The alternative vote re-visited
Electoral reform re-emerged in the 1980s as a significant issue in British politics. After a long spell in which the established system was very widely accepted, warts and all, political developments in the last ten years have undermined satisfaction with the system. The 1983 and 1987 general elections produced a particularly disproportional relationship between the parties' votes and seats, and thereby highlighted the inherent unfairness of first-past-the-post. The Liberals and Social Democrats presented electoral reform as a central feature of their Alliance programme, and the Nationalists and Greens advocated systems other than first-past-the-post. Since 1987 growing concern over the Conservatives' electoral dominance has prompted renewed interest in electoral pacts between out-of-office parties, and thus in electoral systems which might facilitate such pacts. As well as doubts about the adequacy of the electoral system for the House of Commons, the proposals to create Assemblies for Scotland, Wales and the English regions, and Labour's recent proposals to establish an elected Upper House, involve the question of the electoral system that should be used. The 1990 Labour Conference recommended that the party consider the creation of a Speakers' Conference to examine the whole issue of electoral reform.
The Second Labour Government and the Politics of Electoral Reform, 1929–1931
In his pioneering study of the British electoral system, David Butler notes that "One of the main problems of the historian of the second Labour Government is to discover what action the Liberals took to exact the fullest return for their support in the division lobbies."' Owing to the preponderance of economic issues in this period, however, scant attention has been focused on the constitutional question of electoral reform which had the greatest bearing on the relationship between the Liberal and Labour parties in Parliament. Robert Skidelsky's Politicians and the Slump, the most thorough economic and political analysis of the Second Labour Government, is curiously jejune on this subject.2 Recent biographers of Ramsay MacDonald and David Lloyd George, the Labour and Liberal protagonists, describe in detail a series of joint enterprises between the parties, but they fail to delineate the precise nature of their relationship in light of the critical electoral reform question.3 And Butler was never able to come to close quarters because of a paucity of primary sources. Now, however, it is possible to merge these separate strands, along with a neglected Conservative view, into a comprehensive explanation of the Liberal-Labour nexus. Despite much suspicion by contemporaries, especially among Conservatives in Parliament and the press, of a supposed Lib-Lab "bargain," it was repeatedly denied by prominent Liberal and Labour members.4 In light of
The lights that failed: European international history, 1919-1933
PART I: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF EUROPE, 1918-1929 1. The Hall of Mirrors: Peacemaking in the West 2. Distant Frontiers: Peacemaking in the East 3. Revolution from the Left: The Soviet Union and the Post-War Settlement 4. The Primacy of Economics: Reconstruction in Western Europe, 1919-1924 5. The Primacy of Nationalism: Reconstruction in Eastern and Central Europe 6. Revolution from the Right: Italy, 1919-25 7. The Geneva Dream: The League of Nations and Post-War Internationalism 8. New Dawn? Stabilisation in Western Europe after Locarno 9. Faltering Reconstruction: Cracks in the Locarno Facade 10. Troubled Waters: Uncertainties in Italy, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union 11. Faltering Internationalism: Disarmament and Security after Locarno Conclusion: Europe Reconstructed? PART II: THE HINGE YEARS, 1930-1933 12. The Diplomacy of the Depression: Economics and Foreign Policy 13. Beyond Europe: The Manchurian Crisis 14. The Poisoned Chalice: The Pursuit of Disarmament Conclusion: The Hinge Years Appendices Select Bibliography