Das System
Sir : Why does Nigel Lawson think there would be no danger from the NPD if Germany had our electoral system ('Spectator's notebook,' 5 April)? I was in Germany when the Nazis were just beginning to become dangerous, and I am convinced that their holding of a handful of seats mattered hardly at all. The people were clearly in a mood to follow anyone who promised them a place in the sun, and whether that party already had a few seats or not was neither here nor there. Owe the Nazis got mass support, the British electoral system would have given them an overwhelming majority in the Reichstag (Goering thought every seat in the last prewar election, and he cannot have been far wrong); as it was, with the proportional system, they never won a parliamentary majority at all.
People like the neo-Nazis do not become less dangerous by being deprived of a voice in parliament: on the contrary, they are more likely to feed on a sense of injustice. The British electoral system would also be extremely dangerous to Germany because it would tend to disrupt the Federation. That Co. Durham is made to appear in the House of Commons as though inhabited solely by Labour supporters, Surrey solely by Conserva- tives, is a thing that our long-united country can survive, but would Federal Germany sur- vive having its industrial Lander represented solely by SPD members, its agricultural Lander solely by coy?
What would be an improvement for Ger- many would be to go over to the single- transferable-vote form of proportional repre- sentation, introducing a personal element into her present impersonal system and enabling the voters to show what sort of coalition, if any, they wanted.
Enid Lakeman Director, the Electoral Reform Society, 3 Whitehall Court, Westminster, London SW1 Nigel Lawson writes : The advantage to Ger- many of Britain's electoral system would not lie in the denial of parliamentary representation to the neo-nazis. Rather, as I explained in my notebook, it would lie in enabling one of the two major parties, the CDU or the spD, to gain an overall majority in the Bundestag and form a government, with the other providing a strong and responsible opposition. As it is, the two big parties have had to combine to form a government, and there is no parliamentary opposition worth speaking of. Hence the growth of extra-parliamentary extremist opposition groups, such as the militant student left, as well as the NPD
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