Careful What You Ask For Labour Party: Following UK Labour Not Smart Politics

Tuesday, 24 September 2024, 7:52 pm
Opinion: Ian Powell

Labour leader Chris Hipkins is presently in the United Kingdom to learn from the British Labour Party led by new Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Although Leaders of the Opposition are entitled to an annual overseas study trip (Chris Hipkins also went to the UK last year), this one has attracted more than usual media interest,

As examples the Sunday Star Times featured two articles on 22 September. One was by political journalist Henry Cooke Hipkins learning from Starmer while the second was by Stuff National Affairs Editor Andrea Vance British help for Labour’s playbook.

The context was, following the previous Labour government’s hammering in last year’s brutal electoral defeat, former prime minister Hipkins’ keenness to learn from the recent ‘landside’ victory of his British counterpart.

The official election results compiled by the BBC are reported by Politico: Official elections results.

Superficially Hipkins rationale seems perfectly logical. Afterall Labour won 412 out of the 650 seats. However there is a massive ‘but’.

A massive but…when a landslide is not a mandate

Starmer’s victory was not a popular will landslide. Instead it was a consequence of the fundamentally different electoral systems in the UK and New Zealand – ‘first past the post’ and proportional representation respectively.

The reality of Labour’s ‘landslide’ is forcefully explained by British leftwing author and commentator Richard Seymour in the online Sidecar publication (5 July): Majority yes; mandate or landslide no!

How is this for the opening of his article?

Was ever a country, in this humour, won? A majority without a mandate, and a landslide that isn’t a landslide. Labour won 64% of the seats with 34% of the vote, the smallest ever vote share for a party taking office. Turnout, estimated at 59%, was at its lowest since 2001 (and before that, 1885).

He goes on to put his analytical boot in further:

When a soggy Sunak [defeated Conservative prime minister] finally pulled the plug on his flagging, flag-bedraggled government at the end of May, every poll showed Labour with a double-digit lead, at over 40%. Sunak’s litany of unforced errors, as well as the massive funding gap between Labour and the Conservatives and the queue of businessmen and Murdoch newspapers endorsing Labour, ought to have helped keep it that way. Instead, Labour’s total number of votes fell to 9.7 million, down from 10.3 million in 2019.

Other biting observations

Among the many other of Seymour’s biting observations were:

• The Conservatives plunged from 44% to 24% while the far-right Reform UK surged from nowhere to 14% of the vote (but only four seats). The combined Tory–Reform vote, at 38%, was bigger than Labour’s share.
• Labour gains in Scotland were helped by the Scottish National Party’s unexpected implosion.
• The Greens increased their vote share from less than 3% to 7% and took four seats.
• Five new independent candidates opposing the genocide in Gaza were elected, including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn who defeated his Labour rival in Islington North with a margin of 7,000 votes.

Other ‘non-landside’ features

There are also other ‘non-landside’ features. It is rare that a new elected government loses its own seats. But some were lost and others had their majorities slashed.

Jonathan Ashwood, who would have otherwise gone into cabinet, lost his safe seat to one of the above-mentioned independents. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, saw his majority slashed only just scrapping in by just 528 votes.

But capping all this was the slashing of Starmer’s own majority from 27,783 in 2019 (66% turnout with Conservatives in second place) to 11,572 in 2024 (54% turnout with an anti-Gaza genocide independent in second place).

What if it had been known that Labour would have got a worse popular vote in 2024 than in 2019 and that its Leader’s own majority would have dropped by so much (and that was all that was known)?

It is conceivable that Starmer would not have been elected to replace Corbyn as Leader after the 2019 election defeat.

What a difference a political system makes

The British Labour Party’s massive majority in the House of Commons simply highlights how profoundly undemocratic ‘first past the post’ is compared with proportional representation in New Zealand.

If the UK had proportional representation the combined Conservative-Reform elected MPs in 2024 would be nearly 4% more than Labour’s.

Labour would only be able to form a government in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and one other party, such as the Greens or Scottish Nationalists.

Or, to put it another way, if the UK electoral system was based on proportional representation, compared with 2024 Labour under Corbyn would have had 6% more seats in the 2017 election (and only 1% less than in 2019).

British Labour’s rightwing turn

In the 2017 and 2019 general elections Labour could fairly be called leftwing campaigning on transformational policies focussed on ‘for the many, not the few’.

When Starmer successfully stood for Labour’s leadership after the 2019 election he affirmed his continued support for this policy direction.

However, much sooner than later, there was a strong swing to the right including purging many leftwing members.

Combined with demoralisation over this dramatic shift to the right, the impact on membership has been severe.

When Jeremy Corbyn was its leader in 2019 Labour’s membership was 532,000. Under Starmer’s leadership, by the end of 2023 it had fallen by a massive 30% to 370,450.

This shift to the right was reflected in Labour’s complicity, when in opposition to the genocide in Gaza. As mentioned above this complicity also had a negative electoral outcome for Labour.

The effect of Labour’s shift to the political right was that the 2024 election was not between two main parties each of the left and the right.

Instead it was between one of the right (Labour) and the other of the hard right (Conservatives) with the third party and ‘spoiler’ being of the far-right (Reform).
Starmer’s new political friend

What might not have been anticipated is Keir Starmer’s new found political friend Giorgia Meloni who leads the far-right government (much closer to the UK’s Reform) in Italy.

Starmer is in awe of Meloni’s anti-migrant policies. This has recently come to the fore.

On 16 September two separately published articles in Euro News and The Guardian respectively brought this out: Starmer set to contribute millions to Meloni’s anti-migrant initiative and Meloni’s anti-migrant measures.

Since taking office Giorgia Meloni’s government has introduced a number of severe anti-migrant measures such as:

• extending the amount of time people can be held in deportation detention centres to 18 months and ordering the construction of new centres; and
• enacting draconian policies against charity ships in the Mediterranean, with captains facing huge fines if they carry out more than one rescue operation at a time.

During Meloni’s first year in power, the number of people arriving in Italy by boat rose sharply, with the total reaching 125,806 in 2023, almost double that of 2022. But arrivals so far this year have dropped dramatically to 44,465.

According to figures from the International Organisation for Migration, more than 1,400 people have died or gone missing in the central Mediterranean since January.

Chris Hipkins should think about smart politics

Few people would have predicted Labour’s thrashing in New Zealand’s 2023 election when it had thrashed the National Party in 2020.

Labour became the first majority party in Parliament since the introduction of proportional representation in 1996.

But it happened. Looking to UK Labour’s electoral success in 2024 for insights into how New Zealand Labour should approach the 2026 election is not smart politics.

Chris Hipkins should think about the political reality of this. UK Labour’s parliamentary majority is not a reflection of popular will.

Instead it is a reflection of an undemocratic electoral system. Hence, contrary to appearances, Labour’s majority has an inherent fragility within it.

If Hipkins can’t grasp this then he may as well tag on to his overseas trip a visit to Rome to catch up with Starmer’s new friend.

© Scoop Media

Ian Powell

Otaihanga Second Opinion is a regular health systems blog in New Zealand.

Ian Powell is the editor of the health systems blog 'Otaihanga Second Opinion.' He is also a columnist for New Zealand Doctor, occasional columnist for the Sunday Star Times, and contributor to the Victoria University hosted Democracy Project. For over 30 years , until December 2019, he was the Executive Director of Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, the union representing senior doctors and dentists in New Zealand.

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