Geoffrey Ashe's column

During the February election I invented a new psephological concept: the Hairdresser's Husband Theory. The hairdresser in question lived in an area that returned a Tory MP. It had once been Liberal, but had never come within miles of going Labour.

"My husband," she said, "is Labour. But he's voting Liberal this time because it's the only hope of getting our MP out."

I am not certain that he actually did, because a Labour sticker later appeared in his window. As portrayed by his wife, however, he was a key figure in that election and may well be again in future ones. There would be no point in holding yet another postmortem on it, months afterwards. If I raise the topic it is purely because the results are still with us, and liable to set new fashions in political advocacy. Above all we may expect stronger efforts to sell electoral reform, meaning Proportional Representation or some variant of it, as a cause worth fighting for. I dissent. This is where the hairdresser's husband comes in. The cry for PR, like most of the punditry the election inspired, is stultified by an outworn dogma. A vote is assumed to be a vote fur. If you put your cross against a candidate's name, you are deemed to be backing the policies he upholds. In Britain th is was still largely true as late as the Macmillan era. Today it is false. The February vote was mainly against, and does not fit the logic which the PR theorist presupposes.

instantly resigning was that the result was an anti-socialist majority vote, justifying an anti-socialist coalition. Nobody seemed to think it odd that he should construe the result in terms of an issue, socialism, which had scarcely been mentioned.

It wasn't a rejection of the whole system. Total disgust would have produced a light poll, whereas the poll was heavy. Rather, it was against the existing parties and not for them. That face probably accounted for at least half the Liberal vote. It was tactical. Mill ions of hairdresser's husbands voted Liberal, not hoping to get Thorpe in, but hoping to get Heath out.

l f politicians and newspaper letterwriters had grasped this simple truth, we might have been spared much morningafter bewilderment, and many attempts to ma~ e sense of a shock result by explaining what the people had 'really' opted for. We were told that they had opted for moderation. But since almost every candidate of the major parties claimed to be moderate, how else could the vote have gone? What seriously-credible outcome could have shown extremism? We were also told that the people had opted for a Grand Coalition of all parties. Yet no party proposed this during the campaign. As it wasn't on the agenda, how did the voting show a desire for it? A Grand Coalition would mean in practice that Parliament, unable to find a stable solution on the basis of 37% or 38% of the vote, had concocted one based on 0%. This would undoubtedly be hailed as a triumph of democracy.

Several months ago I remarked in Resurgence on 'a loss of bearings, a kind of national entropy-factor', and on the British public becoming harder to predict, harder to manipulate. The election and its sequels revealed a state of affairs where many crucial elements lie outside the known limits, in uncharted territory. 'Anti' voting was not the only source of confusion. Look at the fracas over opinion polls. Only two of them - Gallup, the oldesf, and Business Decisions, the youngest - did even tolerably well in terms of percentages; and one of those - -Gallup - still didn't pick the winner, because of undiagnosed motives which spread the votes in a way its sample-structure didn't provide for, so that the second biggest total elected the biggest group of MPs.

The February election was not about moderation or coalitions. It was about Heath and his return match with the miners. An election on that issue offered him his sole chance. But it gave even his own campaign as Prime Minister an 'anti' character. He fought on the theme 'Hate the Miners', and by implication, the party they identified with. It wasn't frankly stated like that, but no other the me counted with the rank-and-file Tory faithful. The lady canvasser on my doorstep said nothing about the Government's record or intentions. She threatened me with a dictatorship of Sam McGahey and Barbara Castle.

That set the tone for everybody else. Labour never looked like a positive option. It was an anti-Heath protest, and in the end an effective one. Thorpe was anti-both. On the fatal Friday, you may recall, Heath himself finally admitted the negativity of the entire exercise. His excuse for not 2

Pollsters today show a depressed awareness that imponderables are spoiling the game, coupled with a failure, so far, to pin them down. During the election they presented their findings in doctored versions which professed to be truer than the raw data, but asked for trouble. What they usually published was not the actual response to a survey, but a rigged result produced by cutting out an unstated number of 'don't knows', on the bizarre theory that this gave a better cross-section of the electorate which the 'don't knows' belonged to. At least one poll, ORC, finally confessed to cooking even the figures it did publish. They were adjusted by a factor which was supposed to allow for relative keenness among supporters of different parties. This failed. ORC's figures would have come nearer to being right without the cookery.

Besides the thickening haze over elections, I fancy that in the last few years the pollsters have found it getting harder to frame valid questions. Proper answers tend now to be difficult to give; any answers at all tend to mislead. Take the fairly recent question "Do you think Britain will be better off through EEC membership?" What did the answers to that one mean? My own would be: "Quite possibly yes, by the standards of being better off which you (and EEC) are taking for granted. Britain may have more 'growth', more juggernaut vehicles, more Concordes and Maplins. Only, you see, I don't call that being better off." The poll form has no space for such a response. I have to give a straigh"t 'yes' or 'no', and either is misleading. If I say 'don't know', my answer will be merged with a mass of other 'don't knows' meaning at least three different things - ( 1) I haven't thought much about this and have no opinion, (2) I've thought about it a lot and can't decide, or (3) I can't give you a straight 'yes' or 'no' answer.

When a question on a single issue can start such ambiguities, what shall we expect in a real election, when a whole ragbag of issues is dumped out on the table in several ways, most of them phoney?

To revert to the election that actually happened, it prompted a flurry of debate about electoral reform, and that (I repeat) may well be a continuing battle-cry. In the light of the facts, how should we take it? Sceptically. The alleged injustice was the Liberals' getting a fifth of the votes and only a forty-fifth of the seats. But here once again was the tacit claim that electoral behaviour is positive - that a Liberal vote, normally at least, meant a vote for Liberalism. It didn't.

In any case, as someone pointed out in The Times, Proportional Representation would not give the professed result, it would replace one injustice with another. l l would prevent either of the larger parti es from ever getting a Commons majority. Whichever formed a government, it would always depend on the hundred. or more Liberals, and therefore would do only what pleased them. They would be virt,,ally the government all the time, even with no more than their fifth of th:F: votes. In any foreseeable British future, PR wouldn't create justice, it would create permanent rule by a minority.

So should we turn from tlie parliamentary system in despair? Not qrute. I can think of one question which might lead to fruitful thinking. Did the February vote throw up any exceptions to the general pattern? Can we pick out.any section of the electorate and feel at ·all sure that its votes were positive, did have meaning, did give citizens a voice in the House?

I would say that this was uue to at le ast some extent in mining constituencies, and in the ones that returned nationalists Welsh, Scots, and, it must be confessed. Ulster diehards. Such regional and occupational votes were a small fraction of the total, yet they needed no PR to become effective. They were strong because they were concentrated, not, lik e the Liberal votes, spread in a shapeless fil n:: all over the map.

Whatever this hint amounts to, it doesn't point to PR, it points to devolu ti ox and pluralism. Positive democracy might exist if it could be brought down to a regional or local scale. I am not sure whether this implies favouring regional movements in their present form, whether Welsh, Scottish or anything else; but it certainly implies taking them seriously. ~