UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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This would be a bad result.
I want the Tories gone. I am content for that to be a Labour majority - although I think we'd get a far better quality of government (including much-needed electoral reform) if Labour were the largest party in a hung parliament and depended on Lib Dem support. Governments that have to convince people other than their own supporters to vote for their policies tend to come up with more rigourously thought-through policies and pay more attention to addressing their critics' concerns.
But regardless of whether you agree with that last statement, Labour winning 535 out of 650 seats (on barely a majority of the vote) would be a recipe for atrocious government. We'd have to rely overwhelmingly on their own backbenchers to be the ones to scrutinise and hold the government to account, in the absence of an opposition presence - and the vast majority of those backbenchers would be people who only just entered Parliament themselves for the first time, many of them likely people who were selected for their seats without expecting to win, and who wouldn't even know what they were doing for the first few years.
Maybe from a purely democratic point of view, however in the current environment it's better than what we have now and it's a reflection of the general mood of the country.
Blair had big majorities and we look back on this as a period of good governance up until the war and identity cards.
Blair had 418 MPs to 232 opposition MPs (including 165 Tories and 46 Lib Dems). So Labour outnumbered the opposition about 2-to-1, which wasn't great. Even then, Blair voluntarily chose to work with other parties, such as the joint committee on constitutional reform.
The Flavible prediction for these polling numbers would give Starmer 535 seats to 115 opposition - so Labour outnumbering the opposition nearly 5-to-1.
And far from working with other parties, Starmer is currently purging long-standing Labour pluralists like Neal Lawson. That's a very different proposition to 1997.
Also Blair went into the 1997 election with 271 MPs (the 1992 result plus defections and by-elections) - so around 1-in-3 of his 1997 party were rookie MPs. Starmer is going in with 195, so roughly 2-in-3 of his MPs would be rookies - yet, to a far greater extent than 1997, we'd be relying on those rookies to hold the government to account as if they were wily experienced old hands.
A government with a big majority is essentially a 5-year dictatorship. It's the worst of both worlds - not only do they have barely any short-term accountability but no long-term planning is required either.