Broken English
This photograph of a recent installation by the Ghanian artist, Ibrahim Mahama, at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester is entitled Parliament of Ghosts. It is made out of old railway seats and battered cabinets full of withered documents, all remnants of the British colonial era. Probably unintentionally, it sums up the state of English politics today.
Newspaper columnists writing about the situation are full of words like ‘collapse’, ‘meltdown’ and ‘splits’ It is easy enough to find both Labour and Conservative M.P.s willing to criticise their leaders, often in scathing terms whilst there is an apparently constant flow of resignations from Party whips to be come independent or to form short-lived groupings under some invented name. There are currently 16 such independents sitting plus such as Chuka Umunna and Sarah Wollaston who first left parties, Labour and Conservative respectively, then joined the Liberal Democrats having fallen out with others in the short-lived Change UK.
The decision to prorogue Parliament has produced an even greater deluge of claims that we are falling into a dictatorship which seems a touch strong, given that M.P.s will lose just five working days given their habit extending the summer holidays by a couple of weeks to attend each others conferences or perhaps to stay on the beach for a few more days≥
The absence in all of this chatter is any clear suggestion as to just what might emerge from the current wreckage, in particular whether the two-party system which has held sway at least in England for over hundred years might breakdown. Let’s leave the Conservatives out of the reckoning. The Conservative Party does not do splits; it does rancorous factions but not splits largely because its autonomous local associations have control over candidate selection and local finance. The Labour Party is, of course, a quite different animal and one which has the dates 1931 and, more relevantly, 1981 written on its heart.
In 1931, its leader Ramsay McDonald, one of its founders and its first Prime Minister, led a faction of the Party into a kind of alliance with the Conservatives and Liberals forming a National Government. He was denounced as a traitor by the Party and expelled and in the 1931 election, Labour was shattered, getting just 52 seats despite obtaining 30.6% of the national vote. In 1981, four leading Party figures left to form a new party, the Social Democrats (SDP) and were joined by 28 Labour M.P.s and one Conservative. The basis for the new party was that Labour had become too left-wing under a socialist leader and was espousing policies such as unilateral nuclear disarmament and leaving the EU. It was also feared that a far-left movement whose name began with M was infiltrating the Party.
In the election of 1983, in which the SDP formed an alliance with the Liberals, the voting figures were as follows:
Share, % Seats
Conservative 42.4 397
Labour 27.6 209
SDP/Liberals 25.4 23
Margaret Thatcher won in a landslide and Labour stayed as the Opposition for fourteen years. One of the luckiest Labour candidates was one Jeremy Corbyn, who had been chosen as the candidate in a seat, North Islington, which the Social Democrats were expected to win comfortably. In the event, the sitting M.P., Michael O’Halloran, who had joined the SDP, but had not been selected as candidate because of his notorious corruption, intervened as an independent, split the vote and Corbyn slipped in. (I drove Jeremy around on election day, 1983, and he was probably as surprised as I was that he won).
The moral of both these dates is that under the merciless first-past-the-post electoral system, under 30% of the vote gets you nothing and that a party which splits gets hammered.
The long-term electoral situation for Labour already looks bleak particularly if, as seems very likely, Scotland becomes independent post-Brexit. In the past Labour has needed a strong showing in Scotland to achieve a Parliamentary majority, something which until 2005 it got. Scotland was, after all, almost the founding home of Labour. In 1997, it did get a huge majority and would have done so without Scottish seats but this landslide looks like a fading dream in the current situation. The Conservatives currently hold 304 of the 573 seats in England and Wales with Labour holding just 255. It already has nearly all Welsh seats so it must make big gains in England where, currently, the Conservatives hold 296 seats and Labour 227. A previous post on this site shows just how regionally concentrated the Labour vote in England has become (These are the Chumps who Lost Scotland, http://rainsborough.blogspot.com/2015/). Gains on this scale in England look close to impossible. The map of British constituencies after the 2015 election show just how confined is the Labour vote.
The moral of this for Labour is that it is going to be very hard for it to win an overall majority and impossible if it splits in any way. The current outlook is that Johnson will soon call an election making some kind of pact with the Brexit Party and that Labour, currently polling around the mid-20% will not do well.
There is probably one way out for Labour. If it were to propose a root-and-branch revolution in our system of governance including abolition of the absurd House of Lords and its replacement by a senate based around regional elections; much more power and finance to local government and, of course, a proper system of proportional representation to Parliament then it might well sweep in with a majority, even in England, if it were to propose some kind of electoral pact with the Lib Dems and the Greens. It would then, of course, have to learn to live with some form of coalition government and could, reasonably happily, split into the two parts who are currently at such odds with each other inside the Party. Or perhaps Britain could develop regional parties with their own agendas. Scotland might then choose to remain inside the union of 1707.
This is all fantasy of course. Labour has never had any interest in constitutional reform and Corbyn and his close advisers stuck in the 1970s will not change this now. So the Parliament of Ghosts will wander along, shouting at all and sundry but with no-one really listening.
British constituencies in 2015
The wild card in this is Nigel Farage and his, presumably ephemeral, Brexit Party. Just to where he and his devoted followers will migrate after Brexit is quite unknown. Presumably if the leader departs to earn a good living in Trump’s USA they will drift to their natural home following Boris. But Farage may well have other political ambitions in England and he is probably the most astute politician in the country.
Meanwhile the ghosts in Parliament will have some more weeks shouting their empty words.
