A View from the 'Hill

China Post editorial:

Lessons to be learned from the UK election

The British electorate will go to the ballots on Thursday to choose its next national government. Following the economic downturn, a corruption scandal involving members of parliament, poor ratings and an infamous “bigoted”gaff by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, pre-election polls strongly suggest that there will be a change of administration after 13 years of rule by the center-left Labour Party.

This could give the Conservative Party its first chance at government since 1997, or the Liberals (now rebranded as Liberal Democrats) its first since 1915. The most likely result, however, may be a hung parliament, resulting in a coalition of Labour and Liberals or of Conservatives and Liberals.

Given that there is no difference of policy regarding Taiwan between any of the main parties, and since the UK has no “Taiwan Relations Act” offering protection against a belligerent and possibly dangerous neighbor, is this of any relevance to Taiwan?

Perhaps there are two or three lessons the British learned during this spring's election campaign that the Taiwanese electorate and their would-be representatives can share, and maybe another they can draw for themselves.

The first lesson is that despite having one of the oldest and longest-established legislatures and having been the model for many emerging democracies around the world — hence Britain's epithet the Mother of Parliaments — its own democracy is far from perfect.

Its first-past-the-post system, in which the victor is selected from a multi-candidate single-member electoral district, without any transfer of votes, means that the Labour Party could conceivably receive the third-largest share of the ballot but gain, not just enough parliamentary seats to be the largest party, but even have more than half, and therefore be able to continue its single-party rule.

The Liberal Party has historically suffered from this situation, with its share of the votes not translated into an equivalent number of MPs. People are less willing to “waste” their votes on a third party, it argues, and so cast their ballots for one of the big two. Not surprisingly, the Liberals have long been proponents of electoral reform, advocating some form of proportional representation (PR).

This move has been resisted by the Labour and Conservative parties, which have dominated Britain's political landscape for the last century. They argue that while PR might appear more democratic, it actually gives exaggerated influence to centrist parties that hold a balance of power. Moreover, Britain's experience with coalition governments has not been positive.

Democracy is not one single thing. Thus Taiwan did not become democratic with the popular election of its president, it became more democratic. Moreover, democratic systems must be defended against reversals, but equally they must be re-evaluated and, where necessary, updated.

Taiwan is experiencing just such a re-evaluation at present as the main opposition parties push for a referendum on the issue of signing an Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement with China. While referendums — as a limited form of direct democracy — appear to be more democratic, they can give exaggerated influence to well-funded and well-organized pressure groups. And in theory at least, they are inconsistent with the role of a parliament in a representative democracy.

In Britain, for example, despite repeated calls for and promises of referendums, they are rarely used. The last national one — on whether to join the European Economic Community — was held in 1975.

The second lesson learned by British parliamentarians was that public tolerance of corrupt or merely self-serving representatives has a limit. The fact that the Liberal Party has gained significant ground over the last few weeks, so that there is now a more-or-less three-way split between the main parties, has little to do with politics and is largely due to fallout from the MPs' expenses scandal. That elected representatives were siphoning off tens of thousands of pounds (millions of NT dollars) under claims for second homes or “secretarial services” by family members while calling for the public to tighten their belts to aid economic recovery was clearly too much for many to stomach.

The Liberals' leap up the polls also resulted from the performance of their leader, Nick Clegg, in the UK's first public presidential-style public debate, which was shown live on primetime television.

One final observation Taiwan's parties might make of the British electoral landscape is that the historically left-wing Labour Party moved step-after-step towards the center through the 18 years of Conservative rule from 1979 to 1997. Similarly over the last decade, the Conservative Party has drifted from the right toward the center to make itself electable.

Although such left-right analysis is not so relevant to Taiwan's political scene, the confrontational stances and scare tactics adopted by the political parties here could be toned down. Perhaps a similar shift toward a common middle ground could help to heal the mutual antipathy and social conflict in Taiwan.