Exclusive: Sunak could be presiding over ‘wake’ at conference, warns Prof John Curtice – with voters furious over NHS failures, cost of living, migrants and Liz Truss
Exclusive: Sunak could be presiding over ‘wake’ at conference, warns Prof John Curtice – with voters furious over NHS failures, cost of living, migrants and Liz Truss
Agreed with this. Labour are far from perfect, but I’d still rather have them than the Tories. My ideal outcome from the next general election would be Labour falling short of a majority, though: this would force them to cooperate with another party, and ideally that other party would be the Lib Dems and/or Greens, who would push for electoral reform as a condition of cooperation. I don’t think we’re going to see any meaningful change in the country until we ditch FPTP, which puts too much power in the hands of a few swing voters in specific areas of the country, who are seen as necessary to win over while everyone else just gets thrown under a bus. And we’re never going to get PR with a Labour majority government.
I think you’re right that a Labour majority wouldn’t go for PR, but I also think PR is unlikely to solve many problems. It was FPTP that gave us the NHS after all!
But basically we need to get the Tories out and right now, the simplest way to do that is to get Labour in!
What PR would achieve in the long run is assure that future governments actually reflect what the people want. FPTP can’t achieve that, because it allows situations where Tory governments get massive majorities based on only 30-35% of the vote, which results in them, amongst other things, dismantling the NHS, which at best only 30% of the country wants. All Labour majority governments achieve is undoing some of the damage, before getting voted out again.
So while I agree the highest priority right now is getting the Tories out, and I’ll vote however I need to in order to make that happen (realistically, that’ll actually be the Lib Dems for me - I’m in the south west), a Labour majority isn’t a long-term solution. Labour would never get to stay in power forever. Under a proportional system, the fact that 60-80% of the votes are for progressive parties would actually be reflected in parliament, which will never be the case under FPTP, and would mean that parties like the Lib Dems and Greens (who are more committed to tackling climate change than Labour) would have a say proportional to the number of people that actually voted for them. Right now, the 10-15% that vote Lib Dem and 5-10% that vote Green, scattered all over the country as they are, are entirely ignored. So are everyone who doesn’t live in a city or the red wall.
People often make this argument, that PR would somehow lock in left wing governance, but that simply hasn’t been the experience in other countries that have adopted it. We’d get just as many Tory minorities, propped up by Lib Dem or whatever Ukip’s called these days, as the other way around.
What we wouldn’t get, though, are 80+ seat Tory majorities on 35% of the vote. There’s also the fact that in countries with PR, right-wing governments are closer to the centre than they are in countries without it. Minority governments and coalitions have to compromise to get anything done, which leads to better, more balanced legislation more often, while taking into account a broader range of viewpoints which, crucially, represent the whole country and not just a segment of it.
Yes, and I agree that’s broadly a good thing. But it also means the likes of Ukip end up in government.
We already have the valorisation of compromise under FPTP in the form of battling for the ‘centre ground’: parties compromise with the electorate in order to win. Under PR, parties compromise with each other in order to govern.
Is one better than the other? I think PR is better, because the compromise is continuous. But there’s not a lot in it.
This is why although I basically agree PR is a good thing, I don’t prioritise it.
What we really need to do is get every single political party out. There isn’t a single one of them that is willing to do enough to stop climate change or to address inequality.
Okay, I’m not really sure what your theory of change is, here.
The only thing that will stop climate change is large scale international agreement. The chances of that happening are small, but they’re better with Labour.
We need to change our perspectives. Electoral politics isn’t the most important thing for changing our society, it should be quite low on the list.
What we really need to do to change the world for the better is to substantially change the structure of society. We need to build an alternative structure to what exists - a series of workers co-ops, housing co-ops, social centres, industrial unions, and so on, and once we have such a structure in place we can withhold our labour and stop participating in the exploitative, destructive system that exists now. This would effectively lead to the collapse of the current system in a way that would minimise harm.
That’s just a list of nice things.