Editor: By sheer literary finesse, wedded to historical sophistication Mr. Nelson renders moot the Oxbridger Cult, at The Economist? Or something closely akin to it!
Reader Editor: The Economist first two paragraphs :
Among the questions prompted by Labour’s huge victory on July 4th is whether Britain’s electoral system needs overhauling. The party won 63% of the seats on only a third of the vote, prompting complaints from some smaller parties, and a few smarting Conservatives, that the result was unfair. The case for reforming the country’s first-past-the-post (fptp) system, in which the candidate who wins the most votes in a constituency takes that seat, is becoming ever stronger. But it should not be a priority.
Measured by the difference between share of the votes and share of the seats in Parliament, this election was the most skewed result in British history, and second in Western democracies only to a French parliamentary election in 1993. Because its voters were efficiently distributed around the country, Labour needed fewer than 24,000 votes for each of its seats. Reform uk, in contrast, needed well over 800,000. Under the Scottish system of proportional representation (pr), Labour would have won 236 seats, not 411; Reform uk would have had 94 mps instead of five.
Editor: Fraser Nelson of The Spectator offers this:
Something pretty big is missing from Labour’s historic landslide: the voters. Keir Starmer has won 63 per cent of the seats on just 33.8 per cent of the votes, the smallest vote share of any modern PM. Lower than any of the (many) pollsters predicted. So Labour in 2024 managed just 1.6 percentage points higher than the Jeremy Corbyn calamity in 2019 – and less than Corbyn managed in 2017. ‘But for the rise of the Labour party in Scotland,’ says Professor John Curtice, ‘we would be reporting that basically Labour’s vote has not changed from what it was in 2019.’ And that’s on the second-lowest turnout in democratic history. So where, then, is the supposed Starmer tsunami?
There certainly has been a Tory meltdown. Their vote share dropped from 44 to 24 per cent – by far the lowest in the party’s history. But remarkably, almost none of this seems to have gone to Labour. It mainly went to parties that had no chance of winning seats outright (like Reform) which makes Labour a beneficiary. But the level of enthusiasm for Labour is – well, let’s look at the share of the vote claimed by election-winning parties.
Editor : I’ll skip ahead, The Economist eventually answers the question it asked in its first paragraph: ‘But it should not be a priority’.
But the main reason to be judicious is that other things matter more. Labour came to power promising stability: the last thing Britain needs right now is another round of constitutional change. Time and political energy are better spent on the party’s overriding mission of souping up growth. The new government has made a decent start, most notably with a series of measures to liberalise planning, but these are early days. Big battles lie ahead—not just over building, but also over Europe and public services.
Voting reform was not in Labour’s manifesto; it is not likely to feature in its first term. Good. But the election does reinforce the case for a more proportional system. By the time the country next votes, it will be almost 20 years since the av referendum. The two main parties should put commitments to electoral reform in their platforms in 2029.
The Toxic of Myth of Growth, and the imperative to liberalise planningare the standard tropes of an utterly failed Neo-Liberalism. Note that Voting Reform is not, nor will it ever be a priority of Neo-Liberals! @MazzucatoM had yet to appear on the political scene and her: “mission-driven government’’…
Most people won’t know the name Mariana Mazzucato. Yet the economist is about to have a significant impact on their lives.
The University College London (UCL) academic’s signature idea – “mission-driven” government – is about to be put into practise by Sir Keir Starmer following Labour’s landslide election victory.
The new Prime Minister has set out five “missions” across energy, health, crime, education and the economy. Achieving goals across each category will be at the heart of his new government.
Starmer was inspired by Mazzucato, a Left-leaning academic who has spent the past decade championing this “mission” driven approach through lectures, numerous papers and four books – with a fifth one in the works.
She believes governments must tap into the spirit of the Apollo programme – where US space agency Nasa marshalled the private sector to put a man on the Moon – to tackle the biggest issues of the day.
That means a more muscular state that is willing to intervene in a host of industries, an approach that remains controversial among many of Mazzucato’s peers.
Editor: Fraser Nelson offers these enlightening, indeed sobering final paragraphs!
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Anyway, none of that matters now. Vote share will not be part of the conversation. But it is relevant in understanding how illusory Starmer’s majority is: a Potemkin landslide which looks impressive but, upon inspection, does not have very much behind it. And this has implications. It is often said that Britain is an anomaly, parliament swinging to the left when Europe moves to the right. But have the British voters, really, moved left? The Lib Dems have more seats (71) than Reform (5) but Ed Davey’s men won fewer votes (3.5 million) that those of Nigel Farage (4.1 million). So it would be deeply misleading to take this parliament as a proxy for UK public opinion.
I expected Starmer to win a big majority, but neither I nor anyone else expected how low the Labour support would be. This time yesterday, I thought that Labour would be in for ten years. Today, seeing the shallowness of Starmer’s support, I think there is all to play for next time around. The voters have turned away from the Tories but did emphatically not turn towards Labour. Never in a century of elections have the two main parties had a lower combined vote share. All told, the next five years in British politics will be thrillingly unpredictable.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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