With another UK snap General Election looming in less than a fortnight, it becomes almost impossible to escape the promises and pledges various political parties make in their manifestos, newspapers, the morning radio show, or the evening telly programme. Having lived in this country for nearly 13 years, British politics still leaves me perplex.

As an undergrad student in political science in the late 1990s, the ‘Westminster model’ was one of many political systems we had to learn about from Arend Lijphart’s book Patterns of Democracy. One of the oldest democratic models in the World, it has brought political stability to the United Kingdom and other former British colonies for centuries – so we were told.

Great was my astonishment when I discovered the realities of the Westminster model after I had permanently moved to Britain in 2007. I remember the surprise I felt watching for the first time the debates in the House of Commons. Indeed, the very architecture of that House itself shocked me: Two sets of green benches menacingly facing each other with the table and despatch boxes in the middle and the seat of the speaker – throne-like – at the far end of the room. The very architecture of the House only allows for one thing: confrontation. Indeed, the constant sneering, ridiculing, laughing at the political ‘opponent’ has left a lasting and very troubling impression on me. The lack of respect for one’s political opponent displayed in the House of Commons hardly tallied with my idea of a venerable and dignified parliamentary system of government that – as a naive foreigner – I thought firmly rooted in British gentlemanlike manners.

How could any reasonable law or policy be agreed on by a Parliament divided by a structural adversarialism and antagonism, where the minority party (called “the Opposition”) by definition has to attack and undermine anything the governing party proposes? How could important issues be solved given the lack of cooperation across the benches?
The answer, of course, is that the Westminster model normally does not require any cooperation, negotiation, or agreement across party lines. The model is based on an astonishing concentration of power in the governing party’s hands – and more precisely in the PM and his/her cabinet –, which makes any compromising unnecessary (except for the rare occasions of a coalition or a minority government (“hung parliament”). The party who gets a majority of seats in the House of Commons gets a blank check and essentially does whatever it pleases to do. The late Lord Hailsham  - former Lord Chancellor and Conservative cabinet minister – quite rightly called the Westminster Model an “elective dictatorship.”

Disproportional system of voting

What I always found even more disturbing than the extraordinary concentration of power in the cabinet, is the fact that this power is based on a very thin link to popular support.

The alternative designation of the Westminster model as ‘majoritarian model’ may suggest that whoever gathers a majority of voters around their manifesto gets to form the government. In reality, however, the first-past-the post voting system with single-member constituencies leads to “manufactured majorities” (Lijphart’s term) that emerge from an artificial amplification of the votes of the winner in each constituency. Indeed, the majoritarian electoral system implies that each constituency only gests to elect one MP and whoever wins a simple majority of votes wins the seat, while the votes of those who voted for other candidates essentially disappear into thin air.

Therefore, somewhat paradoxically, the ‘majoritarian model’ makes the virtually unrestrained rule of a small elite possible. Consider, for example, the 2015 General Election – the last regular General Election that was not dominated by the single issue of Brexit: The joint vote share of Labour and Conservatives was 67%, which – however – translated into 84% of the seats (562 out of 650). The Conservatives won 330 seats – and thus the right to form the government – by winning just 36.9% of the vote share. To put this into context: The UK population in 2015 was estimated at 65.11m, 44.5m of whom constituted the electorate, 66.20% of whom registered and turned out to vote. This means that less than 17% of the UK population got to decide who would form the next government.

Indeed, the winner-takes-it-all single-member constituency system implies a massive distortion of the popular will: if you voted conservative in the 2015 election, your party would get a seat in Parliament for every 33,105 conservative votes cast (vote share divided by number of seats won). If you voted labour, you would get a seat for every 47,088 people who vote labour. If you voted Green, on the other hand, together with your fellow 1,788,879 Green voters you would also get just one seat!

The electoral system also dramatically limits the voters choice: Only two parties have a realistic chance of ever achieving a majority of seats in the House of Commons; often pushing many people to choose the lesser of two evils rather than the party that is actually closest to their preferences. Moreover, once a party has won a majority of seats, control by the electorate over policies ceases. This is a major issue in a system that requires parties to be broad catch-all-parties that have various wings representing at times very different political orientations. Once in power, the winning Party decides who gets to be PM without any popular say: in 2015, the voters elected the Conservatives lead by David Cameron who became PM for a second time. Since then the PM has changed twice without any prior popular vote (although Theresa May – who had become PM following Cameron’s resignation after the lost Brexit referendum – did call a snap election in 2017 that – while leaving her 5 seats short of a majority in parliament – allowed her to form a new government by entering a “confidence and supply agreement” with the Democratic Unionist Party that cost the tax paper £1bn). Rather than by popular election, the PM changes simply as a result of party-internal personnel changes.

Boris Johnson too became PM not following a General Election, but following a leadership contest inside the governing Conservative party. As such, a vote by members of the Conservative party, not of the people of Britain decided who became PM. 66% of the Conservative party members who voted in the contest supported Johnson. This corresponds with 92,153 people, i.e. 0.14% of the 2019 UK population of 67.53m! Let me put this figure into words: Zero point one four percent of the population of this country got to decide who would lead the country at one of its arguably most crucial moments in peacetime history!

(all the stats and figures are from here and here)

Keep calm and carry on voting?

Even more shocking to me than the distorted electoral system that allows a well-organised political organisation without any obvious anchoring in and backing by broader society to capture the government is the equanimity with which my fellow Brits seem to accept this state of affairs. This in spite of the fact that most Brits are staunch believers in democracy. Indeed, many a remain voter in the 2016 Brexit referendum will tell you that they are in favour of exciting the EU now because “the will of the people” has to be respected.

Such statements are not shaken by the fact that an advisory referendum decision taken with a simple majority – representing 23% of the population – can hardly be seen to represent the ‘will of the people.’ Furthermore, the belief in the “majority decision” is unaffected even by the most obvious violations of due democratic process in the run up to the taking of that decision. There can be little doubt that the various falsehoods and proven illegalities around the Brexit referendum campaign would have led to the result being voided by courts were it not for the fact that as a legally non-binding procedure the referendum result is purely political and does not full under the jurisdiction of the courts.

A similar blindness among British citizens to abuse of power and disregard for due democratic procedure became obvious when the PM was found guilty by the country’s most senior judges to have lied to the Queen about the reasons for proroguing Parliament earlier this year, or when allegations emerged that the Conservatives may have tried to bribe members of the Brexit Party to not run in certain constituencies.

Whether proven or just allegations, in a time of heightened political tensions and high stakes, one might have expected each one of these events to lead to an uproar in a country that prides itself with its democratic tradition and respect for the Rule of Law. Yet, neither the General Election campaign nor voter intentions seem affected in any way whatsoever by these revelations. One explanation for this may lie in the wide-spread cynicism and the radical ‘end justifies the means’ thinking that have become characteristic of our times. The only other explanation for British voters’ turning a blind eye on politicians’ trampling democratic institutions underfoot, is that the staunch deference to the “will of the majority” may in actual fact hide a historically induced acceptance of the rule of a small unaccountable elite over the many.

Another source of perplexity is the relative silence and powerlessness of business in the current situation. While the trade unions are well in control of parts of the labour party, the same cannot be said of the employer associations – in particular the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) – in the Tory party. The Conservatives are very largely a party of rentiers and financiers not of industrialists. The PM himself expressed this state of affairs very clearly – and in his usual crude way – when answering a question about the interests of business in the Brexit process by saying “F**k business!” Business may support the Conservatives on grounds of a preference for lower taxes and deregulation, but the conservatives do not properly represent any productive business interests. But just like the general population, the two-party system may not leave employer associations any real alternative – especially in times when the labour party is captured by the far-left – which leads to an almost unconditional support in spite of policies that go against the preferences of a considerable part of the CBI membership.

Speechless and voiceless

I became a British citizen in December 2015. One of the reasons for applying for the British passport was the fact that after nearly 10 years of living (and paying taxes) in the country, I finally wanted to be part of the political community and “have a say” in political matters. Four years on, I feel as disenfranchised as before. Participating in elections feels futile and indeed almost like legitimating a deeply unfair and broken political system where the majority of the population (e.g. 83% of the population who did not vote Conservative in the 2015 election) remains voiceless and unrepresented. Rather than a ‘representative democracy,’ Britain should rather be seen as a ‘delegative democracy’ (as Guillermo O’Donnell calls it – see Lijphart, 2012: 13).  Election day does not mean sending your representative to Westminster (unless you happen to support one of two major parties and you happen to live in a constituency where this party happens to stand a reasonable chance to win a majority). For me, election day means abandoning your political rights for up to five years by legitimising whoever acquires a majority of seats in the House of Commons to do whatever they want without any possibility to systematically control their actions while in government.

Some of the things I describe in this post have at times left me speechless. I may still go to the polling station and vote in the upcoming election – simply out of a feeling of civic duty if nothing else. However, I know already that as a resident of Islington North – Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency – there is no chance that any of my preferred candidates will win a seat in Parliament. Therefore, whatever happens on December 12th – conservative majority or hung parliament – what is certain is that – like the majority of the people in this country – I will remain voiceless in Westminster.