Democracy’s tide running against Brown

By Philip Stephens

There is nothing in the British constitution to curtail the time in office of one or other political party. Term limits do not work in parliamentary democracies. For all that, last week’s local elections were a reminder that the system does have checks and balances that militate against one-party rule. Nor are they any less potent for their informality.

The parties have offered all sorts of reasons for the drubbing Gordon Brown’s government received at the hands of local and London electors. The prime minister has shown unfamiliar contrition. David Cameron’s Conservatives have claimed tenancy of the political centre ground. The Liberal Democrats hung on with an entirely creditable result. It would be foolish to write off Nick Clegg.

All agree that the economy – more specifically the anger-inducing coincidence of falling house prices, rising food and fuel costs and squeezed real incomes – was the pivotal factor. Mr Brown has acknowledged he made mistakes by, among other things, dithering over an election last autumn and failing to anticipate the impact of the abolition of the 10p rate of income tax.

Others would add to the list an inexplicable political mystery: how could a politician so long obsessed with stepping into Tony Blair’s shoes not have had a strategic plan for his premiership? Mr Cameron, meanwhile, can claim that the vote for his party was almost as strong as that against the government. Backing the Tories no longer carries a social stigma: that is why time for a change resonated so strongly in Boris Johnson’s victory over Ken Livingstone in London.

The question left unanswered is whether this was an, albeit fierce, mid-term protest or whether the voters have reached a settled view about Messrs Brown and Cameron. Was this 2004, the deep hole from which Mr Blair climbed to win a third term the following year? Or was it 1995, when New Labour’s local victories were the harbinger of John Major’s 1997 defeat? We will not know until the general election. The omens for Mr Brown, though, are not good.

This is where the checks and balances come in. Whatever the significance of one set of local election results, the cumulative impact matters greatly. Successive defeats sap the capacity of governments to sustain themselves. Call it democratic intuition or sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of voters, but the party in power nationally almost invariably loses the town halls. Thus during the 1980s and 1990s Tories witnessed the near-destruction of their local government base. Margaret Thatcher started out in 1979 with 12,000 Tory councillors. Mr Major left 10 Downing Street 18 years later with only a little more than 4,000.

Demoralisation and decay in the town halls translates eventually into defeat nationally. The incumbent at Westminster loses the local activists and organisation needed to mobilise support. Opposition parties by contrast grow progressively stronger.

The Tory experience is now being mirrored by Labour’s. Mr Blair had nearly 11,000 local Labour councillors behind him in 1997. Mr Brown, after last week’s defeats, is down to a shade more than 5,000. Conservative representation has doubled during the same period. Little wonder that the Tories are now far better at getting their supporters to the polling booths.

The second of what I call democracy’s automatic stabilisers operates in Westminster and Whitehall. The authority of a British prime minister, primus inter pares in the cabinet, is based on patronage. The occupant of Number 10 commands loyalty because he or she doles out the plum jobs and the ministerial limousines. Almost everyone wants some share of the spoils.

Longevity in office, however, erodes this power just as it corrodes the local base. Once a party has been in power for a decade or more, a prime minister – even a relatively new one – finds the number of the appointed in government is exceeded by the disappointed.

In this second category are those former ministers who have seen their careers cruelly curtailed and those who have never actually carried a ministerial red box.

Some take their disappointments well. But a large swath of the has-beens and never-will-bes feel only token loyalty to the leader who has denied them their dreams. Many have been overlooked twice – by Messrs Blair and Brown. They seethe.

Add these two trends together – decay locally and weakening authority centrally – and the third check comes into play. Beholden to a shrunken cadre of party workers – the ones who stay are the most tribal – governments are over-attentive to a dwindling band of loyalists. Thus the Conservatives began to embrace an agenda of anti-Europeanism and radical tax cuts. We are seeing something similar with the calls for Mr Brown to pay more heed to core Labour supporters. This is irrational – governments in trouble should seek to widen their appeal. But logic is counted out of such calculations.

So is the government doomed? Well, nothing in politics is preordained: the Tories, after all, won the election they should have lost in 1992. Mr Brown, though, is swimming against a tide more powerful than any since 1997.