There should be a general election now. The agony of British politics is growing too much to bear. The morbidity of the Tory government is too obvious. Whether or not Labour’s Keir Starmer in Downing Street is what Britain most needs is irrelevant. Barely one voter in five supports the present Tory government. Starmer may enjoy the support of barely half the electorate, but that appears enough to bring about a change of regime. If this is to happen, then the sooner the better. There is no national interest in delay.
The concept of fixed terms of office is familiar to most forms of democratic government. The normal term is five years. All power ultimately corrupts, and even the most popular leader should lay down the rods of office after a period of time and allow fresh blood its opportunity. The British constitution requires only that parliament seek re-election within five years, with MPs free to decide who should be ruler and for how long. Prime ministers can call elections whenever within five years they think is best for them – one reason for some parties’ past longevity in office. By the time both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair had been in Downing Street for 10 years, they were showing signs of destructive exhaustion.
Every decision now emanating from Rishi Sunak’s office is in election mode. This has recently applied to national insurance, pension increases, non-dom taxation, immigration, rent reform and planning control. Downing Street’s team is composed of young political tacticians seeking insults to hurl at Starmer, photo opportunities for Sunak and money to dollop on potential voters. Sunak is not a bad or dishonest leader of his country. But there is an emptiness to his politics, as of a man grasping daily for the raft of survival.
For his part Starmer seems gripped by inertia. He expresses no outlook on the world distinct from Sunak. He agrees with him on arms to Ukraine, a Gaza ceasefire, halting Channel boats and not breathing a word about Brexit. Starmer’s only idea on defence is better military housing and tighter procurement. We get no sense of Labour’s policy on a chronically sick NHS, rail strikes, the water industry or the bankruptcy of local government. There is nothing noticeably Labour, let alone socialist, in Starmer’s speeches. He is clearly frantic to give no hostage to Tory fortune, his one ally being the public’s craving for change. It was the same ally that deserted Neil Kinnock in 1992.
As for shadow ministers confronting emergencies in public services, they are all tongue-tied, as if given a flea in their ear from the not-yet-chancellor, Rachel Reeves. Poor Louise Haigh floundered on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning unable to promise another penny for the collapsing regional bus services. The health shadow, Wes Streeting, is reduced to sounding more Tory than the Tories on NHS privatisation. Ask Labour’s shadow cabinet a question and they can only chant the Blairite mantra, “Things can only get better.”
We are left with an eerie sense of a ghostly government in waiting. The year 2024 promises to be the Great Vacuum, the year when Britain’s public administration stalled. Even the Labour-linked thinktank the Future Governance Forum has lost patience. In a report this week it reflected on the incoming Cameron government in 2010. Armed with departmental business plans and a civil service briefed on what to expect, it apparently hit the ground running. The best Labour has is Starmer’s five “missions” declared last year: growth, clean energy, the NHS, “safe streets” and opportunity. They were bland and unspecific. The report demanded that Starmer offer “a clear, overriding purpose” and a “clear narrative of change”. Of this there seems little hope – at least for the next year.
A bizarre episode in British constitutional history was the 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act. It stipulated that the Commons should be elected for a full five years, failing a vote of no confidence in the government or two-thirds of MPs calling for an early election. The intention was to reduce the advantage granted to a prime minister in personally fixing an election date. The act hoped to shift from Downing Street to the Commons a degree of control over the electoral cycle. It was ardently debated by constitutional experts and initially stopped Boris Johnson from calling an early election in 2019. He curtly repealed the act in 2022.
Some version of the act should be restored. The democratic issue should not be in which party’s interest is the date of an election, but whether it is in the national interest. It may not make much difference. There may not be at present a two-thirds Commons majority for an early election, but at least the opportunity should be there.
No one can regard the past decade in British politics as anything but a shambles. The country faces a year of crumbling services and glaring impotence at the heart of government. Change may or may not prove painful. It should surely start now.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
