With the UK’s general election less than two months away, it’s looking pretty likely that the winning party won’t get an overall majority, which will result in a “hung parliament”. Now the conventional wisdom on hung parliaments is that they lead to either a weak minority government or a weak coalition majority, which is bad for the country and leads to very scary things.
But putting aside the argument that Thatcher’s and Blair’s huge majorities haven’t exactly been a massive boon to the country, how do other nations with “weak” government fare? The following are the some of the countries that are above the UK in terms of GDP per capita, alongside the type of government they currently have:
- Denmark - Three party coalition
- Sweden - Four party coalition
- Norway – Three party coalition
- Canada- Minority government
- Austria – Two party coalition
- Ireland – Two party coalition
- Switzerland- Four party coalition
- Netherlands – Three party coalition
- Belgium- Billion party coalition
Now, there are some problems with my use of “GDP per capita” as a measurement of how well a country’s government is doing. But it does show that a hung parliament is not an inherently disastrous thing for a country. And the fact is that you can take almost any general measure of a country’s success – income equality, living standards, happiness levels, life expectancy – and almost all of the above countries would still give the UK a good thrashing.
But the conventional wisdom is that a hung parliament is a BAD thing, so, you know, whatever.
no comments | tags: hung parliament, UK, UK Politics
Last Monday The Times reported that the Lib Dems have started “scenario planning” for what they should do in the entirely plausible event of a hung parliament – which is what would occur if the Conservatives win the election but can’t form a majority government. According to the Times article, they plan to use a variety of scenario planning techniques including mind maps, game theory and, uh, writing on whiteboards – indeed, the article itself has pictures of some tantalising yet conveniently vague whiteboard scribblings in Vince Cable’s office, which I assume we are meant to think are incredibly clever what with Cable’s past experience as a professional scenario planner for Shell.
Game theory aside, two things really struck me from the article’s fascinating discussion of what the Lib Dems are thinking vis-à-vis a hung parliament. One is their determination not to prop up Gordon Brown:
There is an assumption that should the Tories be the largest party in a minority Parliament, the Lib Dems will probably support them in some form. This seems unlikely, at this stage, to be a formal coalition. But they recognise it would be electoral “suicide” to do the reverse and prop up Gordon Brown to keep him in Number 10 if the Tories are the largest party.
Now it could be argued that this isn’t a very logical view to take. If you agree that the Lib Dems and Labour are both centre-left, then the fact is that in every election since 1979 there has been a centre-left majority – yet in 18 out of the last 30 years we have been ruled by a centre-right party. Following this, it makes complete electoral sense for two centre-left parties – that together form a bigger majority than the centre-right one – to form a coalition. It is, technically, the best way to express the will of the voters. This is my view, at least. However, I concede that this arguably ignores two vital points. The first is the truism that though we have three main parties, we are in many ways rooted in a two-party mentality: if Labour is losing, then the Tories must win and vice versa. The idea that a ruling party could fail to get a plurality but still remain in power (albeit in a coalition) is one that might seem perfectly natural to the inhabitants of many proportional representation-using, coalition-loving countries out there but would seem entirely alien to us.
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2 comments | tags: 2010 UK general election, hung parliament, Liberal Democrats, UK Politics
