Is it possible to limp to a landslide? Evidently yes, because this is exactly what Labour has done in the local elections.
The turnout was just over a third of the electorate, which is why I describe Labour’s victory as ‘limping’. Had more people bothered to vote, the Tory Party could have been thrashed even more decisively. As it is, Rishi Sunak lives to lose another day.
Our first-past-the-post system is inherently binary. No matter how many parties appear at ballot, either Conservatives or Labour is guaranteed to win. I suppose if Kierkegaard had been interested in such mundane matters, he could have described the system as ‘either/or’.
Anyway, the present situation is as normal as in the first two letters of SNAFU. Labour has won; the Tories have lost. What could be more normal than this? If one side doesn’t win it, the other one will. Now it’s Labour’s turn.
Since I voted for the losing side, I could describe the result as bad for me, the Conservative Party or even the country. But why is it bad for democracy? Hasn’t democracy worked as it should?
It has. Yet if we consider why it has worked as it has, perhaps we may detect systemic flaws in this way of deciding who should govern a major country. It’s only when our democracy run riot indeed acts in character that its flaws are laid bare for all to see.
It’s a truism that most people vote not so much for one party as against the other. When a party has been in power for as long as the Tories (14 years, give or take), people accumulate grievances galore. Eventually the sum total of their gripes gets to a critical point, beyond which lies utter frustration.
They no longer want the ruling party to get its act together. They want it out. That’s how it always is: show me a state where everyone is supposed to be deliriously happy with the government, and I’ll show you a totalitarian dictatorship.
Fair enough. But finding the Tories bloody useless, which most people have done, isn’t a valid reason to vote against them. It’s only half the reason.
The other half ought to be a sound justification for believing that Labour will do things better. They will balance the budget while lowering taxes. Solve the immigration problem. Stimulate growth. Put paid to unemployment. Stop ruining the economy with green madness. Put defence on a sound footing. Put a sock into the mouth of wokery. Keep the unions under control – you can expand the wish list on your own.
However, there isn’t a scintilla of evidence that might even remotely suggest that this will be the case. On the contrary, there exists a mountain of evidence that Labour will be much, much worse – in every department.
First, let me correct the misconception I’ve espied in one of this morning’s papers. British voters, wrote the author, always choose between centre-right and centre-left, eschewing either extreme.
That’s how things might have been in the past, but they demonstrably aren’t this way now. The choice before the British electorate is that between centre-left and Marxist.
No Tory government since Maggie Thatcher’s can be remotely described as conservative or even centre-right – socially, economically, culturally or in any other way, including the hypothetical wish list I cited earlier. It’s a straightforward social democracy, with no real conservative candidate having the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell to clear even the early stages of the selection process.
As to Labour, it’s a Marxist wolf in the sheep’s clothing of centrist moderation. With the animal cunning typical of socialists, Labour leaders have learned to mask their true nature with sensible pronouncements, inching closer to the centre as the next election approaches.
Hence the grand gesture of ditching the unvarnished communist anti-Semite Corbyn in 2020 and replacing him with Sir Keir Starmer, who has the nous not to wear his Marxism on his sleeve. But make no mistake about it: he does wear it under his outer garments, the way Thomas Becket used to wear a hairshirt underneath his gilded brocade robes.
Starmer’s earlier job was Director of Public Prosecutions, in which capacity he never saw a criminal he couldn’t exonerate. Commonly regarded as the worst-ever holder of that position, Starmer was finally dismissed in 2013 before he could flood our cities with socioeconomical victims of social injustice, otherwise known as thugs. He got his ‘K’ on the way out, which was a small price to pay for getting rid of him.
Sir Keir then became a regular contributor to a journal with the self-explanatory title of Socialist Lawyer. There he treated his readers to profound insights, such as that trade unions should control “the industry and community” and that “Karl Marx was, of course, right”.
Tony ‘Yo’ Blair, former activist in the KGB front called CND, tricked his way to 10 Downing Street by pretending to be a Thatcherite in disguise. Indeed, on the surface of it his policies, though still a far cry from being Thatcherite, looked more moderate than one would expect from a CND activist.
Hiding behind such appearances, Blair managed to deliver more destructive blows to the British constitution than any other prime minister in history.
Dragging Britain into the awful Iraq war, routing the House of Lords, creating American-style institutions that were at best redundant and at worst subversive, dumping extra billions into the bottomless pit of the NHS, introducing the employment-busting minimum wage, setting the stage for today’s housing crisis that keeps young people off the property ladder, reducing industrial output by three per cent at a loss of a million jobs (a remarkable achievement for a party claiming to represent the working class) – such is the legacy Starmer is proud of.
Yet because he lacks Blair’s charisma and talent for card-sharping trickery, he can’t keep his innate Marxism from showing through the holes in his Blairite trousers. Sir Keir is essentially Jeremy Corbyn pretending to be Tony Blair.
Yet the public doesn’t seem to realise this. One can hear people saying things like “It’s time to let Labour have a go”, but no one can give a cogent answer to the question of “What exactly do you expect Labour to do better?” This isn’t a question they can answer or, in most cases, even ask.
In other words, people fly by the seat of their pants all the way to a Labour government that will undo the few good things the Tories have done and outdo the many bad things. If this isn’t an indictment of elective but unselective democracy, I don’t know what is.
And this isn’t a one-off. Knee-jerk voting is dominant in most elections in most democracies, and only my innate moderation prevents me from replacing ‘most’ with ‘all’.
Let me assure you this isn’t sour grapes. If voters were able to activate a modicum of common sense, never mind something deeper than that, and arrive at their support of Labour on that basis, I might take issue with their choice, but not with the very system.
As it is, this is a bad day for democracy – not just for me, the Conservative Party and Britain.
How I wish I could disagree with you! But you are correct in your analysis. We hsve been in a comparable position before and have voted our way out of it eventually, so perhaps the best we can hope for is that this will happen again. But will the electorate do as we would hope?
All too true. And unfortunately, there seems to be a double standard for the two parties. For conservatives, if the policies don’t produce the desired results (or, more likely, some people just hate what was being conserved) the voters want them out . For progressives, when the policies produce disastrous results (and they will – they are meant to) voters fall for the old line “we just didn’t go far enough” and the party remains in power. I think the biggest problem is voter apathy. Just a third of registered voters voted? And how many eligible are not registered? Terrible. If one is going to live in a democracy (or a republic) one has the responsibility to understand the issues and the candidates and make an informed decision. That’s how I understand it, but I must be in the minority there.