The Yellow Peril

The cat is now out of the bag! At the Liberal Democrats’ spring conference, Sir Menzies Campbell expressed his preference for the formation of Lab-Lib coalition after the next general election to keep David Cameron’s Conservatives in the wilderness of opposition. Ming, like the rest of the Left is terrified by the results of the most recent opinion polls that show that the Conservatives would enjoy a working majority in the House of Commons after the next general election. If the actual election results mirrored these polls, then it would scupper the Liberal Democrats’ long-cherished hopes of holding the balance of power in parliament and entering into a coalition government so that they can implement their core policy of deciding the composition of the Commons based on proportional representation, the scourge of European politics.

In most countries that use proportional representation and have more than two major political parties, this electoral system has produced a limitless supply of weak and ineffective governments where the smaller parties are granted the de facto right to blackmail the parties that have won the popular vote if the latter wish to enjoy a parliamentary majority and government office. The introduction of proportional representation at Westminster would have one of two adverse effects on political accountability and how political power is exercised.

The first of these consequences would be to concentrate greater perpetual political power into the hands of unelected and increasing unaccountable civil servants while the politicians squabble their way into a stalemate over their conflicting, contradictory aims and methodology. The second and more likely scenario would be the institution of an all-but-permanent and hegemonic anti-Tory Left-wing Lab-Lib coalition. Such a circumstance would mirror that of Swedish politics where the Social Democrats have governed Sweden virtually non-stop since the end of the Second World War. All proportional representation would do is to all-but-permanently entrench the Liberal Democrats on the government benches as the parliamentary kingmakers. As such therefore, proportional representation is as a big a threat to the fabric of our society as terrorism and closer European integration. So much for democracy!