13 July 2024
The 2024 General Election (4)
Tag(s):
The 2024 General Election has been described by the polling expert Sir John Curtise as "the most disproportionate electoral out turn in British history.” The media have tended to report Labour's victory as a landslide. It clearly is in terms of the number of seats that they have won with over 400 and the biggest majority since Tony Blair's victory in 1997 but it is in no way a landslide in terms of the electoral vote. Labour only received under 34 cent share of the electoral vote with just 9.7 million voters voting for them, half a million less than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour vote in 2019. With more votes he only got half the number of seats. The turnout was the lowest in recent history with only 60% so Labour's approximately third share of that means that only 20% of the electorate have voted for them and 80% have not. It is therefore impossible for them to claim as they do that they have a mandate to carry out a variety of policies. They clearly have the electoral majority in parliament to be able to do so but they don't have the popular support to do that. What is clear in this General Election is it is not so much about people voting for Labour. As I've explained fewer did than in the previous election but it is about people not wanting to see the Conservatives continue in power after a very mixed record over 14 years with a number of scandals and scrapes that weren't so much to do with policy but to do with behaviour.
The sheer number of parties represented in this election is unprecedented in my memory and there's no question that the introduction of Reform under the leadership of Nigel Farage prevented the Conservatives from competing equally for the leadership. If you combine the Conservatives’ share of the vote at 24% with Reform’s share of the vote at 14% you get more than Labour's share of the vote but Reform’s 14% share was only rewarded with five seats whereas Liberal Democrats with a smaller share of the vote managed to win 71 seats. I think this is not to do with politics but with electoral strategy. Reform is a new organisation with little experience of General Elections and quite clearly had national appeal which they found more difficult to translate into local victories whereas the Lib Dems were extremely clever in the way they targeted particular seats largely defended by Conservatives and even the one I live in, historically always Conservative, returned a Liberal Democrat candidate who at the local level made a lot of noise but very little intelligent impression.
My own view is that for the good of the country I wish Labour well but I think they're going to find it very difficult. As I've explained they don't really have popular support. To win fewer votes than the extreme left-wing Jeremy Corbyn managed in his two previous campaigns in 2017 and 2019 indicates they have not really won popular support and I suspect most people who voted Labour did so out of tradition without really understanding what their manifesto was all about. If we take some of the key areas of responsibility which with one or two exceptions are now run by Labour MPs who have no previous experience of serving in the cabinet:
-
The economy The new Chancellor Rachel Reeves during the campaign said that if they came to power they would inherit the worst set of economic circumstances since World War II. That is absolutely untrue. Indeed, when Labour handed over to the Conservatives in 2010 one of her predecessors admitted that there was no money. While in no great shape the economy is actually performing rather better having turned the corner on a number of measurements, not least a reasonable level of growth and reducing the rate of inflation to the target rate of 2%. Rachel Reeves set out a number of general directions, but she will find it extremely hard to meet the public's expectation for ever increasing public services while the markets as they did with Liz Truss react very badly when new policies are announced without adequate funding.
-
Education I commented in a previous blog on my resentment of the application of VAT on private schools. I went to an excellent direct grant grammar school in the 1960s for which I won a scholarship from my county. in fact, there were fees charged but they were modest. When the direct grant was removed by a previous Labour administration such schools had to decide whether they would become local grammar schools thus losing their edge or whether they would become private and have to charge fees. My school went private but that was a decision forced by the Labour government of the time. We're told by Labour that by charging VAT on private schools they will raise enough new money to hire 6,000 new teachers. That amounts to one new teacher for every three schools, and I cannot believe that that will have any significant effect whatsoever while the destruction of the private schools will have a massive negative effect.
-
Housing Labour has set a target of building 1.5 million new houses over a five-year term i.e. 300,000 houses per year. Nothing like that has been achieved since the 1960s and indeed today there is not sufficient capacity in the industry nor sufficient skills and the whole planning process takes far too long. Labour may have ideas about dealing with that but those won't be implemented quickly as they will clearly run into all sorts of opposition both from local authorities and from local neighbourhoods’ objection to building on Greenbelt. I personally do not object to building on Greenbelt if it is not green and Sir Keir Starmer has talked about Greybelt and in that I have some sympathy with the approach but again it will take time to implement and 1,500,000 houses will not be built by the new Labour government in five years.
-
NHS I have met the new Secretary of State for Healt, Wes Streeting and I found him quite impressive. He says that the NHS is “broken” and it's difficult to disagree with that. However, if it's true it's going to take more than five years to mend it. There are huge issues of investment, morale, and training. We're still at great expense training doctors many of whom are then recruited by countries like Australia where they have better conditions, and we tend to replace them if at all with less well-trained doctors from parts of Asia. My comment is not racist but simply based on the standards of medical care in different countries.
-
Immigration The media, the public and therefore the politicians tend to focus on the scandal of small boats bringing illegal immigrants across from safe countries like France. That is because they are highly visible, and coverage can appear on our television sets much more visibly than equally illegal immigrants coming across in cars or planes or buses or trains. The number of people who come on the small boats is a tiny fraction of net immigration which is at all-time highs and totally out of control. Some businesses like to be able to recruit skilled workers from other countries at lower costs but if so they should not be allowed to do so and should be made to train the huge number of people we have in this country who are out of work not because there are no jobs but because they choose to be so. They claim all sorts of minor medical problems like anxiety. Anxiety is not a state of mental health. It's simply a temporary state of mind that all of us go through at some time.
-
Defence Labour have set a target of increasing expenditure on defence from the current 2.0% of GDP which is the minimum standard NATO countries are expected to achieve to 2.5% but they've made no attempt to explain how this will be done. Even the 2% is a rather unsatisfactory measurement because it includes the country’s expenditure on veterans, i.e. pensions and other costs. Of course, we should bear these costs for men and women who have served in our armed forces but now they are retired they're not contributing anything at all to the defence of the realm. I think if Donald Trump makes it back into the White House this issue will become a major bone of contention between the US and Europe as many US citizens believe Europe does not pay its fair share of defending itself against Russia and other threats.
-
Prisons I think the appointment of James Timpson as Minister for Prisons is a really good one because he knows as much as anybody about the state of prisons. As a successful businessman he and his family are committed to employing a significant number of former prisoners usually with very positive outcomes. He knows about rehabilitation, and he knows how to distinguish between those who can be rehabilitated and those who are more likely to have learnt new criminal skills during their time in prison. He also believes as I do that prisons are not just overcrowded and almost full but have far too many people in them who should not be there.
-
Transport The major problem in transport is the railways which are in a mess primarily because of the poor ways in which privatisation was delivered. It means that in every case instead of a public monopoly we have a private monopoly and I think that a private monopoly will be worse than a public monopoly because of the profit motive. What is really needed is competition and that's what takes place in several European countries like Sweden where the rail service is excellent. The costs are relatively reasonable, and it is because there are companies competing for business on the different railway networks. The answer is not to return to nationalisation. One of my concerns is about a parliament where more than half the MPs are new, with over 150 less than 40 years old, a proportion unprecedented in modern electoral history. I believe that experience in politics is important. The knowledge of history in politics is important and I can remember as I'm sure all of my generation can just how bad British Rail was. Do we really want to go back to that?
-
Energy Labour actually said in its manifesto that there would be lower energy prices. It might just as well have said “pigs might fly”. There is no possibility of lower energy prices. It's much more likely that they will be higher. Some people take seriously the idea that hydrogen could replace gas but estimates show that the cost of that hydrogen would be eight times what it is for gas. We don't have any cheap solutions and I am totally unclear what the new Public Energy Company will do with £8.7 billion, figuratively a drop in the ocean in the energy market.
-
Environment There are many challenges for the new Environment Secretary particularly in the farming industry, but the biggest problem is undoubtedly water. Yet again privatisation simply made the same mistake as with the railways of creating private monopolies rather than a public monopoly and as private monopolies the water companies have been managed purely for profit and dividends by their owners rather than for service and investment. I believe what has happened is criminal and there should be people in gaol for what they've done to what was not a bad public service before and is now a terrible one. But to sort it out the answer again would not be renationalisation. That's never worked either. There has to be competition or if you do have renationalisation it's got to be with the highest standards of performance and that doesn't really happen very often with state-run monopolies.
It is undoubtedly a very challenging agenda and would be for any party coming into government at this time. It is undoubtedly true that the Conservatives have not made the best of the 14 years they have been in power, but I am very concerned about a party having as large a parliamentary majority as Labour has now got. It can be considered almost like a single party state that can do whatever it likes but I think it will find that actually it can't and if it doesn't start to deliver quite quickly on the few promises that it has already made it will come under enormous public pressure, not so much from the political parties sitting opposite in parliament, but from highly dissatisfied members of the public some of whom are starting to protest in ways that don't fit with the conventional style of British politics.
Blog Archive
Boards
Business
Chile
Current Affairs
Education
Environment
Foreign Affairs
Future
Health
History
In Memoriam
Innovation
Language and Culture
Languages & Culture
Law
Leadership
Leadership & Management
Marketing
Networking
Pedantry
People
Philanthropy
Philosophy
Politics & Econoimics
Politics & Economics
Politics and Economics
Science
Sport
Sustainability
Sustainability (or Restoration)
Technology
Worshipful Company of Marketors
David's Blog
|