50-50 nations

Mickey Kaus says

that "a 50-50 tie may be the new equilibrium state of American politics",

and helpfully provides links to other

people who have said the same

thing in the past. It stands to reason that in a two-party state, the parties

will find themselves moving in the direction of the center. And the New York

Times front an article

today on how an individual – New York governor George Pataki – has

moved from being essentially conservative in 1994 to being essentially liberal

in 2002.

Which all set me to thining: why doesn’t a similar thing happen in the UK?

British elections are just as likely as not to be landslides, whether for Thatcher

or for Blair. And all the opinion-polling, focus-grouping and position-tweaking

in the world doesn’t seem to be doing the Tories the slightest bit of good.

Basically, I’m wondering why there seems to be no chance of a Tory government

in the foreseeable future. The reasons I came up with:

• The UK (or Great Britain, at least) has a three-party system, not a two-party

  system, and therefore a vote against one party doesn’t need to be a vote for

  the other. In the US, if one of the parties caters too much to its core constituencies

  (the unions, the Christian right) then alienated moderates run straight into

  the arms of the opposition. In the UK, they run straight into the arms of

  Charles Kennedy, which is a much less frightening prospect.

• Both Democrats and Republicans are more naturally universal than Labour

  and the Conservatives. Just look at their names – while everybody in

  the US is both a democrat and a republican, most Brits aren’t affiliated with

  organised labour, and neither do they consider themselves to be particularly

  conservative. Even within the Tory party, the Thatcherite wing was and is

  far from small-c conservative.

• In the US, the executive and legislative branches are separately elected.

  So even when the president wins election by a comfortable margin, the electorate

  still constrains him through Congress. That’s impossible in the UK. It’s also

  much easier to split your vote in the US: vote Pataki for governor and Hillary

  Clinton for senator, say. In the UK, you can vote against your party in terms

  of local elections, but they have very little effect on national politics.

• The fact that there are 50 elected governors and 100 elected senators, as

  well as a kind-of-elected vice president, means that both parties have a relatively

  large pool of powerful politicians from which they can pick their presidential

  candidates. Once a UK party loses power, on the other hand, none of its MPs

  hold any kind of important office. That makes it much harder for the opposition

  to take back power: basically, the party in government has to lose the election,

  rather than the opposition winning it. Remember that the only politician in

  the UK who’s elected by more than 80,000 people is the mayor of London.

All of which is to say that the British constitutional system would be vastly

improved by having a powerful and elected second chamber. It would be a good

thing for many reasons, of course, and the conclusion is far from ground-breaking.

But my point is that a second chamber would do more than simply provide a legislative

check on the executive. It could become a proving-ground for the opposition,

giving politicians who aren’t in government an opportunity to take on an important

public role. I’m not sure that even a second chamber would be able to rehabilitate

the Tories in their present parlous state. But it might have helped to create

a stronger opposition candidate in the 1992 election than Neil Kinnock. And

it could even give the Liberal Democrats the national legitimacy they need to

become the official party of opposition.