YOU BETTER NOT LOOK DOWN [456]

Sir Keir Starmer's official Prime Ministerial portrait

“Whoso pulleth out this sword from this stone and anvil is the true born King of all Britain.”

The opening spoken passage of Rick Wakeman’s “Arthur” is just about the only part the BBC have not used to introduce their General Election coverage since 1979, but with each seat having been contested contested on the premise of “may the best person win”, a place could surely be found.

I followed this election through my fingers from the moment it began. The unforced errors of Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party campaign ranged from calling it in the pouring rain, announcing the return of National Service, leaving the D-Day commemorations in France early, through to investigations into party members’ insider knowledge for betting on when the election would take place, and the disputed “£2,094” per household that having a Labour party in government would cost. Having a working state for the cost of a Sky TV subscription, something Sunak counted not having as a deprivation in his childhood, could be a good deal.

While Sir Ed Davey seemingly went on an extreme sports holiday to bring attention to the Liberal Democrats, and Nigel Farage decided we were worth his attention over Donald Trump, all Sir Keir Starmer had to do was remain statesmanlike, talk about returning politics to service, and following through on that once elected... 

Then the election became about keeping transgender women out of women’s spaces, with Starmer saying he thought they shouldn’t be allowed, and offering to meet J.K. Rowling to discuss her concerns, as the de facto leader of the “gender critical” movement, which abjectifies an entire group of people by asserting sex over gender at all costs. Starmer wants there to be a “reset moment” for trans people, removing the toxicity from the national conversation, but I would love to find out how he will do that.

Once again, I tried to watch the election results through the night, expecting the momentum prompted by the exit poll’s prediction of a Labour Party landslide to drive the TV coverage. I had seen enough polls predicting a “supermajority” of five hundred seats for Labour, but I was expecting a result like that seen in 1997, which was 418 Labour seats to the Conservatives’ 165 seats. The exit poll had 410 versus only 131, and while the thirteen forecast seats for the right-wing Reform UK were concerning, this was explained as being due to lack of sampling data, expected to be revised downwards. There was enough to talk about, but the first hour of coverage was dominated by a race to declare the first result. 

I mostly stayed with the BBC’s TV coverage, as ITV and Channel 4 had opted to include former politicians in their core teams – one verbal spar between Alistair Campbell and Nadine Dorries put me off Channel 4 for the night – and ITV had centred its coverage around one massive, visually uninteresting desk. After a full day’s work, and no longer able to keep my eyes open, I wound up retiring to bed at 12.45am, with only six results having been called. I woke up again at 4.40am to Rishi Sunak winning his seat for the Conservatives, but conceding the race – Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer had become Prime Minister, his party eventually winning 412 out of 650 seats, with a total of 33.7% of votes cast, on a 60% turnout.

What the public was voting for appeared not to be Labour, but Not-The-Tories, or Not-The-SNP in Scotland. Tactical or protest voting caused seats previously safe for one party to become more marginal this time around. People punished the Conservative government for leaving the country in a worse condition than when they assumed power in 2010. Meanwhile, some independent candidates won over parties due to specific issues like the war in Gaza. The First Past the Post system rewards the winner, but it means Labour enters Parliament with a shallow voter base.

The biggest protest vote was for Reform UK, the fourth party under which Nigel Farage has run for Parliament, which won five seats despite receiving 14.3% of votes, splitting the right-wing vote with the Conservate Party. If your party gets few seats because most of your candidates came second or third, then of course you could have done better if the rules were different. Changing to a proportional representation system would have benefitted the Liberal Party in 1974, the SDP in 1983, and Reform UK in 2024, but wanting to change the system because it would benefit you specifically is suspect, especially after a referendum in 2011 to change to an “alternate vote” system was, well, voted down.

It is imperative that, for whenever the next election take place, the Conservative Party regains its focus. British politics is usually fought from the centre ground, moving further left or right leaves people behind. Voting for Farage’s parties has been used most effectively as a blunt instrument in previous local, general and European elections, and while Farage talks of professionalising Reform UK, still currently a limited company over which he has the most voting shares, his stated aim of supplanting the Conservatives won’t happen if the Conservatives take his place first.

As for the new Prime Minister, all he needs to do is make our lives better while keeping the noise down. If he does, we might allow him to keep doing it.

WE’RE ALL GONNA ROCK TO THE RULES THAT I MAKE [211]

It is unlike me not to engage with politics, or to even follow it, as my writing here attests, but when it came to the 2019 General Election, and the inevitability of a Conservative win in order to end the deadlock over Brexit, I switched off very quickly. I received my postal vote nearly three weeks before the day of the election, and put the completed vote through my town hall’s letterbox hours before the Conservative Party announced their manifesto. Once the exit poll was declared at 10pm on Thursday 12^thDecember, declaring a Tory victory by 80-plus seats, I lasted fifteen more minutes before needing to watch something else – I missed the election-night tradition of looking into the counting taking place at the UK’s enormous variety of sports halls.

I consider myself politically to be slightly left of the centre, meaning I usually vote for a different party with each election, but never the right-wing Conservatives. Then again, my home town has had a Conservative MP since at least 1835 – only three different MPs have represented the area in the last seventy years, and the latest one, coming up on their tenth anniversary, just increased their majority. My dissenting vote made as much difference as it would by eating it, or setting it on fire. 

At that point in the election campaign, the Conservatives had already put out a misleading social media ad, making it look like Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer could not answer a question on “Good Morning Britain,” and Conservative Central HQ’s Twitter page was renamed “Fact Check UK” during a TV debate. These sleights of hand are what you are used to looking out for on social media anyway, and have been part of election campaigns since the invention of posters, let alone radio or television. As a film scholar, I was particularly offended by the Starmer ad being described by James Cleverly, the unfortunately-named Conservative Party chairman as having been “edited” instead of “doctored,” as if I wasn’t reading it properly – I hope he has accidentally stepped on a Lego brick since then.

Having afforded myself the relative luxury at looking at the election campaign after having voted, I personally do not believe that the Conservatives won due to the ongoing Brexit issue, or on public services, or in comparison to how bad the Labour or Liberal Democrat campaigns went: it was because the Conservatives were so pervasive in the discourse of the election, and that came from everyone, not just the media. They ran the clearest, if least detailed campaign: “Get Brexit Done,” then some other things. They had the least robotic leader – Boris Johnson looks like a child’s drawing of his brother Jo. They had the least overlap between themselves and the other parties, with all parties in competition with them.

However, I am perturbed by the talk following the election about how Boris Johnson will now govern as Prime Minister. Yes, he will not have to pander to the right-wing of his party, or towards the centrist MPs that lost the party whip during the last Parliament, and now their seats. Having won so many seats in the north of England, traditionally Labour territory, what effect will this now have on decision making? Shouldn’t we have had more of an idea of Johnson’s attempt during the campaign, where he was seen as having evaded questions, mainly by evading his being interviewed? Perhaps, we have heard little since because he is still working it out. The certainty over Brexit appears to be over – the UK is leaving the European Union or not, regardless over whether I think the question should have been asked or now, but what happens after that is another question, when there really shouldn’t be a question.