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Coalition Government

My Lords, I shall focus, as my noble friend Lady Symons did at the beginning of her speech—and I thank her for inaugurating this debate—on the issues of manifestos and mandates in the context of coalition. Over the past generation at least, the party manifesto at elections has become rather akin to a quasi-contract between government and the electorate. It is clear why that should have happened. What is often called in the literature expressive voting, which is what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, meant when he talked about people having a kind of loyalty to a party that they have grown up with and which is linked to social position, religious outlook and class, has declined tremendously in favour of what has come to be called instrumental voting, whereby people vote for parties in relation to how they see their interests at a particular time. A manifesto might be a way of trying to address the issue of instrumental voting, so that people look at what they will get out of a Government, whether it is in their interests and so forth. The fact that there is a manifesto provides a basis for building up a degree of trust between the electorate and the Government. Acting on the manifesto provides the Government with their mandate and authority. That idea reached its zenith, for good or ill, in 1997, with the Labour Party’s pledge card, which was very much promoted by my noble friend Lord Prescott. Indeed, all the pledges were fulfilled. That card was an attempt to forge a link between government and people in a narrow sense but also in terms of what the Government could be held to account to do and trusted to do. The doctrine of the manifesto and the mandate becomes intensely problematic in a post-election coalition deal. The coalition agreement, according to Mr Vince Cable, superseded the manifestos of the two separate parties, but there is then a question of legitimacy, when some features of the coalition agreement were not part of either party’s manifesto. The counterargument to that has been that a coalition Government in these circumstances may claim legitimacy because they are governing in the national interest. Okay, nobody voted for that coalition and nobody voted for that coalition agreement, but it still might be claimed that they are legitimate. This is a controversial claim, just as what is in the national interest is a controversial topic. In saying that they are legitimate because they are governing in the national interest, the Government are judge and jury in their own case, as they determine the national interest. The second alternative justification is that the electorate voted for a hung Parliament or coalition. This is a rather difficult claim to justify. You only need to read John Stuart Mill on the fallacy of composition to see how fallacious that kind of argument is. Certainly, you cannot attribute or impute to the electorate an intention to do any such thing. It is an outcome of millions of individual intentional acts, all of which were perhaps undertaken for quite different reasons, so you cannot do that. The issue of how to legitimatise a post-election coalition brings us back to the issue of its mandate. This means that, for this Government, we must just say, ““We are where we are. It is not ideal, but this is what we have got””. It seems that we must be much more careful and deliberate in future coalition formation. If swing parties such as the Liberal Democrats—third or fourth parties—are going to claim legitimacy for coalition deals that they might subsequently make, they will have to be clear before an election who their preferred coalition partner is. The idea of equidistance, which the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, argued for when he was leader of the Liberal Democrats, is not sustainable in an election campaign. Given that there has been this coalition, it is just not going to be feasible for Liberal Democrats to say in future that they are equidistant between the other parties and will make some coalition deal after the election in the light of how things turn out and what their interests are. The Liberal Democrats will have to commit themselves in advance at least to the idea that, other things being equal, this party rather than that party is the preferred coalition partner. That links to the issue of legitimacy. It is only if a party such as the Liberal Democrats do that that people can choose to vote for or against that preferred coalition, rather than its being the result of a post-election deal of the sort that we have now. That will be an important element of any future coalition. Equidistance is just not a feasible or morally legitimate position, because it perpetrates a kind of sleight of hand on the electorate. The other problem with coalition in this country is that we have only the Liberal Democrats as a plausible third-party coalition partner. In other countries, there is a wider range of choices. Certainly, if the AV referendum is successful, I hope that there might emerge other possible swing parties. The Greens might be the most obvious; the nationalist parties might be, too, if they saw that there was a benefit in developing more United Kingdom-oriented policies as opposed to just pursuing a narrower, nationalist agenda. It seems to me that in those circumstances it is not going to appear all that acceptable to the British people to have a party, whichever it might be—it would be the Liberal Democrats in the circumstances that I am outlining—that receives a minority vote but is almost permanently in government as a swing party and in a position to join a coalition. There should have to be at least the opportunity for some kind of competition for the position of being a partner in a coalition and I hope that that will emerge over time. Overall, I am arguing that we should, if possible, avoid what happened this time with the post-election deal.