While Americans were celebrating July 4, Britons went to the polls. Well, some of them did, at any rate. The result was a huge Labour landslide . . . with a shockingly small Labour vote:
Current projections suggest Starmer has secured this ‘historic’ majority on the basis of just 35 per cent of the vote, that’s five points lower than Jeremy Corbyn achieved in 2017 and only three points higher than in the disaster of 2019. As the BBC’s polling supremo, John Curtice, points out, this is ‘slightly below that secured by Tony Blair in 2005 and will be the lowest share of the vote won by any single party majority government’. Plus, the turnout, according to the BBC, appears to be around 60 per cent – the second-lowest level since 1885. Only the turnout in 2001 was lower than this, at 59 per cent.
That’s from a few hours ago; the current tally has Labour at 33.8 percent. Regardless of where the final number comes out, nearly two-thirds of the voters will have cast ballots against the party coming into power.
Fine, you may say: Electoral systems are designed to produce governments, and in anomalous situations, that can sometimes mean a government that is very far from majority support or that actually got fewer votes than some other party. That’s true of our system, and it’s true as well of Westminster-style parliamentary systems, albeit in different ways. Labour won fair and square within the rules of its country’s game, and surely the Tories richly deserved their worst electoral defeat in the three-century history of their party.
But here’s the difference: As of this morning, without even time for a transition, Keir Starmer’s Labour now runs everything worth having. It controls the only house of the national legislature with any power. It controls the national executive. It can, by these levers and with a majority of this size, effectively rewrite Britain’s constitutional order, unconstrained as it is by a written constitution with a cumbersome amendment process. It is barely constrained by its court system. Unlike in America, the national government is almost wholly unchecked by local or provincial governments. One-third of the people, voting one time, can change everything.
Our system is still better than this. We still have advantages over countries that never wrote their constitutions down. Our system provides many different checks on whoever is in the White House, and this provides particularly strong centers for resistance when the president’s party has too narrow a popular base to provide big majorities in the House, and too transient ones to roll up overnight a big majority in the Senate and the state governments. The American president is still not a king. But with nothing even closely resembling a national majority, Starmer may be immediately able to govern much more like one than any American could.