https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/06/16/one-last-corrosive-act/

In the 1951 general election – the only one Churchill won – 97 percent of the votes went to Britain’s two main parties, Labour and the Tories. Most of the remaining three percent went to the Liberals, who acted as a receptacle for protest votes through the post-war years. A high point of sorts was reached for the Liberals in 1977, when their thirteen MPs propped up James Callaghan’s Labour government. But two years later, Thatcher won her first election and promptly introduced her brand of neoliberalism to a woefully ill-prepared nation.

As I explained last time, the acid of neoliberalism didn’t stop once it had destroyed the trade unions and the public sector, but continued to dissolve everything it came into contact with… including the political parties themselves. And it was, in part, the third place Liberal Party which produced the first shock, as voters – fed up with both Thatcher’s economic vandalism and Labour’s internal naval gazing – sought some alternative. From 1981, an alternative appeared in the form of the SDP/Liberal Alliance. The Social Democratic Party was formed by four dissident Labour MPs – Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams, and Bill Rogers – and sought to position itself as a kind of “middle way” between the neoliberal extremes of Thatcher and Labour’s drift to the socialist left. This though, left it contending with a Liberal Party which also presented itself as a middle ground party, with the risk that the two minor parties would end up taking votes off each other rather than from the two main parties. And so, an alliance was formed so that both parties would be unopposed in their target seats.

It wasn’t quite enough. While the alliance increased its parliamentary seats from 9 to 23, its main impact was in taking millions of votes away from the Labour opposition… allowing Thatcher’s Tories to secure their largest majority, taking previously “safe” Labour seats across the country. The Alliance hung onto all but one of its seats in 1987, but it was clear that there was no prospect of a breakthrough. And so, in 1988 the majority of SDP members voted to merge with the Liberal Party and become the “Liberal Democrats,” with a small rump remaining as the SDP… which continues – campaigning on the same left of centre programme to this day.

The Liberal Democrats fared better during the Blair years, taking 46 seats in 1997 and 52 seats in 2001. This caused brief excitement among the professional-managerial class, who began to speculate about Britain becoming a three-party state… particularly in 2005, when Blair’s increasing unpopularity helped the LibDems secure 62 seats. This though, turned out to be the high point in terms of seats won. Although the LibDem share of the vote rose to 36.1 percent in 2010, they lost five of their seats. Labour, of course, did far worse during the fallout from the 2008 crash, making it very difficult for the LibDems and the nationalists to sign up for an anti-Tory coalition. And in the end, the so-called “Orange Book” (i.e., neoliberal) LibDems were more comfortable entering a coalition with Cameron’s Tories.

It was a coalition which – deservedly – cost the LibDems their reputation and their seats. In 2015, they lost 49 of their seats, while their vote share slumped to just 7.9 percent. By then though, several new parties were having an impact. The Scottish National Party so dominated the election north of the border that they pushed the LibDems into fourth place. And in terms of votes – but not seats – the UK Independence Party – which had won the proportional European Parliament election the previous year – had also overtaken the LibDems (winning 3,881,099 votes to the LibDems’ 2,415,862).

It was this growing UKIP popularity which spooked Cameron into promising a referendum on Britain’s EU membership in the 2015 manifesto. And it was this, in turn, that gave Cameron’s Tories their unexpected majority in the 2015 election – Cameron had gambled on another coalition with the LibDems, who would have undoubtedly forced him to ditch the referendum promise. Instead, he delivered and promptly lost the referendum, plunging the UK into the ongoing political crisis which continues to rumble on.

In large part, the crisis of the past decade is due to the neoliberal corrosion of the parties themselves. The LibDem/Tory coalition had demonstrated the reality that all of the establishment parties were just slightly different shades of the same neoliberal formula – free market and cultural liberalism – increasingly rejected by voters on both the left (who reject the free market economics) and the right (who reject the radical social policy). The Labour Party – which continues to mop up left-leaning voters – mouths words about the economy, but ultimately supports market liberalism. Similarly, the Tories mouth words about cultural policy, but turn out to be even more ardent neoliberals than Labour – for example, massively increasing immigration (by some 700,000 a year) mostly from non-European countries since 2019 after promising to reverse it.

Those of us who came of age during the Thatcher years had always anticipated a revolution from the political left, since in those days it was still possible to imagine some version of the Marxist demand for public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange (which, until 1995, was a central part of the Labour Party’s constitution). Today, however, since the means of production is in China, the means of distribution in the hands of the supranational alphabet organisations, and the means of exchange controlled by the Wall Street bankers, it is far harder to imagine this kind of economic revolution.

This, at least in part, explains the rise of a new conservatism aimed primarily at reversing the cultural and social reforms of the neoliberal years… Although it is the remorseless decline in prosperity which has been driving ever more people into the arms of fringe alternative parties of both left and right. Survey after survey has demonstrated that the majority of the UK population leans “left” on the economy and “right” on cultural and social policy – a position thus far ignored by all of the parties – establishment and fringe. But this, in turn, shows how the neoliberal acid is eating its way through the electoral system itself.

On 4 July 2024, Britain will have a general election. It is easy to think of this as a single event. But in reality, Britain will have 650 separate elections in which voters living in each seat will elect a single representative to send to Parliament. Since almost all of those elected will also be representatives of one or other party, the party with the most seats will be able to form a government, with the leader of that party becoming prime minister. Therein is the first problem with the system – that an MP is supposed to represent the interests of his or her constituents, but all too often represents the interests of his or her party to them. But this is as nothing to the glaring mismatch between votes and seats.

The reality of UK elections is that most votes do not count. The main reason for this is that the majority of seats are “safe.” My own constituency, for example, in a relatively prosperous suburb adjacent to a top-tier university, is a safe Labour seat held by a largely absent MP (who has little need to put in an appearance in the years between elections). And so, any Tory, LibDem, Plaid Cymru, or Reform votes cast during the election are completely wasted (save, perhaps, for saving the candidate’s deposit). In the South Wales Valleys to the north, Labour have dominated to the point that the votes can be weighed rather than counted… prompting the idea that a donkey wearing a red rosette could get elected (and according to some unkind folks, back in the 1980s Neil Kinnock was living proof of this).

It is for this reason that vote share can diverge dramatically from the number of seats won. The most extreme (for specific reasons) example of this is Plaid Cymru’s three seats won on less than one percent of the votes cast (because the party only stands in Wales and can only win in a handful of seats in the rural north and west of Wales). Nevertheless, because of the concentration of a small vote share into just three seats, Plaid Cymru can get more MPs than a larger party whose votes are spread out. The LibDems achieve more seats across the UK by the same process of focussing their campaigning on a relatively small number of target seats. For example, in the 2015 election, Plaid Cymru won three seats with a total of just 181,704 votes (many of which will have been wasted across the other 37 Welsh seats where Plaid Cymru had no chance of winning) in contrast, UKIP won just a single seat despite receiving 3,881,099 votes (1,465,183 votes more than the LibDems, who won eight seats).

People living in safe seats would barely notice that an election is happening (other than through establishment media). They may see some posters and placards, but they are unlikely to get to talk to the candidate or some of the party activists – who will have been sent to the nearest marginal seat to campaign. And it is only in these marginal seats that parties will seek to secure as many votes as they can by having an active presence and by attempting to knock every door… something which does make some difference.

All the way back in the 1950s, when there were just two main parties, people saw no reason to question the system. Indeed, it was only three decades previously that five million working men and all women were granted the vote… and most simply accepted it as the received way in which things were done. But in those days, the parties had also represented something concrete and distinct. The Tories were the overt party of British capitalism at a time when British capitalists were still world leaders (albeit leaders being rapidly eclipsed by American capitalists). On the opposite side was a Labour Party which stood as the political wing of the trade unions at a time when British industrial might was still world leading (although rapidly being eclipsed by just about everyone else in the developed world). The only remarkable factor in elections of the period was that so many working people seemingly voted against their best interests for the Tories.

Something broke after the 2016 referendum… and not just in the UK. Constituencies which had voted Labour since the stone age (at least that’s how it seemed) woke up to the fact that the neoliberal version of Labour no longer spoke for them nor promised to meet their needs. However, the unlikely arrival of the supposed political outsider Jeremy Corbyn secured their votes on a promise to honour the referendum result and to bring an end to the market liberalism of the previous four decades. It almost worked… but not quite. Theresa May was left heading a minority Tory government in thrall to the Ulster Unionists, while Corbyn turned out to lack the Machiavellian skills required of a leader… failing to pay off the Ulster Unionists, and failing to assure the Israel lobby that whatever words they may have spoken, Labour would do nothing to change the UK’s support for Israel. In any case, by 2019, Corbyn no longer looked like an outsider… but the maverick Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson did.

In 2019, Corbyn continued to pile up professional-managerial class votes in London and across the archipelago of metropolitan suburbs adjacent to the top-tier universities. At the same time, he lost swathes of Britain’s ex-industrial, rundown seaside, and smalltown seats where the post-industrial precariat had previously voted Labour out of deference to their working-class grandparents. Only the Labour diehards in the South Wales Valleys provided a hint of Labour’s working-class roots.

The problem for Labour in 2019 was not, as often argued, that precariat voters were duped (though they were) so much as that they participated in the election in the way the system was designed for. That is, because it involves 650 different elections, it is impossible to vote on national – still less – international – issues, nor can the system accommodate single issue concerns. Rather, the system depends upon selfishness (in the more positive meaning of the word). Across the Atlantic, in 1980, Ronald Reagan had given voice to this in the USA’s similar electoral system, when he turned to his audience and posed the question, “are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

This gets to the essence of first-past-the-post elections – that they are meant to represent the interests – economic, cultural and social – of the voters within each constituency. If the incumbent governing party is doing a good job for all, their MPs will continue to get elected. If they do a poor job, then they will lose MPs, and if the losses are great enough they will be replaced. Oppositions fare somewhat better – as the old adage has it, “governments lose elections” – since they benefit from the unpopularity of governments. However, as Miliband in 2015 and Corbyn in 2017 discovered to their cost, if the opposition fails to offer a credible alternative, even an unpopular government can defeat them.

Which brings us to the situation today. The incumbent Tories are suffering from the four key destroyers of government:

Presiding over an economic downturn (most people are worse off now than in 2010, with much of the economic downturn coming in the past five years),
Breaking trust with the electorate (most obviously, partying while the people were under house arrest, but also failing on cultural issues, immigration, and failing to deliver the promised positive Brexit deal with the EU),
Scandals (most recently a Sunak insider defrauding a betting company by betting on an election date which he knew was about to be announced – but also everything from sending anonymous dick-pics to the more disgusting abuse of covid contracts favouring friends of Tory ministers),
Sitting for too long (the current government has been in office for 14 years, the Blairites were there for 13, and Thatcher’s Tories for 18 – five of them under her successor).

The sense of betrayal is all the greater because of the false promises made to millions of former Labour voters who lent their votes to Boris Johnson in 2019 on the understanding that he was going to reform the Tory Party as well as the UK as a whole. But even as Chancellor, Rishi Sunak was thwarting the meagre “levelling-up” sop by diverting funds back to already wealthy Tory constituencies. And as prime minister, Sunak turned out to be the consummate neoliberal technocrat – effectively telling the unwashed masses that solving their growing problems was no longer possible.

The Labour Party have been the default beneficiaries of Tory failure. But the 2024 election has none of the excitement experienced in 1997, when a majority – wrongly as it turned out – believed that Blair’s New Labour had discovered some kind of “third way” between market liberalism and Marxian socialism. There is no groundswell of support for Keir Starmer’s Labour in 2024. Rather, they are mostly holding their 2019 voters, while the Tory vote has haemorrhaged in all directions. So that Labour look set to win around 80 seats more than Blair did in 1997, while securing some three million fewer votes. Meanwhile, the socially conservative (but still largely Thatcherite) Reform UK – the successors of UKIP – look set to secure more votes than the Tories but are only likely to win a handful of seats.

The latest polling has Reform UK in second place on 19 percent of the vote – compared to the Tories 18 percent. But while the Tory vote has been evaporating following a series of self-inflicted gaffs by Sunak and his campaign team, the Reform UK vote has increased dramatically following the return of the charismatic – at least compared to the other leaders – Nigel Farage. Nor is this a mere protest vote against the Tories. As Adam McDonnell at YouGov explains, just a third of reform voters would return to the Tories if a Reform candidate was not on the ballot.

This suggests that – for now at least – Reform UK are benefiting from the cultural and social dimensions of the coming revolution (although they still tend to be economic liberals) as the neoliberal consensus breaks down. And for this reason, the 2024 election result will bring the whole system into disrepute in a way not witnessed in living memory. Of course, things may change by election day, but at the halfway point in the campaign, the state of the main parties according to the latest YouGov MRP polling is:

Labour: 37 percent
Reform UK: 19 percent
Tories: 18 percent
LibDems: 14 percent
Greens: 7 percent
SNP: 3 percent
Plaid Cymru: 1 percent
Others: 2 percent.

If the UK voted on a proportional basis (in which every vote counts) this would translate into the following seating arrangement in Versailles-on-Thames:

Labour: 241 seats
Reform UK: 124 seats
Tories: 117 seats
LibDems: 91 seats
Greens: 46 seats
SNP: 20 seats
Plaid Cymru: 7 seats
Others: 6 seats.

Indeed, in a proportional system far more people would vote for smaller parties knowing that their votes would not be wasted. Under the current system, which favours the two neoliberal parties – because people vote for the lesser of two evils – Labour and the Tories will secure far more seats than their vote share implies. In the event that the polling is the same on election day, the respective vote shares are predicted to produce the following outcome:

Labour: 422 seats
Tories: 140 seats
LibDems: 48 seats
SNP: 17 seats
Greens: 2 seats
Plaid Cymru: 2 seats
Others (including Northern Ireland): 19 seats.

Note that Reform UK would have no seats despite polling in second place. Although several pollsters have suggested that if Reform UK’s polling continues to rise, they might secure six or seven seats, even as the Tories are reduced to double figures… with the tantalising possibility of the LibDems taking more seats to become the official opposition.

Whatever, a Labour “supermajority” now looks inevitable – and that is also likely to add fuel to the growing revolt. And privately, one wonders if Keir Starmer’s team are beginning to worry about the potential scale of the Tory defeat (although one suspects that politicians are too vainglorious for such concerns). Deprived of an opposition, the incoming Labour government will also stand metaphorically naked before the electorate for the next five years. They may, of course, blame the current economic and infrastructure mess on their predecessors. But since their election pitch is that they can solve those problems, there will be a limited time before the electorate will expect them to deliver. The same goes for their Manifesto pledges, which they can drive through parliament virtually unopposed.

Not that a Labour government is likely to succeed. The general decline in prosperity which is growing across the western states is all the more pronounced in the UK where even economic fundamentals – like the ability to make steel or to provide clean water – have been undermined by decades of neoliberal vandalism. Most likely, Labour will find itself engulfed by a growing economic collapse across the western economies which will hit the UK particularly hard. As that happens, it will become impossible to hold to the free-market liberalism which has prevailed for the past four decades. It is possible that in the face of this collapse, Labour might revert to the policies of an earlier age in which widespread public ownership of utilities and critical infrastructure was the norm, and in which a greater degree of state involvement in the economy was welcomed. If, on the other hand, Labour persist with a neoliberal agenda, then one or other of the challenger parties from outside the neoliberal establishment will likely gain ground.

It is doubtful that the Tories can reinvent themselves in opposition. Not least because their core of free market liberal MPs will dominate the rump after the election. Moreover, the handful of Reform UK MPs (assuming they get elected) will be more credible cultural and social conservatives compared to a Tory Party with a history of cultural and social liberalism. This, in turn, holds out the prospect of both of the current establishment parties being unwanted by the British electorate in 2029… at which point, the electoral system itself must break, as millions of voters abandon the establishment duopoly, but find themselves with a duopoly government anyway, simply because of the way the seats are rigged… the old American sentiment about “no taxation without representation” comes to mind. And neoliberalism’s final corrosive act may well be the destruction of the electoral system which gave birth to it in the first place.