Should the democratic process be subject to thresholds?
The UK Conservative Party’s 2015 election manifesto is expected to promise that a future Conservative Government, if elected, would dramatically tighten up industrial action laws, with a minimum 50 per cent ballot participation threshold alongside a requirement for unions in ‘core’ public services to obtain a minimum 40 per cent majority of all those eligible to vote. Are such requirements – which would threaten to invalidate many ballots supporting strike action – justifiable in a democratic society?
It can – and has – been argued that it is not reasonable to impose electoral thresholds which do not apply to the UK political system (in local and general elections) and that such initiatives can only be seen as an attack on the democratic right to organise and take strike action.
First, there have been a number of recent parliamentary by-elections and local elections where turnout has been nowhere near 50 per cent; turnout for the 2008 London Mayoral election was just 45 per cent and in 2012 only 38.1 per cent; for the 2014 European Parliament elections it was just over 34.2 per cent; for the 2012 Alternative Vote (AV) electoral system referendum it was just 41 per cent; the lowest ever by-election turnout of 18.2 per cent was recorded in the 2012 Manchester Central by-election, with a just above threshold of 53 per cent in the 2014 Newark by-election; even worse, recent Police and Crime Commissioner elections have resulted in turnouts as low as 16.4 per cent in Northumbria and 10.3 per cent in the West Midlands. Moreover general elections do not take into account the estimated 3.5 million people who are not even registered to vote.
Second, research by the GMB union calculated that just 16 out of the 650 elected Members of Parliament secured the support of 40 per cent of those entitled to vote in their parliamentary constituency area election in 2010 (Labour Research, February 2015). Not one MP would pass a threshold demanding support from 50 per cent of the electorate. Only 23.5 per cent of the electorate voted for the Conservatives in May 2010 and only 1 in 7 cast their votes for the Liberal Democrats. Likewise the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was elected in 2012 with less than 50 per cent of both first and second preference votes and on a turnout of only 38.1 per cent.
Was it not the Conservative hero Winston Churchill who famously declared that a majority of one is sufficient?