It's not true that 'all votes count'

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The new electoral system coming into effect for this year’s Senedd elections is a step forward from first-past-the-post, but is still less than perfect. The main criticism levelled at it by many is that it means that electors cannot choose individuals, only parties. Personally, I’m relaxed about that aspect – decades of door-to-door campaigning taught me that (other than in local council elections, where they may know the individuals) most people vote on party lines anyway, and pay little attention to the candidates. For me, the bigger criticism has always been that there is no opportunity for people to express a second or third choice, so that anyone voting for a party which wins no seats has effectively had no say in the outcome. It was, though, the best outcome that was possible given Labour opposition to STV, and it would be churlish not to recognise that.

As campaigning ramps up, however, the failings of the selected system are becoming more obvious, with Labour and – if anything, even more so – Plaid suggesting repeatedly that a vote for anyone else will split the anti-Reform vote and hand seats to Reform. Leaving aside the essentially negative message of that proposition, encouraging people to vote against one party rather than for another, it isn’t the sort of behaviour a properly proportional system should be encouraging. It’s an admission, in effect, that the chosen system is sub-optimal, giving the lie to the oft-repeated claim that 'all votes count'.

It opens the question, though – will the new Senedd change the decision and opt for a proper STV system? Officially, Plaid support STV (although they haven’t always looked exactly enthusiastic about doing so in the councils they control), as do the Lib Dems and the Greens. The last time he opined on the matter, I’m sure that Farage also supported STV (although all Reform Ltd polices have to carry the caveat that they are subject to sudden and arbitrary change). The only parties dead set against it are Labour and the Tories. The opinion polls could all be wrong, of course, but if the general trend of the polls were to be true, current projections would give supporters of STV a clear super-majority in the Senedd, enough to push through such a change if they wished to do so. If they can summon the courage to act, it might even become the most lasting legacy of a change of government in Cardiff.

Who's going to check? And when?

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Whether the newly appointed leader of Reform Ltd in Wales actually lives in Wales or not appears to be an open question at present. It’s a question which Martin Shipton, at Nation.Cymru, is doggedly pursuing. If it’s really true that he doesn’t, then both he and Farage have been more than a little foolish in putting forward a story which falls apart after one day of scrutiny. Maybe they really are that stupid, but it’s more likely that they believe that they can game the system.

The requirement that candidates for May’s Senedd election should live in Wales, and be registered to vote in Wales, is entirely reasonable, especially after the experience of a predecessor party to Reform having had a resident of Wiltshire as its leader in the Senedd. It’s something of a departure for UK electoral politics, though: there is no requirement, for instance, for any candidate for Westminster to reside in the UK. They merely have to state that “they are at least 18 years old and be either: a British citizen, or a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, or a citizen of a commonwealth country who does not require leave to enter or remain in the UK, or has indefinite leave to remain in the UK”. They also need to provide an address where they can be contacted. But as far as I’m aware, there is no requirement for the returning officer to verify the information provided. Verifying the veracity of the information provided by candidates has never been part of their role; they merely verify that the relevant boxes on the form have been completed properly. It seems probable that the same approach will apply in the case of Senedd elections: if the candidate provides a valid Welsh electoral roll number, and gives an address where (s)he claims to live, is it any part of the responsibility of the Returning Officer to check that those details are true?

It is perfectly legal to be registered to vote at two different addresses (it’s not usually legal to vote at both, although there is no check on that), and the definition of ‘main residence’ is not as straightforward as it might sound. Reform Ltd may be about to ‘test the system’ by putting forward as a candidate an individual who may not meet the legal requirements. It’s not at all clear that there is any process in place to challenge the information provided by candidates, let alone pro-actively verify its veracity, other than by a court process after the election. Relying on ‘the law says’ amounts to assuming that all candidates are honest people of good faith. It’s just possible that some might not be.

Second choices need to be counted, not assumed

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Following the result of a by-election in the Vale of Glamorgan last week, some partisan commenters have attempted to make the argument ‘vote Green, get Reform’, or ‘vote Labour, get Reform’. There’s certainly a mathematical basis for such suggestions: added to the vote of the second-placed Plaid candidate, either the votes cast for the Green candidate or those cast for the Labour candidate would have been enough to secure a victory for Plaid had one or other of those parties chosen not to stand. By the same token, however, if the Conservatives had not stood a candidate and all of those votes had gone to Reform Ltd, then Reform Ltd would have won, even if there had only been two candidates in the race. Whataboutery works both ways.

The bigger problem with the argument that voting for one party ‘allows’ another to win is that it makes assumptions about what people’s second choices would have been and about how voters choose a party. In an ideal world, maybe we would all sit down with the detailed manifestos of the various parties and assess which one most closely represents our own views, which comes second and so on, and then assess which of our acceptable choices has the best chance of winning before casting a vote. In the real world, the first doesn’t happen and the second requires a degree of knowledge about what other voters are going to do which owes nothing to science and everything to guesswork and rumour.

Years of direct doorstep experience tells me that, whilst those 85 who voted Green should logically have put Plaid as their second choice (both parties favour Welsh independence, and both have strong environmental credentials, although Plaid is somewhat shaky, to say the least, on energy policy), it is highly unlikely that they would all have done so. Some would have chosen Labour, some the Tories, others would have stayed at home – and I’d be very surprised indeed if at least a couple hadn’t opted for Reform Ltd. Similar considerations apply to those who voted for each of the other parties: the basis on which people choose a party to support is much more complex than an analysis of policy positions.

Back in the days when Plaid would have been seen as a ‘no-hope’ party in places like Barri, I and other candidates (I did once stand in a ward in Barri itself) used to argue that people should vote for the party they most want to see win, rather than against the one that they most want to see lose, whilst those parties seen as having a real chance at winning argued that people should vote for the least distasteful of them rather than ‘wasting’ their vote. Now that Plaid is seriously in contention in such seats, it’s no surprise (even if a little disappointing) to find those positions reversed.

The real lesson of the by-election is that an electoral system based on first-past-the-post where more than two parties are involved can deliver seats to a party which enjoys only minority support – and the more parties in serious contention (there were four in this case), the lower the percentage of the vote needed to win. If we really want to know about people’s second choices, we need to count them. A system of proportional representation wouldn’t necessarily stop the rise of Reform Ltd (I suspect that a number of people in all parties would be unpleasantly surprised to see how many of their supporters would give their second vote to Farage’s lot), but it would be likely to deny absolute power to any party which cannot demonstrate broader support. The question is whether the government in Westminster is able to understand that, and make the change before the next UK-wide parliamentary election. Rueing the day afterwards will be too late.

Can Corbyn change?

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The history of setting up new parties in the UK is not exactly a trail littered by success. One of the main reasons for that is the electoral system which, as long as there are two parties generally perceived as ‘natural’ front runners, allows two main parties to shut others out by each claiming that any vote not for one is, in effect, a vote for the other. It’s a tactic which has been used for decades by Labour and Tory alike, and goes a long way to explaining why neither of those parties has ever embraced electoral reform.

One of the features of such a system, however, is that there is an inherent tipping point; once any third party reaches a certain percentage of the vote it can suddenly have the effect of shutting out one or other of the traditional two main parties. Opinion polls suggest that Reform Ltd may have reached that tipping point, although there is a lot that could, and probably will, go wrong for Farage between now and the next Westminster election. It is in that context that Corbyn and friends have decided to launch a new party. Maybe, if the old system really is reaching the end of the road, the UK could see both the two old main parties being swept aside by two new main parties, however unlikely that might seem in historical terms.

Despite agreeing with much of what Corbyn has said over the years on a range of issues, I have serious concerns about a new party led by him.

Firstly, he has never exactly been an enthusiast for electoral reform. There is, of course, an element of chicken-and-egg about the issue – the best way for a new party to break through is under an electoral system which allocates seats more accurately on the basis of votes cast, and the best way of getting that sort of electoral reform is for one of the parties which is being shut out by the current system to somehow win a majority under the current system. Serious, long term reform of the UK political system depends on implementing a change which clearly runs counter to the interests of those making the decisions. Nevertheless, a clear commitment to reform might be the best way for a new party to encourage others to support it on a one-off basis in a single election. Has Corbyn the vision to understand that?

Secondly, unless the new party can get its vote share up to around 30%, it could end up with a respectable vote in many constituencies whilst winning precisely no seats. And it could even end up losing seats for the Green Party. Success in the short term necessarily involves a willingness to form alliances. Corbyn is steeped in old Labour Party values, including the one which welcomes co-operation with other parties just as long as those other parties recognise Labour’s hegemony and do as they are told. Can Corbyn put such attitudes to one side and form the sort of cross-party alliances required to bring about electoral success – and in England, that primarily means with the Green Party?

Thirdly, Corbyn has always had a strange blind spot when it comes to Wales and Scotland. This is a man who supports national liberation struggles across the globe, and is a long-time supporter of a free and united Ireland. Yet, when it comes to those parts of the UK which don’t have a stretch of water separating them from England, he somehow seems to see the dominance of England as being part of the natural order of things. Working with others in Wales and Scotland will require a willingness to adapt his attitude towards them – has he the sense to do that?

At the moment, there’s something of a gap where detailed policies should be, and we’ll have to wait and see how that gap is filled. Vague aspirational stuff isn’t enough, even if it generates a few headlines.

Not the epitaph Starmer would choose

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Sometimes, people talk about aspects of the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system used for most elections in the UK as though they were design features. But the system was never really ‘designed’ at all; what we have today has evolved over a period from a system which was used when the number of people voting was strictly limited and elections were more about choosing an individual to carry the banner of the wealthiest in parliament than about choosing a government. Having said that, if it had been designed by what have been for the best part of a century the two main UK parties, they would almost certainly have included the ‘feature’ that the system should work to preserve the dominance of those two parties and freeze out, as far as possible, any challengers.

In that regard it has worked as it would have been intended to work, giving those two parties turns at being in government (with a built-in bias, obviously, in favour of one of them – nothing says that the turns have to be of equal duration). If that is the intention, then the system works really well. Right up to the point at which it doesn’t. Inherent within the system is the possibility of reaching a tipping point. As long as a challenger party’s overall support remains below about 25%, and is evenly spread across constituencies, whichever of the two incumbent parties can achieve a little over 30% with their support irregularly distributed can achieve an overall majority of seats in parliament, and the other can form HM's loyal opposition. Democracy it ain’t, but it serves its intended beneficiaries (Labour and the Tories) well, and explains why they are both so reluctant to change it.

However, if the tipping point is ever reached (and the whole point is that it isn’t supposed to happen), the system facilitates a challenger party sweeping the board, with an even lower percentage of the vote. We’ve seen the consequences of that this week in the English local elections. Labour and Tory alike are behaving as though the way to freeze Reform Ltd out is to adopt their policies and be more like them. More rational souls might wonder what the point of keeping them out is if you’re going to do the same as them anyway – and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that if their views are thus legitimized, many voters might conclude that they should simply vote for the real thing.

A far better approach (which also has the not-exactly-inconsequential advantage of being more democratic as well) would be to adopt a proportional electoral system. The Lib Dems, Plaid, and the SNP would support such a change, and even the head Fromage is on record as saying he supports it (although if he thinks he might stand a better chance of becoming PM under the existing system, that might change – politicians’ principles have been known to become flexible when political advantage is at stake, and Fromage didn’t exactly have a lot of principles to start with). The Labour Party membership have supported the idea in party conferences, and with his current majority, Sir Starmer has a superb one-off opportunity to make a change which would be game-changing (as well as being likely to give Labour a share in power for more of the time). It seems, though, that he’d prefer to alternate between acting like a rabbit caught in the headlights and outright panic. Labour accused the Tories this week of gifting the by-election to Reform Ltd by not campaigning, but the person who is really gifting the next election to them is Sir Starmer himself. ‘The man who facilitated the UK’s slide into authoritarianism’ is probably not the epitaph Sir Starmer would choose. But then I suppose few of us get to choose our own epitaphs.

Counting the members

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The response by the leader of the English Conservative and Unionist Party to the growth of the membership of Farage’s Reform was a masterful demonstration of how to ensure that your enemy’s successes receive maximum media coverage, underlining in the process the true extent of her political acumen. Whether her claims of fakery are true or not has yet to be fully resolved, although such evidence as has been produced suggests that a party led by Farage may have broken his habit of a lifetime by actually bearing at least a passing resemblance to truth, an outcome at which few can have been as surprised as Farage himself. We are told that, if the growth in membership numbers continues at its current pace, then Reform will have double the number of members in the Tory Party by the end of January. That’s mathematically true, but it’s also mathematically true that at the current rate of growth, the entire population of the UK will be Reform members in only 38 years from now. Simplistic mathematical truth isn’t always a useful or meaningful metric.

Given the lack of clarity about what ‘membership’ actually means for a ‘party’ which still appears to be legally owned and controlled by the man himself, and the suggestion that few of those ‘members’ are actually likely to end up pounding the streets, let alone ringing the doorbells of unsuspecting voters, membership numbers in themselves, whether accurate or not, probably don’t tell us a great deal about Reform’s electoral prospects, even if they do help to reinforce the idea that Badenoch could start a fight about nothing in an empty room.

More significant are the opinion polling numbers which have been appearing recently, showing that Reform has a certain momentum at present, to which Badenoch has kindly, if rather incompetently, added. But if a week is a long time in politics, it’s a very long time indeed until the next Senedd election, let alone the next UK election, and parties led by Farage have in the past shown an uncanny ability to self-destruct, so we should be careful about over-reacting to a few opinion polls. But neither should we be overcomplacent in the face of the rise of a political movement dedicated to the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many, aided and abetted enthusiastically be those who will pay the price: sometimes, it seems, turkeys really do vote for Christmas. Especially when the media seem so determined to talk up the possibility in order to give themselves something to talk about.

Much of the talking heads reaction seems to be about the policies and philosophies underpinning political debate in the UK, and whether ‘the right’ will somehow transition from Tory to Reform or come together in some sort of takeover of one by the other. That misses the point, almost as much as the comforting suggestion that Wales is somehow a ‘left-wing’ nation which will reject the even-more-extreme Toryism of Reform just as it has traditionally rejected the more mainstream Toryism of the Tory Party itself. None of that stuff about left and right is what drives Reform’s members, voters and supporters. Whilst those at the top of the party might have a clear vision about concentrating power and wealth in the hands of a few by impoverishing the many, it’s not one that they’re going to share – for obvious reasons. The rest are driven more by a ‘plague on all your houses’ mentality, an appeal to outdated English jingoism (yes, even in Wales), and a good dash of racism, albeit increasingly presented in terms of a clash of cultural perspectives. None of this is amenable to pragmatic argument about the detail of policies and promises which no-one believes are going to be enacted anyway.

But if it isn’t easy to counter these attitudes, it really is extremely easy to reinforce them, and it’s something which the Labour government manages to do regularly. Every time they tell us that there is not enough money for things such as winter fuel payments, they tell us implicitly that those things on which they do spend are higher priorities. It’s no surprise that some people see every penny spent on dealing with the desperate people arriving on these shores as being money which could be used for something else, if only it weren’t for these immigrants. Ask yourselves how many times you’ve seen memes suggesting that the homeless, or veterans, or pensioners are more deserving of our support than immigrants, with a strapline along the lines of ‘we should look after our own people first’. It’s a narrative which Labour’s own words and actions reinforce daily, even if not entirely intentionally – and it’s utter nonsense. The UK is one of the world’s richest countries, and it also has one of the largest gaps between the richest and the poorest – those two facts are not unrelated. The question we should be asking is how we use the wealth which exists. It’s a question which the Labour Party used to ask, but stopped asking decades ago in its rush to follow the Tories in their adoption of a wholly false theory of economics which just happens to benefit the few.

We can’t yet know whether the momentum which Reform currently has will continue and carry them into electoral success in future contests. But we can be pretty certain that if it does happen, the current Labour government will have facilitated and enabled it with its blind adherence to self-imposed fiscal rules and an unwillingness to challenge inequality in any meaningful way.

Waiting for the next bus?

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It's tempting to see the result of the latest ballot among Tory MPs to choose a new temporary leader as being just another display of the inherent duplicity of the species. But, whilst there certainly is an element of that involved, it seems that the reality on this occasion is that it’s an even bigger demonstration of their incompetence. Their complete absence of trust in each other has meant that they couldn’t even stich up an election where the electorate is only 120 strong. The ‘explanation’ for the result is apparently that some supporters of James Cleverly – the walking, talking demonstration of the inapplicability of the theory of nominative determinism – were so confident that he was going to be in the last two that, instead of voting for him, they voted for the one that they thought he'd best be able to beat.

They think that they’re such a clever and sophisticated electorate that holding multiple ballots eliminating one candidate each time enables them to use all the low cunning which they possess to game the system so that the final run-off is between the one they want to win and the one that (s)he stands the best chance of beating. But here’s the thing: if we look at the very first round of voting back at the beginning of September, the order in which four were eliminated precisely matches the result achieved just over a month ago. And if they’d used the first-past-the-post system, which they insist is the only democratic way of voting, to select the final two they would have ended up with the same two that they’ve actually got. A month of political manoeuvring, Machiavellianism and dissimulation has got them exactly where they could have been a month ago.

It's hard to say whether the use of STV would have produced a different result. I suspect that having to rank six candidates in order of preference might have been too big an intellectual ask of many of them, but it would certainly have been much harder to game. Maybe the result would have been the same anyway, just achieved a lot more quickly. What is clear is that, whether by accident or design, an overwhelming majority of Tory MPs have opted for a final contest to select the candidate who can do the most to wreck what remains of a once-formidable election-winning organisation. And all the signs are that the aging, white, wealthy, south-east England based membership will enthusiastically assist in that aim. But Tory leadership campaigns are like buses: there’ll be another one along shortly.

Labour likely to miss an opportunity for electoral reform

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The now former PM’s Tory Oblivion Project failed at the last fence, leaving his party with more seats than he had hoped, and himself unable to make the planned getaway to California to be reunited with his fortune – for a few months at least. His only consolation must surely be that there are enough Tory MPs left for them to fall into multiple sects, groups, and schisms rather than unite behind a clear successor.

In terms of seats won, the scale of Labour’s victory is stunning, and under the antiquated electoral system used in the UK, it’s only seats that count. Scratch the surface, though, and start looking at the votes cast and the story is rather different. Winning 63% of the seats on a mere 34% of the vote gives absolute power to a party which could only persuade a third of the electorate to vote for it. Democracy it ain’t. Outside Scotland, Labour’s vote share rose only by a tiny margin overall in England, and actually fell in Wales, but those averages disguise differential movements in different constituencies which led to the votes being concentrated where they were most effective. Even then, had Farage plc not taken so many votes, mostly, one suspects, at the expense of the Tories, the result would have been very different.

It's a mistake, of course, to simply assume that Reform voters would otherwise have voted Tory. Some would have voted Labour, others for Plaid, the SNP, the Greens, or even the Lib Dems. But supposing for a moment, for the purposes of illustration, that all those who voted for either the Tories or Reform had actually voted for the leading contender of the two in every constituency, Wales would have woken up to a very different landscape yesterday. We would have 18 Labour MPs, 10 Tories, 2 Plaid – and 2 Reform, namely Llanelli and Maldwyn. There were special circumstances in both those latter 2 seats, of course, but ‘special circumstances’ can’t be used as an excuse for results we might not like. Whilst the assumption that Tory and Reform voters would have voted for each other’s parties is hopelessly over-simplistic, the illustration does serve to underline just how shallow Labour’s ‘landslide’ really is.

The Electoral Reform Society has done an analysis of the votes, and produced some numbers for how the result might have looked had the election been fought on the basis of the Additional Member system which has been used to date for Senedd elections (although it’s now being scrapped for a closed list system). Whilst it would have made no difference to Plaid on 4, and little difference to the Lib Dems who would have had 77 rather than 71, the impact on Labour, Conservative, Reform and the Green Party would have been huge, giving them 236, 157, 94, and 42 seats respectively. Starmer would today probably be negotiating with the Lib Dems and possibly the Greens as well, before forming a government. Caution is needed here, of course, not least because a different voting system might lead to people making different choices; assuming they’d simply vote for the same party is not an entirely valid starting point. If the Tories and Reform agreed to some sort of coalition, that would take them past Labour’s total, but then they run out of potential allies. Labour would have had far more viable paths to a working majority. I don’t really want to see 94 Reform MPs in the House of Commons, but I want to keep them out because people vote against them, not because of a rigged electoral system.

The ERS are promising to produce an analysis of the probable result based on use of STV, the proportional representation system favoured by many of us. It will be interesting to see the outcome of that work, although working out where people might have placed their second and third preference votes is even more fraught with assumptions than the analysis which they’ve done to date. I suspect that the overall picture will not be hugely different – at headline level, Labour would still be without a majority, the Tories would still be a larger group than they are today, and there would still be substantial numbers of Reform and Green MPs. And Starmer would still be trying to negotiate some sort of coalition.

The obstacle to electoral reform remains that both Labour and the Tories have demonstrated that the current system can give them absolute majorities on a minority of the vote. As long as enough Tories believe that swinging towards Farage’s position will make Reform go away, they are unlikely to change their stance. And while Labour, as a party, has adopted proportional representation as policy, the apparent scale of this week’s victory makes it unlikely that they’ll invest much effort in pursuing it. It wasn’t in their manifesto, and Starmer himself seems at best lukewarm on the idea. It would be a mistake, though, and one which could all-too-easily allow the return of the Tories in five years time. Those arguing that the scale of the victory means Labour will be in power for at least a decade need to remember that what was done in a single election cycle can equally be undone in another, and a mere 34% of the vote isn’t a very good starting point for any government. It’s in Labour’s own interests – and any sense of democracy and fairness demands – that the system is changed whilst they have the power and the numbers to do it. I’m not optimistic that they will, though.

Searching for the Big Idea

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It’s barely a month since Starmer told us that his absolute top priority was more spending on defence and weaponry. I noted at the time that his ‘top priority’ seemed to change regularly, and today he’s launched his six key messages for the election. It’s not really surprising to note that defence isn’t one of them. It’s one of those ‘top priorities’ which somehow didn’t make the cut.

The six pledges themselves are a pretty uninspiring collection at best. Two of them – relating to health and education – are England-only pledges, two – on economic stability and anti-social behaviour – are things which any and every party could claim as their objectives and tell us little about the ‘how’, and the remaining two – on setting up new bodies for energy and border security are so lacking in any detail which distinguishes them from the present government’s policies as to be meaningless. Describing the whole package as ‘first steps’ sounds an awful lot like an admission that even his previous unambitious statements are now considered over-ambitious.

Perhaps the most revealing statement of all came from Pat McFadden on the morning media round, who said that, “The only way you’re going to win the next election is by appealing to people who haven’t traditionally voted for you and who have voted Conservative … That is what the difference between losing and winning is, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of in that”.  With one caveat, I’d even agree with him. It’s no small caveat, though: it is that winning power is more important than having any plan for what to do with it, or any desire to change anything other than whose hands are on the levers of power. ‘Being in government’ has become, in effect, Labour’s only rationale and purpose.

There is, of course, a strong argument for replacing an imploding and incompetent rabble with a united team who can be effective, although I’ll admit to being amongst those who aren’t entirely convinced that delivering austerity competently is necessarily better than delivering it incompetently. Being incompetent in delivering the wrong thing isn’t always a bad thing. They want Tories to vote for them in the belief that they’ll be better and more effective Tories than Sunak’s mob.

In fairness, that last point about relative competence isn’t exactly a controversial proposition. It is, though, a colossal admission of failure by Labour. Not only have they failed to convince people that there is a better alternative, they have given up even trying; and no longer believe it themselves. They are, instead, reduced to peddling the idea that the best future available for us boils down to choosing the gang which will be the least incompetent at implementing policy. As Big Ideas go, it’s more than a little lacking.

Straws, not life rafts

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There was some mystery a few days ago as to whether and where the PM voted in Thursday’s elections. Given that he splits his time between his constituency and London, he is legally entitled to register to vote in both places (although given his party’s dogged pursuit of Angela Rayner for possibly registering in the wrong one of her two addresses many years ago, it’s reasonable to suppose that they’re not over-keen on admitting to that fact).  And he’s even entitled to vote in both places, as long as it’s not a parliamentary election, although he probably wouldn’t be exactly enthusiastic about owning up to doing that either.

Given the choice of admitting that he voted for the London mayoral candidate, who’s known mostly for her tweets praising Enoch Powell and displaying a not-exactly-subtle thread of anti-Islamic feeling, or admitting that he voted for the North Yorkshire candidate, who was a News Editor at the Daily Star when it compared his immediate predecessor to a lettuce, I can understand his wish to avoid telling us that he voted for either, let alone both. Even Sunak can work out that there’s no right answer to the question, ‘Which did you vote for – the alleged racist or the lettuce-lover?’. To the extent that one can trust the veracity of anything broadcast by GB News (spoiler: not a lot), it has subsequently claimed that he voted by post for the lettuce-lover. It was obviously one of those ‘tough decisions’ that politicians are always telling us need to be made.

No party is immune to the possibility of putting forward ‘eccentric’ candidates at election time, and vetting candidates is a particularly difficult issue at local government level where the number of candidates involved is so high. Mayoral candidates are, however, much fewer in number – there were only 11 up for election on Thursday – and they are much higher in profile. Selecting two out of 11 for which the party leader might be embarrassed to admit having voted is quite an achievement, even for a party in terminal decline.

But we can’t simply ignore the local election candidates just because vetting them is so difficult. Apparently, one of the bright spots for the Tories last week, according to them, was retaining control of Harlow council by the narrowest margin of a single seat. It was achieved, though, by including a councillor under investigation for anti-Islamic remarks. His exact status is currently unclear, but it appears that he was suspended whilst being investigated and somehow unsuspended in order to stand as a Tory candidate even though the investigation had not concluded. Whether he will even be eligible for membership of his party’s group on the council is as clear as mud. Depending on an individual in that position to portray the result as a ‘bright spot’ has a certain whiff of desperation about it.

Their biggest bright spot of the night was, of course, retaining the mayoralty in Teesside. They also came surprisingly close to doing the same in the West Midlands. The common factor between both of those results was that the Tory candidates did everything they could to distance themselves from their party and its leader, preferring not to mention either unless they really had no choice. As a result, some of the less dim Tory MPs may well conclude that their best chance of being re-elected is to pretend they’re not Tories, so it’s a tactic we will probably see repeated later this year at the Westminster elections. It might, though, turn out to be an extrapolation too far. More of a straw at which to clutch than a life raft.

New complex systems of maths

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There are different approaches to the subject of mathematics, and it is possible to posit a number of wholly consistent alternative systems which produce some results which everyday life might consider to be more than a little strange. Back in my sixth form days, I was somewhat taken by the hyperbolic form of non-Euclidean geometry, in which the sum of the angles in a triangle varies according to the size of the triangle – with the extremes ranging from zero for an infinitely large triangle to 180 degrees for an infinitely small one. It’s of limited practical use in daily life (where we are, in cosmological terms, close to being infinitely small), but none the less fascinating for that.

It’s not uncommon for me to be more than a little harsh on the extent to which Sunak and his not-so-merry men are mathematically challenged, as a result of watching them struggle with some very basic arithmetic. Perhaps I’m being unfair; perhaps they’ve just developed a hitherto unknown version of mathematics, in which things which make little sense to most of us are actually part of an internally consistent system of logic which the rest of us are just too stupid to comprehend. This was reinforced today by the sight of some Tory spokesmen apparently trying to tell the world that yesterday’s round of elections was, in fact, a huge success for the party. The fringe elements have gone further: the falling number of votes ‘proves’ that the public at large has an appetite for even more extreme policies. It’s a strange equation they’ve developed in which people who refuse to vote for increasingly extreme policies can somehow be brought back into the fold by adopting even more extreme policies. Absolute success is thus equivalent to an absolute lack of votes; only when no-one at all votes for them will they feel fully vindicated. They might even have once possessed a mathematical proof of their theorem, which they’ve emulated Fermat by losing after scribbling something in the margin.

It's an interesting conjecture although, like non-Euclidean geometry, it’s of rather limited practical use to anyone else. On the other hand, my old favourite, Occam, might suggest that the simpler solution might be a more appropriate conclusion to draw. They really are just not very good at maths.

Devolution is fine as long as Wales always copies England?

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This week, we were the ‘lucky’ recipients of a 12 page newsletter from the soon-to-be-former Government Chief Whip, Simon Hart. Amongst other things, he tells us that he campaigns against the Labour-Plaid Welsh Government “who are adamant in their desire to downgrade and shut down the hospital”, without specifying to which hospital he is referring, although the leaflet is more explicit when it comes to his plan for Carmarthen, which claims that the Welsh Government “wants to close Glangwili Hospital”. It’s a sort-of-truth, although a more balanced account would point out that the intention is to replace it with a bigger, better, and brand new facility further west. The merits or otherwise of that proposal are fair game for political debate, of course, but presenting it simply as a ‘closure’ isn’t entirely honest.

We are also told that the 20mph default speed limit (or ‘blanket’ limit to use the inaccurate term so favoured by the Tories, including in this leaflet) isn’t working and that “half a million people have said so” by signing a petition. The pedant in me says that the petition may indeed demonstrate that the policy isn’t exactly the most popular ever, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t working. Policies can be both unpopular and effective. Unless, of course, the only determinant of the ‘success’ of any policy is its popularity – but only a confirmed cynic would accuse a Tory politician of believing that.

More generally, both of those items reflect the fact that the most striking thing about this leaflet for a Westminster election is the extent to which it concentrates on devolved issues over which the MP (whoever he or she might be) will have little or no influence. I suppose, given the record of the UK Government, fighting the election on the record of a different government of which he has not been part makes a certain amount of sense. The attempt to portray the current government’s record on the economy as a success simply underlines the extent to which such a campaign would have to depend on ‘alternative facts’.

In the same vein, we come to the section on ‘free’ childcare, where he bemoans the fact that Wales is not precisely aping the English scheme, but is instead introducing an income threshold. The first problematic aspect of this is the claim that it will be ‘free’ in England whilst it is means-tested in Wales. In fact, the English government is underfunding the scheme to such an extent that nurseries are going to be charging parents top-up fees, because they are not going to be paid enough to cover their basic costs of staffing and premises (even if we assume that there will be enough places available, which is far from being certain). They’re not allowed to call them top-up fees of course, so they will be billed as things such as “consumables” (and, whilst it’s not wholly unreasonable to charge for things like food, there will be, we can be sure, an element of creativity to maximise the opportunity to make up for the government funding discrepancy; and for the poorest of working parents, it does less than it could to help people back into work). Most parents are likely to understand that a charge of around £2 per hour might mean that the childcare is cheaper, but it won’t fit most people’s definition of ‘free’. Claiming to have delivered the equivalent amount of cash to enable Wales to underfund childcare to the same extent might be ‘true’, but it doesn’t overcome the basic problem of underfunding.

But the hypocrisy in this is that the party which has previously argued that prescriptions should be means-tested so that hypothetical Welsh millionaires can’t get hypothetical free paracetamol is now arguing that those same hypothetical Welsh millionaires should be able to get hypothetical free childcare. I’d like to think that it was a Damascene conversion to the concept of universality in the delivery of public services, but I suspect that this – like much of the other criticism of what the Welsh Government does – is much, much simpler than that. They simply believe that the Welsh government should always use its powers in ways that deliver the same policies as England. Still, the good news is that the soon-to-be-former Chief Whip won’t have to worry about any of this for much longer.

Sunak channeling Nelson?

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The Prime Minister seems to be more than a little exercised about the result of the Rochdale by-election, but equally short on solutions, unless you count a bit of performative and ritual condemnation and yet more action against protests. Whilst it’s true that the by-election was hardly the finest hour for any of the traditional parties, and that most people would probably agree that ‘extremist’ is a reasonable description of Galloway, the simple fact is that, under the rules of the game, Galloway won the election. It’s called democracy and, since democracy is about debate between different viewpoints, it doesn’t always produce the results that some of us might want. Of course, in one sense Sunak is displaying traditional ‘British’ values; in this case those of Nelson as he ignores the extremist takeover of his own party. He seems blissfully unaware of the parable about motes and beams.

Would Galloway still have won under a system of proportional representation? It’s hard to be certain, but with 40% of the vote going to Galloway, the second and subsequent choices of eliminated candidates would have had to break very decisively against him for the result to change. That isn’t the end of it, though – had there been a system to allocate the votes of eliminated candidates between those remaining at each stage of the count, that might have attracted a higher turnout. ‘What if?’ is an interesting but largely academic pursuit. What we do know is that Tory and Labour alike prefer to retain the system because it enables them to win an absolute majority on a percentage of the vote lower than that achieved by Galloway (meaning, incidentally, that his constituency victory has rather more democratic legitimacy than the parliamentary majority won by either Labour or the Tories in five of the general elections in the last half century).

Most of the time, the UK’s electoral system works in a way which favours a two-party contest, with other parties being seen as ‘also-rans’. However, sometimes circumstances are such that the system can end up favouring an alternative, for example if the support for that alternative is heavily concentrated geographically. The rise of the SNP to dominance (a dominance which would have been far less sweeping under a properly proportional system) is one example. Galloway’s victory, in what are probably utterly unique circumstances in Rochdale, is another. In railing against the outcome, either Sunak is too dim to realise that he is really railing against the UK’s electoral system, or else he is trying to lay the groundwork for a further assault on that system to rig it even further in favour of his own party. His words were so empty of content that it’s really hard to tell.

One thing on which I can agree with Sunak is that we face a serious danger from extremism. It’s just that the extremism emanating from his own party worries me more than any other sort, because that extremism is actually in power and eating away, from the inside, at the traditional values which its proponents claim to espouse.

Making silly assumptions

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Following the results of the Kingswood by-election, Sirjake came up with what some have described as a bizarre defence of his party’s performance. It wasn’t so bad, he said, because “If you add up the Conservative and the Reform Party vote, it’s more than the Labour Party vote”. The statement is, of course, mathematically accurate, albeit of limited practical value. I’ve lost count of exactly how many elections I fought as a candidate when I was politically active, but I think it was around 20. I won a few, but the victories were certainly outweighed by the losses. I don’t doubt, though, that if I’d been able to add the votes of another party selected at random to my own, I could have ‘won’ all of them. That isn’t the way elections work, though.

Sirjake also took comfort from the fact that “Labour did not get over 50%”. It’s another true statement – it just ignores the fact that under a first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system there is no requirement to get past 50%. And indeed, in two of the four elections Sirjake has fought in his current constituency, it’s a bar that he didn’t get over himself. Again, it’s not the way elections work, although it’s possible that Nanny hasn’t explained that to him yet.

The attitude underlying it is that candidates for Reform and the people who vote for them are really Tories at heart, and merely temporarily estranged. In fairness, it’s not an attitude limited to Sirjake, or even to the Tories, many of whom would agree with him. It’s also an attitude shared by Labour, who frequently talk and behave as though those who vote for the Lib Dems or the Greens – or Plaid in Wales and the SNP in Scotland – are really just temporarily estranged Labour voters who sooner or later will return to their ‘true’ political home. The Tories and Labour alike see politics as a two-party affair, trying to bring everything down to the level of ‘it’s them or us’, as though they have a right to expect that anyone against ‘the enemy’ will vote for them. Sunak was at it this week, with his statement that anyone not voting for the Tories is voting for Starmer and the Labour Party.

It’s one of the reasons that they both cling to the FPTP electoral system – it’s a system which encourages people to see things in such stark binary terms. Traditionally, it’s Labour which has suffered more than the Tories under this system – the political ‘right’ has long been more united behind one party than the political ‘left’, but Labour would prefer absolute power for a third of the time than sharing power most of the time. Unusually, the system is currently working against the Tories with the splits on the ‘right’ visible not just within the party (where they’ve always existed), but with another party challenging them for the xenophobic and English nationalist votes on which they’ve long been able to rely.

Part of Sirjake’s problem is that he has been unwilling to follow through the logic of his claim. If all those Reform voters would really have preferred a Tory MP to a Labour one, then a proportional system of voting would have allocated their second choices accordingly. Things aren’t quite that simple, though. An unkind soul might well point out that if you add together the Labour vote and either the Lib Dem vote or the Green vote the total would come to more than the total of the Tories and Reform, and if all of those voters had preferred Labour over the Tories, then the Tories would still have lost.

In truth, whatever system is used, it’s dangerous to assume that all of those voting for Party A would really have 'come home' to Party B on second or third choices. That assumes that people’s second and third choices (to say nothing of their first choice) will follow the logic of an analysis of party platforms and policies. Politics really ain’t like that. And that is the real flaw in Sirjake’s analysis.

Missing the opportunity

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The idea that the way people vote may not always be the result of a careful assessment of the parties and their candidates is not exactly a new one. Graham Wallas, back in 1908 (“Human Nature in Politics”) argued that political opinions and actions are largely the result of habit based on irrational assumptions. I can’t remember exactly where, but another formulation of a similar idea which I came across in 1970 or 1971 described voting as an essentially irrational act. Not everybody would agree, of course, but there is enough truth contained in the statements for us to be wary of those who argue strongly for a position which implies something different. As evidence, of a sort, I can offer one story from my own campaigning history in which an elderly couple told me that they were going to vote for myself and Plaid Cymru “because Labour and the Tories gave away the Empire”. There are plenty of other examples, and few people who’ve ever done any serious canvassing will not have similar stories to tell.

The immediate relevance of this is the debate over the proposed new voting system for the Senedd, which has aroused the ire of some. Some of the criticism is justified; some rather less so. Personally, I’d prefer that the two parties pushing reform (Labour and Plaid) had agreed to implement STV instead. There are problems with all voting systems, but it's always seemed to me that STV is the best – or perhaps I should say least worst. For me, the primary criticism of the closed list system as opposed to STV is that STV allows second, third etc choices to influence the outcome, whilst under a closed list, only first preference votes count, meaning that the votes of people whose first choice is for a smaller party are completely disregarded. Much of the public criticism of the closed list has, however, revolved around a rather different issue, which is about the right of voters to choose an individual to represent them, rather than simply a party.

In small rural community council elections, where most of the candidates will be known to most of the electors, I don’t doubt that the personality and history of the individual is a major factor in the voters’ choice. But the more populous the area choosing a representative, the smaller the proportion of the electorate that will actually know enough about the individuals, and the more likely it is that voters choose based on party rather than person. And whilst some long-standing MPs and MSs like to believe that they have an enormous personal vote, my own experience of canvassing at Senedd and Westminster parliament levels tells me that that is likely to be greatly exaggerated. As a candidate, I’ve had people telling me that ‘I don’t normally vote for your party, but I’m voting for you’, and as a canvasser for other candidates, I’ve had people telling me that ‘I normally vote for your party, but I’m not voting for X’. Candidates hear the positive messages – their foot-soldiers hear the negative ones. It is a fiction of the UK constitution that voters choose an individual to represent them rather than a party, but a fiction that many choose to believe. It's true, of course, that a closed list effectively allows parties to select which of their candidates will be the first to be elected, but the extent to which that ceases to be true under a more open system is somewhat exaggerated.

There is another aspect to this as well. Some of the critics of the closed list have also been quite critical in the past of the quality of some of those elected to the Senedd. There is a certain degree of arrogance behind that criticism, implying as it does that those making the criticism have the knowledge, experience and ability to do better. But let us suppose that the criticism is indeed a valid one. Are electors really in a position to be able to address that, given their necessarily limited knowledge of the individuals? If the quality of those elected needs to be improved, the only people in a position to do that are the political parties themselves. Furthermore, it isn’t just about individuals – if we want a successful Senedd leading a successful Wales, we need the best team. And as any sports fan will know, the best rugby team isn’t the one with 15 outside halves, and nor is the best soccer team the one with 11 centre-forwards. A closed list invites the electors to vote for a team rather than an individual, and that gives the political parties the opportunity to decide who their A-team is and position team members on the lists in such a way as to get that team elected in the order it chooses. The problem with that however is that, in practice, there is no sign to date of the parties abandoning a selection system based entirely on ambition and popularity and trying seriously to assess ability and suitability instead. As it is, they seem to be hell-bent on going for a closed list system which is not as representative as STV and then ignoring the one big advantage that it does have.

Who cares about an arbitrary number?

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There is a long-standing, but rather odd if you stop to think about it, trend for organisations announcing new initiatives, buildings, or policies to concentrate on the cost rather than the substance. It’s as though the PR officers believe that the most important part of the news is how much is being spent, rather than what is being done. Here, here, and here are a few random examples. Anyone wanting to know what the story is really about will never find out from the headline alone. But in terms of the impact, it’s what is being done that is the real story – and the price attached to it is often a largely arbitrary first guess rather than a detailed costing.

That, it seems to me, was always the status of Labour’s £28 billion Green Investment Plan – just another headline lacking in real detail. Just about everyone can tell you how much they planned to spend – few can tell you what they were actually going to do with it. In that limited sense, ditching the headline sum is, or should be, a non-story. The question should be more about what they’re actually now not going to do which they were previously planning to do. And the answer to that question is far from clear in anything that they’ve managed to say so far – it’s all been about the number, which was pretty much plucked out of the air to begin with. Listening to their statements, one could be forgiven for believing that they are not changing their plans at all, just stopping all talk about the cost. But doing what they previously said would cost £28 billion, without spending £28 billion, and sticking to the silly fiscal rule which they themselves have invented is a mathematical impossibility. Whether it helps them politically is another question – switching the debate away from an essentially ridiculous numbers game to a more complex question which the media can’t even be bothered to engage with might help them electorally, but it tells us little about what we can expect from a new government.

The party was, in reality, pretty stupid to name a figure at all in the first place. It might have made a good headline at the time as an indicator of how serious they were about taking  action on climate change without having to do the hard yards to spell out the detailed policies, but that’s a very short term consideration. And it played into the hands of a Tory Party determined to hold Labour to a standard of fiscal responsibility to which they’ve never adhered themselves. To say nothing of a lazy media more interested in the yah boo politics of ‘he said, she said’ than in attempting to explain the seriousness of the situation and the required actions and consequences, let alone the complexities of public finances.

And that brings us to the real, and very sad, story here. It’s not some superficial froth about U-turns and flip-flops, it’s not about the detail of government expenditure and how it is financed, it’s not even about climate change and the urgent need for action. It’s about the one thing – the only thing – to which Labour is now resolutely committed. That is to play the game under Tory rules and abide by whatever constraints the outgoing Tories leave for them. At a time when people seem to be crying out for change, the only thing Labour are planning to change is the people implementing the policies.

Mathematics, Pure and Applied

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In response to a question from the soon-to-be-former MP for Ynys Môn, the soon-to-be-former Leader of the House of Commons expressed her shock at the plan to increase the membership of the Senedd. Following a quick sum which demonstrated that she does at least have a basic command of primary school arithmetic, Mordaunt pointed out that if the size of the House of Commons was based on the same ratio of members to population, there would be 2,058 MPs. She should probably stick to carrying swords – at least then she’d only have to demonstrate the limits of her understanding once every coronation. And silently, at that.

Whilst the outcome of her quick calculation is mathematically accurate, several other things are equally true based on a similar calculation. If the ratio of elected members to population in the UK parliament mirrored the Scottish parliament, there would be 1,591 MPs, if it matched the Legislative Assembly of Northern Ireland, there would be 3,221, if it matched Portsmouth Council (which covers Mordaunt’s constituency) there would be 13,569, and if it matched my local community council, there would be 765,113 MPs. And there are corollaries, of course – if we take the House of Commons as our starting point, the Senedd should have only 32 members, Portsmouth Council should have 2 members, and Town and Community Councils should be abolished. As an exercise in pure mathematics, about the only sphere in which it’s rational to divorce the numbers from all meaning and start comparing apples and oranges, it’s mildly interesting. But in the real world it’s pointless and irrelevant.

The question is, or should be, what is the best number for the membership of a particular elected body, taking into account the population, responsibilities, demographics and geography. And the truth is that there is no ‘right’ answer to that question. Mordaunt’s response – typical of a Westminster MP – is based on the unstated assumption that Westminster has it right. Of course. The body charged with looking at the numbers of members of the Senedd considered a number of what they felt to be comparable legislative bodies across the world, but even doing that contains an implicit assumption that those bodies might have got it right. Ultimately, it’s a matter of opinion, and opinions will differ. Mordaunt, like the soon-to-be-former MP for Ynys Môn, clearly feels that 96 is ‘too many’, but the cynical amongst us might think that they’d say much the same if it was proposed to reduce the number to 10, or even 1.

Few politicians – especially those in an institution which considers itself to have absolute sovereignty over everything, even to the extent of declaring the truth to be untrue – like the idea that some power might be held elsewhere. Fortunately for them (to say nothing of the rest of us) their ‘soon-to-be-former’ status means that they won’t have to worry about it for long.

Drowning slowly rather than quickly

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There was a time in UK politics when a report that Rishi Sunak was consulting Dominic Cummings about how to win the next election would have been treated as some sort of joke. It appears, though, to be true, and some of his own people are worried that Sunak could even have considered the possibility of bringing back so toxic an individual. What struck me, however, was the sheer arrogance of a man who seems to have convinced himself that he is such an expert in electioneering that he can take the wreck of a party – a wreck which he himself did so much to bring about – and turn it, in a few short months, into a party which can present itself as a credible future government. That, and the gullibility of a PM who seems to have swallowed the same idea hook, line, and sinker. Perhaps the PM can be excused, to an extent, for displaying classic symptoms of ‘drowning man syndrome’, although that merely serves to underline the point that many others have made, which is that he’s a politician who simply isn’t very good at politics.

We may never know the full details of the conversation; or rather, we may be left trying to judge which of the two men’s stories is most likely to bear a passing resemblance to truth. It is, of course, possible that Cummings knows a bullet when he sees one heading in his direction, and is secretly delighted to have had enough of a reason to say ‘no’ to Sunak and thereby avoid having to demonstrate his mastery of the impossible, although there’s nothing in his words which suggests such a degree of self-awareness, let alone any understanding of the depth of the problems which he did so much to help create. As for Sunak, he surely ought to have realised from Cummings’ statements and behaviours in the past that the idea that he could have a secret meeting where such matters were discussed without Cummings revealing enough of his own version of the event to act as self-justification and self-aggrandisement was the stuff of fantasy. But then again, ‘not very good at politics’ is not a description which has been used lightly.

In a way, I’m almost disappointed at the outcome. As long as there remains a chance that Starmer will somehow manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory (something which he seems, at times, to be doing his very best to achieve), an election upset remains a possibility. Cummings’ ‘assistance’ would have made for an interesting spectator sport; and allowing him to finish the demolition job on the Tory Party which he has done so well to date would have finished him off, as well as the party. Two birds with one stone, as it were. Sunak will just have to continue drowning slowly by his own efforts instead.

Will Sunak call an election for next month?

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Not because he thinks he’s got any chance of winning it, obviously. That ship sailed and sank a long time ago, and is now lying in pieces at the bottom of the ocean somewhere. The attraction of a snap election lies elsewhere, in the slow-moving but ever more incriminating Covid-19 inquiry. The long-awaited appearance of Sunak and Johnson before the judge leading the inquiry was delayed once because of the party conference season, but it will take another significant factor to delay it a second time, and in the absence of such an event, both men are currently slated to appear during November. In the meantime, the inquiry has had a chance to see and consider some highly incriminating emails, which reveal, amongst other things, that the UK’s top civil servant thought that the government looked like a tragic joke, and that Sunak’s ‘eat out to help out’ scheme was launched with no consultation with the scientists and experts, whose opinion was that it would only help to spread the disease. It’s hard to see how either man can face the judge and KCs without having what remains of their reputations shredded, very publicly. Calling a snap election would be like pushing the pause button. Again.

It's probable that Johnson believes that he can bluster and obfuscate his way through any difficult questions, just as he used to do at PM’s Questions in the House of Commons, blaming Labour, the Civil Service, the media – anyone but himself. He is, quite possibly, stupid enough to think that a judge whose sole task is to get to the truth can be treated like a Speaker whose main task is to referee a bun fight, and that eminent KCs asking precise and difficult questions can be batted away by calling them names as though they were opposition politicians. Maybe Sunak even thinks the same way – his approach to PMQs certainly seems to mirror that of his former boss, albeit minus the snobbish classical references, and without the confidence born of complete and utter shamelessness. But what about the people around them giving them advice? Do they really have so few functioning neurons between them that they cannot see the train crash which awaits their bosses in just a few short weeks?

Calling an election wouldn’t prevent the train from crashing, of course; it would merely delay it – and by not much more than a few weeks at that. And a shredded reputation is still a shredded reputation. But holding an election before it gets shredded might just save a few more seats than waiting until after the shredder has finished its work. There must surely be someone advising him who can see what’s about to happen. Or is it time to order additional stocks of popcorn?