Whoever wins in Eastleigh, the coalition will lose

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/08/coalition-candidates-losers-eastleigh

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The Eastleigh byelection will be the first since the 1930s in which two governing parties in a coalition will be fighting each other with a realistic chance of winning. The battle will be yet further evidence that the elite manoeuvrings of coalition politics have hardly affected grassroots party allegiances. But even at Westminster coalition ties are being loosened.

The coalition agreement of 2010 provided for disagreements between the two parties. They could agree to suspend collective cabinet responsibility on matters such as nuclear power, student fees and the alternative vote. Last month, however, Liberal Democrat ministers took matters further by unilaterally voting against a government proposal on the redrawing of constituency boundaries, an issue on which collective responsibility had not been suspended. Yet they remain in office.

The coalition enjoys a comfortable Commons majority, but there is no way of knowing whether it has support in the country. It is the first peacetime coalition since the mid-19th century to be formed after, rather than before, a general election. The 1895 Conservative/Liberal Unionist coalition was formed before a general election and fought the election as a coalition; so did the Conservative/Lloyd George Liberal coalition in 1918 and the National Government in 1931. The 2010 coalition, by contrast, was formed after the votes had been counted.

The coalition has therefore opened a gap between the principle of parliamentary government, according to which government is responsible to parliament, and that of democratic government, where it is responsible to the voters. Normally, of course, the two principles coincide. But, as David Cameron presciently predicted in an interview in the Independent on the day before the 2010 election, with a hung parliament "instead of the people choosing the government, the politicians do".

No voter had the opportunity either of supporting or opposing the coalition; nor was the coalition agreement ever put before voters. A single-party government might claim, with varying degrees of plausibility, that it has a mandate for policies in its election manifesto. No such claim can be made by the coalition. Not only was the government decided after the votes had been counted, so also were the policies.

Before the 2010 election, Lord Owen, the former SDP leader, declared: "The electors are entitled to ask that party leaders and candidates are straight with them about a hung parliament before they cast their votes." But in 2010 that did not happen. The formation of the coalition and the doctrine of the supremacy of the coalition agreement have important consequences for the quality of democracy in Britain. We hear much of the democratic deficit in the European Union; the coalition has brought about a democratic deficit in Britain. With another hung parliament in 2015 a distinct possibility, that deficit will only be filled if the party leaders indicate to the voters before the election which parties they would be willing to enter a coalition with, and on what terms. Otherwise the gap between the political class and the people will become a chasm.

Eastleigh will widen that gap, since the strains of coalition at cabinet and parliamentary level will be replicated and indeed magnified at the grassroots. There will be no coalition candidate, and there is therefore no way a voter who favours the coalition can endorse it. Under alternative voting, rejected in the referendum of 2011, or under some systems of proportional representation, voters would have been able to endorse the coalition by distributing their preferences between the two competing coalition parties. Under first past the post, that is not an option.

The byelection, therefore, will be for or against the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, not for or against the coalition. Whoever wins, the coalition will lose. This could indeed be its moment of truth, since it will be revealed as the artefact of a Westminster elite, with little resonance at the grassroots. The Eastleigh byelection could well confirm Disraeli's famous aphorism that England does not love coalitions.

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