The campaigning for the General Election in the UK on 12th December 2019 is well under way. It is quite clear that Brexit is one of the key issues. I still think that using a General Election to determine how we move forward with Brexit is the wrong thing to do; and also that having one key factor (Brexit) as the reason for choosing a government is an incredibly dangerous approach. Even though Boris Johnson would like to make Brexit the only issue - his answer to every question seems to be "get Brexit done" - the good news is that some others are coming to the fore. This will be bad for the Conservatives because they have such a terrible record on pretty much everything over the last 9 years; but will these other issues have enough weight to stop this being a one issue election?
The problems with having a General Election mainly based on the one issue of Brexit are as follows:
- Whichever party gets into power will claim that this gives them a "mandate from the people" to execute their Brexit strategy. This is very unlikely to be the case. Even if that party had more than 50% of the vote, which has not happened since before the Second World War, they cannot be sure that people were voting for them because of Brexit. For example, there will still be Remain supporters voting for the Conservatives and Leave supporters voting for Labour or the Liberal Democrats because of their other policies. In the more likely case that the winning party has less than 50% of the vote, trying to claim that they have majority support for any individual policy would just be nonsense.
- People voting for a party based on just one issue could result in a majority government that then moves forward with a whole program of works that actually has little support from anyone. General Elections need to be based on the "whole package" and not just one high-profile issue that masks other important factors in the party's manifesto.
The current "first past the post" electoral system that is used in the UK does not help with any of this. This system usually results in the party having the largest share of the vote gaining a majority of seats in the House of Commons, and so being able to implement its policies with little resistance from the opposition. Normally, that share of the vote is less than 50% - as mentioned above, the last time the winning party had more than 50% of the vote was before the Second World War. It is even possible for the winning party not to have the largest percentage of votes, and still get the most seats, which would make an even bigger mockery of any claims to have a mandate for anything. I think we need to move to a more representative electoral system where the numbers of MPs in the House of Commons more closely matches the percentages of votes given to each party. I know this would frequently result in "hung" parliaments, i.e. no one party has the majority of MPs, but we would then have to get parties working together to progress policies more acceptable to the majority of voters. It would avoid wild swings from one extreme to another as the party in government changes. Currently, 40% of the vote could result in a party getting 60% of the seats and being given the power to freely implement policies not supported by the majority of voters.
In his recent campaigning, Boris Johnson has been using the word "democratic" to imply that MPs voting against him and his Brexit policies have been acting undemocratically. This is just not the case - it is not the job of all MPs to represent the opinion of the "winning" side, whether that is after a General Election or after a Referendum. Those voters on the "losing" side should also still be represented in Parliament. He either does not understand how our system of democracy works, or he is just name-calling in a feeble attempt to wind up the electorate against his opponents. Boris Johnson also says that he is only holding this election to clear the way for Brexit. This is again clearly not true. He was starting to make progress with his own Withdrawal Agreement (which is mostly the same as Theresa May's Withdrawal Agreement) but decided to put that on hold in an attempt to win a majority in Parliament to allow him to force through the Brexit that he wants, not necessarily the Brexit that the people want.
One very positive thing is that there does seem to be a lot more attention to whether the statements made by the parties are actually true - there is a lot more "fact checking" going on. This is badly needed, though there has already been one case of the Conservatives making their Twitter feed look like a fact checking service in order to discredit Jeremy Corbyn during one of the televised question and answer sessions. There were no apologies from the Conservatives for this, they seem to think it was perfectly OK to try and misrepresent their own biased views as a fact checking service. However, Twitter have said if they do such a thing again, then they will take action. The service that I use the most for this is Full Fact. I take the view that anything said by a campaigning politician should be treated with suspicion until it has been checked against such a service.
I will do one more post before the election to summarise the position as I see it. My hope for this election is that the Conservatives are not returned with a majority. If they are, that would allow them to continue unfettered on their path of destroying the United Kingdom. Their record over the previous 9 years was bad enough, but since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister and appointed his cronies to ministerial posts, things have got significantly worse. This is now a party that will do what is best for the rich, for big business and for themselves - not what is best for the whole of the United Kingdom. They talk about "One Nation" Conservatism, but that is not what they are practicing. My ideal result would be that the Conservatives are not in government after 12th December, but unfortunately I can't see this happening at the moment. Maybe things will change over the next two weeks. I certainly hope so.
Gerontios
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