What is ‘strong government'?

Abstract

Tom Ellis comments critically on the report by the Constitution Unit entitled ‘An Assembly for Wales’. In its report entitled ‘An Assembly for Wales’ the Constitution Unit, a high‐powered think‐tank dealing with constitutional matters, draws two conclusions about electoral systems. The first is that ‘the choice [of system for electing a Welsh assembly] lies between a majoritarian system (such as first‐past‐the‐post) or a system of proportional representation’. The other equally categoric conclusion is that ‘Majoritarian systems are more concerned with producing strong government, and proportional systems with producing a representative parliament’. Both conclusions are characteristic products of the conventional thinking which passes for political analysis in Britain, and they accurately reflect the prejudices of the party‐dominated oligarchic governing system. Their shallowness is a consequence of the assumptions unwittingly influencing British political debate. The thinking, when not deliberately perverse, is conditioned partly by Britain's constitutional tradition and partly by the empirically‐minded English temperament. It has produced in this case two cliches, each of which is just plain wrong.