Do you remember “crush the saboteurs”? Recall when Theresa May’s Tories had a double digit lead over Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party? How in the May 2017 local elections, the Conservative party gained 563 seats and Labour lost almost 400? How all of this led to political pundits – including yours truly – to predict a massive Tory landslide?
Of all the things that are weird about the current political climate, I’d pick the strangest as being the fact that the Conservative party is looking to have a repeat of the 2017 general election, one in which they lost the majority they already had, and that the political media seem to be going along with this, oblivious as to what happened only two and a bit years ago. Yes, Johnson has a poll lead and it appears to be going up. But we’ve all been here before, haven’t we?
One of the things the 2017 general election should have taught pundits is that most people who don’t spend their lives obsessing about politics are way behind those that do, and it takes them a bit to catch up. This has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence – some very smart people spend little time on politics; very stupid people can be obsessed with the minutiae of Westminster – it’s much more akin to viewers of a TV series like “The Sopranos”. People who have seen every episode three times are going to know way more about it, and catch up much more on the subtleties going within the narrative than someone who has watched one episode while playing on their phone. This is obvious when put like that, but it took the 2017 general election for us to see it. Well, for some of us to see it.
I had assumed a Tory landslide in 2017 for several reasons, but a big one was because I had witnessed May be so mindbendingly terrible while retaining a healthy poll lead. I figured the public must have priced her lousiness in. Except that wasn’t what happened: they only started to pay attention when a general election came round. It was only then that they saw all of the stuff we obsessives had seen for months.
Number 10 is now pushing the idea of Johnson and Corbyn debates, one on one. So, let’s put bumbling posh man who looks on the verge of a nervous breakdown up against Corbyn in his most comfortable and able arena? Great idea, chaps. Remember what happened in 2017 with this…..oh, forget it.
The Tories two biggest attacks on Corbyn and the Labour Party have now been nullified – by the Tories themselves, no less. One: Corbyn will take huge risks with the economy. Rebuttal: the Tories are proposing to destroy the UK economy on purpose. Two: Corbyn will put the country massively in debt with borrowing for socialist policies. Rebuttal: the Tories have decided the money tree is indeed real and growing in the Number 10 garden. Seriously, what is the Conservative attack line on Corbyn in the next general election going to be? The Hamas/IRA stuff again? It failed last time, miserably.
And yet, apparently Johnson will walk the election. Because he has a poll lead based on pretty crappy numbers in the abstract and the country apparently “wants Brexit”, although that’s far from certain at best.
M says
Well, either the country still wants to leave the EU or it doesn’t. We kind of need to find out. A referendum’s a non-starter because I don’t think there’s any question anyone can agree on, and anyway, people like the leader of the Lib Dems have already said that they won’t accept the result of a second referendum if they don’t agree with it any more than they accepted the first one.
So it has to be a general election, and it has to be between parties with a clear position: the Conservatives can’t fight it as the half-Leave, half-Remain party they were in 2017. Because if they did that then even if they did win a majority it wouldn’t actually help resolve the situation.
We’d have had a general election already if it weren’t for the FTPA importing US-style government shutdowns into our system. Westminster was supposed to be immune from that particular form of dysfunction, because if legislature and executive couldn’t agree that was supposed to trigger an election to sort things out, rather than being trapped in stasis, unable to move, until the next scheduled election, as happens in the USA. But no.
So whatever happens in the near future, the FTPA has to be dealt with in the medium term. It’s a pity it can’t be repealled due to the issue of what happens to prerogrative powers once they are removed form the monarch; but it has to be adjusted somehow, especially now the only actual justification for its existence, the hamstringing of Cameron’s ability to call a General Election as the guarantee of coalition, has long passed, to ensure that this extended state of stalemate can never occur again.
L says
Giving the freedom to a Prime Minister to call a General Election whenever (s)he wants to is putting too much power into the hands of one person. Every other elected body that UK voters vote for, all the way from Parish Councils through the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd to the European Parliament have fixed election dates, with by-elections as necessary. Why should the Westminster Parliament be any different?
The only changes to the FPTA, I would make are to require a simple majority rather than 2/3 of all seats and reduce the maximum Parliamentary term from five to four years; Governments that last for five years often run out of steam (or worthwhile legislation) in their final year and historically have happened when a Prime Minister does not expect to win an election after four years.
M says
Giving the freedom to a Prime Minister to call a General Election whenever (s)he wants to is putting too much power into the hands of one person. Every other elected body that UK voters vote for, all the way from Parish Councils through the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd to the European Parliament have fixed election dates, with by-elections as necessary. Why should the Westminster Parliament be any different?
It should be different because, as we see, fixed election dates run into the ‘government shutdown’ problem when the executive and legislature don’t agree.
It doesn’t really matter if a Parish council can’t do anythign because it’s gridlocked. but for a national parliament, it maters rather a lot.
One of the good things about the Westminster system, as opposed to the US system, was that it was impossible for such an inpasse to persist. But the FTPA has imported that undesirable aspect of the US system over here, with, as we are now seeing, awful results as government is trapped in stasis with legislature that is opposed to the executive and an executive which is unwilling to follow the legislature.
The only changes to the FPTA, I would make are to require a simple majority rather than 2/3 of all seats
That effectively, though, does allow a PM with a majority to ‘to call a General Election whenever (s)he wants’, which is exactly what you say is ‘too much power into the hands of one person’; while leaving the problem of a lame-duck minority government stuck in power which an opposed legislative as we see at the moment.
So your proposed change manages to re-introduce the ‘problem’ that you wanted to solve, while not actually solving the real problem we now have — the worst of all worlds!
ROD WRIGHT says
why should we take Johnson off his petard. Leave him there for many months. They have made us suffer for many years.
Paul W says
That would be irresponsible. It is *not* about Boris Johnson. It *is* about the future of the country.
“They have made us suffer for many years.” And who are “they” and how exactly have we suffered?
The UK has the lowest unemployment figures since the early 1970s and low inflation.
A schop says
Prediction conservative party will be destroyed in london and Scotland the lib dems will Hoover up in horizontal smog back yard Midlands and north labour will hang on
The bumbling idiot who thinks he is al Capone will not work in working class heartlands they are more likely to vote farage who will be lucky to do better than UKIP
Result minority labour government supported by snp as liberals however well they do only come to the rescue of a conservative government