Keir needs allies to help shift Commons balance
IF, as even an irregular newspaper columnist, you occasionally get stuck for a topical topic, there’s always the opinion polls.
Between January and November 2021 some 226 national opinion polls asked representative samples of UK citizens how they would vote in a hypothetical “general election tomorrow”. Just five of those 226, as logged by Mark Pack’s PollBase, put Labour ahead by more than 1%, while Conservative leads ranged up to nearly 20%.
December was different. Despite the lengthy build-up of issues potentially damaging to the Government generally and the PM personally, the polling picture changed really rather suddenly.
From that first December weekend – of Omicron and Sunday tabloid headlines of how “our loved ones died while No.10 partied” – through to the new year, it was Labour ahead in a tomorrow general election by around 6%.
Whereupon Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer visited Birmingham. He toured Tyseley Energy Park, checking out the new electric mini car.
And there and in his later Millennium Point speech he mentioned the Commonwealth Games, of course, plus his factory-worker father and Britain’s and Birmingham’s proud manufacturing traditions – suggesting to at least one fellow academic local observer that he was endeavouring somehow to “reignite passions stirred by Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’” in the run-up to New Labour’s historic 1997 General Election triumph.
It seemed three weeks of modestly encouraging poll projections had somehow persuaded Starmer that he and Labour could go it alone. Who needs the Lib Dems’ 12%, the Greens’ 5%, and the Others’ maybe 10%? We’ve hit the high 30%s; Downing Street, here we come.
Admirable, in its way – apart from one small comparative consideration. Back in the Blair glory days, of the roughly 350 national opinion polls published between March 1993 and New Labour’s historic May 1997 election victory, 349 had put Labour ahead of John Major’s Conservatives by margins of over 10%.
Not one Conservative lead in over four years, with New Labour’s lead averaging 15 to 20% and occasionally topping 40%.
And, thanks to our wildly non-proportional ‘First Past The Post’ (FPTP) electoral system, New Labour duly achieved a massive 177-seat majority on just 43% of the vote. And they did go it alone, for 13 years, when the majorities ran out, with no serious sign of returning.
It could have been very different. Several big pledges in that 1997 Labour manifesto weren’t met. Some – cutting street crime and anti-social behaviour, phasing out mixed-sex hospital wards – because they were genuinely big, complex issues.
But not the pledge to hold a national referendum on electoral reform. Blair could have called that any time from 1998 onwards, having already completed the spadework of establishing an Independent Commission on the Voting System.
Chaired by one-time Birmingham Stechford Labour MP and by then Lib Dem Lord (Roy) Jenkins, the Commission was to recommend an alternative voting system for the Commons that extended voter choice, was broadly proportional between votes cast and seats received, maintained the link between MPs and geographical constituencies, and would produce stable government.
The then new Scottish Parliament had just been elected using one such system – the Additional Member System (AMS) – which would have ticked the necessary boxes, as now do the London Assembly and Welsh Senedd/Parliament.
The Single Transferable Vote (STV), used by the Northern Ireland Assembly and now in Scottish local elections, would also have qualified. Reasonable reform was required, not novelty for the sake of it.
The Jenkins Commission, however, evidently felt that only something unique befitted such an eminently chaired body, and invented ‘Alternative Vote Plus’ – a system used nowhere in the world, less proportional than AMS and STV, and giving less voter choice than the Supplementary Vote system now used for elected mayors and Police and Crime Commissioners.
But still fairer and more proportional than our FPTP system that just two years previously had over-rewarded New Labour’s 43% vote share with 63% of MPs. And seemingly too close to true proportionality for the PM to risk us mere voters having the chance to choose it in his manifesto-promised referendum.
So, no referendum – not in that Parliament nor the following two – one consequence being that we have today an increasingly unpopular, unaccountable, but immovable Government with a comfortable 56% Commons majority elected on a
43.6% vote.
Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair KG blew his chance back in the nineties, but it doesn’t require having the present author’s surname to realise that Labour’s and Starmer’s policy hereon in simply MUST be to game the system – and do it properly!
And the signs are that he gets it – at least kind of. For some reason he chose a Christmas Eve interview with Times Radio to emphasise that in the next General Election he “will focus my party on target seats, on the places where we can win and we know we have to win.”
‘Focus my party’, but not stand down, even if, as in the North Shropshire by-election, it is obvious to all that seats are unwinnable by Labour. To quote the old US fairground expression: ‘Close, Sir Keir, but no cigar!’.
What’s required to achieve his stated aim of a Labour-dominated Government is a formal electoral pact between, ideally, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Greens – which, as modelled recently by The Constitution Society would have deprived the Conservatives of their Commons majority and – oops, run out of space, for the time being!
Three weeks of modestly encouraging poll predictions somehow persuaded Starmer that he and Labour could go it alone