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Before I go any further with this post-UK election piece, I want to make one thing clear: however much there is to say against the British Conservative party – and I have said most of it – it is not an anti-democratic movement.
We had the blessing of a peaceful handover of power on Friday morning. Rishi Sunak did not follow Donald Trump and deny the results of a legitimate election. His supporters did not storm Parliament.
The Conservatives are right wing while the Republicans are far-right wing. I do not use that label out of leftish rhetorical excess. It is a simple statement of fact to describe as “far right” extreme conservatives who do not accept democratic rules.
Nevertheless, despite the differences between the US and UK, there are lessons to draw from the UK centre-left’s ability to defeat conservatism and the ominous signs of a coming defeat in the US.
You must be ruthless
To anyone brought up on the British centre-left, the idea that we could organise anything, let alone the destruction of the most successful party in the history of the Western world was fanciful – to put it mildly.
Our typical meetings echo with cries of “Can anyone work PowerPoint?” and “No, you said you would book the hall, Vanessa”. Meanwhile the further left you go, the more you become convinced that faction fighting is the sole skill your comrades posses.
Nevertheless, the British centre-left won last week with a display of utter ruthlessness that was wholly out of character. (The winning being as much of a rarity as the merciless exploitation of Tory weakness.)
The UK has a first-past-the-post voting system. It works fairly well when there are just two parties. But it has gone haywire now we have five parties in England – Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, (the radical right) Reform and the Greens – and six in Scotland and Wales who add in their own nationalist parties.
In these circumstances, victory comes to parties that can target winnable seats and encourage tactical voting against their main rivals. Labour has won two thirds of the seats in Parliament on one third of the vote because it managed to do both.
The psephologist Sir John Curtice calculated that
“In seats where it started off in second place to a Tory incumbent, Labour's vote increased on average by six points. Elsewhere in England where the opportunity to turf out a Tory did not exist, Labour’s support was markedly down – on average by five points.”
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats destroyed the Conservatives in wealthy southern England by persuading small groups of Labour and Green voters to unite in a common anti-Tory front.
The result was devastating. The political scientist Ben Ansell said the ability of the centre-left to play the system had left the UK with a Parliament that “will be the fifth most disproportional in the world, after St Lucia, Barbados, the Bahamas, and Bhutan”.
Obviously, we need electoral reform.
Equally obviously, the British centre-left was able to face political reality.
Can you say the same of US Democrats?
The time to be ruthless and ask whether Joe Biden was too old to run again, and whether Kamala Harris was too unpopular to replace him, was 2023. The Democrats should have found their best candidates months ago.
Now it may be too late, because chaos would follow a last minute attempt to replace Biden and Harris.
On the Democrats’ tombstone it may say that they died because they preferred being nice to being ruthless.
Political narcissism can be deadly
Joe Biden told the American network ABC that on no account would he step aside for a younger candidate.
The interviewer, the former Clinton official, George Stephanopoulos, exposed his narcissism.
He asked “if you can be convinced that you cannot defeat Donald Trump, will you stand down?”
Biden laughed and replied, “It depends on if the Lord Almighty comes down and tells me that, I might do that.”
The Lord is not planning to visit Washington DC, even though it could do with His intervention.
Later Stephanopoulos tried again
“If you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you're warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?
Biden: “I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good job I know I can do, that's what this is about.”
It’s all about Biden, and Biden being satisfied with himself, even if he loses. He sounds like an American Lear.
Never underestimate the delusions of vain old men. As they (we, I should say) approach death they want to prove to themselves, as much as to anyone else, that they are indispensable, even though at some level they must know that the graveyards are full of indispensable men.
British political activists are no less vain. There was no anti-Tory pact last week because partisan players would never accept one.
Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Greens could not sit down and agree to run just one candidate against the Conservatives in each constituency. They wanted to accentuate their differences.
So, Labour risked splitting the anti-Tory vote and ran candidates in seats where the Liberal Democrats stood the best chance of winning and vice versa.
Like Biden, local activists could not bear to leave the stage. Voters had to work out how best to defeat the Tory themselves.
Obviously, the parties only campaigned hard in target seats. But no party withdrew candidates in unwinnable seats or said to their voters, “we have no chance here”.
Which leads me to my third point
Not all voters are stupid
In the UK, enough voters could work out how to exploit the first-past-the-post system. Equally, in the US enough voters can see that, at 81, Biden is simply too old to be president.
And if they did not know already, his debate performance revealed that less-than-startling fact to them.
They are perfectly entitled to ask who will be taking the decisions if their president is incapable of doing so.
American progressives reply with arguments that are wholly true and wholly beside the point. Trump is a convicted criminal, they say. The civil courts ruled that he was a rapist. He lies all the time. He shows signs of incipient senility himself. He is a proven threat to democracy.
Besides Trump’s crimes, Biden’s age is an irrelevance.
All of this is true. But if you are building a coalition, you must be alert to the concerns of wavering supporters.
Despite its low vote share Labour freed much of the UK to vote against the Tories. When Jeremy Corbyn was Labour’s leader, fear of the far left pushed moderate voters towards the Conservatives.
When Keir Starmer defeated the far left, those same people supported the Liberal Democrats and helped to push the Conservatives out of power. Their concerns had been answered and they were free to vote against the right.
I find it intensely worrying that the Democrats have not done the hard work. They did not try to deal with the concerns of potential supporters when they had the chance and maybe now it is too late for America, the UK, Ukraine and Europe.
Needless to add, I hope I am wrong.
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Is anyone trying to calculate the effect of the new requirement for photo ID on the UK turnout?
Ironically, in 2020 Biden was the practical choice to head off the nomination of the unelectable far left Bernie Sanders.
The number one reason the Democratic Party did not choose an alternative to Biden in 2023 is that too many egos wanted to fill his shoes. You may have noticed that the debate stages for both parties have been filled with 12+ candidates.