What is Gordon Brown up to? His sudden interest in electoral reform when there is scarcely legislative time left in this Parliament to consider it may be his cynical way of kicking the issue into the long grass. Or it could be a sign he thinks Labour’s only chance of staying in office after the election is through striking a deal with the Liberal Democrats in a hung Parliament.
It was the latter variety of calculation that induced Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Government to support electoral reform in 1930 even though neither the Prime Minister nor his colleagues really believed in it. But what started as a mere political manoeuvre gathered its own momentum and nearly became law. Battered by the worsening economic recession and lacking a parliamentary majority, Labour needed the Liberal Party’s acquiescence to stay in power. The Liberal leader, Lloyd George, named his price — proportional representation. Labour then tried to spin out the negotiations, hoping to keep Liberal support in the meantime and avoid having to call what promised to be a calamitous general election.
Then as now, discussion of electoral reform involved a potent combination of scholarly scientific inquiry, high talk about democratic representation and low calculations about how best to rig a new system for party advantage. Lloyd George demanded the single transferable vote. This happened to be the version deemed likely to return the highest number of Liberal MPs. Labour reckoned it would suffer less if the alternative vote were introduced. Reluctantly, the Liberals were induced to accept it would be better than nothing.
Thus, in February 1931, the Electoral Reform Bill passed its second reading by 295 votes to 230. This placed the Conservatives in a quandary. They mostly preferred first-past-the-post, but their party chairman, Neville Chamberlain, assumed the alternative vote would not be too damaging. He also believed that the sooner the legislation was passed the quicker the Liberals would dump Labour. The Tories could then win a swift general election. For this reason, he argued that Tory peers in the House of Lords should not veto the alternative vote.
It seemed Britain was about to get a new electoral system that neither of the main parties really wanted, nor even the version that the Liberals favoured, purely because of a short-term calculation about the timing of the next general election.
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What saved first-past-the-post was the financial crisis of August 1931. It brought down the Labour Government and the voting reform legislation with it. Subsequently retained as Prime Minister by the Conservatives, Ramsay MacDonald immediately forgot all about electoral reform, his Presbyterian conscience easily soothed by the consolation of staying in power under the existing system.