From Climate Scepticism

BY MARK HODGSON

When four out of five people didn’t vote for you

I’ll keep this short, as plenty of people have had their say in the media already about the mismatch between the votes cast (or not cast) in the recent UK general election and the numbers of seats obtained by the various political parties that stood in it.

On 1^st July the Guardian reported on Ed Miliband’s claim that:

If we win the election, it will send a message round the world that the approach we are taking on clean energy, our argument on bills, independence, jobs and future generations, you can win an election on that argument…

…We are seeking a mandate in this election for that agenda, it’s a mandate for economic change and it’s a mandate to tackle climate change…

…We will make the modern, progressive, big tent case for climate action which does the right thing now. Rishi Sunak may have departed the pitch but I don’t think the British public have.

And now that the Labour Party has won the general election with a massive majority in the House of Commons our new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has claimed:

For the first time in 20 plus years, we have a majority in England, in Scotland and in Wales and that is a clear mandate to govern for all four corners of the United Kingdom.

At the risk of being pedantic, Sir Keir, Northern Ireland is also part of the United Kingdom, and you don’t have a majority there, due to the sectarian nature of its politics that sees the main UK parties (including the Labour Party) generally avoiding anything to do with its politics. So “all four corners” is a bit of an exaggeration.

Leaving that aside, however, there is no doubt at all that the newly elected Labour government has a constitutional mandate to implement its pre-election manifesto. Our first past the post system has delivered a stunning victory for Labour, but in no meaningful sense can it be said that the UK public voted enthusiastically in support of any part of Labour’s manifesto. As the BBC acknowledges:

A purely proportional system – where national vote share translated exactly into the number of seats – in 2024 would have given Labour about 195 seats and no majority. The Tories would have had 156 seats, Reform 91, the Liberal Democrats 78 and the Greens 45.

I acknowledge that such an analysis is subject to the caveat offered up by the BBC in its next paragraph:

However, it’s also important to recognise that voters might well vote differently if the voting system was more proportional.

That’s a fair point, but it’s also reasonable to point out that only around 59.8% of the electorate actually voted. Politicians would no doubt seek to ascribe such a low turnout to apathy, but I suspect it has much more to do with widespread disillusionment with political parties generally. Combine that low turnout with Labour’s share of the vote (generally reported as being 34%, but that’s a rounding up), and Labour has probably been elected with a landslide majority having received the votes of a smidgeon under one person in five who was entitled to vote. In no sense is that a ringing endorsement of Labour’s manifesto, and in no sense does it entitle Labour politicians to claim a popular (as opposed to a constitutional) mandate.

I don’t imagine it will stop them from trying to make such claims, and those opposed to Net Zero will probably be dismissed as anti-democrats. In that respect I have two comments:

First, I am finally persuaded (after having had increasing doubts for some time) that our first past the post system isn’t fit for purpose. This week’s election result is an affront to democracy. As the BBC observed, in the above article:

The gap between the share of total votes won by the winning party in the 2024 general election and the share of Parliamentary seats won is the largest on record.

It seems that Labour’s MPs were elected on average by roughly 28,000 votes, while Reform obtained an MP for every 800,000+ votes it received. For the sake of balance I should point out that the Green Party also received a paltry return in terms of MPs for its vote share (though it wasn’t so badly disadvantaged as Reform). Millions of voters have effectively been disenfranchised.

Second, Reform’s more than four million votes might have yielded a return of only five MPs, but at last there will be a strident and persistent anti-Net Zero voice in Parliament. I suspect that the Parliamentary authorities will offer Reform little opportunity to make the case against Net Zero, but with Nigel Farage now in Parliament, we can expect a lot of noise. I suspect that Ed Miliband and his colleagues are about to discover that his plans to accelerate Net Zero will be a lot harder to implement and a lot less popular than they currently assume. Unless they acknowledge the reality of the situation fairly quickly, I strongly suspect that for all their skewed landslide victory, Labour won’t get a second term in 2029. The mould is shattering before our eyes, and our complacent politicians are the ones who are shattering it. If Labour presses ahead with vigorous “world-leading” climate plans, I think the next five years might make the upheavals of the post-Brexit vote years look calm indeed. Interesting, but turbulent, times await.