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Labour’s election hopes just got stronger – thanks to Nick Clegg

August 6, 2012 2:16 pm

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Only this morning, we wrote that “a dangerous germ of an idea is now in the Tory body politic – and it will grow fast”. Nobody could possibly have anticipated just how fast. Ill discipline on the backbenches has cost the government Lords Reform, which in turn has cost Cameron his precious boundary review. Constitutional reform has been kicked into the long grass.

And so have the chances of a Tory majority next time around.

Whilst some on the Tory backbenches will rejoice at the shelving of plans to abolish their constituencies (step forward Nadine), the more strategic amongst them may fear that scrapping a move that would cost Labour 20 seats is in effect scrapping a move that gave the Tories a fighting chance in 2015. Update: George Eaton of the New Statesman notes that the Tories need an 11% lead to win the election under current boundaries.

On the current boundaries, with the current polling, the 2015 election would be a Labour landslide.

Not that the 2012 polling counts for anything now – and the election is far from won by Labour, or lost by the Tories. But those scrapped boundary changes? They matter a hell of a lot.

Firstly, they matter because of crude, naked electoral maths. Without boundary changes the Tories will obviously need to win more seats. And that is – of course – more difficult. But this also matters because it’s the prime exemplar of what we were talking about this morning – Cameron’s parliamentary tactics now seem to be:

“Appease the backbenchers. Throw some red meat to the critics. Cling on. And hope for the best.”

Hope for the best on the economy, and the polling and the mood of the Tory Right (the reason why lords Reform was deemed more important than boundary changes). Hope that everything falls into place by 2014 in time for tax cuts and fear-mongering ahead of the general election. It’s not an appetising brew, but Cameron will need to drink it if he wants to be more than a one term PM. Ted Heath in an orange t-shirt.

Meanwhile, Nick Clegg can console himself with the fact that he might save a few seats in 2015 with this gambit – and for the first time he has shown that he understands how coalitions works. Small parties can in fact extract painful concessions from larger parties, rather than just rolling over time and again. Yet he’ll also have an unhappy party, disillusioned that all of the constitutional reforms have come to naught. (Note to Nick: They don’t call them “Conservatives” for nothing).

Ed Miliband and Sadiq Khan will – rightly – attack the government for going back on their word and abandoning Lords Reform. They will do their best, between Olympic events, to expose the weakness the PM is displaying, and noting that this is yet another u-turn. But they won’t be that disappointed. They had already begun to play games with constitutional reform over the parliamentary timetable. When the stakes are as high as they were here, you have to win. They had in mind the prize of boundary reform abolition. Lords Reform will be forced to wait (again), but there can now be no excuses if Labour fails to introduce a full, democratically elected upper house once back in power.

And the prospect of Labour being in power moved a little closer today. Thanks, in no small part, to Nick Clegg.

This isn’t such a silly season after all.

Mark Ferguson is the Editor of LabourList. Marcus Roberts is the Deputy General Secretary of the Fabian Society, and writes here in a personal capacity.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Homfray/510980099 Mike Homfray

    And should we win the election, we ensure that boundaries take into account population numbers and natural communities.

    I’d like us to think about proper regional devolution ensuring that the Lords have less to do, but can do it better

  • 000a000

    “Firstly, they matter because of crude, naked electoral maths. ”

    This is the only reason why they matter. Imagine if it was the other way around and The Tories would have a 20 seat advantage from a massive bias inbuilt into the electoral system. There’s no way Labour would claim some bizarre notion of community or “gerrymandering” (though we’re yet to see anything to back these claims up).

    Still, great news that the hated Lords “reform” bill is dead.

    • http://twitter.com/mistyblulabour dave stone

      Change should bring about benefit – for the population at large, not just political careerists.

      As Pete Reeve, UKIP’s local government spokesman remarked: “By increasing the size of the constituencies it will have the effect of pushing people away, rather than drawing them into the political process.”

      I understand why the Tory ‘leadership’ wants to prevent participation – it’s part of the Old Etonian mind-set: ‘we think we’ll be rather good at leading, leave it to us’ but, as my dear old grandmother used to say: self-appraisal is no appraisal.

      • Redshift

        Totally agree with him in this case (quite rare). If anything we should have more MPs. The cost could easily be offset by reducing the size of (an elected) the House of Lords (or scrapping it altogether).

    • Redshift

      The reason for that bias is that too many voters in too many areas simply hate the Tories because whenever they are in government they act like a bunch of twats. 

      Labour for all their problems when they were in government are not as toxic as the Conservative Party and have more seats they can feasibly expect to win. 

      If the Tories don’t like this then they could back PR (a system I don’t like by the way), but be under no illusions. Their proposals are gerrymandering and nothing less. 

  • http://tangentreality.blogspot.com/ tangentreality

    So given that Labour acknowledge that the current electoral system is biased, will Miliband do the principled thing and support the boundary changes to push them through in spite of Lib Dem opposition?

    Ah. Thought not.

    • Amber Star

      LOL. Good one. Any more jokes where that came from?

      • Chrisfowler08

        Amber you are a Star.

    • John Ruddy

      We’d support fair boundary changes – we’d support changes to the number of MPs that are based on need, not electoral expediency. 

      But these are not those changes.

      • jaime taurosangastre candelas

        …”we’d support changes to the number of MPs that are based on need”

        What does that actually mean?  It does not appear to be Labour policy to support constituencies based on total population, rather than over 18s (i.e. registered or potential electors).  Do you propose constituencies based on some other measure of “need”?

        Once Labour failed to support a total population basis of constituency sizing, then it had no intellectual credibility in supporting the status quo, at least not without advancing any argument at all as to why constituencies should persist in being unequally sized in terms of electors (and in 95% in favour of Labour seats).

        There was a moral choice on both sides:  either equally sized on total population, or equally sized on electors.  Labour chose to support the immoral position in the middle of unequally sized by electors, and then compounded that error by failing to come out with any arguments at all in favour of the position it did adopt.

        • Redshift

          That wasn’t the choice at all. The choice was the status quo or a carefully calculated Tory gerrymandering scheme.

          • Jeremy Poynton

            The status quo is in effect a Labour gerrymandering scheme. This is being corrected in the interests of electoral democracy. Your response suggests you are not a big fan of said electoral democracy. 

          • Redshift

            It isn’t Labour’s fault that the Tory vote isn’t very efficiently distributed. If they had wider appeal this wouldn’t be a problem. The problem is that they have too many no-go areas for a party with ambitions for majority government. Until they address their toxic nature, there won’t be another Tory majority government. 

            Their proposals also conveniently ignore the problem of voter registration, an issue that they have in fact intentionally attempted to exasperate by changing it from household to individual registration. 

      • http://tangentreality.blogspot.com/ tangentreality

        The boundary changes are fair. They are simply trying to equalise the number of voters in each constituency. What’s unfair about that?

    • Cari_esky

      I would also suggest that if the boundaries are made more equal then compulsory voting should also be considered, like they have in Australia.

    • Redshift

      It isn’t an intentional bias that Labour’s voters happen to be more efficiently distributed. If the Tories weren’t so toxic in so many places then this wouldn’t be a problem. 

      The proposals are gerrymandering to ensure that less transient and generally more affluent areas count more in terms of parliamentary seats than other areas. It should be done on population and with some respect to natural communities. 

  • Amber Star

    Ed Miliband and Sadiq Khan will – rightly – attack the government for going back on their word and abandoning Lords Reform.
    —————–
    If they have any sense they’ll STFU & quietly take the ‘win’ of the boundary changes being blocked by the LDs.

    Nick Clegg pretty much offered to do Lords reform Labour’s way, referendum & all. We knocked him back – & rightly so. But gloating & attacking the Coalition would be a mistake. It would only give Nick Clegg & the utterly shameless David Cameron more opportunities to blame Labour as well as – or even instead of - the Tories.

    Ed M & Sadiq Khan will, hopefully, stick to their story of saying that now wasn’t the time; parliament needs to devote its time to the economy & related issues; then let the whole thing go quiet. They also need to work out something that Labour can help the LDs with, just to make sure that Clegg doesn’t u-turn on opposing the boundary changes.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_ZPXYLRVP4XOIGGDJWAL6HUO7U4 David

    This is undoubtedly a politically interesting day: a by-election looms and the possibility of a snap general election appears on the horizon.

    The Miliband/PLP strategy of sniping and picking at the threads binding together the fabric of the current coalition appears to have worked, but winning an election will, I suspect, need much more “meat” for the electorate, and I would question how ready the PLP are to present that vision.

    There is also the vexed question of how much Labour should want to accept responsibility for the “poisoned chalice” that is the current economy: with the European downturn likely to be prolonged and painful even if the Euro itself does not disintegrate, which it may still do, and brewing troubles in both China and the US economies, wiser economic heads within the party may conclude that the best we can hope for is to “ride the waves”, with possible (perhaps even likely?) downsides resulting from these externalities having the potential to reflect back upon the party.

    Upsides to the economy appear to be limited in both scope and likelihood.

    The worst possible situation (and it hardly stretches the imagination to consider it) would be for a renewed global downturn to coincide with the second budget year of a new Labour or Lib-Lab administration; significantly impacting the UK and causing a downgrade of the UK’s rating.  In this scenario the current Lib-Con Coalition government would have neither been replaced sufficiently recently, nor entrenched long enough for blame to be credibly apportioned to its decisions, and a Tory opposition could easily make significant political capital out of such a downturn, having the potential to turn a slight public perception for financial mismanagement (the remnant hangover from the last administration) into a very strong view of financial incompetence which could stick for many years to come.

    May you live in interesting times, the Chinese curse goes: we may yet consider today to be just that.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Graeme-Hancocks/1156294498 Graeme Hancocks

    Excellent.

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