The British tradition of minority government

Timothy Peacock

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526123282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book gives a fresh perspective on minority governance using declassified files which challenge some of the myths surrounding the minority administrations in the 1970s, and reveals a British tradition of minority government which goes beyond that of other countries.

1

Myths, methods and minorities

New perspectives

[On 7 February 1978, Prime Minister James Callaghan] said that it was quite conceivable the outcome of the election would, as he had indicated to Mr Steel, be a close run thing with the Tories being the largest party without an overall majority […] he would resign in those circumstances […] in his judgement Mrs Thatcher would certainly try to remain as Prime Minister for as long as possible, even if only for a fortnight – he would do the same in her shoes.¹

This previously classified Labour Government minute from February 1978 records a candid discussion between Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan and his Principal Private Secretary Sir Kenneth Stowe. At a time when the Government had no overall majority, and a sudden election followed by another ‘hung parliament’ was considered to be a serious possibility, Callaghan was weighing up whether to resign immediately and allow Conservative Opposition leader Margaret Thatcher to form a minority government, or to attempt to stay in office himself by making further deals with other political parties. On 9 June 2017, the unexpected loss of the Conservative Government’s majority in a snap general election led senior Conservatives to weigh up in the early hours of the morning whether or not Prime Minister Theresa May should resign. As it became clearer that the Conservatives would be the largest party and not far short of a majority, the decision taken was that May should remain as leader for the immediate future, and the Government should attempt to remain in office by forming a minority government with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).²

Conservative plans for a coalition government, a snap general election, prime ministers considering whether to stay in office after an electoral or a referendum defeat, and the contemplation of both Labour and Conservative deals with parties including, among others, the Liberals, Scottish National Party (SNP) and Northern Ireland Unionist parties, are all aspects readily identifiable in British politics since 2010, particularly following the indecisive result in June 2017.³ However, plans for all these different scenarios, drawn up by political leaders and their advisers in the 1970s, were contained in previously classified files, released in the years up to and after 2015. These documents challenge the mythology that dominates historical accounts, documentary films and television news programmes, in particular the contention that the minority governments of this era were weak, unthinking aberrations, alien to Britain’s otherwise strong majoritarian political traditions.

Using these newly available sources, including Labour and Conservative strategy papers, this study provides fresh perspective on 1970s Britain and on the country’s contemporary politics. The work examines different aspects that had to be confronted by political leaders, including, inter alia, forming governments, handling parliamentary defeats, electoral timing, negotiating with other parties and making post-electoral plans for a minority or coalition government. At one level, by bringing to light hidden narratives, it aims to demythologise the widespread academic and popular understanding of this era, showing that both main parties were far more strategically proactive than has previously been assumed. At another level, it demonstrates the British exceptionalism in minority government against an international backcloth, and provides a methodological foundation for examining contemporary challenges of new forms of government in democracies around the world.

The focus in this study is on events during the 1970s which have not been fully explored, but which were of great importance to contemporary actors in their day-to-day work in Parliament. While some of these events might seem comparatively trivial, they were of critical importance to the modus operandi of the Government and Opposition. This means that the study will not give as much attention to some of the issues which have been more widely debated, such as the postwar consensus (a more obvious manifestation of which was the aim of maintaining full employment through state intervention in the economy) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis in 1976.

Definitional issues: what is a minority government?

Minority government is a concept which has become more commonly articulated in response to the changing landscape of British politics in the twenty-first century. Indecisive opinion-polling led to significant talk of a ‘hung parliament’ and prospective minority government prior to the 2010 and 2015 general elections, and, following devolved elections in 2016, the administrations in both the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly were minority governments. The June 2017 Westminster election led to a Conservative Minority Government and has provoked much popular and scholarly commentary on the subject. However, the meaning of this term is often not clearly defined and has changed over time.

Minority government in its modern form occurs in a parliamentary democracy when a political party forms a government, but does not itself have a majority of the seats in the main legislative chamber. Such a government has to rely on the cooperation or abstention of other parties for it successfully to enact or repeal legislation, and for its day-to-day survival in votes of confidence.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many, if not all, British administrations, could be regarded more loosely as ‘minority’ governments. Some did have ‘majorities’ of MPs in Parliament who aligned with them on particular issues, but such support was not automatically guaranteed. In cases where parliamentary approval was required for a Budget or for legislation, it often resulted in the assembly of ad hoc agreements with individuals or groups of MPs, or else relied on the absence of any unified opposition. A number of governments collapsed in cases when these arrangements failed and ministers were defeated in Parliament on a significant issue.⁴

A number of developments in the mid- to late nineteenth century increased the potential challenges for running governments based on these ad hoc groupings: extension of the voting franchise; the emergence of disciplined political parties; the increased responsibilities of administrations and their need to pass significant parliamentary legislation; and the fact that governments were decided by winning national elections rather than having their leaders selected by the monarch. The increasing ‘norm’ in Westminster since the Second World War (and even earlier) has been perceived to be that of a single-party majority governance, achieved by the victors at general elections.

The term ‘minority government’ has sometimes led to confusion when referring to British politics as a class-based conflict between the citizenry and a ‘minority’ elite in political institutions. Others have taken it as a reference to inequalities in the electoral system, and the ability of parties to win elections on a ‘minority’, for example, the Labour Government of 2005 and Conservative Government of 2015 winning a majority of parliamentary seats on less than 36.9 per cent of the total votes cast.⁵ The term ‘minority government’ has also been misapplied to presidential or semi-presidential systems, including that in France, in which a separately appointed executive, usually a president, does not hold a corresponding majority in the country’s legislature. However, these executives are not totally dependent on their position in a parliament for the continuation of their office. While alternative terms such as ‘minority Presidential Government’ may serve as clarification, these are not currently widely used. For the purpose of this book, such a ‘minority’ state will be identified using the conventional label of ‘cohabitation’, in which a president and legislature are elected separately and controlled by opposing political parties.⁶

The term for describing the state of a parliament without a majority has been subject to some debate. The commonly accepted lexicon of ‘hung parliament’, first widely used in response to the 1970s experience of minority governments in Britain, has, particularly in advance of and following the 2010 election, been challenged by commentators because of its negative connotations; alternative terms advanced have included ‘no overall control’ and that of ‘a balanced parliament’.⁷ However, these labels are themselves indicative of a normative approach to politics, ‘balanced’ implying the absence of a single-party majority as more favourable. There is also potential confusion with the term ‘balanced parliament’ being used by commentators to describe constitutional concepts such as the ‘balance of powers’ between different parts of the legislature, referring to long-standing treatises on parliamentary democracy like Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution.⁸ The phrases ‘minority government’ or ‘hung parliament’, which have been common parlance since the 1970s, will primarily be used here as factual descriptors of the institution.

British tradition of minority government

What is this tradition?

It is our contention that these minority government experiences in the 1970s are indicative of a concept which we shall refer to hereafter as the ‘British tradition of minority government’. This ‘tradition’ consists primarily of the following four aspects:

1) Preference for minority government when there is no majority: The main political parties in Britain have historically, when faced with no single-party parliamentary majority in the House of Commons, preferred to form minority governments rather than coalitions. The few exceptions to this are in wartime emergencies or, as in 1931 and 2010, when the country was faced with a perceived significant economic crisis. This is in contrast to the many minority administrations since the late nineteenth century. The Wilson and Callaghan Governments rejected potential plans for coalition or fresh elections, as we shall see in Chapters 3 and 8.

2) Continued desire for majoritarian rule: Minority governments in Britain, or main parties faced with the prospect of minority rule, will try, wherever possible, to return to single-party majority rule, rather than accepting political or institutional changes (such as electoral reform) which might lead to future minority or coalition governments. In the 1970s, governments and oppositions blocked a number of proposals that could have brought Britain more into line with minority or coalition-oriented European countries, discussed in greater detail in Chapters 4–6.

3) Pragmatic adaptation: Minority governments in Britain have been willing to innovate where necessary to ensure their own political survival and legislative success, while still endeavouring to fulfil their ‘continued desire for majoritarian rule’. An example of this in the 1970s would be the negotiation of the limited interparty agreement in the form of the Lib–Lab Pact, often misidentified by commentators as ‘confidence and supply’.

4) Self-referencing: Minority governments in Britain have adopted or justified strategies primarily through reference to British political history and the contemporary British political system, rather than by drawing inspiration from other countries with their own established traditions of minority government. Strategy papers from the 1970s provide strong indication of this self-referencing, even of administrations far removed from contemporary experience, such as Conservative Minority Governments from the nineteenth century.

Methodological issues: our model for rereading minority governments

Our work employs a new critical model for the study of minority governments, which, in the first instance, provides fresh scholarly insights into 1970s Britain, but which also may act as a foundation for the re-examination of other historic British minority administrations and those in other countries.

The first distinctive feature of this approach is that the study is structured around an interparty comparison of Minority Labour Governments with the Conservative Oppositions that they were facing. This framework goes beyond existing histories of minority governments, which are often non-comparative or else usually compare administrations from different time periods or from different countries. A parallel study of both parties in the same time period shows how the same historical national political situation conditioned the different responses through their different roles.

Arising from this comparison is the exploration of the Opposition’s role in this process. There are as yet no studies concentrating on how opposition parties respond to minority government, the specific challenges faced by them often acting merely as a corollary to those faced by governments. Examination of this underappreciated area demonstrates how significant a problem minority government could be for an opposition party, in terms of parliamentary strategy and the need to avoid appearing irresponsible.

The third aspect of the model is that of combining a rereading of existing theoretical models with a comprehensive historical case study. Many works on minority government are primarily concerned either with revising theoretical models, illustrated through brief references to particular examples, or with non-theorised but nevertheless valuable...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Myths, methods and minorities
• 2 Myths about leaders: personalities and strategy-making
• 3 The birth of myths: alternatives to government formation
• 4 The myth of weakness: legislative management
• 5 The myth of coalition: the Lib–Lab Pact
• 6 The myth of exclusivity: informal interparty cooperation
• 7 The myth of binary choice: electoral timing
• 8 Myths and secret plans: future minority governments/coalitions
• 9 Dissolving myths: the day the Government fell
• 10 Rewriting political mythology in 2017
• Bibliography
• Index