If Gordon Brown resigns, should there be a general election?
We’re almost back at the start of the political season, and presumably that will mean more speculation about the future of Gordon Brown. Earlier in August, Martin Kettle wrote about the prospect of a new Prime Minister in the Guardian. Should there be a general election if Gordon Brown is forced to step down? No, says Mr Kettle, because Governments depend on Parliamentary majorities, which a Straw or Miliband government would still have. His conclusion:
If you accept - which it is clear the angry, the disillusioned, the supercilious and the merely hostile do not - that Labour is entitled to defend and where possible advance its own collective self-interest within the rules of the political system, then it follows that Labour is entitled to change its leader again and then to stay on until a time of its own choosing, not that of its enemies. It may even be the more honourable course as well as the more politically advantageous one.
While I don’t argue with the constitutional rightness of his argument - British governments do depend on the support of the Commons, not the support of the general population - I think the democratic case is more complex than Mr Kettle suggests.
At base, this is another issue where a legal/constitutional position is up against a vaguer concept of popular legitimacy. The constitutional position is clear, the popular legitimacy one is less so. There are two main arguments as to why a new Prime Minister would not have popular legitimacy:
First, the argument that changing leaders now was not part of the deal at the election. Voters expected Tony Blair to go, and Gordon Brown to replace him. They didn’t expect anyone other than Brown to be Prime Minister at the time of the next election, and so any new Prime Minister should seek an immediate personal mandate.
This argument depends on the idea that people vote for personalities rather than parties at election time, and there is some evidence for that. Even if the research is mistaken, and voters are secret policy wonks, the parties have been putting personalities of leaders front and centre at election time for a while, so there is a plausible case that the terms of the sale are based to some extent on personality (whether that is philosophically a good thing or not).
The second argument is that the ‘natural’ electoral cycle is nearly at an end. If there were a challenge in late 2008, almost four years would have passed since the last election. As elections that governments think they might win are generally held every four years (1979-83-87 and 1997-2001-05), it seems to be against the spirit if not the letter of the law to change Prime Minister and then stay on till the bitter end.
These arguments are strong because they point out ways in which what a Government is going is contrary to the general way in which people expect things to be done. This is a particularly strong argument in a country without a written constitution, where practices enforced by public feeling often crystallise into accepted conventions. Why could there not be a Prime Minister from the House of Lords, for instance?
This is not to say that public disapproval outweighs the legal position as set out by Mr Kettle - democratic constitutions, even unwritten ones, are vital checks on popular passions. But if Mr Brown is replaced, the call the Government makes on election timing might be a little bit of constitution-writing in action.