Condorcet paradox in the British Parliament

A lot more wailing and gnashing of teeth after last night. Calm down everybody, why are you surprised? It’s been clear for at least two years that we have a Condorcet paradox in Parliament, meaning there is a majority against any particular course of action. There’s 180 - 190 hard leavers, made up of just under 160 Conservatives and about 20 Labour MPs plus the DUP. There’s a larger group of about 220 hard remainers made up of Labour MPs plus the SNP, the TiG, the LDs and about 20 Tories. The rest are what you may call reluctant leavers, former remainers who think we have to apply the referendum result for fear of the consequences. They can be subdivided into Conservative Re-leavers (who support May’s deal mostly) and Labour Re-leavers of whom there are around 70. This means any proposal will be voted down by an alliance of people who often have diametrically opposed reasons for disliking it.

What about last night? What it doesn’t tell us is if there is a Condorcet winner. This is a proposal that a majority can live with even when it’s the first choice of a minority. So the votes in favour don’t tell us which proposal has that feature - the one that does may be the first choice for relatively few people. What is more significant is the composition of votes against an option. Where the hostile majority is relatively coherent or large that proposal has little or no chance.

From that we can deduce that 1. There’s a huge majority against no deal 2. there’s an almost equally large majority against revoking Article 50. 3. there’s a clear majority against a referendum ( when you see how many Labour MPs either voted against or abstained). So the Condorcet winner that will emerge on Monday (if there is one) will be one of the soft Brexit options. The most popular is Turkey ( customs union only). I must confess that’s something of a surprise to me, I think a lot of MPs are still spooked about immigration. The second most popular is an option to also be in the single market.

We may still be at an impasse after Monday. If that happens the chances of leaving without a deal go up, not least because the EU may well decide there is absolutely no point in drawing things out.

You can see four or five very clear groups of MPs now Left Remain, Liberal Remain, Right Remain, Right Leave and Left Leave. It will be interesting to see what happens with them.

You might ask why do we not have situations like this more frequently? (It did happen before over House of Lords reform). There's two answers. The trivial one is that normally party discipline is strong enough to overcome this. The prior arguments take place within parties and you get a clear binary choice with only marginal defections. This has been undermined firstly, by having a referendum and secondly, by the Fixed Term parliament Act which has enormously weakened the executive. The deeper reason is that parties normally align with the deeper divisions in the country and so party loyalty and identity leads to a choice ranking that prevents a Condorcet paradox. You can still see an element of that in the voting. However, as I keep on saying, the parties we have no longer align with the substantive divisions - hence the collapse in collective responsibility. If two or three or even four coherent parties emerge from this, that problem will become much less.