The best outcome for the next election will not appear on the ballot paper, and is already the target of a hostile and escalating press campaign. It hardly needs to be said that a renewed mandate for Tory rule will be an obvious catastrophe for the country. No government in British democratic history can be considered such a devastating failure, whether on objective measures – weak growth, an unprecedented squeeze in living standards, declining life expectancy and crisis-ridden public services – or on its own terms.
To its critics, Margaret Thatcher’s administration represented a nightmare, but its cheerleaders can recite a long list of what they would consider proud achievements: mass privatisation, smashing trade union power, slashing taxes on the rich and flogging off council houses. What would an equivalent score card look like for 13 years of Tory rule? Brexit is its defining innovation – and who even pretends that’s going well these days?
But that is not to say that a majority Labour government will save a nation from its most acute turmoil since the war. Having jettisoned the core pledges he made to become Labour leader, Keir Starmer has failed to offer a coherent vision for the country he seeks to lead. Labour is now run by Blairite devotees, who hark back to the latter half of their icon’s time in office, an era defined by privatisation, attacks on civil liberties and the war in Iraq.
The best bet is a hung parliament that finally frees British democracy. This could be done in two ways. One is to expand the franchise. It is striking that the British right is currently accusing Labour of seeking to “rig” elections by giving the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds, and granting it to EU citizens who are long-time British residents. Even Jacob Rees-Mogg has admitted that the Tories’ compulsory voter ID policy – a “solution” in search of the near non-existent problem of voter fraud – was an attempt to gerrymander elections. The Tories know that restricting the right to vote helps them, while expanding democracy hurts them. In a hung parliament, there will be a majority for franchise expansion and perhaps automatic voter registration.
The other is to scrap an outdated electoral system in favour of proportional representation. There is no prospect of this happening if Starmer secures a majority. Though he led Labour members to believe he supported voter reform when he stood for leader, he has – true to form – U-turned. Instead, the Liberal Democrats and other parties should demand a referendum on abandoning first past the post. That means learning the lessons from their ruinous coalition with the Tories – when the party helped kill faith in the democratic process by abandoning their pledge to scrap tuition fees, and accepted a referendum on the alternative vote, a bad electoral system that can deliver even less proportionate results than our own. The Tories and their media allies are already portraying such a move as a recipe for permanent chaos. Given the havoc we have endured since the Conservatives won an 80-seat majority, such claims merit derision.
Under PR, parties to the left would gain a substantial number of seats, either through the creation of a new political movement, or the existing Green party being beefed up by mass defections from Labour’s embattled socialist flank. But Starmer’s allies did not expend so much energy crushing the party’s left to then spend political eternity having to negotiate coalition agreements with their defeated enemies. Neither can they be certain they would remain the senior partners: in France, the centre-left had to accept a junior position in an alliance with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s more radical movement.
This shift in the electoral system would cure a looming political crisis. Millions of Britons support, say, public ownership, scrapping tuition fees and putting up taxes for the rich. Starmer’s allies are stitching up parliamentary selections to ensure that MPs who advocate such policies no longer exist, disenfranchising a significant section of public opinion. In the Corbyn era, Labour could be accurately described as a loveless marriage between left and right: today, the left is permanently locked in the attic.
There is the warning that radical rightwingers would also gain parliamentary representation, but the point is moot. The hard right – led by the likes of Suella Braverman – has already taken over the Tory party and is set to become even more dominant after an election defeat. Under a fairer electoral system a European-style centre-right party might do better than under the system we have now.
Experts remain divided on whether the local elections point to a hung parliament, and given the combination of Tory self-immolation, squeezed living standards, high interest rates and the Scottish Nationalists’ crisis, a majority Labour government is an entirely plausible prospect. But a repeal of pernicious Tory laws – and a check on Starmerite authoritarianism – is more likely in a hung parliament.
Britain is overdue a democratic revolution: both by extending the right to vote, and an electoral system that allows full and fair representation of the nation’s views. Removing the Tories is an absolute precondition for any of this to become possible. But let’s not pretend a sweeping mandate for the authoritarian factional warriors who rule Labour is the answer. If the electorate evict the Tories without entrusting either party with a majority, they’ll have made a wise decision indeed.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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