Labour’s looming constitutional vandalism
Today, Britain goes to the polls. A tired Tory government seems resigned to catastrophic defeat, but a landslide victory for the Labour Party could spell constitutional disaster.
If the media are to be believed, the result of the election on the 4th of July is a foregone conclusion. The Tory party has run out of steam and is drifting headlong towards the rocks. Half-hearted noises about (non-compulsory) national service and inflation figures finally falling have failed to dent the sizeable Labour lead. Democratic governments do seem to have a natural lifespan and, just as there was likely nothing they could have done to win the 1997 election, it seems that the public is simply sick of the Conservative party and has decided it’s time they had a kicking.
Stepping back for a moment, this is rather odd. Why should the British public think it proper that Party X should govern just because it is tired of Party Y? Yet one hears this all the time. “It’s time for a change”. “They’ve been in for too long, the other lot should have a go.” They’re old. They’re tired. We need something new, fresh, different.
This is everything that is foolish and exasperating about universal suffrage democracy.
Has anyone espousing this philosophy actually given it a moment’s thought? You cannot decide who governs without any reference to the platform on which they are standing, and yet this is precisely what many people seem intent to do on the day of the election.
Partly it’s because most people (perhaps mercifully) have no political ideology and often innocently drift from one viewpoint to another. To be uncharitable, one might use Field Marshal Haig’s words (said of Lord Derby) that they seem to, like a feather pillow, bear the impression of the person who last sat on them.
Even among those one might broadly describe as on the right, there is a widespread feeling that the Tories have proven themselves complacent and useless and need at least to be punished, at most destroyed and replaced. The Twitter hashtag “Zero Seats” has become a popular slogan for those egging on this end. Frankly, it is difficult to argue with the Party’s record: ongoing Channel crossings, the abject failure of the absurd Rwanda policy, internal factionalism and scheming, the wreckage of the country throughout the hysteria of the pandemic, and, of course, the embarrassing botch of our departure from the European Union. To name but a few highlights.
Britain certainly faces challenges and I am sure the Tories are entirely inadequate to address them. But so are the Labour party. With huge quantities of immigration eroding social cohesion, crumbling infrastructure, an ageing population, a debased and ailing currency, and a national debt equalling the size of the British economy, there are no easy ways out. A Labour party, fresh and triumphant with its three-digit majority, simply cannot solve these problems, and so will attempt to look like it’s doing something by leaning into its favourite social and cultural preoccupations.
So far ignored in the election campaign — and seemingly largely forgotten — is Keir Starmer’s 2020 commission on constitutional reform, headed by Gordon Brown. The startlingly radical set of recommendations produced by the commission in 2022 were entirely endorsed by Starmer who promised that a Labour government would bring about “a change not just in who governs, but how we are governed”. The report — eerily titled A New Britain — is a nightmarish compendium of every conceivable constitutional shibboleth of the progressive left, and its recommendations would ravage what remains of Britain’s ancient political settlement.
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