn’t think things could get any more surreal than with Johnson as PM, but Grant Shapps (and to an only slightly lesser extent Michael Gove) being the voice of reason in the face of an extremist Conservative government has made me wonder what rabbit-hole I have fallen through to some weird Wonderland.

  16. And the elephant in the room – I wonder what odds the Bookmakers are now offering for/against Boris regaining his crown by Easter…

  17. The Conservative Party is usually pretty focussed on winning and keeping power, but can they really expect to remain in government at a fifth consecutive general election and under a fourth unelected leader? (They lost after winning three elections under Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Douglas-Home, and after winning four under Thatcher and then Major.)

    It would be extraordinary if a government elected not three years ago with a majority of 80 cannot get its legislation through. Is there in fact one Conservative Party now? Perhaps they need to lose a general election to overcome the deep rifts between the different factions in the parliamentary party.

    Nadine Dorries has called for a general election so Liz Truss can get her own electoral mandate for the changes she wants to make. Assuming she wins of course…

  18. Fine crop of coments today. DAG’s observation on the intense visability of splits within the ruling party is of course entirely valid. Yet, always recall that the current constitutional arrangements condense all political opinion into two (occasionally three) political formations to accommodate the demands of a FPTP electoral system. Even when not quite so obvious the splits are always there, and I think always have been.

    We have moved some way from the C17th century Parliament when at least one member was sent to the Tower (literally) for suggesting the mere exiistence of faction when privately referring to the potential conduct of “the other lot”.

    Party has now become a key vehicle for securing the privilege of a five year dictatatorship. The competitive opinions – when in a minority even with ones own party – can now obtain dictatorial powers merely by engineering a party election. We have seen this ‘capture’ repeatedly from Thatcher’s clique through Blair to Corbyn to Truss. Power is moving from Parliament to the Party. I also like hung Parliaments: they slow this process down.

    As Tim observed (above), “their livelihoods are dependent upon getting (re)elected”. The departure of the gentleman MP of independent means can be welcomed for many reasons, but the present system of ‘professional politicians’ places the Party structures in the enviable position of controlling policy, particularly when aligned to serious amounts of political money (qv 55 Tufton Steet).

    I suspect this ‘capturism’ is responsible for the pretty low level of performance in recent UK governments. The ruling faction simply cannot muster the level of support necessary to address or challenge consensus political dogma – such as the property market bubble, lack of strategic infrastructure, overexposure to variations in food supply.

    Could a hung Parliament better address those issues? Be difficult for it to do worse.

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