Why wait for electoral reform?

Tweet

 

It might have been a low bar to jump, but Burnham demonstrated yesterday that he can craft and deliver a better speech than his predecessor. And it seems to have cheered up the members of his party, so his immediate mission has been accomplished. How much it means for the rest of us, however, is rather less clear. All his biggest promises are slated for delivery after the next election, and are thus predicated on the assumption that Labour will win that election. It might, of course, happen before the scheduled date in 2029, but if we assume that Burnham is sincere in saying that there will not be an early election, then the programme for government for the next three years, based on his speech yesterday, looks a little thin, to say the least.

Both before and after that election, he seems to have committed himself (again) to sticking to the so-called ‘fiscal rules’ – a wholly arbitrary device which outsources government financial policy to the money men in the City of London, whose main objective is to protect and grow the wealth of the few. It keeps debate exactly where the neoliberals want it to be – arguing about false choices around tax and spending rather than about meeting people’s needs by putting available resources within the economy to good use. It's not a good start.

The dependency on winning another election before beginning to implement the ambitious programme he set out is another wholly artificial constraint. There is no requirement under the English constitution for a party to have mentioned something in its manifesto before doing it (which seems to be the basis for prevarication). If there were, no government would ever be able to react to unforeseen events or changes in the political or economic situation, and no government would ever be able to do anything which was not specifically mentioned in its manifesto. (As an aside, it would also make coalition governments, or minority governments depending on ‘arrangements’ with another party problematic, because literally nobody would have voted for that precise programme.)

Specifically, in relation to yesterday’s speech, there is nothing which prevents the introduction of proportional representation before, rather than after, the next election. Labour has a massive majority in parliament, the Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens all support such a change. Even Reform Ltd have made supportive noises in the past (although whether some of the polls showing the possibility of an overall majority under First-Past-The-Post might cause them to waver is an unanswered question). The only committed opponents are the Tories – and they have only 20% of the seats in the House of Commons. It should take months, rather than years, to get a consensus amongst the other parties, even if Reform Ltd do fall by the wayside on the issue – and such a consensus should sail through parliament. There is time to do this now, and have the next parliament elected on a proportional basis, rather than run the risk – albeit apparently receding – of a Farage-led government in 2029, an eventuality which would kill off most of Burnham's other proposed reforms.

Given that no recent polls show Labour even near an absolute majority on its own, much of what Burnham laid out yesterday would probably be easier to implement under a proportionally-elected parliament which normalised agreement and coalition. So why wait?