It’s fair to say that you would be hard pressed to find a Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition who didn’t want to win a big majority at a general election. Under the British system of parliamentary government, a party which wins a big majority can, at least in theory, do almost anything – as long as the majority sticks together. But therein lies the catch, on which more later.
As a constitutional matter, though, the story is quite different. In some important ways, the institutional mechanisms of the House of Commons are set up on the assumption that, if not equal, the number of government and opposition MPs will not be too great – even the physical architecture of the Commons chamber attests to an assumption of rough parity.
In this blog I want to explore some of the political and constitutional consequences of a governing party winning a substantial majority, with a particular focus on three different areas:
- The effect of a large majority on the government itself and a widespread assumption that a larger majority is likely to foster rebellion.
- What happens to the committee system and the allocation of committee positions in an ‘unbalanced’ Commons.
- The mechanics of opposition politics, and who gets to form the ‘Official Opposition’ in the case of a truly monumental landslide.
The first of these three issues will be particularly salient after the next general election if, as is now widely expected, Labour enter office on the 5th July with a substantial majority, and the third will be important if the Conservatives face a significant electoral wipe-out and a ‘Canada ‘93’ style result, as some commentators are now suggesting.
Rebellious majorities?
It is now something of an article of faith amongst commentators on British politics that a large majority has its own drawbacks and that a large, fractious, parliamentary majority may actually be worse for the government than a more modest – and manageable – one. But is there any truth to this?
On the surface it seems pretty clear that winning a big majority is better than winning a small one, or not winning a majority at all. In the mid-2010s a great deal was made of the fact that the 2010-15 Parliament, during which the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats governed as a coalition, was ‘the most rebellious in history’. Indeed, in that parliament, the Government was defeated seven times, a number subsequently overshadowed by the thirty-three defeats suffered by Theresa May’s 2017-19 minority government, and the twelve defeats faced by Boris Johnson’s minority government in final months of the same parliament. By contrast, in the period since 2019, the large Conservative majorities of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak saw the Government defeated only five times.
But if we look past the obvious fact that it is easier to get your agenda through the Commons with a majority than it is without or with only a small majority or in a coalition, it becomes less obvious that a large majority is as advantageous as a smaller one.
Let’s start by taking a look at Britain’s last two majority governments, the Conservative administrations elected in 2015 and 2019 respectively. As a 2022 blog published by the Institute for Government shows, the large majority with which Boris Johnson entered office in 2019 was, in fact, much more rebellious even in its first two years in office than the small majority of just four seats won by David Cameron. Between 2019 and 2022, 44% of all Conservative MPs had rebelled against the whip at least once, half of that number had rebelled at least twice, and 70 MPs had rebelled at least six times. By contrast in the first session of the 2010-15 Parliament, just 18% of Conservative backbenchers rebelled on even one occasion.
Despite suffering relatively few Commons defeats, the Conservative governments of 2019-24 did face a number of high-profile defeats which caused considerable embarrassment to the Prime Ministers of the day. In January, for example, the Government faced a politically significant (although in the end relatively minor) revolt against its so-called ‘Rwanda Bill’, including the resignations of two Party Deputy Chairmen. In December 2021, meanwhile, a shocking one hundred and one Conservative MPs rebelled against proposals to introduce ‘Covid pass’ requirements for nightclubs and other large venues, again forcing the Government to rely on support from Labour.
But the rebelliousness of larger majorities is not a new phenomenon, as some commentators have suggested. As Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart show in their contribution to the 2017 book Ten Years of New Labour, the large majorities won by Tony Blair proved similarly challenging. Although Blair’s first parliamentary term in 1997-2001 saw unprecedented party cohesion, in the 2001-5 Parliament, Labour MPs rebelled against the Government on 259 separate occasions, the greatest number since the fractious 1974-79 Parliament. In total, Cowley and Stuart show, Labour backbenchers rebelled in 20.8% of all votes between 2001 and 2005.
Such was the extent of rebelliousness in that period that Peter Oborne could wryly remark in The Spectator that ‘Tony Blair has achieved the impossible. Three years after winning a landslide majority of 160, he is forced to conduct his business as if he were leader of a minority government’.
And although these rebellions may seem insignificant because they have no chance of bringing the government down, they can be acutely embarrassing for the government of the day. Both Boris Johnson’s resignation and the implosion of the Sunak Government were hastened by a sense that the Prime Minister had lost control of the party, even without having actually faced any significant defeats in the Commons.
So, will Labour be hoping for a comfortable but not gargantuan majority in the coming election? Probably not. All these risks aside, having a large majority affords a government a clear mandate to pass its key legislation and reshape the country in its image which governments with smaller majorities just aren’t perceived as having. And if Keir Starmer is elected Prime Minister with a large majority on 4th July, as is generally expected, he probably won’t lose too much sleep over it – at least not until the rebellions start.
The Committee System
The composition of the House of Commons also has important implications for the place functions, particularly in relation to the appointment of members to parliamentary committees. Since 2010, the chairs of most Select Committees have been elected by the House as a whole, but other members continue to be selected by MPs from their own party, with committee positions allocated on the basis of parliamentary strength.
Most, although not all, committees have eleven members including their chair, meaning that ten members are allocated on a partisan basis. As a consequence, most committees in the last Parliament were dominated by the Conservatives and Labour, usually with one member from the Scottish National Party.
But if committee memberships were allocated proportionally on the basis of YouGov’s first MRP general election prediction, which puts Labour on 422 MPs compared to 140 for the Conservatives, an eight members of an eleven member select committee would be assigned to Labour, with only two assigned to the Conservatives and none to any other party.
That’s quite significant, because it would drastically reduce the influence of opposition parties in select committees and undermine their capacity to scrutinise the actions of the party in government. Which is not to say that the governing party’s own backbenchers are not up to the task, but it is generally regarded as important that they alone are not responsible for scrutinising the government’s actions.
In fact, in the twilight days of the Brown Government and the early days of the Coalition, a significant movement for reform of the Select Committee system arose precisely from a perception that these committees were dominated by the party in power. The election of chairs by the whole House and the selection of committee members by the parliamentary parties were initially proposed by the Wright Committee in 2009 precisely in order to redress the dominance of select committees by the Government.
Whilst these reforms would not be undone by the dominance of the House of Commons by one party, the effect of that party’s preponderance in select committees could well lead to a real or perceived shift in the governing party’s favour. Since select committees form the backbone of both government backbenchers’ and the opposition’s ability to scrutinise the government, their subordination to the party in power would represent a very worrying outcome for political accountability.
Who forms the opposition?
So far, this article has rested on the assumption that, following the general election, the old Labour-Conservative duopoly is likely to persist, probably with Labour in government with a large majority, and the Conservatives forming the official opposition. But what if that isn’t the case?
In fact, since Rishi Sunak called the election last month, there has been more and more – increasingly feverish – speculation about the possibility that the Conservatives will not win the second largest number of seats in the Commons. Above I described this as the ‘Canada ‘93’ scenario, in reference to Canada’s 1993 Federal Election in which the then ruling Progressive Conservative Party fell to 2 seats and fifth place in the polls, in no small part due to a challenge from their right by a party called ‘Reform’.
Realistically, so dramatic a collapse doesn’t seem to be on the cards for the British Conservative Party. Most commentators still expect the Conservatives to achieve a comfortable second place finish in terms of seats, if not necessarily in terms of votes. But it is certainly not impossible that the Conservatives will sink to third place.
To use one (admittedly quite imperfect metric), if we put the results of Redfield and Wilton’s polling from 12-13th June into the Financial Times’ election prediction model, we find Labour on 509 seats, to 91 for the Liberal Democrats and just 11 for the Conservatives. Is this scenario particularly plausible? It’s hard to believe – but it is possible, and it would be remiss to ignore its constitutional implications or a Commons in which the Conservatives do not form the official opposition.
The mechanism by which the Leader of the Opposition (and thus the official opposition itself) is actually selected is not very well known. Generally, we assume that the Leader of the Opposition is the leader of the largest party in the House of Commons, but the process for appointing the leader is a little more complicated.
In statutory terms, the position of Leader of the Opposition is established as follows in the Ministerial and other Salaries Act (1975):
In this Act “Leader of the Opposition” means, in relation to either House of Parliament, that member of that House who is for the time being the Leader in that House of the party in opposition to His Majesty’s Government having the greatest numerical strength in the House of Commons.
But Erskine May offers a slightly different definition, which reads as follows:
The prevalence (on the whole) of the two-party system has usually removed any uncertainty as to which party has the right to be called the ‘Official Opposition’; it is the largest minority party which is prepared, in the event of the resignation of the Government, to assume office.
In general, the two definitions should lead to the same result: that the second largest party in the Commons should form the opposition.
But Erskine May’s emphasis on the party which forms the opposition being ‘prepared, in the event of the resignation of the Government, to assume office’ introduces a subtle ambiguity about who should form the official opposition. Thus, in June 2016, the Scottish National Party MP Pete Wishart argued, somewhat tendentiously, that the resignation of most of the Labour frontbench in the wake of the referendum earlier that month meant the party would not be able to form a government if called upon.
In that case, the argument that the second largest party could no longer form the opposition was not credible. But ironically, if, as in Canada in 1993, a party like Wishart’s own SNP which avowedly did not seek to represent the vast majority of constituencies won the second largest number of seats, real questions might arise about whether they could credibly form the official opposition. In cases of ambiguity, as Erskine May has it and John Bercow clarified in 2016, the final decision about who is the Leader of the Opposition lies with the Speaker. But making such a decision would represent a significant political intervention which may undermine the perceived neutrality of the office and further undermine our fragile constitutional architecture.
In Britain we generally operate on the assumption that questions about committee assignments, the identity of the official opposition, and that delineation between two ‘major’ and several other ‘minor’ parties is clear. But these are not inevitable features of parliamentary systems, as both the ‘dominant party’ systems found in Singapore, South Africa, or Japan and more turbulent party systems like that found in Canada attest. And after the coming election we may need to think again about the relationship between parliamentary procedure and the parties.
Angus Brown.
Angus is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge, where he works on debates about constitutional guardianship and the emergence of modern constitutionalism in the eighteenth century.
The Constitution Society is committed to the promotion of informed debate and is politically impartial. Any views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and not those of The Constitution Society.