Starmer isn't really serious about change

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It’s understandable that a Labour Government led by Keir Starmer, if that’s what we’re going to get after the next election, would have a long list of things it wants to do. Some of them would be new initiatives, others would be repealing some of the worst acts of the current government (although his appetite for the latter seems very limited at present). The problem with acts of parliament passed by one government is that they can be very easily repealed by its successor; ensuring that change ‘sticks’ is far from easy. There is one major change which he could make, however, which would not only be hard to repeal in itself, but would also make it harder for the Tories to reverse other changes at some future date. That change is the one thing which Starmer seems absolutely keen to reject, namely proportional representation. Once a parliament is elected by a fully proportional system, it’s hard to imagine circumstances in which it would decide to revert to the absolutism of first-past-the-post.

What makes it so easy for one government to reverse the actions of its predecessors is the way in which our current electoral system usually gives absolute power to one party on a minority of the vote. Changing that means that repealing legislation would require a more consensual approach. It’s true that it would also make it harder for a government to get its own proposals through parliament in the first place; but looking at Brexit, the legislation to tear up international law over asylum, and the new act giving sweeping powers to individual police officers, many of us might think that to be rather a good thing. Demographics coupled with opinion polls showing that younger people’s opinions tend, on the whole, to be more socially liberal and progressive than those of older people, meaning that it is far more likely that a Labour leader prepared to be bold (a category which admittedly might exclude Starmer) could find a majority in a proportional parliament than a Tory leader seeking to appeal to the extremes. It seems that Starmer would sooner enjoy absolute power for one term and pass a whole series of reversible measures for the Tories to unpick than enjoy a more diffuse and conditional hold on power for a much longer term and make longer term changes to the UK’s society and economy. On that basis, apparently, many people see him as some sort of ‘progressive’. It’s a strange definition that they are using.