UK: A disunited kingdom

They were elected with a landslide majority in 1906, with an array of talented leaders, backed by broad social constituencies and claiming plausibly to embody the highest ideals of progress. Yet after 1922 they were sidelined, an irrelevance for the rest of the 20th century. The strange death of Liberal England has fascinated historians ever since the publication of George Dangerfield’s 1935 study of that name, dividing them between the adherents of determinism and those of contingency. Is this scenario now being replayed with Labour in the Liberals’ stead?

Something important but not yet fully understood may have happened with the 2010 general election. Historians will pronounce on its implications when hindsight makes it safe to do so. But we might now begin to ask some questions. Does the election herald a new politics? Widespread euphoria signals a sense that something momentous has happened. But what?

Commentators talked first of the advance of democracy: the possibility of proportional representation (PR) promises to complete the democratic project begun in 1832. Yet the Whiggish teleology fails if 2010 marked instead a series of leaps into the psephological dark.

One problem is that ideas of political representation – and so of what counts as a democratic mandate – are matters of convention and change greatly over time. The single-member constituency using first-past-the-post, with each elector casting just one vote by secret ballot, is a late Victorian invention. In the 18th century the norm was for most constituencies to return two members, each elector having two votes. The result was clear: electorates seldom unseated ministries and the wider political discourse rang with accusations of ‘tyranny’.

The way PR adds to the permanence of political incumbents is well known, but this may not prevent its adoption. This suggests that what was at stake in the general election was not widely understood to be democracy as such. Rather, democracy is a term we use to dignify the mechanisms by which the few govern the many. The many generally bear this subjection with stoicism. Occasionally they rebel and seek to establish a genuinely populist movement.

But soon the new populism falls into the hands of its own elite, self-serving, self-referential and indignant when challenged. The growing acceptance in England (though not in Scotland) of that characterisation of the Labour movement is one significance of the results of 2010. But this acceptance alone will not change the system.

More important than changes in the electoral machinery is the election’s implications for the Union, in 2010 as in 1906 a preoccupation of historians. Recently, this has rested on the way Labour’s Scottish seats tipped the balance to help that party to a majority at Westminster. Yet although these seats remain – and have grown in number – they seem increasingly a last retreat. As blue spread across the map of England, red became more and more a tribal identity.

The significance of Scottish Labour is increasingly not that it is Unionist, but that it is Scots. Its Labour identity aligns it with Scottish Nationalists in one key respect. Their shared raison d’être is now to demand handouts from Westminster; to defend public spending in Scotland against ‘the cuts’, that bogey long anticipated and now a reality. In an era of fiscal contraction, such ideals will be continually affronted.

In Scotland, this leaves the Union underpinned chiefly by the Liberal Democrats; the Union is therefore left hanging by the thread of the new Conservative-Lib Dem coalition.

The Union no longer depends upon a shared Protestantism: all parties are now equally secular, whether Unionist or nationalist. Nor does it depend upon a shared exploitation of Empire: all are equally inhibited about free trade and hide behind the fig-leaf of aid. It depends not on action against a Catholic ‘Other’: the largely Catholic EU fails to provoke a Scots reaction. Instead, the Union depends on political contingency. Without the Union as it now stands, with the ‘East Lothian question’resolved, can there again be a Labour government in England and Wales?

Labour’s overdetermined social constituencies survive, yet political contingency trumps deterministic explanations. So it has always been: the Liberals did not have to lose in the 1920s. Electoral reform as such does not threaten the continuance of the Union. Rather, electoral reform and the erosion of the Union may both be consequences of something else: the strange death of Labour England.