Are the parties fighting the last war?

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It’s difficult to know how seriously we should treat any individual opinion poll. Different organisations use different methods, particularly when it comes to ‘weighting’ to try and ensure that the sample is representative. But when multiple polls by different organisations over a lengthy period show broadly consistent trends, it’s reasonable to suppose that they are telling us something about what is happening. In the case of the upcoming Senedd elections, I’m still struggling to believe how well in the one case, and how badly in the other, Reform Ltd and the Labour Party are doing. Whilst I can’t simply ignore the data-driven evidence in front of us, I’ll admit that, for someone who spent decades campaigning door to door, the extent and speed of the change is something I’m struggling to understand and accept. It somehow doesn't 'feel' right, and evidence which contradicts experience is always a difficult thing.

Once we get to a situation where there are two obvious front-runners, it’s probably inevitable that those two will start trying to ‘squeeze’ the votes of the other parties by presenting the outcome as a binary choice. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t intensely disappointing. In most of the campaigns I ever fought, I was more of a squeezee than a squeezer, left trying to convince people to vote for what they wanted most rather than against what they wanted least. So-called tactical voting is harder to determine under the new voting system for the Senedd elections, since it will probably only really have an impact on the sixth, or at best fifth and sixth, seats in any constituency, and it’s really hard to predict what will happen as we get down to that level of vote counting. Some of the politicians try to tell us that the new system makes every vote count, but it really isn’t true. Anyone voting for a party (or independent candidate) receiving less than around 10-12% of the vote in a constituency will effectively be, in the eyes of those trying to use the squeezing tactic, ‘wasting’ their vote; such votes will have no impact on the outcome of the election. Denial of the opportunity to register a second or third choice is my main criticism of the new system.

The question isn’t just about the mechanics and technicalities, however. I’ve long wondered just how effective the pressure to choose between Labour and Tory has been or, rather, to what extent the polarisation of electoral politics in the UK between the two largest parties was down to this tactic as opposed to other factors. Purely on the numbers, more recent elections show an increasing tendency away from a two-party polarisation – if it did work in the past, it hasn’t worked so well recently. Not only is it essentially a negative approach, but to the extent that it did work at all, it was never based on any careful analysis of opposing manifestos before choosing the lesser of two evils – it was far more visceral than that. A hatred of ‘the Tories’ on the one side and of ‘the Socialists’ on the other was always a substitute for proper debate between alternative visions for the future. Perhaps the fact that the ‘alternatives’ were generally not that different when analysed more objectively helped that framing. Whether either Plaid or Reform Ltd attract that sort of folk history-based hatred to a sufficient degree (outside the bubble in which the political anoraks live) is surely an open question. 'Stopping Reform' may not be quite the killer line that some seem to think.

They say that generals always prepare to refight the last war rather than the one that might actually happen, and I can’t help wondering if adopting a tactic based on what has historically believed to have been the case and trying to apply it in an entirely different scenario isn’t acting in a similar manner.

Who split which vote?

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When the dust settled, the ‘too-close-to-call’ by-election in Gorton and Denton turned out to be no such thing, and the Green Party gained a very clear victory. That is good news, of course, but even though the margin of victory was solid, the winner only got 41% of the vote. Under a more proportional system of voting, that means that second preference votes would have needed to be counted, and the mathematician and amateur would-be psephologist in me speculated about how the result of that might look.

Of the 11 candidates, eight (accounting for 1892 votes in total) would have been eliminated fairly rapidly and, unless we choose to believe that they would have overwhelmingly (including the 706 Tory votes) gone to Labour, the second choices of those voters would have made no difference to the order of the first three candidates. The final stage of counting would thus have seen the Labour candidate eliminated as well, meaning that there were then 11,256 voters whose second choices would have determined whether the victor was the Green Party or Reform Ltd. With a margin of 4402 between those two parties, those 11,000 votes would have to split something like 2.3:1 in favour of Reform Ltd for their candidate to overtake the Green Party’s candidate and seize the seat. We don’t know, of course, how they would have split in practice. Unless and until someone does some detailed research, it’s all speculation. But the key element of that speculation is a very simple question: of those who voted Labour, despite everything that has happened since the last General Election, would they have tended towards the Green Party or towards Reform Ltd?

Those who cling to the notion that the Labour Party is still a progressive force, and that its supporters are committed to a progressive platform (whatever the word ‘progressive’ means) will be utterly convinced that they would have gone with the Greens, leaving the outcome unchanged. I’m not at all sure that they’re right. Much of the support which Reform Ltd have picked up over the past few years has come from Labour – amongst Labour voters, there is a deeply conservative streak when it comes to issues such as immigration. I don’t think it at all impossible that Reform Ltd would have won the seat in that scenario. (That doesn't make me reconsider supporting Proportional Representation - we need to win the arguments against the likes of Reform Ltd, not rig the voting system to keep them out.)

That brings us to an interesting alternative view of the ‘vote-splitting’ concept. The worry of some before the election was that the Greens and Labour would split the ‘progressive’ vote and allow Reform Ltd to win. What if the real story here is that Labour and Reform split the reactionary, neoliberal, authoritarian, anti-immigrant vote and thus allowed the progressive candidate to win? Those who are still clinging to the idea that Labour is somehow on the side of the good guys might be blinding themselves to the true extent of the danger.

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.

A seasonal budget pantomime

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There is something quite seasonal about the Labour-Plaid deal over the Senedd budget. It is, after all, that time of the year when pantomimes proliferate. In the case of the budget, the Finance Minister knew that he could not get a budget supported only by Labour through the Senedd, so he presented a budget with £380 million unallocated to allow him some space to bargain. He knew what he wanted to do with that money – and he also knew that his priorities just happened to largely coincide with the demands which Plaid would make. So a little bit of negotiation and some changes around the detail, and hey presto – the reserved money gets put back into a budget which ends up looking remarkably like it would probably have looked in the first place, but now supported by a majority. Labour claim a win, Plaid claim a win, and the rest can only proclaim in unison, “Oh no it isn’t”.

Like all good pantos, superficially it’s largely performative. But, again like all good pantos, there’s a serious side to the slapstick as well. In a legislature elected partly on a proportional basis – and which, from next year, will be elected on a wholly proportional basis – no party can expect to have a majority in the chamber unless they attract at least 50% of the vote and, in the currently fragmented political world, that looks vanishingly unlikely in future. Harsh reality says that negotiation and agreement should be the norm; responsible parties need to be willing to compromise in order to ensure effective government. The alternative to the agreement which has been reached was a degree of chaos and the potential loss of large sums of money to the Senedd – reaching an agreement is sound and responsible politics, even if some would quibble with some of the detail.

It's a pity, though, that it requires such dramatics to get there. Maybe, over time, as coalition / pragmatic agreement becomes ever more normal, we can get to the same place faster without cliff-hangers; maybe, if the UK ever adopts a more proportional electoral system for Westminster, Wales won’t look so different from the accepted UK ‘winner takes all’ norm and compromise will come to be more accepted. Then again, maybe not. Perhaps the driver of achieving perceived political ‘victory’ in negotiations will always be a requisite of any agreement in order to try and demonstrate the absence of any type of sellout. But concentrating criticism on whether something is or is not a sellout avoids discussion about the detail. And is wholly in line with the Tory/Reform approach to political debate.

Voters aren't fish, and don't always choose the 'right' angler

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A couple of weeks ago, following a by-election in the Vale of Glamorgan, this blog post talked about the need to count, rather than assume, voters’ second choices. The question about making assumptions came up again on Thursday, in this article by Ben Wildsmith on Nation.Cymru, calling on Gareth Hughes and the Green Party to withdraw from the Caerffili by-election. I’m something of a fan of Ben’s writing: his articles are well-argued, make good points, and are often humorous to boot. But on this occasion, I cannot agree with his logic. The idea that parties seen as outside chances should ‘stand down’ to avoid ‘splitting the vote’ and letting (insert your bête noir of choice here) win is not one I’ve ever been keen on, although my view might be slightly coloured by having been on the receiving end of such expectations on more than one occasion.

There tends to be something of a belief amongst those performing mathematics on polling numbers that there are only two pools of voters. One contains only progressive fish, with Labour, Lib Dem, Plaid and Green anglers all trying to catch them, and the other contains only reactionary fish, with anglers from the Tories and Reform Ltd trying to haul them in. Since the number of fish in both ponds is limited, any caught by one angler are unavailable to the other anglers, and if one of those anglers is better at catching fish than the rest, his total catch is still limited by the number of fish caught by his competitors. And, obviously, the more anglers in one pond, the harder it is to match the catch of the best angler in the other. I’ve knocked enough doors and spoken to enough punters to know that life really isn’t that simple. Voters don’t always stay in their allotted pond, and if the Green angler lays down his rod, some of the fish are as likely to swim into the other pond as they are to leap onto the Plaid angler's waiting hook.

There is a convenient and comfortable myth to which many involved in Welsh politics cling, in which the electorate in Wales is of a radical disposition and finds the Tories toxic. Would that it were so; but whilst it may have been a couple of decades ago, it isn’t today. And the rise of Reform Ltd shows us that Tory toxicity isn’t about policies or personalities anyway, it’s just about branding. Take the same people and the same policies and give them a different brand name, and many voters will, apparently, flock to the cause. To a very large extent, I blame Labour for that. Firstly, because they’ve ceased to be particularly radical or even progressive, and secondly because they’ve depended for so long on one simple attribute rather than arguing for any particular policy platform: being 'not-the-Tories'. It turns out that even those who have voted for them for years, if not decades, have come to believe that Reform Ltd, despite being largely composed of ex-Tories, are also now ‘not-the-Tories’, with the additional advantage of being untainted (as a brand, even if not as individuals) by having failed in the exercise of power.

And that’s the point about the Green angler and his rod. Laying it down simply gives credence to, and reinforces, the idea that all self-identified ‘progressives’ essentially share a perspective, and that ‘progressive’ voters should support the ‘progressive’ candidate most likely to win. I doubt that the Green Party candidate will receive many votes in the by-election (sorry, Gareth), but even if the total votes cast for him is more than the difference between the first and second placed candidate, there will be no way of knowing that his absence would have made a difference – in a first-past-the-post election, his votes cannot simply be added mathematically to those of another candidate. And he will be putting a different perspective and agenda before the electorate – can giving the voters more choice ever be a bad thing?

There is actually a very good case for politicians to come to an agreement on which party will stand where, but it applies only to a single issue and is only relevant in a Westminster General Election. It relates to the question of electoral reform. A short, single issue parliament which passed such a law and then dissolved itself for a new election under new rules would be well worth while. The problem is that that single issue doesn’t neatly split itself between self-styled ‘progressives’ and ‘reactionaries’. And whether Farage will still be as keen on electoral reform if an election under FPTP gives him absolute power on a minority vote is an unanswered question. Not one to which I really want to discover the answer the hard way.

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.

A choice of possible legacies for Starmer

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There is a lot not to like about the new voting system which will be used for the Senedd elections next year. Whilst most seem to object to the idea of voting for parties rather than individuals, I tend to see that as little more than validation of what already happens: people tend to vote for parties not individuals, even if individual candidates prefer to believe that their ‘personal’ vote is a bigger factor than it is in practice. I've been there myself. The bigger issue for me is that, effectively, only first votes count – votes cast for any party which does not win enough votes to gain a seat are effectively worthless. It is simply not true, as proponents of the system claim, that it means that ‘every vote counts’. Like many others, I would prefer a system of STV, which overcomes both of those objections.

As systems go, however, it’s still better than the one we use for Westminster elections. At the last election, Labour gained absolute power and almost two-thirds of the seats. This is described as an overwhelming victory, despite Labour receiving only a little over one third of the vote. Latest opinion polls (and there’s a lot which can change in the interim, including a high probability of a Farage-led implosion) suggest that it’s a trick which might be repeated by Reform Ltd at the next election. It would, again, be described as a huge victory. Opinion polls for the Senedd suggest a similar level of performance by Reform Ltd in terms of votes which, translated into seats, might even make them the largest party – but they would be a very long way short of a majority. And given that their only conceivable coalition partner is the Tories, there is a vanishingly small probability that they will get anywhere near forming a government. Some have talked about how excluding the ‘winners’ from government is somehow undemocratic, but the problem is with language not democracy. A party which can only win around one third of the vote and cannot find one or more coalition partners to get it up to 50% of the membership of the Senedd hasn’t ‘won’ the election, even if it has more votes than any other party. The only thing they’ve ‘won’ is a few seats, the same as any other party represented in the Senedd. Generations of dealing with a system based on first past the post has led us to a degree of confusion about what ‘winning’ means, and we need to recalibrate our language. The ‘winners’ of an election held under a system of proportional representation are those who end up with enough partners close enough in outlook to them to be able to form a government.

There should be a lesson there for Westminster parties (and most especially Labour) in that first past the post may well gift absolute power to Farage and Reform Ltd, but a system of proportional representation would be likely to lead to a very different outcome. As Polly Toynbee pointed out in Monday’s Guardian, based on current polling Sir Starmer has a choice of legacy: he could be the man who reformed the UK’s electoral system or he could be the man who gifted the UK to Farage. The omens are not good. Not just because this is not a man who never seems particularly enamoured with the idea of changing very much at all, but because he also seems to belong to that strand of thought which has long dominated the Labour Party which would prefer to exercise absolute power occasionally (leaving the Tories or even Reform Ltd to hold similarly absolute power the rest of the time) than share power almost continuously. Choosing between enabling Farage and blocking him ought to be what is jokingly called a no-brainer, but Sir Starmer seems likely to make it literally so, by avoiding the engagement of a single neuron in the process.

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.

Understanding what winnng means

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What ‘winning an election means is not as straightforward a question as it might appear. It’s easier to answer in an individual constituency or ward than it is overall: under first-past-the-post, (FPTP) it’s whoever gets the most votes, whether that amounts to an overall majority or not, and under any of the various alternative systems used in different places, the winner(s) is/are the candidate(s) who come out on top after the various rounds of counting. Looking at the situation overall, however, it’s too easy and simplistic, especially for those whose understanding is based primarily on FPTP, to conclude that the party with the highest number of seats or votes is ‘the winner’. It is on that flimsy basis that some polls are suggesting that Reform plc could ‘win’ the next Senedd election.

There is, though, no serious suggestion that Reform plc will win a majority of the seats – and nor will any other party on the basis of any polls taken to date. Though neither party will particularly thank anyone for pointing it out, the likeliest outcome of the next Senedd election is some sort of arrangement between Labour and Plaid, even if they are the second and third placed parties (whichever way round) in terms of seats. Surely, the real ‘winners’ of the election will be the party or parties that form the next government rather than the one with the numerically largest number of seats? The only way that Reform plc can be part of any government in the Senedd is by coming to some arrangement with one or more other parties. And there is only one other party likely to countenance that. It’s not entirely impossible, based on current polling, that Reform plc and the Tories between them might garner enough seats for a majority, but it stll appears vanishingly unlikely. Talk of Reform plc ‘winning’ the election is somewhat overblown in that context.

Whether it’s right that the largest party should be excluded from participating in government purely because they cannot – either alone or by working with others – conjure up a working majority will be perceived (and presented) by some as some sort of affront to democracy, but it really is not. It is an inevitable possible consequence of a more proportional system of voting under which more parties are enabled to have representation for their viewpoints. And the simple fact is that Farage and his crew are unable to command a majority for their views in Wales. The fact that a party representing only a minority viewpoint cannot end up with a majority of the seats is a positive feature of PR, not a flaw or bug. It’s just a pity that England insists on keeping a system which does allow that to happen and imposing it on us when it comes to government at the UK level. It’s a mistake – albeit one made by plenty of political commentators – to allow our thinking to be constrained by English norms into believing that the party with the largest number of seats is always the ’winner’, and talking in such terms only emboldens those who would wish to cry foul.

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.

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.

Quantum voting

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Most of us are familiar with Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment about a cat in a box. Not so many realise that the point is not simply that we don’t know whether the cat is dead or alive until we open the box, but that the cat is, under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, both dead and alive until the box is opened and the cat is observed, at which point the uncertainty resolves itself into either a dead state or a live state. Until that point, not even the cat knows whether it is dead or alive, because it is both. It’s a hard concept to get one’s head around, but Schrödinger’s point was to demonstrate how foolish it is to seek to apply quantum uncertainty to real world physics, even if it is indeed odd that such fundamental uncertainty at particle level does not reflect itself in classical physics.

The UK is on the brink of running a rather different large scale experiment on the applicability of quantum uncertainty in the real world. According to Sunak, any vote for a party other than the Tories is a vote to put Starmer into Downing Street, whilst according to Labour, any vote for a party other than Labour is a vote for the continuation of a Sunak government. If both are true, it must mean that around 30% of the votes cast in the coming election will enter a state of quantum uncertainty when they are placed in the ballot boxes. At that point, those who thought that they had voted against both the two largest parties will actually, under the Labour-Tory interpretation, have voted both for and against both Labour and the Tories. This uncertainty will only resolve itself when the ballot boxes are opened and the papers counted, at which point the application of the Labour-Tory interpretation to voting will be shown to have been as foolish as the application of the Copenhagen interpretation to that imaginary cat.

For those of us who prefer to live in the real world rather than that postulated by strange thought experiments, what the observation and measurement will tell us is, firstly, that around 30% of the electorate will have rejected the idea of both a Tory government and a Labour government and, secondly, that most of their votes are essentially worthless because those behind the Labour-Tory interpretation have rigged the rules of the experiment to allow only two possible outcomes in most constituencies. If either of them really believed what they say, they would be arguing for a system of voting which allowed that 30% to express for themselves which of the two biggest parties they like most (or, perhaps, hate least) by indicating their second and subsequent choices. The main reason that they don’t do so is because they fear that, if they did, they might find that an awful lot of the ‘firm’ choices they receive from the 70% or so voting for one or the other are already concealed second or third choices being made by voters with pegs on their noses, and that the whole idea of ‘the two biggest parties’ is itself a largely imaginary construct. Just like Schrödinger’s poor cat.

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.

So stupid, it's almost clever?

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It is a feature of the UK’s electoral system that one party gets absolute power on the basis of a minority of votes, whilst opposition parties are rendered impotent. Occasionally – very occasionally – however, circumstances conspire to place a certain amount of power in the hands of the opposition.

The possibility of a future resurrection of HS2 is a case in point. In an attempt to not merely kill the project, but to drive a stake through its heart and garland the coffin with garlic, Sunak is rushing to try and cancel contracts and sell off the land already purchased. But land sales can take time, and in all probability there are less than 12 months to go before an election which all the polls and pundits predict will usher in a Labour government. If Starmer really wanted to resurrect the project (as most of his party colleagues north of Birmingham seem to be demanding), then he could announce that he will immediately reverse any land sales as soon as he gets into office. It wouldn’t stop land being sold, of course; but if people really believed that the time, effort, and money that they would need to put into acquiring the land would, in all probability, be wasted, most of them would think twice before rushing into any deals. The government could respond by selling off the land cheaply (rather than at a higher price as some have predicted), but any valuer looking at a repurchase by the government would presumably take that lower price into account when assessing market value. Instead of which, Starmer is standing on the sidelines bleating about the Tories tying his hands by selling off land, and using that as an excuse not to commit. It’s possible, of course, that he doesn’t want to build HS2 – a respectable position, even if large swathes of his party disagree with him – but he’s choosing to hide behind the Tories instead.

Meanwhile, it turns out that, despite what he said and what most of the media reported last week, Sunak most emphatically did NOT announce the electrification of the north Wales mainline. Not only is the figure he placed on the cost little more than a finger in the air estimate, he’s now saying that nothing on the long list published last week was intended to be taken seriously, it was just a list of illustrative examples. A bold attempt to counter the fact that he had p***ed off large swathes of the north of England by pleasing a larger number of people elsewhere has ended up p***ing them off too. Perhaps he was just insufficiently clear about the actual status of his little list, but it looks more like a wholly deliberate intention that people would be so delighted at his ‘announcements’ that they wouldn’t scrutinise the detail too closely. Or maybe he’s enough of a realist to understand that nothing he can or say do will avoid the looming defeat and that his best strategy is to make things as difficult as possible for an opposition which has committed to accepting his policies and budgets as a starting point, no matter how unrealistic and incoherent they might be. He might almost be so desperately incompetent as to be clever: perhaps the stupidest one is the one who accepts unrealistic budgets and incoherent policy as a valid starting point and tries to work from there.

Considering second choices

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One of the problems of the oft-vaunted ‘progressive alliance’ is the difficulty in defining what a ‘progressive’ actually is. For most of those promoting the idea, it seems to be more-or-less equivalent to ‘anti-Tory’; but being anti one thing isn’t at all the same thing as having a common platform or a shared set of values. Another of the problems is that it runs up against the tribalistic inclinations of many politicians, especially those in the Labour Party who believe that any sort of electoral alliance involves, in essence, other parties standing aside for Labour. A third problem is that it involves clearly identifying which anti-Tory party is best-placed to beat the Tories in any particular seat, communicating that effectively to the electorate, and persuading them to vote for that party in order to defeat the Tories.

That last issue is currently playing out in the seat abandoned by Nadine Dorries after she was foolish enough to believe that a promise made by Boris Johnson might actually be honoured. The parties and pollsters are busily trying to profile the electors in the seat to decide whether the constituency is more akin to those seats snatched by the Lib Dems over the past year or so or to those snatched by Labour – in both cases with stunning swings unlikely to be repeated in a general election. A poll commissioned by the Labour Party shows the race as being neck-and-neck between themselves and the Tories (quelle surprise), and I have no doubt that the Lib Dems are, as usual, distributing tens of thousands of leaflets containing dodgy bar charts demonstrating why ‘Labour can’t win here’. The result, according to Labour, is that there is a danger of the Tories sneaking through the middle – their vote could collapse compared with last time, but without voters lining up behind just one of the other two challenging parties, their residual support could end up being still high enough for the party to retain the seat.

It's also clear that both Labour and the Lib Dens are getting ready to blame the other for such an outcome. For once, and despite their presumed use of dubious statistics in support of their campaign, the Lib Dems are marginally on the higher moral ground here. They have consistently supported a system of proportional representation which would allow voters to express a second choice rather than just a first. If, as both parties seem to believe, the supporters of both parties really do see the other as preferable to the Tories, then the electors would easily settle the question as to which was best-placed to defeat the Tories, albeit that that would not become clear until after the votes were cast and counted. The Labour leadership, however, remain firmly wedded to the idea of ‘first-past-the-post’ elections, a position which effectively means that they would prefer a Tory victory to an outcome which more fully expresses the views of the electorate.

Fortunately, not all of Labour’s leaders share that approach, however. Here in Wales, the government has published more detail on its proposals to move to a much more representative electoral system. Much of the criticism of the changes has concentrated on the fact that they are proposing ‘closed’ lists, under which people can only vote for a party rather than the individuals. It’s a reasonable point, although it’s the system that has been used quite happily for the Senedd list seats and for electing MEPs for some years.  It also skates over the fact that the extent to which people vote for individuals rather than a party in the first place is greatly exaggerated, both by politicians themselves who want to claim some sort of personal mandate, and by media outlets who want to portray politics as being primarily about the careers of individuals. To me, the bigger criticism by far is that the system revolves entirely around first choice votes; voters casting a vote for a party which doesn’t achieve enough votes to win a seat in a constituency have their votes effectively excluded from affecting the outcome at all. If they knew that, in the event of the party for which they cast their first vote failing to achieve any representation on the basis of first choice votes, their second choice vote would be counted, that would encourage more people to see their votes as having a relevance, as well as producing a result more reflective of public opinion. Whilst the proposals are a huge step forward from where we are, it’s a missed opportunity to do the job properly. As ever, established parties really don’t want other parties gaining any sort of toehold.

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.

Appealing to the minority

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Most of the most fervent supporters of Laura Norder, in her rawest and most vengeful state, tend to prefer to see her dressed in deepest blue, and are highly suspicious of attempts to lighten the shade a tad, never mind choose a different colour entirely. The result when the Labour Party attempts to steal ownership of the issue from the Tories is that it ends up sounding either like empty rhetoric (“tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”) or like an even more extreme version of the Home Secretary of the day. Tony Blair ‘only’ had to outflank Michael Howard in the role; the increasingly hapless Keir Starmer has to deal with the deranged Suella Braverman. Desperate times call for desperate measures, some might say, which may help to explain Labour’s highly personalised attack ads on Sunak over crime issues.

It's not entirely unreasonable in principle to seek to associate the current leader of the Tory Party with the actions of his party’s government over the past 13 years, even if he wasn’t even in parliament for the first five of those years: the buck stops at the top. It does, though, make it harder for anyone with any sense of rationality or fairness to argue that the actual DPP at the time a decision was taken not to prosecute Jimmy Saville was in no way responsible for the decision taken by the organisation he headed, which was the essence of Johnson’s unpleasant slur against Starmer. And there is at least a danger that extending the criticism of Sunak all the way back to 2010 ends up sounding like a criticism for not changing the rules and processes bequeathed to the Tories by Labour following the 2010 election. Fighting fire with fire is one thing, but joining one’s opponent in the gutter is another entirely. One of the earliest moral strictures drummed into me as a child was that two wrongs don’t make a right; the Tories may have started the descent into the gutter, but that’s a wholly inadequate reason to join them there.

The third attack ad has been widely interpreted as being an attack on the PM’s wife, but it seems to me that, looked at in objective terms, it is the most valid of the three to appear to date. It is a matter of recorded fact that the Sunak household benefitted from the availability of non-dom status for tax purposes, and when it came to light, he seemed to see nothing wrong with the arrangement as a matter of principle. Certainly he did nothing as Chancellor, and has done nothing as PM, to abolish or limit the availability of the status, and whilst that’s a sin of omission rather than a sin of commission, it’s entirely fair to pin that one directly on him, in a way that blaming him for sentencing by the judiciary simply is not.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, all the reports suggest that Starmer is delighted by the reaction to the ads. It’s an approach which has left many, including members of his own party, uncomfortable and uneasy, but he doesn’t care. It’s not as if they’re going to vote Tory as a result. All he cares about is appealing to those voters who can win or lose him the next election. We can be certain that he will have had detailed analysis showing who these people are and what they care about, but we can get a long way towards answering those questions by some simple arithmetic. To win an absolute majority, he needs to win 128 seats directly from the Tories; to displace the Tories as largest party, 79 seats would do the job. Assuming that all the extras come as direct changes from Tory to Labour, he needs about 150,000 people to change their votes to win 79 seats, and around 500,000 to change their votes to achieve an overall majority. They are the only votes in whom he is interested; he can and will forget the other 46 million voters.

The problem with identifying such a minority slice of the electorate is that they are unlikely to be typical of the rest of us: appealing to Tory voters who live in seats with small Tory majorities necessarily involves appealing to a comparatively tiny minority of the electorate, and one likely to hold more extreme views. People who believe that the justice system is about punishment, not protection of the public, rehabilitation or re-education, and that the more people thrown into prison for longer terms in poor conditions the better. Many probably also want to bring back hanging and flogging. People who don’t like foreigners, especially those of a different skin hue, and think the EU is some sort of evil empire. People for whom the not-so-subtle racism invoked by associating a picture of a PM of Asian origin with a message suggesting that he is lenient on grooming gangs is more of a wink and a nudge than a red flag. They could have taken a different decision; they could have decided to try and appeal instead to those Tory voters (yes, there are some) who have been turned off by the dishonesty, sleaze and sheer incompetence of the last three PMs; they have instead decided to go after those voters to whom all the worst attributes of Johnson actually appealed.

At it’s simplest, it’s case of seeing the end as justifying the means, but it’s another serious indictment of an electoral system where parties know that they only need to pitch their appeal to a tiny minority of voters. It would never work in a properly proportional system.