What follows is an abridged version of an essay by Dr Dan Boucher, academic, commentator and former Conservative Party activist. Labour’s victory in the 2024 General Election was unique and unprecedented, with mass abstentions and low turnout handing them an enormous majority which belied their support on the ground.
The government’s decision to ride roughshod over the pledges it made during the campaign are therefore extremely serious, not least on issues like Europe where we were told that they would not re-negotiate the terms of the Brexit Referendum. Once in power and bolstered by an enormous majority however they have now jettisoned those promises in a flagrant breach of trust which may risk the credibility of parliamentary democracy itself.
The government would do well to draw on historical precedent and take account of wider public opinion when formulating policy rather than relying on its disproportionate support in Parliament.
Labour’s Problem is Greater Than You Might Think
Electoral Upheaval
The impact of the elections of 7th May has been extraordinary and unprecedented.
In Wales, Labour’s one hundred year’s dominance was ended as it was pushed from first to a very distant third place, with just 9 seats out of 96, while the Conservatives, who gained the second largest number of votes in 2021, were pushed into fourth place with only 7 seats. Meanwhile Plaid, who came third in vote share in 2021 came first, with 43 seats, forming the new Government, while the new main opposition party, Reform, with 34 seats, secured no seats at all in 2021.
In Scotland, the change was a bit more restrained but still very significant with the governing SNP’s share of the vote falling by 9.5% at constituency and 13.1% at regional level, while Reform has come from having no seats in 2021 to being, jointly with Labour, the second biggest party in 2026.
In the English local elections, while Reform moved from 2 councillors in the relevant election areas to 1,452, Labour lost 1,498 councillors and the Conservatives, 563.
There is no other way of describing this kind of unprecedented change other than by means of the term, electoral earthquake.
In the context of the post-election analysis and inevitable questions about Keir Starmer’s leadership, some have accused the media of stirring things up, and the Prime Minister’s defenders have said that mid-term election results are often bad. The Prime Minister has a mandate, and he must get on and govern.
Responses of this kind, however, are completely disconnected from political reality because, if anything, the above analysis under rather than over plays the enormity of the presenting moment.
In order to really understand the problem with the argument, ‘let’s carry on the same as usual’, it is vital that we not only come to terms with the events of 7th May, but with the fact that the challenges arising from 7th May are greatly compounded by difficulties that relate back to the nature of the Prime Minister’s 2024 mandate.
Labour’s 2024 mandate is less than straight forward for two reasons:
First, the current government, even at the height of its popularity, without allowing for mid-term blues, had the smallest share of the vote of any modern government, just 33.7%.
To put this in context, in terms of the numbers of votes cast, Keir Starmer’s mandate to be Prime Minister is less than Jeremy Corbyn’s mandate to be Leader of the Opposition in the December 2019 General Election.
Second, this challenge was then compounded by the fact that rather than this relatively tiny vote share for a winning party translating into an appropriately tiny majority of the kind that licenses modest, tentative governance, Labour received the second largest, landslide majority government in living memory. Additionally, and central to the curious mismatch between votes for Labour and the number of seats won, Reform secured a substantial share of the vote which was spread in such a way that it did not translate into seats. They only saw 5 MPs elected in contrast to the Lib Dems whose smaller vote share gave them 72 seats.
Historical Precedent
There have, of course, been times before when our electoral system has thrown up strange results. Most strikingly the October 1951 and February 1974 General Elections resulted in the party with the most votes coming second rather than first in terms of their share of the seats.
In both these cases, however, the difference in votes and seats was not vast and in the case of the February 1974 election it was quickly followed with another election in October. While the results in July 2024 were less problematic in that they did not deny government to the party with the most votes, they were and are problematic in the sense that they produced a government with the smallest ever share of the vote and gave it a landslide share of the seats that was (even in 2024) and is (now to a much greater extent) completely disconnected from political reality.
The UK is almost unique in having an unwritten constitution wherein part of our way of doing things does not run on the basis of hard law but on the basis of conventions, self-restraining constitutional ordinances that get to the heart of the UK political tradition. It is here more than anywhere that we are confronted with the sense that that we are better understood organically as a ‘body politic’ than mechanically betwixt the cogs of hard laws. In this we confront the Burkean nature of our constitution summed up so eloquently in his letter to a member of the French National Assembly.
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity,—in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption,—in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
In the UK, the wisdom that flows from acknowledging the benefit of maximising ‘government from within’ rather than that ‘from without’, has not been confined to questions of general behaviour, but the operation of the constitution itself where we have in the past enjoyed the civilising influence that arises from balancing hard law with convention.
The problem not only with Keir Starmer, but with much of the Labour Party – Maurice Glasman excepted – is that the strength of the UK polity that derives in part from the role played by conventions, and the need to respect them, is not understood let alone practiced.
There is, of course, no existing convention for what happens in the event of the curious mismatch between share of the vote and the number of seats held arising from the last General Election, because we have not been in a place quite like this before. The point about conventions, though, is that they are an expression of a living body politic which develop over time to deal with new challenges as they arise.
A good example is the Salisbury Convention of 1945 through which the House of Lords chose to restrain itself and not vote down bills in the manifesto of the Attlee Government even though the chamber was at that time dominated by Conservative Peers.
While, of course, the impact of the July 2024 election on the House of Commons, and the July 1945 election on the House of Lords, are in some ways quite different such that the kind of restraint required in the latter is plainly greater than in the former, both prompt questions about how far the dominant party in each chamber should push their hard numbers strength given the extent to which this is now demonstrably out of kilter with society at large.
We are faced with a government whose new flagship bill, the first to be mentioned in the King’s Speech, the European Partnership Bill, effectively reverses Brexit.
EU Reset
They will no doubt point out that their manifesto talks about a ‘reset’ in our relationship with the EU and an attempt to develop a more positive relationship going forward but that ‘reset’ is framed in terms of respecting the Brexit result and makes no reference whatever to dynamic alignment.
Regardless of what one thinks of Brexit, those who voted for it voted to leave the EU to take back control and make our own laws. Instead of honouring that vote which was, by definition, a once in a generation vote, not to mention the biggest democratic vote in our history – 17,410,742 votes – the Government is now proposing an even greater repudiation of Brexit through their European Partnership Bill than rejoining the EU.
Rather than taking back control of law-making, they are proposing that, like Northern Ireland, the rest of the UK now gives more control over law-making away than we enjoyed even when we were in the EU! Although we could be outvoted, at least when we were a member state, we had seats in the EU legislature making the laws to which we were subject. Labour must understand that it cannot reverse such a once in a generation mandate to leave the EU, take back control and make our own laws through its proposed European Partnership Bill on the strength of its much smaller conventional single term mandate of just 9,708,716 votes, which does not sanction reversing Brexit and giving back control in any event.
Appropriate Restraint
Going forward two points should be stressed.
In the first instance, this article is not an argument for changing our electoral system. Recognising that First Past the Post can on occasion generate odd results is not a reason to get rid of it. The critical point is that it is understood not as an abstract set of rules but rather a procedure that is sustained within the UK body politic the values of which are there to enable us to navigate our way through any unusual results by means of the application of appropriate restraint.
Moreover, our system offers flexibility in relation to this, courtesy of the rule that rather than having to have a General Election five years after the previous General Election, there must instead be a General Election within five years, so, if necessary, it can happen considerably earlier. This is how our unwritten constitution (which has many great advantages, is central to the UK political tradition, and what it means to be British) works.
In the second instance, while calling a General Election would be one way of dealing with the current difficulty, the need for this might be avoided if the Government adopts appropriate restraint going forward.
In this it is helpful to recall what happened in 1951 which, while presenting a different kind of mismatch, (one where the winning party gets a small majority on the basis of slightly less seats, rather than that the winning party gets a huge majority on the basis of the lowest ever vote share and within two years is confronted by an electoral earthquake which further problematises its position), does provide a lesson in the constitutional imperative for self-imposed restraint.
In October 1951, the Conservatives polled 13,717,851 votes to Labour’s 13,948,385 and this translated into an unusual but modest Conservative majority of just 17 seats. Churchill did not seek a new election but practiced a restrained form of governance. Given that he had a majority of seats he took the unusual step of offering the leader of the Liberals a seat in his Cabinet, mindful that this would then give the Cabinet a majority of votes as well as seats, but the Liberal leader declined.
Churchill then pledged that the government would not offer legislation affecting the privileges of trade unions and undertook not to restore University representation even though it was in the Conservative party manifesto, which stated: ‘We shall restore the University constituencies, which have been disfranchised contrary to the agreement reached by all three Parties during the war.’ When Churchill stood down, Eden immediately called a General Election, so the October 51 Parliament only lasted one Prime Minister and three and a half years rather than five.
If the current Government under any leader wishes to pursue its European Partnership Bill, it must first call a General Election. If it does not do so and deploys its voting strength in Westminster, which is now demonstrably disconnected from political reality, for profoundly controversial purposes in relation to which it has no mandate, it is hard to overstate the electoral implications for Labour at the next General Election, whenever it comes.
Dr Dan Boucher has a PhD in sovereignty and international relations. A former Conservative candidate who left the party in over the Northern Ireland Protocol, he currently works for Jim Allister KC MP, the Member of Parliament for North Antrim and Leader of the TUV.
We would like to thank Briefings for Britain for their kind permission to republish this abridged article. The full account can be found in the attached link here.
