Boris Johnson’s resignation by itself will not pull the UK out of its political quagmire. Instead, the country needs electoral reform to keep the Tories out of power.
Across his public life, there have been any number of crises that might have ended Boris Johnson’s political career.
On a personal level, there has been his philandering.
There is the charge of corruption during his tenure as mayor of London, his repeated lying as both politician and journalist, a tendency to use loaded and racist language, and his economic and political illiteracy.
What seems to have finally proved his undoing, at least as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was more an effect of accumulation of offences, rather than some final outrage taking his tenure beyond the pale.
In any event, his handling of the sexual assault claims made against Tory whip Chris Pincher was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
But throughout the party’s inept handling of the pandemic, and the more recent public outcry surrounding Partygate, Johnson held on, and did so until now, largely with his party’s support.
There were 14 million people who came out and voted for the Tories. On the other side of the aisle, Labour suffered a humiliating defeat, losing 60 seats and ending up with only 202 seats, its lowest number and proportion of seats since 1935. However, of those who turned out to vote, some 18 million did not vote for Johnson or his party.
Indeed, only a month ago Johnson received the support of 211 MPs in a vote of confidence.
Johnson has consistently justified his refusals to resign on the basis of what he described as the ‘colossal mandate’ delivered to him and his party in the general election of 2019 – although one suspects, for Johnson, the mandate is his alone.
On the face of it, claims to Tory ascendancy would appear straightforwardly true: Tories enjoy a majority of 80 seats, winning the highest percentage of any party since 1979.
There were 14 million people who came out and voted for the Tories.
On the other side of the aisle, Labour suffered a humiliating defeat, losing 60 seats and ending up with only 202 seats, its lowest number and proportion of seats since 1935.
However, of those who turned out to vote, some 18 million did not vote for Johnson or his party.
In other words, even accepting Labour’s loss was indeed a humiliation, i.e. something quite out of the ordinary, the majority of people in the UK still cast a non-Tory vote, which, for all we know, might have been vociferous anti-Tory votes.
In fact, the Tories managed to increase their popular vote by a mere 268,836, and yet gained – and continue to enjoy – a ‘bruising majority’ on the back of such slim margins.
The Conservatives’ ‘colossal mandate,’ then, is in effect a colossal fiction, one manufactured by an electoral system singularly incapable of functioning in a minimally democratic form.
It has created an elective dictatorship and unleashed attendant harms on both British citizens and some of the most vulnerable people in the world.
And yet, in the discussion surrounding Johnson’s tenure, that fiction has not been discussed – Johnson is declared unfit for office, the Tories are accused of doing a terrible job, but the fact they have essentially usurped that job without a substantive democratic mandate receives little to no mention.
In these times of crisis, our societies are often described with language drawn from pathology – ideologies of populism, nativism, or religious fundamentalism, specific figures like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, or Johnson himself, are either themselves diseases or else the symptoms of deeper and more malignant diseases, with names like ‘white supremacy’, ‘mob rule’ or ‘oligarchic overreach’.
The cures then offered range from, say, more liberalism and less democracy, more rule by technocratic experts, or alternately more populism, but of a left-wing, rather than authoritarian kind.
But the problem with the UK’s electoral system seems, more than anything, to be the lack of commitment to the tenets of democratic politics of the most basic kind.
Indeed, talking in the language of left-wing populism is entirely counterproductive here.
That is not to say that policy informed by a certain populist understanding of the work to be done is unwise or unnecessary, only that the rhetoric of populism is going to get hammered.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn very rarely talked in any kind of populist idiom (the many not the few is hardly a fiery slogan) but was pilloried as a dangerous populist anyway.
Instead, a broad anti-Tory ideology needs to be mobilised both to express the fact it is already a widely existing sentiment amongst the British people, but also to cement, as fundamental to party political practice, a moral commitment to democratic principles – one person one vote, majority rule, and representative institutions within which parties receive the parliamentary presence they have earned and deserve.
Ultimately what the UK faces is a constitutional crisis, that needs to be described as such.
Labour is late to this party – only MP Clive Lewis has been seriously advocating for it within the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), even as the membership (80 percent of them), and an increasing number of unions, are now behind it.
The resolution of that crisis demands electoral reform, which will in turn allow Labour, and all those other parties, to achieve the parliamentary presence their votes deserve and deprive the Tories of the power they do not.
This would prevent a figure like Johnson from ascending to the most powerful position in the country without the backing of the majority of the country.
There is no denying that, to some, Johnson has been, and still is, a popular figure, and that his charisma, mystifying as it is to some, plays a part in the party’s popularity.
Such popularity speaks to deep divides – across age, class, race, gender, geography – in the country’s political landscape.
It is a popularity that must be allowed the degree of representation it is owed, but no more than that.
Indeed, the nature of our democracy has been singularly incapable of expressing that divide, instead gifting the man and his party dangerous degrees of control over our democracy.
To be sure, the effects of these changes to the electoral system might precipitate the end of the Labour Party, and perhaps this explains the reluctance of the Labour leadership and party to contemplate it.
While this will inevitably mean there’ll be a battle over who gets to call themselves the real Labour Party, it is a price worth paying as smaller, genuinely left-wing parties might emerge from the ashes, and we may see principled enhancements to democracy.
Enough of these ‘Big Church’ parties full of members calling one another comrade through gritted teeth.
To be sure, such a left-wing party is only ever likely to play the role of a kingmaker, perhaps even in junior partnership with a party led by someone like current leader Keir Starmer.
But a junior partner in government is undoubtedly better than the purged margins of opposition.
In the short term, the solution is simpler.
Rather than going it alone, Labour must operate as part of pre-election pacts designed to deprive Tories of any chance of a majority in parliament.
Labour must, above all else, recognise the deeply harmful legacy – and promised future – of a Tory government.
Although the country needs radical change, and I believe the best way to achieve that is through a socialist politics of sorts, the priority now is to recognise that we are in a defensive situation: Johnson’s not being fit to rule is not the main problem.
The chief problem is his party, and the solution is to keep them out of power.
Thankfully, achieving that requires no coup d’état but only needs principled commitment to democratic reform.
