Two parties and many

One of the irritating things about democracy is that, every now and then, voters make stupid choices. This is not surprising: Nobody says that the majority is always right, merely that majority approval is required for legitimacy. Yet even in the annals of stupid majority decisions, Brexit shines.
 
Brexit would never have happened, or caused the sort of extraordinary chaos it has, if the standard and time-tested institutions of parliamentary democracy had not been bypassed by then British Prime Minister David Cameron in order to have a referendum that he thought he would easily win. But he chose to have a vote with “Leave” and “Remain” on the ballot, and 52 per cent of British voters chose to leave. Actually facilitating this task was then delegated to their representatives. This is a reminder of why we don’t have plebiscites, and instead choose representatives. Give the voters half a chance and they will demand the impossible; what’s needed is for them to select representatives who can figure out what is in fact possible.

 
But there’s one other thing that has emerged from the post-Brexit mess that British politics has descended into, particularly evident to any Indian observer: A fragmented politics, with multiple shifting coalitions, is far better, more efficient, and more democratic, than the “normal” two-party system.
 

What happened in Brexit? Why was it such a surprise to, say, David Cameron? It turns out that, while pro-European Union Conservatives had long understood that their party harboured a large number of committed Eurosceptics, they overlooked the fact that many voters who would never vote Conservative had similar views about Europe (or, more accurately, about foreigners generally). Late on Brexit referendum night, it was when the north-eastern town of Sunderland voted to Leave that people began to realise what was happening — Sunderland has had a Labour local government since the local council was first set up in the 1970s and is the closest thing to a one-party town you can imagine.

 
This is why post-Brexit politics has destroyed cohesion in not just the Conservative but also the Labour Party. If Theresa May constantly has to fight off her extremist wing, Jeremy Corbyn of Labour leads a restive set of immigration-hating Brexiteers, socialists who think the EU is a neoliberal plot, and metropolitan Europhiles. The moment he takes a real stand on Brexit, the uneasy concord within the Labour Party might fall apart — and he might lose ground in either the north-east, in places not so different from Sunderland, or in London and other cities where Remain won a comfortable majority.

 
It is often argued that the Brexit referendum was an expression of frustration — whenever a majority does something stupid, we are under orders to never say that it is stupid, we have to say instead that it is born of legitimate frustration. It’s as if someone runs deliberately into the path of oncoming traffic and pundits say sadly “this is naturally an expression of frustration at the abysmal implementation of traffic laws and the preferences given to SUVs in a neoliberal set-up”. But in fact, to the extent that any frustration was revealed, it was frustration at disenfranchisement. The Labour party, too, had its own xenophobes, but mainstream Labour had never gone far enough to appease them. Yet under a strict two-party system, they could not imagine defecting to the other tribe. Such a mass defection happens only rarely, and under specific circumstances — as when whites in the Southern United States turned en masse from the Democratic to the Republican Party in the three decades after the civil rights movements of the 1960s. Thus they could not express themselves in “normal” times — but, when given a chance in a referendum freed of party identification, they did so quite emphatically.

 
And this is why multi-party states, that require coalitions, are better. You always have an option; most people will find a way to express themselves, even through a minority party that might well wind up holding the scales of power at some point. Coalition politics is far more democratic, in that it provides voice to more factions; it is far more efficient, in that more information is conveyed from the electorate (the opposite of how north-eastern Labour voters’ views were not conveyed accurately); and it is thus “better”. There is no reason to suppose that two-party states are the normal sort of democratic set-up. In fact, as Europe’s vast variety of coalitions show us, Britain and the United States are the exception rather than the norm.

 
Thus, as India prepares to vote in 2019, it is worth remembering several things. First, coalitions are not the enemy: They provide better representation. As the current government’s awful record reminds us, one-party governments need not be better than coalition governments, and are often worse. And second, the argument “there is no alternative to Modi” is fatally flawed — in India, we are particularly fortunate, since there are dozens of alternatives. Email: m.s.sharma@gmail.com; Twitter: @mihirssharma