The Tory doom-mongers
Although the Prime Minister has not admitted it yet, the Tory campaign is “now predicated on the assumption of imminent defeat on an epic scale”, said Iain Martin in The Times. The Conservative Party has started running adverts that warn against giving Keir Starmer “a massive majority” or “a blank cheque”. Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, has spoken of the danger of Labour winning a “super-majority”. This is an “outlandish” electoral strategy, “counter to all democratic custom”. Standard practice is never to concede defeat, and to insist that the only poll that counts is the one on election day. But it may just be realistic, given the “brutal three-way squeeze” on the Tories – from Starmer’s disciplined and reassuring Labour, from a “skilful” Lib Dem campaign, and from Reform UK, under a resurgent Nigel Farage. Extrapolating from the polls, we’re looking at a vast Labour majority of anything from 144 to 336 seats, said John Rentoul in The Independent. I suspect we’ll end up at the lower end of that range, but it seems possible that Tony Blair’s postwar record of 179 will be beaten.
“Vote for Rishi Sunak: he’s going to lose anyway.” It’s not “an inspiring election slogan”, said The Times. And “the reality is that voters thoroughly disillusioned with Toryism are unlikely to buy such an argument”. Even so, the problems that would be posed by a Labour super-majority “are real and should be explored”. Starmer “could pass almost any law”, and govern “almost wholly unencumbered by the safeguards usually present in Parliament”. All but a handful of select committees would be run by Labour. Anger at the Tories, and the quirks of our voting system, look set to bring us close to “one-party rule”, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. It’s not just the new taxes that Labour will inevitably introduce. Just like Blair, Starmer is likely to use his honeymoon period to push through major constitutional changes. He wants to give 16- and 17-year-olds the vote – because, of course, they would overwhelmingly vote Labour – and to give more power to quangos dealing with matters such as racial equality. These will be effectively “immune to the ballot box”.
Is it just possible, asked Matt Honeycombe-Foster on Politico, that Starmer isn’t really going to usher in an elective dictatorship bolstered by “pimple-faced” teenagers? And that these are just Tory scare tactics, designed to push voters back into the Tory fold? The term super-majority is “meaningless” in the British context, said Emilia Randall in The i Paper. As long as the government has a solid working majority, it can do as it likes. That’s how Parliament works. The strategy is a sign of desperation, said Rowena Mason in The Guardian. The Tories need a “gamechanging moment”. Nothing has worked so far, so the party has moved on to the threat of a super-majority, which it had been “hoping to keep in its back pocket for the very last moment. Sunak is almost out of levers that he can pull.”