Political Legitimacy

Political Legitimacy- In the Eye of the Beholder


That the Tories intended to legislate on Trade Unions was signalled in their election manifesto but the Bill that went through its second reading in the House of Commons in August has surprised all informed commentators and experts in industrial relations. Thus in a letter to The Guardian on 17th August more or less all of the leading experts on industrial relations in the UK denounced the Bill as ‘the most sustained attack on trade unions and workers’ rights since the Combination Acts of the early nineteenth century’ and argued that the Bill by setting minimum voting thresholds would seriously curtail the possibility of legitimate strike action. Their dismay was also supported amongst others by Liberty, Amnesty International, the British Institute of Human Rights and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. The previous Business Secretary from the Coalition Government Sir Vince Cable is reported as describing the Bill as ‘ a vindictive, counter-productive and ideologically driven’ attack on Britain’s trade unions which has ‘no evidence base at all’.

What the Bill does amongst other attacks on Trade Union rights is to criminalise picketing, permit employers to hire strike breaking agency staff and check the flow of funds to the Labour Party. Tory ministers apparently made proposals within the previous Coalition Government to change the mechanisms for party funding by trade unions but were prevented by the Lib Dems from implementing these. The core of the Trade Union Bill is to make strikes unlawful unless 50% of those being asked to strike vote in the ballot. It also will require that for key public sector workers that at least 40% of those asked to vote support the strike – thus in teaching if 100 are asked to strike then it is only lawful if 50 teachers voted and 40 of those backed the strike. In effect the Bill sets a double threshold for key public services. These draconian changes are according to the present Business Secretary Mr. Sajid Javid  ‘ being introduced so that strikes only happen when a clear majority of those entitled to vote have done so....’.

The purpose of the Bill is self evident  - to weaken trade unions in the UK and to further undermine the funding of the Labour Party. But given the very low level of UK strike action in recent years there is no convincing case for further tightening the law relating to ballots on industrial action and if anything the problem in the UK is that trade unions are not too strong but too weak. Existing laws relating to trade unions in the UK are already draconian relative to other industrial countries. The problem isn’t that trade unions in Britain and in most other industrial countries have excessive power but rather the opposite. As a consequence too little of the growth since the 1970s of labour productivity has accrued to labour and far too much to the owners of capital. With results that are evident to everyone in the continued concentration of income and wealth amongst the top 1% during recent decades. If there is to be progress in reducing income and wealth inequality then stronger worker representation is required and not less. An observation made most trenchantly some years ago in his magisterial analysis of the corporate state by J.K.Galbraith where he called for’ countervailing power’ [The New Industrial State, 1967].

What this proposed Trade Union Bill also does is to raise once again the issue of political legitimacy in general and the whole question of voting reform in the UK. The AV referendum rejected reform of the first past the post system but the problems have not gone away and seem to have intensified. There have been calls by UKIP and Greens and others for revisiting the whole question of the voting system in the UK. The most damming analysis of the present system is contained in a recent report of the Electoral Reform Society [The 2015 General Election: A voting system analysis]. That reform is now urgent is clear given the disproportionality evident in the recent 2015 general election between voting intentions and representation. That UKIP could garner 12.6% of votes cast and yet send only one MP to Parliament as did the Greens with 3.8 % of the vote. All of this and much else besides suggests that there is something very wrong with the existing voting system. But the problems go deeper than party representation as such and raise questions about the legitimacy of individual MPs and to what extent they represent their constituencies.

The UK electorate in 2015 was 46.4 million which is three–quarters of a million more than 2010. There continues to be concern about levels of non-registration and the Election Commission has raised the issue of the disappearance from the existing register of electors of some 1.9 million people – many of them in urban areas and concentrated in the young and ethnic minorities. Of those who registered only 30.7 million votes were valid [a 66.2% turnout which was some 1% higher than 2010]. At the 2010 General Election the turnout was 65.1% [61.4% in 2005 and 59.4% in 2001 which was the lowest since 1918]. Not only did a third of the electorate not bother to vote but just as important a large number of electors cannot even bother to register. The Election Commission estimates that in some constituencies as many as 15% are unregistered.

Not surprisingly the turnout of voters was much higher in Scotland where the % voting increased from 63.9 in 2010 to 71.1 in 2015. Indeed the largest increase in turnout of any constituency in the UK in 2015 compared with 2010 was in Scotland at Inverclyde at 11.8% [the next largest increase was at Liverpool Riverside at 10.4%]. That the referendum on independence should have mobilised the electorate and support for the SNP is exactly what could have been predicted. 

The Election Commission concluded in 2010 that, ‘Research suggests that unless voters feel that the election is relevant to them and that their role matters, they are unlikely to participate’. But the situation is even worse than it looks at first sight. In an attempt to rouse the slumbering democratic will the Electoral Commission has encouraged a massive expansion of postal voting in recent years. In the general election in 2015 no less than 7.6 million postal votes were issued which is 16.4% of the entire electorate. Of these 85.8% of the postal ballots were returned – one in 5 of the total with in some constituencies the % even higher [in NE England more than a third were postal votes]. Despite the fact that postal votes have increased fourfold from 4% in 2001 to 15.3% in 2010 and then to 16.4% in May it is still the case that some million people didn’t bother to use their postal vote in the most recent general election.

It gets worse if one looks constituency by constituency at the share of the votes taken by the winning MPs in the UK in the General Election in 2015 and compares this with 2010. This is an amazingly interesting exercise not least in terms of the geographical distribution of seats that is revealed and the disproportionalities that exist in the system.  Even with an electoral turnout of 66.2% in 2015 very few of the MPs managed to secure at least 50% of those voting in their constituency. 50 candidates were elected on less than 40% of the vote and 8 MPs received less than 35% of the votes cast and one MP achieved a record in electoral history with only 24.5% of the votes.

The distributions for 2015 are as follows:

Conservative MPs: share of votes 

Less than 40% of those voting – 5.5% [11.4% of all Tory seats in 2010]
40-49% of those voting – 41.6% [47.2% of all Tory seats in 2010]
More than 50% of those voting – 52.9% [41.4 % of all Tory seats in 2010]

Tories won 330 seats with a share in the total votes cast of 36.9%.  No less than 47.1% failed to secure at least half of the votes cast constituency by constituency. Overall in 2015 the Conservatives did manage to marginally increase the % of their MPs with more than 50% of those voting compared to 2010 but it is still the case that almost half of their MPs failed to get 50% of those voting.

Labour MPs: share of votes 

Less than 40% of those voting - 8.2% [22.15% of all Labour seats in 2010]
40-49% of those voting – 46.4% [48.3% of all Labour seats in 2010]
More than 50% of those voting – 45.49% [29.2% of all Labour seats in 2010]

Labour won 232 seats in 2015 [30.4% of total votes] of which 54.6% failed to secure at least half of those votes cast constituency by constituency.  Overall the Labour Party did manage to raise the % of MPs with more than 50% of those voting compared with 2010 but the % was still below half of those voting. The increase in the % with less than 40% of those voting in 2015 compared with 2010 clearly reflects the impact of UKIP [and to some extent the Greens] who attracted many former Labour voters even in constituencies which Labour managed to win.

SNP MPs: share of votes

Less than 40% of those voting – 3.4% of all SNP seats in 2015
40-49% of those voting – 36.2% of all SNP seats in 2015
More than 50% of those voting – 60.34% of all SNP seats in 2015

The SNP won 56 seats of which 39.6% failed to secure at least half of those votes cast constituency by constituency. So the SNP had a much larger % of their MPs with more than 50% of those voting which reflects the higher turnout in Scotland and the success of the SNP is mobilising their supporters. Compared to the other 2 main political parties the SNP has much greater legitimacy in terms of MPs’  share of those voting securing more than 50% than either the Tories or Labour. Overall the SNP achieved 50% of the total votes cast in Scotland and increased the numbers of seats that they won by no less than 50.

Is this distribution an inevitable result of the first past the post voting system we are left with after the failure of the AV referendum?  Will the degree of unrepresentativeness get even worse if the Government carries out the boundary changes they seem determined to introduce despite the problems noted above of the existing election register and the advice not to do so by the Election Commission?  The answer is unclear but what is revealed by the constituency data is the degree to which both of the major political parties fail to capture at least the support of half of those voting for them in constituencies where they win.

The situation is slightly worse for Labour than it is for the Tories but this simply reflects the fact that the Tories have massive majorities in more wealthy homogeneous constituencies [the Tory shires of fame]. The SNP does rather better than their main opponents given their concentration in Scotland where as a result of the election all of the other major parties were more or less eliminated – with the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems having virtually no representation at all in Scotland with each of them having only 1 seat each. Labour lost no less than 40 seats and the Lib Dems 10 so that Scotland became effectively only represented by the SNP.

What is even more revealing of the degree to which the existing voting system produces outcomes that can scarcely be democratic is to estimate the share by constituency of the % of the electorate [those eligible voters who could have voted] taken by the winning candidate. If one is interested in the question of whether MPs really represent their constituency then surely the ability to mobilise people and get their support in elections is crucial. That a significant proportion of those registered do not vote and another 15% do not register undermines the legitimacy of most MPs who all except for one MP in the election of 2015 did not manage to achieve 50% of the electorate. Thus there is only 1 MP in the House of Commons that managed to get just over 50% of the electorate– he is George Howarth who has been the MP for Knowsley since 1986 and a member of the Labour Party. It is a fact worth emphasising: apart from Howarth who got 78% of those voting no other MP managed to get 50% of the electorate.

The distributions are as follows:

Conservative MPs: share of the electorate 2015
Less than 30% of the electorate: 70 seats [21.2% of all seats].
30-39% of the electorate: 199 seats [60.3% of all seats]
40-49% of the electorate: 61 seats [18.5% of all seats]

Not a single Tory MP managed to secure 50% of the electorate and some 81% of all MPs had less than 40% of those registered to vote [the electorate] – some four fifths of all Conservative MPs thus significantly failed to get a % of the electorate that would legitimise their position as representative of their constituencies despite the fact that they won the general election [the first time since 1992]. If one looks at the geographical distribution of Tory seats then the degree to which the Government is unrepresentative of the country is extreme with almost no urban MPs in the North and West of England and only one MP in Scotland.

Labour Party MPs: share of the electorate 2015
Less than 30% o0f the electorate: 116 seats [50% of all seats]
30-39% of the electorate: 99 seats [42.7% of all seats]
40-49% of the electorate: 16 seats [6.9% of all seats]
More than 50% of the electorate: 1 seat [0.4% of all seats]

Labour as is usual managed to mobilise less of the electorate than the Tories with a mean turnout of 61.7% compared to 68.7% for the Conservatives and 70.9% for the SNP. Overall no less than 92% of all Labour Party MPs [214] were elected on less than 40% of the electorate. This is somewhat worse than the Tories who as noted above had 269 [81%] of their MPs elected on less than 40% of the electorate. But a scarcely stellar performance by either of the main political parties.

SNP MPs: share of the electorate 2015
Less than 30% of the electorate; 6 seats [10.7% of all seats]
30-39% of the electorate: 37 seats [66.1% of all seats]
40-49% of the electorate: 13 seats [23.2% of all seats]

The SNP overall is much more representative of the electorate than either of the other 2 main parties managing to get almost 90% of its MPs elected on a share of between 30-49% which is much greater than either of the other 2 main parties [Conservatives with 79% and the Labour Party much lower at 50%]. How far this performance by the SNP is simply a reflection of the mobilisation generated by the independence referendum remains to be seen but it does seem to have generated an enthusiasm for politics which is not true elsewhere in the UK.

What can be concluded from the foregoing analysis?

What we have is a Government that can scarcely claim to have legitimacy given that it was elected with less than 37% of voters although since they have a small majority in the House of Commons they can rightly take on the mantle of government. However, the situation with respect to legitimacy is even worse if one considers the Conservatives share of the registered electorate where they had the support of just a quarter [24.4%].

There is a clear disproportionality between voters’ intentions and who gets elected which seems to be closely related to the first past the post voting system. The Conservatives and Labour secured 65% of votes but won 87% of the seats. Neither of the two main political parties [Conservatives and Labour] has managed to secure 50% of the votes in the UK in the past 40 years. The situation is of course much worse when turnout is compared with the registered electorate and even more dire when it is recalled that many of those entitled to vote do not even register.

The situation worsened in 2015 where the relationship between voters’ intentions and outcome has been skewed even further that usual. Thus millions voted for smaller parties but ended up with single digit representation- the minor parties [excluding the Conservatives, Labour and the Lib Dems] secured almost a quarter of all votes cast but almost no representation except for the SNP. But the situation in Scotland is equally unrepresentative since the SNP got 50% of the votes but 95% of the seats.

When one analyses the ability of the main political parties to mobilise support at the level of the constituency the situation is one which undermines any legitimacy. As the data shows MPs in both of the main political parties are typically elected with less than 50% of those voting in most of the constituencies. No less than half [50%] of all votes went to losing candidates. Thus 15 million people had no effect on the choice of candidates. The number of candidates elected on less than 40% of the votes doubled between 2005- 2010 and although this trend was partially reversed in 2015 there are, as can be seen from the above data, still a significant % elected on this basis.

The position of individual MPs legitimacy is further undermined when the % shares of the electorate – those registered and entitled to vote – are computed. Only 1 MP [in Knowsley] managed to scrape more than 50% of the electorate out of all the MPs in the House of Commons. No less than 191 MPs had less than 30% of the whole electorate. For Labour no less than 92% were elected on less than 40% with comparable figures for the Conservatives of 81% - not exactly a startling performance for either of the main parties.

Of the 2015 class of MPs no less than 32% went to independent schools compared with only 7% of the school population [49% went to comprehensives]. Amongst the Tories the % is even worse –some 48% were educated in independent schools. No less than 1 in 10 of those who went to private schools went to Eton [where the current fees are £35,721 per annum plus extras]. In the case of the Labour Party 17% went to private schools and 64% to comprehensives [compared to 34% for the Conservatives].

Labour has a relatively smaller % of MPs from independent schools so they are at least more representative of the general population in this particular respect. In 2010 no less than 10% of all MPs were educated at 13 schools [12 of which were fee charging] but unfortunately no data is available for the most recent general election although the situation is unlikely to have changed significantly. Most MPs have had a university education [89%] of which 26% went to Oxbridge and 28% to Russell Group universities.

One can concur with the Sutton Trust that the House of Commons is a little more representative than in 2010 [when 35% had private education] but that, ‘MPs are still 4 times more likely to have gone to a private school than the population as a whole’. In the case of the SNP only 5% had been to an independent school and no less than 90% had been educated at a comprehensive – what an amazing difference in educational and socio-economic background, and it is unsurprising that their policies are so much more representative of the views of their electorate as a whole.

What is one to make of a House of Commons which is as unrepresentative as this? Overwhelmingly white males educated in independent schools and without the legitimacy that would be theirs if they had been able to secure the support of a reasonable % of the electorate.  These data when taken in conjunction with the evidence of the dominance of those privately educated in senior positions in the judiciary, medicine, media, the City and the senior civil service confirms what many have suspected for years. That social mobility in the UK more or less stopped at some point in the 1960s and that extreme income and wealth inequality largely determines access to senior positions throughout British society- including of course Parliament.  Given this situation it is impossible to talk about political legitimacy and we are indeed experiencing a broken polity in the UK.

How does this relate to the opening remarks on the new Trade Union Bill introduced by the Government? If the Tories are so concerned with the legitimacy of trade union policies and practices then why are they so determined to prevent changes to a parliamentary electoral system that clearly produces increasingly unacceptable outcomes. To make it obligatory for trade unions to achieve levels of support through ballots that are never met by MPs in general elections has no justification at all. But then the purposes of the Bill have nothing whatever to do with protecting us all from the rapacious activities of the unions but everything to do with undermining one of the few institutions that could potentially oppose the corpocracy. Governance in the UK is both increasingly ineffective and increasingly in the pocket of corporate interests and the 1%. Questions of legitimacy it can be argued are neither here nor there and what matters are sectional interests and especially those of the rich and powerful.