The polls have really started to move and the Tory party are facing an existential moment. As far as voting intentions go we could be on the verge of seeing the Tories as the third largest party in the polls for the first time in history. Though the political commentators will soon caveat this with saying that the Reform party will be lucky to win more than three seats, the mere notion of this will cause a big discussion about our electoral system.
A YouGuv poll released a couple of days ago had the Labour lead at around 21 percentage points using slightly different and somewhat better methodology. The Labour share of the vote seems to be correcting itself and is now hovering at a more realistic 40%. The Tories are on 19%, the Reform party is on 17%. This is the first poll conducted since the return of Nigel Farage to frontline politics. It is so far the highest the Reform Party has ever polled in a General Election and the 5 year old party could realistically overtake the Tories by next week in the polls. After Sunak’s embarrassment at leaving the D-Day commemorations early yesterday in which he himself acknowledged it was a mistake and the cutting through of the Reform message to more parts of the UK that are in some instances hearing of the party for the first time it is conceivable that this time next week will see Reform pulling ahead of the Tories. The lacklustre Tory campaign which is starting to look like Sunak doesn’t even want to do well is floundering amidst a sea of absolute skepticism every time they unveil a new policy. The cynical view of the Tories means they are reliant almost solely on wealthy pensioners and people who cling to the view that the Tories are the only realistic voice of opposition in the coming parliament. Let us at least acknowledge that no one voting for the Tories is expecting them to win overall, but perhaps a popular MP or two might see themselves garner a reliable base.
The Reform party is the most interesting party of this General Election so far. Their story is drawing the most interest because they are the new challengers and they could actually change the state of play for British politics, perhaps for good. Overtaking the Tories in the polls breaks through one perception that dogs smaller parties - credibility. If you poll over 20% you are the second largest party out in the country, and there is no doubt about it, in the minds of the people. There is another perception - the ability to win. What is the point of voting for a small party with no realistic chance of winning? If Reform polls ahead of the Tories then the perception that Reform can’t win will start to be eroded. It won’t get rid of the reality though, as the Reform vote is too evenly spread. The Tories are still strong in the shires and Labour are still strong in the cities; geographic constraints make it really difficult to predict any more than perhaps 5 or so seats in parliament for what could be the second most popular party in the UK. Though the Reform vote will be strongest in places that had voted overwhelmingly for Brexit and those that leant their vote to the Tories in the 2019 General Election in the red wall, you are still looking at a mountain to climb. Couple that with a lack of data and money which even Nigel Farage admits, and the votes-to-seats ratio becomes wider and wider.
This leads us on to a more disturbing point. IF the polls continue their trajectory, and who knows with still just under 4 weeks to go, and the Reform party pick up something like 19/20% of the vote nationally, perhaps seeing 7-9 million people vote for them, and they are awarded 5 seats, then the electoral system will be under enormous pressure to reform itself. In 2015 UKIP won 12% of the vote, 4 million votes, and was awarded 1 seat. The SNP for example won around 5% of the vote and achieved 58 seats (approx.). The average number for a Labour MP to have to win in a constituency is around 33,000 whereas for the Tories it is closer to 20,000. The electoral system of First-Past-The-Post, in which you only need one more vote than the second largest party in a local area to win, is a very outdated system. It has been the way we have voted ever since the inception of voting in Parliament since elections were a thing. The historic binary nature of politics made this electoral system a mainstay, linking the political representative to the local area in a successful way. The system was supposed to be fair and maintaining the balance of representation and stability. It worked…for a long time. Now, in the age of political pluralism and the bankruptcy of political ideology within the two main parties, the poltiical reaction has not been to shrug one’s shoulders and hope the politicians get it together, people have wanted something else. The political consensus that has reigned since the 1930s national government, diverging slightly in the 1945 general election before realigning itself a couple of years after, is over for the general public. The growing disconnect between the old established parties and the voters has been growing since the turn of the century when we saw historic low turnouts, reaching as low as 42%. The Tories AND the Labour Party are no longer political parties of movements of change or of political ideology that can and will shape a country. The last time we had something like that it was Tony Blair and to this day we are reeling from the damage of that government. “Never again”?
Where we are now is at a very definitive point in the road. The electoral system, which massively benefits both the Labour and Tory party in achieving a duopoly of political representation removing the threat of competition, is what is helping the Labour Party into power in a historic landlisde election and what is keeping the Tory head above the water’s surface. With a more representative electoral system not only would this election be entirely different in terms of the polling numbers but the Labour and Tory party would not even exist any more. Their ‘broad church’ nature, which simply means whoever is at the top basically owns the broad church, would fragment and they would become smaller parties. We would of course sacrifice stability for more democratic representation but when you have had 14 years of Tory rule as chaotic as that, with 5 different Prime Ministers, the word stability would lose all meaning. In effect, Labour’s main strength is that it can lay claim to ‘restoring stability’ but within the world of our electoral system it would be the stability of a duck - calm on the surface but paddling furiously underneath - and we will not see what paddling is going on between Starmer, his cabinet, the Trade Unions and big business…
What we also get from the electoral system we have is a wholly feeble class of politician. In a difficult political environment the cream rises to the top, the best politicians rise to prominence. It is no accident that this country’s arguably greatest peacetime Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (great in terms of impact, longevity and legacy), was a woman as the political atmosphere made it difficult for women to do well in politics. Politicians in ‘safe seats’ (seats where one party has a massive local majority) are not politicians who need to scrap, fight, or even look electable. Politicians used to need to be experienced people from the world of business, the military, the clergy or something because that in itself made them personally electable. You could put a farmyard animal in a Labour or Tory suit and they would win in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of constituency seats. This is not a reflection of voters but on the system we have; one of two parties can win executive power and if you don’t like one then vote for the other…and that’s it. Our politicians are now just people who have done politics at university, been advisors to politicians and then parachuted in to constituencies to be politicians. Right now that is what Sunak and Starmer have done; selected their lackeys and yes-men and women to stand in the safe seats. This has caused almighty rows from within the two big parties (Starmtroopers for example is the name for the handpicked Labour Party candidates to ensure Starmer’s allies flood parliament as opposed to candidates from the far left). Our electoral system ensures bad politicians and lame ducks all over the place. We still have ‘rotten boroughs’.
There are alternatives out there and they are dotted all over Europe. And as Europe moves to the right of politics in every country from Portugal to Hungary, from Sweden to Italy, Britain is moving left. Why? We aren’t a leftist country, it’s just the only possible right-ist alternative has buggered up the last 14 years. Had we a proportional representation system the Labour Party would not be expected to win 440 seats. I’d expect them to not even get half of that number. The Reform party would likely be the biggest party at this current trend, or at least could form a coalition with the smaller Tory party. But speculation is speculation. The point is that binary politics produces very bad politics; it becomes all about negative campaigning. Vote for the least worse option. The lesser of two evils. And as it is said in this country; opposition parties don’t win elections, governments lose them. All an opposition party, the Labour Party, needs to do is wait for the Tories to mess it up. They did, and now Labour is preparing for government. We could have a proportional system like in Germany which is more democratic than we are (ironically). But we don’t. We have an electoral system shared only with Belarus. We have a gigantic unelected second chamber that is rivalled only with the Chinese Communist system in terms of size and legislative power. We have really only a choice of two parties all over the country. Neither Labour nor the Tories want it to change.
So this brings us back to today and the Reform Party. The party campaigns to change the electoral system and so if we are honest the point of Reform isn’t necessarily to win lots of seats, but to win enough votes for people to go ‘hang on, this can’t go on’. We had a referendum on changin the system in 2011 but the system offered (AV+) was so complicated it was barely recognisable as a SYSTEM. Perhaps this time things might just change, we might just see reform.
This article first appeared on the TDL Times. For more information, articles and more please visit www.thetdltimes.com.
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