I have another video out this morning. In it, I argue that Keir Starmer winning a massive parliamentary majority on 4 July is really dangerous in our democracy. Who is going to hold him and his party to account in parliament?
The audio version is avaiulable at:
The transcript is:
Who is going to oppose Keir Starmer in the next parliament?
It's a really interesting question on the basis of electoral opinion polls that are now coming out. Some of those polls suggest that the Tories may have no more than 75 seats in the next parliament. The Liberal Democrats might have 60 and the SNP might be on 35 to 40.
There will then be some other parties of course, with some the Greens, Plaid Cymru and of course the parties from Northern Ireland. But, we will be in a situation where it could be that there will be 450 Labour MPs, and the next largest party will have many fewer than 100 seats.
So, who is going to oppose Starmer?
Who is going to hold this government to account?
I think the one thing we can be sure of is that it's not going to be the Conservative Party. They are already in mayhem. We know that. That's why Starmer is going to get 450 seats. Maybe. If they aren't going to be able to do it because they will be going into all sorts of leadership rows and faction fighting and everything else, all those things that have characterised the last few years of Tory leadership of this country, then are we actually going to have an effective opposition?
Or are we going to have to look to the Liberal Democrats and the SNP to work together in some form of coalition? Well, effective coalition, whether they call it one or not, to actually deliver effective opposition in Parliament to whatever Keir Starmer might be doing.
The challenge to them is going to be really quite enormous. Remember that much of the work of Parliament is done through its committees, where legislation is scrutinised and ministerial actions are scrutinised, and there are committees of a variety of forms to do those various things. The demand on those members of the Liberal Democrats and the SNP, who will be taking their duties as parliamentarians seriously, which I am not certain the Tories will do, will be enormous because they're going to have to cover all those forms of committee and deliver the critique of the Labour Party that is going to be required to make the House of Commons function in anything like an effective way to ensure that we get the legislation that we deserve.
And don't forget that actually Parliament really does make a difference when it comes to legislation.
There are lots of matters that change as they progress through Parliament. Laws that arrive as one thing and depart from the House of Commons heading for the House of Lords and then the statute book as something else.
So, this role is vital. And I am really worried that the stress on our opposition parliamentarians in the next Parliament is going to be enormous.
We need a functioning democracy in this country. A parliamentary system that delivers Labour 450 seats is not going to deliver us a functioning democracy. It is going to be delivering us a democracy that is under enormous undue stress that should not be happening. And that's not good for the future of the well-being of everybody in this country because I believe that is dependent upon democracy working.
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According to the Conservatives, nobody is going to oppose Labour. The Conservatives live off scare stories. The new one is a ‘Supermajority’. This is humbug. The Party that won the 2019 General election with an unassailable 80 seat majority, with the support of only around 24% of the registered electorate, is now complaining about the system of Party Government which it has designed with Labour to be an electoral cartel, because the conservatives are not the beneficiary of a corrupt and essentially anti-democratic system designed to protect special interests.
What the Conservatives (stupid to the bitter end), are reminding people is that the FPTP electoral system in Parliament is rigged to benefit only two Parties (really a Single Transferable Party with two names). The two Party Westminster cartel uses boundary reorganisations, ID cards and any other trick it can think off to ensure the cartel controls Parliament. Faced with a Scottish government the Westminster Cartel implemented a Party-first proportional voting system for Holyrood, precisely because they did not want to face having to deal with an unassailable SNP in Government in Scotland. They didn’t implement PR in Scotland because the believed in democracy. The conservatives only believe in democracy, if the system is rigged to guarantee they win. That are running a cartel, but they actually only believe in monopoly. They never change.
Likewise in Scotland with the Union. The Conservatives only believe in democracy, as long as the system is rigged to guarantee the Union always wins.
What we have in Parliament is an elective dictatorship; and FPTP is the delivery system.
The problem is that the Conservatives are so duplicitous, greedy,
There is a fair chance that any real opposition comes from within the Labour party. And the unions. Starmer has purged as much of the left as he can from the party but it still exists in an attenuated form.
Tempting to suggest that the Tories are setting up the Starmer Party (for that is what it is) to fail. But I don’t think they are either that bright, that organised or that motivated. Possible futures:
Some of the circa 450 LINO MPs get fed up and split off.
Starmer further goads the Scots who move towards independence.
Starmer fails to change anything (unrest directed at MPs).
Other events: some of his sidekicks lose (Streeting) &/or he loses his seat against Feinstein.
How did the UK get to this point? Why?
If the Tories are the second largest party then precedent would have it that they should be the official opposition. However, a coalition of other opposition parties could easily have more seats than the Tories and, to my mind, ought to be able to deprive the Tories of this.
It will be interesting to see how this will pan out if this situation emerges. I can see the Tories wanting to be the official opposition, if only so that their leader can be leader of the opposition. This leads to another question: If there is an opposition coalition, who should be the official leader of the opposition? Perhaps it could be a job share.
A big Labour majority would yet again illuminate the whipping system – which clearly is corrupt and should be stopped in any consitutional reform. .
as Tabitha Troughton says
https://consoc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Cracking-the-Whip.pdf
the new post war German constitution included the right of German MPs
to be ‘representatives of the whole people, not bound by orders or instructions, and
responsible only to their conscience’. No such protection exists for the UK’s MPs
the whipping system retains its potential for the bullying, bribery or blackmail of the country’s MPs. Its enforcers are the MPs known as ‘the whips’. In government, they have the status of ministers, and are paid as ministers but, despite numerous whistle-blowing testimonies from across decades, they have never been
held accountable, even to the Ministerial Code. Under the system MPs are required
to vote against their judgement or conscience, should these conflict with party
policy, or the diktats of their party leader.
This is what gave us Iraq, Brexit and other disasters.
It will be an interesting sight in Parliament as well, given that all the opposition parties will be sitting on the same benches. I wonder if that may cause some friction.
Given the possible size of the majority I might hope that Labour MP’s will do their duty to The Country in Committee at least.
Secondly with such a huge majority and no possibility of preferment for many I would suggest that there will have to be at least some ‘behind the scenes’ conciliation of backbenchers to ensure legislation gets through