Keir Today, Gone Tomorrow

 If there was a General Election tomorrow, how would it turn out?

Well, as Starmer tries to out- Tory the Tories on spending cuts and out-xenophobe Reform on migration, the bad news for Keith is, he's toast and so is the entire "New" Nu-Labour project.

Three national polls in a row put the far right, Trumpite party of chancers and self-enrichers of Reform in the lead, the latest a full 6% ahead of the government.

With the SNP resurgent in Scotland, the result via Electoral Calculus would produce a parliament of:

REFORM - 305 seats

LABOUR - 142

TORIES - 93

LIB DEMS - 59

SNP - 23

GREENS - 4

IND SOC - 4

PLAID CYMRU- 2

OTHERS - 18

(figures use the latest polls for UK from "Find Out Now" and for Scotland from "Survation".

So not quite an outright majority, but with some rebel Tories and ULSTER!!!men (and they are ULSTERMEN!!!!) there'd be little doubt we would be staring a Farage Premiership in the face...

So let's take a minute to grasp what that would mean:

- no more free NHS treatment, you'll need to pay insurance instead;

- huge cuts in taxes for big business and the wealthiest, cuts in services and benefits for everyone else;

- racism run amok in our schools, communities, public services, and immigration service

- men convicted of assaulting their female partners accepted to be MPs

- an end to most types of employment protection, so it would be much, much easier for your employer to fire you at will;

- tax cuts for private schools, spending cuts for state schools;

- scraping of investment in green technology and energy and spending more on subsidising private nuclear energy companies;

- scrap the BBC(yes, you'll miss it when it is gone) for more TV like GB News ;

- cuddling up to Trump, and Putin

- government by the rich for the rich...

Starmer and co, of course, cling to the analysis of 30 years ago, when Bliar won a landslide victory on a minority vote and then watched it wither away over 3 subsequent elections. With even fewer voters supporting him last year than poor old Jeremy Corbyn got in his much-excoriated and widely misrepresented 2019 result, Starmer is facing oblivion... even although Reform has even less support than he got!

Believe it or not, there is every prospect, thanks to our ludicrous first-past-the-post voting system, that Nigel Farage can become PM with just 29% of the vote: a calumny, an utterly bizarre situation that can and must be remedied via electoral reform and proportional representation (PR) so that broadly speaking, parties' shares of the vote should equal their seats in parliament.

I've only ever heard three arguments against PR:

1. Our current system produces "STRONG GOVERNMENTS".

Erm... ???WTF?? WTF ACTUAL F???!!!

2. Our current system means people know who their MP is.

Well, actually, the vast majority haven't a clue who these increasingly faceless, marginal individuals are. I do follow politics and was previously very involved in political activity - I recall lots of MPs resigning their posts under Boris Johnson and realising I'd never heard of the vast majority of them; this has only increased since; who had ever heard of Andrew Gwynne before his career crashed to a close last weekend over his tasteless Whatsapp messages?

3. Our current system may not be that democratic, but it at least KEEPS OUT THE EXTREMISTS...

Well, we all have our views of what is extreme. The Con-Lib Dem coalition remains one of the most hard right governments we've ever had, but either way, with the polls suggesting Reform could just about win outright with barely a quarter of the vote, that little lie falls by the wayside.

At the Nuremberg trials, Hermann Goring noted that Hitler had come to power legally after an election in which the Nazis polled 43% of the vote and got 43% of the seats. To become dictator, Adolf had to bully and bribe the German Nationalists, the liberal democrats and the Catholic Zentrum parties to vote for him, as well as arresting all the many Communist MPs so they couldn't vote against the Austrian Corporal.

Hermann however, pointed out that, had Germany at the time used the British first-past-the -post system, none of this unseemly cajoling and threatening would have been necessary; indeed, the Nazis would have come to power two years earlier than they did because

"Had the democratic election system of England or the United States of America existed in Germany, then the National Socialist German Workers Party would, at the end of 1931 already, have legally possessed all seats in the Reichstag, without exception.."

Starmer is finished before he has even begun. If he wants any sort of lasting legacy, anything worthwhile or even vaguely distinctive to be remembered for, the least he could do is save us from the fascists and give us PR NOW!

Comrade Corbyn's Last Chance

Labour's losses in yesterday's local elections came as little surprise; and nor for anyone reflecting on how our first-past-the -post voting system works was the collapse of UKIP to just one councillor (from 145) a true shock. Even the Tory resurgence in Scotland was predictable given their showing in last year's Scottish Parliamentary elections (and nor was it that spectacular - one "incredible" result was on the basis of 629 votes on the tenth count to win the last seat in a 4-member ward; not the stuff of revolutions, or perhaps more appropriately reaction).

Unsurprising too was Jeremy Corbyn's vow to fight on and John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, explaining it all away as not as bad as expected. What politician doesn't try that - UKIP after all claim their losses were because they are victims of their own success, while the Lib Dems "Tiny" Tim Farron hailed their net loss of 42 councillors as a stunning success. Among opposition parties, only the Greens (up 6) and Plaid Cymru (up 33) actually had any concrete good news, but both were studiously written out of nearly all news stories.

What is surprising is Labour's attitude, both before but especially now after their bad local showing, to those smaller opposition parties given Corbyn's previous calls for political pluralism. In the face of all reality, they continue to talk as if it is still 1950 and the Tories and Labour stand to poll 97% of the vote between them.

The Greens have debated the idea of working with Labour and others in a "Progressive Alliance". The objectives of such a beast - was it to gain electoral reform or simply beat the Tories? - generated more greenhouse  heat than light at times, as did the vexed question of whether or not the Lib Dems might be welcomed to root among the progressive compost. But with Theresa May's snap election called three weeks ago, the overtures to Labour gained a real urgency given the Tories' commanding lead in the polls.

Green leaders Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley both offered to talk with Jeremy Corbyn, while in almost every region of the country, local Green parties offered to consider local accommodations where Green voters are numerous enough to make a possible difference to the outcome. So far, a couple of agreements have been reached in Brighton Kemptown and in Ealing where the Greens will back the Labour candidate in return, among other things, for a commitment to support proportional representation. Greens have also stood down in Shipley, along with the local Lib Dems, to back the Women's Equality Party against the odious Tory incumbent Philip Davies, but so far Labour are adamant they will stand in spite of having little prospect of success. With a few honourable exceptions such as Clive Lewis, this is typical of their national stance: Labour are prepared to stand down absolutely nowhere at all, for any one else. Period.

On Radio 4 just yesterday, Labour's Lord Faulkener insisted the "minor parties" have been wiped aside and it is a straight contest between Tory and Labour ignoring the fact that these same parties had just won almost exactly the same number of council seats as Labour. A few days previously, speaking in Batley (where, ironically, all the major parties stood down in favour of Labour after Jo Cox's murder), Labour Front Bencher Emily Thornberry responded to a question asking if she felt only two parties - Labour and Tory - should be standing in the elections with a plain, "Yes."

So much for Corbyn's pluralism. And so much for any chances of stopping a Tory tidal wave.

We are where we are in good part because of our undemocratic voting system: first-past-the-post, with its winner-take-all outcomes, had repeatedly produced election results completely at odds with the wishes of voters. Time and time again, Government's have gained outright power with a minority of votes cast - only once since the war, in 1955, has the winning party achieved over half the vote.

Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour Party, recognised this. He declared first-past-the-post as unfit for purpose, especially outside a two-party system, and the Labour Government of 1929-31 actually introduced a Bill for electoral reform which was held up by the House of Lords until the Government collapsed. With Labour's success in 1945, the party's commitment to a fairer voting system was quietly forgotten.

And so we are left with this impasse: Labour decry those on the Left who stand against them as stooges for the Tories because of how the voting system works. And yet they refuse to change that system for all sorts of spurious reasons, but at its core is the repeated mantra that we are a two-party country and the choice we face is purely binary.

These claims however are a denial of reality. While in 1951 97% did indeed vote Tory or Labour, in 2015 that figure was just 65%, with more people (35%) voting for "minor parties" compared to Labour's total of just 29%. Just look at Scotland, where the SNP virtually eliminated Labour and where the party continues to fall relentlessly and the claim that UK politics are binary is immediately swept away. And while UKIP is clearly on the wane in England, this is largely because the hard right Tories have adopted their agenda - there is no dividend for Labour. The Greens, meantime, while not at breakthrough, have continued to grow steadily in elected representatives and their current poll ratings show them at least likely to equal if not just yet better their record 2015 showing.

So what on earth possesses Labour, including Jeremy Corbyn, like some sort of Death Wish?

The announcement of a Progressive Alliance and real reciprocation between Labour, Greens, Plaid and the SNP up to the close of nominations on Thursday would produce a wave of support far beyond the current sum of its parts. The Tories have decried such an entity as a "Coalition of Chaos", but it is in fact the thing they fear most - because far more unites these parties than divides them. Faced off against the lacklustre Tory campaign, an alliance would catch the popular imagination and reinvigorate the political landscape.

And yet, although it is technically possible even now, there is little sign of it from the Labour ranks. Regrettably, and almost certainly in vain, Corbyn puts his party's tenuous and frankly impossible unity ahead of the needs of the country. For the sake of trying to conjure up the illusion of a two-party contest, Labour risk delivering Britain into the grim reality of a One Party state.