We all know the ritual. A minister sits on the sofa, the interviewer asks the questions, the minister announces some policy or defends one, and then it arrives, right on cue. But Minister, where is the money coming from? Where is the hundred million coming from? The two hundred million? The fifty million?

I know what that moment looks like, although I should be careful about how much I claim, because I have never been a government minister and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I have done is a great many radio appearances since 2009, talking about policy and then occasionally being grilled on exactly that question, and I have never once known the precise answer to it.

Here is the secret.

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Nobody Knows Where the Money Is Coming From

I don't mean that ministers are hiding the answer, I mean the answer doesn't exist in the form the question demands. A minister sitting in a studio with a policy to announce has not personally done the rigorous analysis behind it, and beyond an agreement with the Treasury they very probably do not know where the money is coming from, because at the moment of announcement it isn't yet coming from anywhere in particular.

So the question is not really a question at all. It is a device that works whatever the answer, precisely because no answer survives contact with it.

What Five Hundred Million Actually Is

The British state is enormous, and it will spend roughly £1.37 trillion this year. That is not my figure but the House of Commons Library's, and the Library helpfully translates it into something a person can hold in their head: about £48,000 per household per year.

So shrink the whole of government down to one family getting by on forty-eight grand. On that scale, every pound the family spends stands in for just over £28.5 million of public money.

Now run the presenter's numbers through it. The five hundred million he is so exercised about comes out at a little under eighteen pounds a year (not a week, a year), the two hundred million is seven quid, and the fifty million he was shouting about last week is one pound seventy-five.

When I first did that sum I sat with it for a while, because £18 is obviously not nothing. But a household on £48,000 a year, spending something like £5,000 per month, is never going to lose an evening over it. They'll find it. I was going to write that they would move a few things around, and then I realised that on a budget that size they wouldn't even need to do that. It is a rounding error.

I am not the first person to notice this. The journalist Sam Freedman recently lost patience with the whole ritual on Bluesky, pointing out that borrowing estimates are routinely off by tens of billions "but we're supposed to imagine money is budgeted to the last penny", and the economist Karl Whelan put it more bluntly still. What I want to add to that is the view from inside the studio, and the arithmetic that goes with it.

The Bit Nobody Asks About

I would add that the £1.37 trillion is not a definite figure either, because it carries a wide margin of error, and we all know this perfectly well from the news every quarter. Spending overshot. Borrowing came in lower than expected. The figures move, always, and in both directions.

For 2024-25 the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast borrowing of £87 billion, and the outturn was £152 billion. That is a sixty-five billion pound miss in a single year, by the body whose entire job is to get it roughly right. Back in our imaginary household, that is the family's income landing about £2,200 away from where the budget said it would, with nobody able to say in advance which way it would go.

What I have never understood is why nobody in the studio thinks that is the story. They get enormously energised about a hundred million here, two hundred million there, five hundred million somewhere else, and they never seem remotely bothered that government spending fluctuates by sums many orders of magnitude larger, or that in advance nobody really knows it is going to happen.

The Household Trap

I should own up to something here. I have chosen a household framing for all this, and I have railed against that framing before, on the grounds that it is far too simplistic a way to think about a national economy.

I am using it anyway, and for a specific reason. Ever since Margaret Thatcher started comparing the nation's finances to a family budget, politicians of every party have done the same thing. "Any woman who understands the problems of running a home," she told the BBC in 1979, "will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country." I can see exactly why it caught on, and I have reached for it myself right here, because it does make the thing easier to grasp.

But the people who habitually think and talk that way are noticeably less keen on the comparison once you point out what I have just pointed out.

So there is a choice to be forced, and it goes like this. Either the household comparison is nonsense, in which case they should stop using it and the twenty-quid ambush goes out with it, or the comparison is sound, in which case no household on earth budgets the way these interviews demand and the ambush stands exposed by the politicians' own favourite metaphor.

Offer them that choice and I think we all know which one they would surrender. They aren't going to give up the chance to spring the gotcha on a minister.

It All Adds Up, and That Is What Budgets Are For

The honest objection to all this is that it isn't simply eighteen pounds inside a forty-eight thousand pound budget. Let governments make announcements of a few hundred million here and a few hundred million there, over and over across a year, and eventually they add up to something that genuinely changes the picture.

I concede that completely. Our imaginary household would indeed notice, after enough twenty pounds here and twenty pounds there, that it had committed itself to several hundred pounds in one area and a couple of thousand in another. You would of course have to plan for that.

But that is what The Budget is for. The clue is in the name. It is precisely why we have these great fiscal set pieces (the Budget, the autumn statement as it used to be called, the spending reviews), and their entire function is to do the adding up.

Which is why the thing that irritates me most is what happens when a minister says that this one is a matter for the Chancellor. That gets treated as a dodge, as a failure to be straight with the public, but it is nothing of the kind. It is the true answer, it is the only true answer available at that moment, and the format punishes the minister for giving it.

What the Markets Are Actually Looking At

The other objection looms over everything, and thanks to Liz Truss it now looms a great deal larger than it used to. The bond markets. When Andy Burnham recently mused about a bit of flexibility in the fiscal rules, gilt yields jumped.

I am not going to pretend they don't matter, because they matter enormously. I will be renewing my mortgage before long at a rate probably a point or two above where it would otherwise have sat, thanks to Truss and Kwarteng's little adventure. That is not an abstraction to me.

But what the bond markets are looking at is the big picture: what a government is doing at the macro level, what the fiscal rules are, what the big envelope items look like, how the overall finances are shaping up, and whether it feels as though this lot are behaving sensibly. They are not remotely interested in whether a department has decided to spend a few hundred million on a particular project.

And none of those questions is resolved by trying to catch a minister out on a sofa at half past seven on a Tuesday morning.

Ask About the Policy Instead

If you are not going to ask the gotcha question about the money, the obvious thing to work out is what you should ask instead, and the answer depends on the policy. There are policies where the money genuinely is the story, and on those, ask away.

But far too often a quarter or a third of an interview (sometimes a good deal more than that) disappears into this pointless theatre when it could have gone on the substance. Whether the policy has actually been thought through. What the objections to it are, and there are always objections, because every policy is a trade-off. I would far rather an interviewer drilled into that.

What a Minister Could Say Instead

Ministers cannot simply turn round and announce that the sum in question is a rounding error. It could end a career. It would certainly be a serious black mark, and for an understandable reason. What ministers are permanently conscious of is that they are discussing, with ordinary people, what are to those people vast amounts of money. Five hundred million pounds is enormous compared with any household. A minister who appears to wave it away won't be forgiven, and nor should they be.

I do wonder, though, whether there is a way to nuance the answer without pretending that five hundred million is small change.

I can think of two routes straight away. They could put it in percentage terms and say what fraction of public spending it actually represents, or they could point at how far the previous government's forecasts turned out to be wrong (carefully, mind, since their own will be out by a similar margin soon enough).

And they could do something better than either of those, which is to invite the question they should have been asked in the first place. Suppose the policy is cutting what people pay in bus fares. The minister could offer up one or two of the real counter-arguments themselves, and say that a much better question would be what this does for people who never use public transport, or for the places where the buses barely run at all. That is a minister taking the scrutiny seriously rather than merely surviving it.

A Pantomime of Precision

What we are really watching is an entire political class colluding in a pantomime of precision.

That is exactly what it is, because everybody involved knows that five hundred million pounds inside a budget of £1.37 trillion is a rounding error (well under a tenth of one per cent, in fact). They collude in it because the arrangement serves all of them in turn. In government the question is an irritant. In opposition it is one of the best levers they believe they have. And pushing back is genuinely difficult, because explaining proportion on live radio, against a presenter with a number and a clock, is not a straightforward thing to do.

Ultimately it does the country a disservice. We have a situation where the public finances can be tens of billions out in a single year and that becomes an abstruse item on the BBC News website or a passing question on Today, while the gotcha gets the clip. Ministers do get asked about the big misses. But the sums are so large, and the misses so routine, that they slide past, because that is simply what running a country is like. A war starts. A US president decides something (particularly erratic since Trump came back, though what American presidents do has always shaken smaller economies like ours).

Meanwhile ministers have become steadily better at sidestepping the small question, stonewalling in a way that neither answers it nor engages with it, largely because it isn't really a question that can be engaged with. I have lost count of the hours I must have spent listening to ministers flannel about this.

Our public discourse would be in considerably better shape if interviewers and opposition politicians went at the substance instead, because that is what actually matters in the end. If the five hundred million pound policy is a good one that works, it will pay back in ways nobody can itemise on a Tuesday morning, and if it doesn't work it won't, and it may well cost more in the long run. That is the point of grilling a minister. Are the policies any good, and will they work?

Not where is the money coming from, Minister, when the answer is a drop in an ocean whose depth nobody can measure to within two thousand pounds.

Further reading

Everything is linked above where it is used. If you want the underlying primer, the OBR's brief guide to the public finances is the clearest short explanation of how any of this actually works.

Chris Curtis, the Labour MP for Milton Keynes North, was on a podcast recently talking about how Westminster works. He was making a political point, but he got there through an analogy about the building itself.

The Palace of Westminster has layers of cable in it, installed by people who are long dead. Wiring, pipes, some of that infrastructure sitting there for hundreds of years. It is very, very difficult to renovate, because as soon as you start trying to go in and think oh, I will pull that wire out, you have no idea what it is attached to. There is no documentation. It is really difficult to know what to do, so the safest thing is to leave it and not pull anything out.

He has been at this a while. He wrote the foreword to a paper on state capacity last year which opens by saying the machinery of the British state is jammed, so this was not an off-the-cuff line. And I thought the analogy was very sharp.

However. I think there is a better one.

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Not Wiring. A Legacy System.

Westminster, the way it works, our politics in general and especially our constitution, functions more like a legacy software system. I have spent thirty-five years developing software commercially, and a lot of what I see in our constitution, and in the way new laws get made, is very much like an old legacy system.

Here is the difference, and it is the whole reason I want to take the analogy off him.

The characteristic disaster in legacy software is not cutting the wrong cable. It is that you make a change which is actually correct. Everyone in the room agrees with it. There are pats on the back and drinks all round when the project is finished. And then it breaks something important. Because unbeknownst to everyone in that room it was doing something important and getting rid of it causes major problems.

That has happened to me. I was out on a customer site once, fiddling with something in order to fix it, and overnight when nobody was watching it caused major problems. It was to do with something called a data-matrix in a job where we automated breweries. It caused a valve to be left open and a load of cleaning fluid (known as CIP fluid) to leak into a vat of beer. It caused quite a few problems.

It turned out in the end that it was not actually my fault. Someone else had been pointing at a data structure they should not have been pointing at. But at the time I was very young and I thought it was my fault. It taught me and important lesson at a young age.

Be sure you know what everything that you connect to a live system actually does.

What Thirty-Five Years Teaches You

I got my first computer at Christmas 1983, when I was nine, and I have written before about what that machine did to the rest of my life. I took a full-time job as a software engineer at seventeen. Those years taught me an enormous amount about walking into a system nobody understands.

There is a term for it: technical debt. You have a system carrying tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code that nobody, or hardly anyone really understands, and that is a difficult situation to be in. When you are trying to fix a problem you have to wade through the code, work out what points to what, work out what the intention of the original author was, test it, look at the outputs, and try to reason backwards from the outputs to what is going on inside.

Sometimes parts of it are closed boxes. Black box engineering, where you put a value in, get a value out and cannot see the original source code, because it no longer exists. All you have is a DLL (a dynamic link library), or an executable file.

The lesson you learn very quickly is this. Don't change anything unless you absolutely have to.

Still Calculating in Shillings

A few years ago I heard a programme on Radio 4 about the old banking legacy systems. The core systems of the British banks, written in an old language called COBOL, which was very good for business systems back in the day and was used to write the original mainframes that the big four still run on.

I can't remember exactly when it was and I can't even remember the name of the programme (I have tried to find it - answers in the comments if you remember it). But there was a claim in it that quite shocked me. They said that one of the big four banks, and they did not say which, was running a system underneath more modern layers written more recently in more modern languages, and that at its core, maybe four or five levels down, there was code still calculating money in pre-decimal pounds, shillings and pence. With translation layers on top.

Decimalisation was 1971. IBM sold Sterling Arithmetic as a paid feature in the 1960s, so the machine could add up in twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound. And this claim was in about the mid-2010s.

I have seen legacy systems with code in them that you can tell was written twenty or thirty years earlier. So the idea that in the mid-2010s there was still code running that had been written before 1971 is entirely believable to me.

Notice what that is, though. Not a repair. A translation layer.

Now, does that sound familiar? Something created decades before, hiding under layer upon layer of further stuff put on top, still used in the modern day, still running on what was written long before.

Our Constitution Is That System

Yes. To me that sounds very much like the British constitution.

There is all kinds of stuff in there. People still talk about Magna Carta even now, even though Magna Carta does not really apply in any meaningful sense any more. There is material in our constitution that is hundreds and hundreds of years old, and it is one of those things where even constitutional scholars struggle to understand exactly what is in there and how it is supposed to work. Which sounds exactly like a computer system whose original developers have long since retired or died, and where nobody really understands what is going on in the code.

Think about what we have done. We built a presentation layer on top of something like the royal prerogative, and ministers exercise it in the name of the Crown through all of those layers.

Then in 2019 a Prime Minister used it to shut Parliament down for five weeks, and eleven Supreme Court justices ruled it unlawful, null and of no effect. That's what we were actually looking at that day. Some of this legacy code from hundreds of years ago bubbled up to the surface, and everyone was incredibly confused about what was happening and why.

Nothing requires our Prime Minister to sit in the Commons. There's nothing to compel a government that loses a confidence vote to actually go. We call these things conventions, and we discuss them as though good chaps, good gentlemen and women, will know what to do when the time comes. That is essentially what our constitution relies on.

But they are just conventions that we think, and hope, and in some cases pray, will be obeyed. There is nothing concrete saying they absolutely have to be. There is a name for this in my trade, Hyrum's Law, which says that with enough users every observable behaviour of your system will be depended on by somebody, whatever the contract actually promised.

Have You Tried Turning Britain Off and On Again?

One of the things you find as a software developer coming into a new project, and if my boss is reading this he will find it quite funny because I proposed exactly this when I started my latest job two and a half years ago, is that every developer's instinct is the Big Rewrite. Capital B, capital R.

TSB tried it in April 2018. Big budget, clear spec. The result took out branch, phone, online and mobile banking, and they were fined £48.65 million between the FCA and the PRA. Knowing what I know about computer systems, and about the systems in the big banks, largely from that programme I listened to all those years ago, I'm not at all surprised.

Every analogy breaks down eventually, and this is where mine does. Computer systems are about code and computers. Our constitution is about people, politics, and law, and all of those parts interacting with each other. So it is not exactly the same. It nevertheless is the same in this one vital respect: it is very difficult to imagine taking our current constitution and quickly changing it into something where it is completely clear what is happening at every level and every layer, without causing absolute chaos.

The Strangler Fig

The solution in computer systems is often a pattern known as the strangler fig.

It is named after the plant that grows around another plant and eventually kills it, but by the time it does, it has created its own shape around the stalk of its victim. The old plant dies underneath and the fig replaces it.

That is roughly what you do with computer systems. You start small, you add little bits, you scaffold them up, you add more, you build around the existing system while keeping the existing system working. Eventually all the new bits replace the old system underneath. Once you are happy it is doing everything the old system did, you remove the old one and let it wither.

Curtis used another example of this on that podcast: devolution. His argument is that with devolution you can slowly start to replace what was there before at a national level. Devolve power to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as in the real devolution settlements of recent years, and those are new institutions. They are not replacements for what was there properly before. They have new rules, new laws, new ways of doing things, and they start to slowly replace what came before. Which obviously bears on what Andy Burnham was talking about before he even became Prime Minister. So the more devolution there is, the more you can propose doing that, and it starts to address part of the problem of how you replace a constitution as old and as sprawling as ours.

Three Exhibits From the Integration Layer

Here are three exhibits from what I would call the integration layer.

Barnett. Devised in 1978 as a short-term fix by Joel Barnett, then Chief Secretary to the Treasury. It was never legislated, and it is still used to fund three of the four nations of the United Kingdom forty-eight years later, despite Barnett himself having asked for it to be scrapped.

Sewel. Written into statute in 2016, and then ruled unenforceable.

English Votes for English Laws. Shipped in 2015, deleted in 2021.

That last one is very interesting, because it is the only thing anybody has managed to completely remove from our constitution and it is the newest one. Which is very telling. The pattern tells us that once something is embedded in our constitution it is very difficult to remove. In fact I would say in most cases it is functionally impossible.

In a way this is even worse than technical debt. At least with technical debt you can do something called refactoring, where you take the old systems and rewrite them. It takes a long time, but you can do it, and you can prove it with tests you run millions and millions of times, on all kinds of what are known as edge cases, to make sure you have fixed the problems and the new code is safe to run.

Whereas our constitution is so difficult, so unwieldy, spread across all kinds of different places, that you cannot do anything of the sort. It is not even written down in one place. That is the problem. What we have as I learned even before the brewery coding job in A-Level politics is an uncodified constitution.

Where I Part Company With Curtis

Codification is where the solution lies, because ultimately, if we are ever going to get our heads around this and ever going to do anything about it, we need something more substantive than what Curtis suggested.

I don't think it's enough to believe you can devolve your way out of this problem. If you devolve, you are not reproducing the strangler fig pattern. What you are actually doing is layering more and more stuff, just in different places. I think it makes the problem even more unwieldy, and there will be constitutionalists in fifty or a hundred or two hundred years who have to deal with the legacy of all of these devolved institutions as well.

The solution is to actually write all this stuff down. Properly write it down.

It is all over the place. In conventions. In Erskine May (the book about how Parliament operates). In laws that have been enforced over the years, and then in the ways those laws have been interpreted with court decisions and everything else. It all needs to be written down. Only at that point can you rationalise it and properly see how it all interacts.

That is what refactoring is in software development. It is effectively rationalising what you have got. It is the only way we are going to get a handle on this, and it is at least a twenty-year process.

The Problem With Twenty-Year Projects

The problem is that Parliaments are only five years, and there are always more important things to do.

As I have written about previously, electoral reform is another example of this. One of the main arguments you hear against it is that nobody's clamouring for it on the doorsteps. And of course they're not. The electoral system is a fairly arcane question that is only really of interest to political geeks like me.

It is the same with constitutional reform. You knock on a doorstep, you go down the Dog and Duck, you sit on the Clapham omnibus, and nobody's prattling on about Erskine May or parliamentary procedure from the Tudor period. People aren't generally interested.

That doesn't mean they don't live with the consequences of it, though. And it is not the right question.

The right question is whether our constitution is fit for purpose going forward, and I think it is undeniable that it is not. It is an unwieldy mess. It is only when we see things poking through the surface, as we did in 2019 with the prorogation crisis, that we start to appreciate how serious the problem is.

We need to get it sorted.

Because the alternative is the thing every engineer recognises and none of us are proud of. You inherit the system. You can't read it, you can't test it, and you certainly can't fundamentally change it. So you leave it running, you touch as little as possible, and you hope nothing important was depending on the bit you did touch.

That isn't a constitution. That's a system nobody is maintaining, kept alive by people crossing their fingers and telling themselves that because it hasn't fallen over yet, it isn't going to.

Further reading

The Sewel convention and legislative consent, House of Commons Library

This is the final part of my mini-series on electoral reform in the age of Burnham.

Andy Burnham is, by the Electoral Reform Society's reckoning, the first Prime Minister in British history who openly backs proportional representation. Not hedged sympathy. On the record.

I have spent the first two parts of this series explaining why I have wanted that sentence to be true since the late nineties, and what happened the one time the question reached the public.

Now the difficult bit.

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His hands are tied

I understand his hands are tied, and it is worth being specific about how.

He hasn't got a mandate for it, because there wasn't really anything in the most recent Labour manifesto about electoral reform. Nobody voted for this.

If anyone is ever going to change the electoral system it is almost certainly going to have to go to a referendum, and we saw what happened last time.

And I am not convinced that once he has his feet under the table in Number 10 he is going to devote much time to it. From his perspective there will be far more important things to focus on.

That is always the issue with something like this. There are always more important things to focus on. It is why it is so difficult in the British state to ever really get anything changed. The current system works, and it keeps working, and then one day it won't.

What always happens

We know what always happens, because it has happened before within my lifetime.

Labour inherited a pledge from John Smith and put it in the 1997 manifesto. Blair won his landslide, commissioned Roy Jenkins, got a fully worked system back in 1998, and the referendum was never held.

What happened there is that Labour did what it always does when it gets the chance to change this. It bottled it, or more accurately it decided the change was not in its interests.

At the top table there were people vehemently against it. Jack Straw and John Prescott certainly (I don't know what Gordon Brown's private view was). And Blair had so much on his plate in that first term that he simply did not have the bandwidth, and frankly he was not that bothered. It was a pledge he had inherited. He ordered the report because he was a great admirer of Jenkins, and I think Jenkins admired him back, so he took it seriously enough to commission. But he did not have the political space to act, and that space is vital for a change like this.

People ask the counterfactual: what if Smith had lived and won in 1997?

I think he wouldn't have had as big a majority, fifty or sixty perhaps, and I suspect he would have run into exactly the same headwinds. He would probably have commissioned a report, maybe from Jenkins, maybe someone else. It would have reported within a couple of years with some sort of compromise, like AV+ or similar. And I think ultimately he would have found more important things to do and it would have been side-lined.

It is the pattern. However much he might personally have wanted it, Straw or Prescott and/or some other senior figure(s) would have been against, and he would have picked his battles.

Then in 2022 Labour's own conference voted to put proportional representation in the manifesto. Keir Starmer called it not a priority. The 2024 manifesto was silent. And the party went on to win a majority under the very system its members had voted to scrap.

I feel like I am repeating myself, which rather makes the point.

Not cowardice

So why does this keep happening? It isn't really cowardice.

The people who are in power and could do something about it are not failing to act because they are frightened. They are failing because it is not in their personal interest, or their party's interest, to act.

It is structural. It is precisely because the current system favours the two main parties that the two main parties are not in favour of changing it.

It is no coincidence that the Lib Dems, the Greens and Reform are all formally in favour of a proportional system.

Although I notice Reform have gone very quiet on that since they went into the lead in the polls, and since those polls started suggesting they could take a majority under first past the post. They aren't banging that drum quite so loudly any more, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if, should they get into government, they quietly dropped the pledge altogether.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The commission is the coffin

Burnham's stated route is an independent commission on the electoral system, followed by proportional representation in the next Labour manifesto.

So there will be an independent commission. I am now old enough to have watched this happen once already, with Jenkins in 1998.

It will recommend a system. It might be AV+ again, it might be the single transferable vote, it might be a d'Hondt system (like we used to use for the European elections). Whatever it lands on will probably be a decent system, and it would genuinely help.

And then it will likely be shelved.

It might just possibly end up in the next manifesto. But we have already seen that things ending up in them do not necessarily mean they happen. It would also require Labour to have a majority after the next election, which on current polling looks unlikely.

The one thing that might make it work is if we come out of the next election with enough MPs belonging to parties that support the change, and Labour has it in the manifesto and feels duty-bound to follow through. Although we saw exactly how much Labour MPs felt duty-bound by their own 2010 manifesto when the AV referendum came round in 2011.

It is very Yes Minister, isn't it. If you want to bury something, call for a Royal Commission. That is roughly what Sir Humphrey advises Jim Hacker at one point.

That is probably a little unfair. The truth is you almost certainly cannot have reform without some kind of independent commission, because otherwise the accusation is that you picked a system because it favours you. So it probably has to happen.

But goodness knows how many times we have now watched an issue punted into the long grass by farming it out to a commission.

What would convince me it will happen this time?

So what would I need to see?

I would have to see Burnham throw his full weight behind it. Talking about it frequently. Making a strong public case for why the current system is broken, not just saying he prefers something else.

And when the commission reports, I would need to see him squarely behind it. A full press conference explaining exactly why he backs it. Making it unambiguous that it will be in the next manifesto. Making it clear that if he is still leader after the next election, and has any say in the parliament after it, he stays wedded to the policy. On the record.

Even then, I can imagine enough wiggle room for it to be quietly side-lined afterwards, particularly if he loses, because then he probably will not be leader. And there are plenty of people in senior positions in that party who are not in favour of this sort of change.

It can be done properly. In Ireland, during the abortion debate, there was a commission that came up with very sensible suggestions, it went to a referendum, and the public were genuinely well educated on what the issues were. As it happens they reached the conclusion I would have favoured, but that is not the point. The point is that it was a textbook example of how a commission, its report, and the way that report is disseminated can be an extremely positive thing.

So I can imagine that scenario. Unfortunately I am too long in the tooth, and I have seen too many examples of the other one.

Less than a quarter

I think there is probably a less than 25% chance we see meaningful electoral reform to a proportional system in this country during my lifetime.

I have just turned fifty-two, so take from that what you will. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty years: I don't think we will see a change.

I have already been politically aware for longer than that and it has not budged an inch.

It would take a real crisis to force it. Eventually something catastrophic will happen. A party will get 25% of the vote and a majority of the seats because of some quirk in how that vote is distributed, and the system will pick the wrong winner, and another party on 28% will get half the seats because their support is spread more evenly across the country. When that happens it will suddenly be a democratic emergency and we will have to do something about it.

And then there will be a panic, and they will implement something that is no good and does not really solve the problem. A bodge job.

I will not stop making the argument. The current system is so manifestly wrong and unfair, and so completely outdated, that I do not see how I could leave it alone. I would argue it was never fit for purpose, but when there were two parties within five or ten points of each other, and it generally picked the right winner even if it gave them more seats than they deserved, I could at least see the case for it.

We are not in that world. We are in a world with five main parties. We are one of the last democracies anywhere to run elections like this. Most democratic countries have some form of proportionality in electing their national parliament. We are a genuine holdout, and we hold ourselves up as a beacon of democracy while we do it.

False binaries

The final argument I would make is that the current system, and the way it forces people into false binaries, is doing something to our politics beyond the arithmetic.

You are either in government or in opposition. You are either on the up or on the down. The chamber of the House of Commons is literally two swords' lengths apart at the despatch box. It is adversarial by design, and I think the electoral system plays directly into that adversarialism.

It makes it so difficult to compromise. It makes it so difficult to get the main parties to come together on anything.

Look at social care. Everyone knows there needs to be reform. And we all saw what happened in 2017 when Theresa May had the temerity to put it in a manifesto; it was instantly labelled the death tax. The way she did it was ham-fisted (I have made joking references to that in the past). But that is the point. Even something the main parties basically agree on becomes impossible, because they are forced into these binaries so constantly that it becomes second nature. If one party says a thing, the other has to say the opposite.

Other countries do not behave like this. They have a much more grown-up style of politics. Not every country, obviously but look across the continent and you find far more cross-party working than we manage here. It was a genuine shock to our system to see what happened during the coalition years.

And it is such a shame, because I have known a lot of politicians over the years and the vast majority of them are thoroughly decent people, in it for the right reasons, intelligent and thoughtful and nuanced.

You put them in that chamber, with the adversarial nature that comes directly from first past the post, and they are almost unrecognisable.

It really does not have to be like this. We just need someone with the will and the political force to finally get this long overdue change across the line.

Over to you Andy.

Once, and only once, the question of electoral reform has been put to the British public. It was the wrong reform at the wrong time, offered as the junior partner's consolation prize, and it was beaten by more than two to one.

I was in it, not in any grand capacity but on the stalls and in the halls, which turns out to be the part worth writing about. This is part two of three of my mini-series on electoral reform in the age of Burnham.

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The sixteen-year-old

At the time I lived in Berkshire and I was involved in the campaign. I manned some stalls in Bracknell, near where I lived, and I went along to public events.

I remember one debate in particular in Reading. Sam Gyimah was there for the Conservatives and he was dead against electoral reform. Ironically he became a Lib Dem during the Johnson farrago (so he's probably in favour of it now) but he was certainly not then.

That debate was quite frustrating, and not because of him.

I had got there early, but not quite as early as some. It turned out the person who was supposed to be speaking in favour of Yes had not turned up. So they scouted round the people who had pitched up and found a kid, a politics student of about sixteen, who said he was in favour, and they put him on the panel.

He wasn't very good, which is not his fault, because he was sixteen years old.

I was really frustrated, because if I had arrived a bit later I might have been able to put my hand up and make some stronger points. Or they might have picked someone else who was a bit longer in the tooth. There were plenty of people in that audience who were in favour and rather more weathered than a sixteen-year-old, who would have made a better fist of it.

That was the standard of the thing. On one of the two sides of a national referendum, in a room full of voters, the case was being made by whoever happened to be standing near the front.

Four pages and one sentence

But the thing I remember most about that campaign is the leaflet.

It went to every house in the country and it described both systems. The description of AV is not desperately complicated, but it does require a bit of effort to get your head round. You count all the votes, whoever is bottom gets eliminated, their second preferences get redistributed, and you repeat potentially a few times. I'm a software engineer, so to me it's simply an iterative process. Five or six candidates gives you three or four rounds, and whoever has a majority of the redistributed votes at the end wins.

Describing that took about four pages.

The description of first past the post was one sentence. The person who gets the most votes wins the seat.

As soon as I saw those two things side by side I thought of the old Reagan dictum.

Why it was AV in the first place

I heard Nick Clegg being interviewed about this by Tim Shipman on The Spectator podcast recently, and he said something I had completely forgotten.

The reason he chose AV as the reform in the coalition agreement was that AV was the system Labour had put in their own 2010 manifesto.

His thinking was straightforward. He knew the Conservatives would campaign against whatever was offered, so the only route to winning was to get one of the two big parties on side. Pick the system Labour had explicitly told the country it wanted, and Labour would have to back it.

You can see the logic. And to be fair to AV, although it is not proportional it is preferential, which deals with the thing you see in every election now. We're the only ones who can stop Reform. Vote for us to keep the Tories out. Vote for us to keep Labour out. All that negative campaigning exists because you have to guess who is most likely to win the seat before you decide what to do with your own vote. Under a preferential system you just rank them, one, two, three, four, and the machinery takes care of it. Your actual preferences go in and get counted.

I still think it was the wrong change.

It isn't that easy to explain (as I have just demonstrated by taking a paragraph to do it) and it isn't proportional. Under some circumstances it can be even less proportional than what we have now. There is evidence to suggest Blair's 1997 majority would have been bigger under AV than it was under first past the post.

It was better than nothing. I would rather have a preferential system than the one we have. But if the question on the paper had been proportional representation, I think it would have been closer. Instead of 68 to 32 it might have been 60/40, or 55/45. I still think we would have lost. But there would have been a marker in the sand saying feeling on this is actually quite strong.

It was not to be.

They campaigned against their own manifesto

So Clegg picked Labour's own policy, and Labour campaigned against it anyway.

More Labour MPs campaigned for No than for Yes. There were honourable exceptions, but not many.

It was pretty gutting, to be honest, though not totally surprising.

It underlined for me the rank hypocrisy that runs through politics at a certain level. I am not one of these people who says all politicians are dreadful and they are all at it and they are all in it for themselves. I do not believe that. But this was an example of principle going completely out of the window. They saw a chance to kick the Lib Dems for going into coalition with the Conservatives, and it genuinely did not matter to them what the system on the ballot was.

It was literally the system from their own manifesto. And they still campaigned against it.

It settled the question

Losing settled it for quite a while, and I do not think that is just something people say.

Towards the end of their time in power recently, the Conservatives used the AV referendum result as a pretext for changing how mayors are elected. Mayoral elections had run on the Supplementary Vote, which is a bit like AV except you only get one second choice. The argument was that the public had rejected a system like this in 2011, so it should go.

That was blatantly self-serving, because first past the post suited them better in those contests (I believe Labour have reversed it since coming back in). But it is a good illustration of what the defeat actually bought.

More than two-thirds of the people who voted, voted against. That number has been available to anyone who wanted it ever since, and it has made it very difficult for people who want reform to claim there is any public feeling behind it.

Next time: Why Labour does this every single time, and whether the first Prime Minister who believes in reform is going to be the seventh to bottle it.

The man who is now Prime Minister has been in office just over a week, and he is on the record as committed to proportional representation. I'd be lying if I said that was not encouraging (of course it is encouraging) and it would be wonderful if the Prime Minister of the day actually did something about this.

I am also a realist, and I have been watching this particular film for a very long time.

So before I get to whether Andy Burnham will do it, which is where this series ends up, I want to explain why I care so much in the first place. This is part one of three of my mini-series on electoral reform in the age of Burnham.

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That is not really right

I first started feeling like there was something wrong with the UK electoral system in the late 1990s. I knew about different electoral systems, having studied politics at A level in the early nineties, and something about the way Tony Blair won his huge majority in 1997 did not sit right with me.

They got a decent proportion of the vote, but it was nowhere near what they got in seats: something like sixty-odd per cent of the seats on forty-odd per cent of the vote. I remember thinking that is not really right. Why would our system give such a disproportionate number of seats to a party for votes?

I started to notice the same thing from the other end, too. The smaller parties, the Lib Dems but also others, got hardly any seats for the number of votes they were getting. In 1997 for example the Lib Dems got about 17.8% of the vote and 7% of the seats.

It just seemed wrong to me.

Any excuse to pivot

It is my most durable conviction. There are other things I've had hobby horses about over the years and I still care about them, but the electoral system is just so iniquitous and so disproportionate that I keep coming back to it. Over and over again.

Look at what happened at the most recent general election. Starmer's Labour got 33.7% of the vote and about sixty per cent of the seats. I am not a fan of Reform at all, but they got 14.3% of the vote and 0.8% of the seats. That isn't fair and it isn't sustainable.

It is also my biggest political heartbreak, because I have put so much time and energy into thinking about it, writing about it, talking about it and campaigning about it. In 2009 I wrote a piece about the likelihood of an MP having been caught up in the expenses scandal and how that correlated with the safety of their seat. It got a lot of coverage, and it's actually what launched my little side career as a commentator (radio, and occasionally television). People were so interested in it that I started getting invited on to talk about what I thought.

I used to do a podcast called House of Comments, and my co-hosts always laughed at how I would find any excuse to segue from whatever we were discussing, pivot if you will, to electoral reform.

It really is my hobby horse. But for decades people have campaigned on this, including me and including plenty of people who have campaigned far harder than I have, and there has been no shift at all. If anything, after 2011, it felt like we had moved very much in the wrong direction.

Absolutely furious

That 2009 piece is worth dwelling on, because the correlation in it explains most of what is wrong.

The safer an MP's seat was, the more relaxed they had been about what they claimed. Look at it from a human perspective and you can understand it completely. If you have a safe seat and you genuinely don't have to worry about what your electors think, then you probably are going to take the mickey a little bit.

I was living in Sandhurst at the time, in the Bracknell seat, and the local MP Andrew MacKay was swept up in it. He had been claiming for things he should not have done. There was a public meeting and I went along.

My goodness, the people were absolutely furious.

And that is the thing you need to sit with, because it shows how much frustration is banked up in the current system. No matter what happens in some seats, no matter how bad things get, no matter how bad the party representing that seat is, if it is a really safe seat, a twenty-thousand-majority sort of seat, nothing moves. Even the more marginal ones, the twelves and the fifteens, are still very safe. It takes quite an upset to change them. Things are in flux now, but historically that is how it has worked for decades.

The first time their vote mattered

There is something very important we should take from the Brexit referendum, and I do not think it has ever been properly absorbed.

One of the things that seemed to shock the main parties, and certainly the Remain side, was that people who had never voted before suddenly decided they were going to. It seemed to come out of nowhere.

It should not have been surprising at all. Here, at last, was an election where their vote actually mattered. It was an in-out, remain or leave, yes or no binary choice, and every single vote was going to be counted. It ended up being very close (52 to 48) and it would only have taken a few hundred thousand people on the leave side to go the other way. It really did matter.

For some of those people, that will have been the first time in their entire lives that they had voted in a national election where their vote actually counted for anything.

True until it isn't

The argument for first past the post has always been that it produces strong, stable government.

That's true, right up until it isn't.

Labour has been in power on its own several times in the last hundred years, and although the Conservatives have had more turns, the current system has still massively favoured Labour. They were in power unopposed throughout the Blair and Brown years with majorities big enough to get whatever they wanted through. The current government can get whatever it wants through. Harold Wilson never had huge majorities (and sometimes had none at all) and he still got plenty done.

Clement Attlee in 1945 is the one Labour always points to. If he had been forced into a coalition, would we even have the welfare state in the form we have it? I suspect we probably would, because the Beveridge Report predated the war and it was an idea whose time had come. But it is a strong argument and I understand why they make it.

The trouble is that the strong single government with a clear mandate was not what we got in 2010, and it is very likely not what we are going to get in future. We now have five main parties in this country: Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Reform.

We are almost at the point where you could spin a roulette wheel. If two or three of those parties are clustered within a couple of percentage points of each other around the 22, 23, 24 per cent mark at the next election, then precisely who ends up governing is going to be very difficult to predict, purely because of the way the system converts votes into seats.

This isn't a situation where you can shrug and say there are only two parties so it all works out. It does not work out. And when it fails, it will fail catastrophically, and then we will have a crisis.

What we are selecting for

Yes, the system has just paid your party extremely well. For how long, though, and at what cost?

We have already seen with Brexit how many people were furious enough to vote to leave a trading bloc and a pooled sovereignty bloc shared with our closest neighbours. It has definitively affected our economy in a negative way. It is not clear exactly how much, but it is tens of billions a year and it is going to get worse. That was a direct result of people feeling disenfranchised.

So you want to keep a system that led to that.

It will not be long, if we carry on, before a much more extreme party has a chance of getting into power unopposed. Reform could take a majority of the seats on about 28% of the vote, or even less depending on how the vote is distributed and where everyone else lands. Just over a quarter of the vote, more than half the seats. And if a party like that gets in, it is unopposed for five years and can do whatever it likes.

I am fairly confident there would be plenty of policies enacted in those five years that the Labour MPs currently sitting rather smugly on a majority won on well under half the vote would be very displeased about.

A proportional system would at least mean that whatever the governing party is made up of has to command relatively broad support across the country. That is how you make sure extremists do not get into power. And I do not really need to spell out, historically, what happens when they do.

Our current system is actively selecting for that to happen one day. Perhaps quite soon.

Next time: The one occasion this question actually reached the public, and how it was lost.

There is a maddening photograph in the Guardian this morning of the playing fields at St Paul's school in Barnes, where the fees run up to £57,000 a year, and the grass in it is a deep wet green with the water still sitting on the blades. Around it, the rest of south-west London has gone the colour of a digestive biscuit. Including the chocolate.

40% of the population of England is now under a hosepipe ban. Half the country is in drought and the temperature has been at or above 30C on 24 separate days this summer. On Tooting Bec Common the grass has burned back to bare soil, which is where children were photographed sheltering under the trees, because their parents are not allowed to fill a paddling pool to cool them down.

Down at Sandwich Bay in Kent, Royal St George's is of course green too. It hosts the Open, and the Guardian puts a visitor's round there at about £400 a day (assuming, of course, that an existing member is willing to recommend you). At Dulwich College, where fees are £67,000, the sprinklers have been going across acres of playing fields since the school broke up in the middle of July.

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The word everyone is using is the wrong one

I have seen reactions to this story today and every one of them, including the Guardian's, calls these exemptions. The MPs quoted call them exemptions. The water companies call them exemptions. The campaign groups call them exemptions and want the “loopholes” closed. It is at least a coherent thing to want. But in this case it’s wrong.

They are not exemptions at all. From what I have been able to discern, what is actually going on is quite a lot worse.

A hosepipe ban is a temporary use ban, made under section 76 of the Water Industry Act 1991. If you want to know what a water company is actually allowed to stop you doing, that is where you should look. I would encourage you to actually go and look, because it takes about 90 seconds and it is genuinely startling.

Subsection (2) opens with four words that decide the whole thing: "Only the following uses of water may be prohibited." Then it gives you the eleven.

Watering a garden with a hosepipe. Cleaning a private motor vehicle. Watering plants on domestic or other non-commercial premises. Cleaning a private leisure boat. Filling or maintaining a domestic swimming or paddling pool. Drawing water for domestic recreational use. Filling a domestic pond. There are several more but you get the idea.

Notice what every single item on it has in common. Domestic. Private. Non-commercial. Domestic. Domestic.

There is no power in section 76 itself to prohibit watering a golf course. There is no power in there to restrict a school from keeping its playing fields verdant and saturated. Nobody carved anything out this summer and no lobbyist had to pick up a telephone.

Only the following uses

I have spent a decent chunk of my working life reading specifications that turned out to say something rather different from what everybody in the room assumed they said. This feels very much to me like one of those. The interesting part of a rule is hardly ever the part everyone is arguing about. It is what is in it and what is not in it.

So here is the scope in two easy to digest sentences:

The law lets a water company make it a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to £1,000, for you to fill your child's paddling pool. It gives that same company no power whatsoever over a championship golf course under those same powers.

That isn't an oversight and it isn't a loophole. It is a list, written down, in the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, which is where this version of section 76 comes from. It came into force on 1 October 2010, it was tidied up slightly in 2017, and otherwise it has sat there unchanged through every drought we have had since.

The switch that nobody has flicked

The reason I am writing this at all rather than just being annoyed on Bluesky as is de rigueur for us liberal intelligentsia these days is the following.

Parliament thought about this. Whoever drafted section 76 back in 2010 clearly sat down and wondered whether a restriction confined to households might one day look ridiculous because they went and wrote subsection (3). Which says the following:

> The Minister may by order add a non-domestic purpose to the list in subsection (2).

There it is. The power to extend a hosepipe ban beyond the household has been sitting there for 16 years. It is one statutory instrument. You know, those things that governments in the last few parliaments have used at the drop of a hat to change things they don’t like without the inconvenience of having to consult parliament? It does not need primary legislation, it does not need a manifesto commitment, and it does not need anybody's permission except a minister's.

No order has ever been made under it. Not one. The list is textually unchanged from the day it came into force. I would love to know who last read it.

This means the honest description of what you are looking at, when you read about a school watering its pitches in August while a woman down the road carries a can out to her hydrangeas, is not that somebody got let off. Nobody picked up the phone or had a hushed conversation in some private dining-club. It is that a minister has had a lever primed and ready to pull since 2010 under governments of three different stripes and through drought after drought not one of them has reached up and pulled it.

Nobody is playing on them

I want to give schools a fair crack of the whip here. Where water companies publish anything at all about sports grounds the justification given is health and safety and to be fair that is a real argument. A pitch which bakes to concrete genuinely is dangerous to play on.

The problem is look at what the date is today. St Paul's is shut. Dulwich broke up weeks ago. Nobody is playing on those pitches. Nobody is going to be playing on them for another 5 weeks and the sprinklers are running anyway.

So either that is not the real reason, or this is drafted loosely enough that it never actually has to be true. Do you have to choose between them? I would say the second is the much more common way in my experience of how rules get written. Or in that case specifically not written.

Professor Hannah Cloke at Reading put this very well telling the Guardian that it was "crazy to sprinkle drinking water over sports pitches that don't need it, when others are facing severe shortages", and making the further point that visible exemptions undermine the whole effort to get households saving water in the first place. That is the part which turns this from unfairness into incompetence. A shared sacrifice stops being shared the moment people can see that it is not. We’ve seen before how egregious differences in the treatment of groups of people lead to very strong public feeling. Ask Boris Johnson.

A different pipe to the same water

St Paul's has an answer and it deserves quoting in full. Danielle Pierce, the school's estates manager, told the Guardian: "We are watering our sports pitches, not the wider grounds, in line with Thames Water's published guidance. This water comes from a dedicated standpipe and is not mains drinking water."

I would take the second sentence first, because it is a strange one. When people in the water industry refer to a standpipe they usually mean a temporary connection to the mains, and if that is what they mean then it is mains water and the sentence contradicts itself. If they mean a borehole then they should say borehole, and I would be very interested to know when it was sunk and what it cost to sink.

Either way, I do not think the argument does the work they seem to want it to. Groundwater is not some separate substance arriving from outer space. It is the same water, in the same catchment, on its way to the same rivers, which is precisely why you need a licence from the Environment Agency to take more than twenty cubic metres a day of it, and why groundwater sits under the same regulatory framework as surface water. The state's own licensing regime is built on the premise that what you take out affects everybody else. If the regulator will not accept "it came down a different pipe" as a defence, why on earth should we?

I would go further. Because there is a third thing here and it also counts against them. A private supply is not free. Sinking a borehole, licensing it and maintaining it is capital expenditure, and it is capital expenditure whose entire function is to put you outside a restriction that applies to your neighbours.

So what the money is buying here is not a favour. It's a permanent exit.

We have done this before

If this were the only time I had seen a restriction shaped like this, I would put it down to slack drafting in 2010. It isn't. I alluded to it earlier with my mention of Boris Johnson. But it doesn’t have to be blatant wine and cake based rule breaking in Downing Street. It can be much more prosaic and ordinary than that.

In September 2020 the government brought in the rule of six. We all remember it. I personally had close family members who had to delay important occasions as a direct result of it. Six people, and if you were having a wedding you got thirty, cut to fifteen a fortnight later, and if you were burying somebody you got thirty. All of those numbers are there in the regulations and in the amendment that followed.

Two of the exemptions have no number attached at all. One of them is an outdoor sports gathering. The other is something the regulations call a "relevant outdoor activity", which they define as "a physical activity which is carried on outdoors and for which a licence, permit or certificate issued by a public body must be held".

That is shooting. Everybody understood at the time that it was shooting. What I find remarkable is that you can read the entire instrument through without ever finding that out. The words shooting, hunting, grouse and firearm do not appear anywhere in it. I checked.

Michael Gove later defended the exemption to the Covid inquiry, saying that he had wanted "horizontal rules" and had not wanted to "stoke an argument" over hunting. He’s good with the words isn’t he?

I want to be careful at this point because these two cases are not equally proven and I am not going to pretend otherwise. On 2020 there is a good deal of published inquiry material about how that exemption came about. On 2026 I have a statute and something I am inferring. I am not suggesting that anybody lobbied for the scope of section 76 back in 2010.

What I am saying is about the outcome and it is identical both times. A restriction lands on the general population, an expensive pursuit sits outside it. In both cases you cannot see it happening by reading the rule. Because in 2020 the rule never named who it was for and in 2026 the rule only covers your paddling pool and garden.

What I actually think

There is an argument going round that all of this is really about privatisation, and that public ownership would sort it out. I have some sympathy but I am not going to have that fight today, mainly because I don't think it's true in this particular instance. Section 76 is an Act of Parliament. It would say exactly the same thing if every pipe in England were owned by the state tomorrow, and the list would still stop at the household.

I keep coming back to something simpler than ownership, and a good deal harder to fix. Rules get written by the people in the room. And if the people in the room like to squeeze in a back 9 when they have a couple of hours on a Wednesday afternoon, or they get invited to go and fire weapons at slow flying birds regularly, they are going to be inclined, even subconsciously, to be kinder to those pursuits than to pursuits they are less familiar with.

I think that is the whole of it. Not a conspiracy, not a bung, not a favour to a mate. Just a category, drawn by whoever turned up, sixteen years ago, and never revisited since.

Meanwhile the switch is still up there on the wall. It takes one order. Somebody could flick it this week. If this drought is as serious as we are being told that it is, why has nobody?

Tick tock.

Further reading

Water Industry Act 1991, section 76 (temporary use bans)

The Water Use (Temporary Bans) Order 2010

Water Resources Act 1991, section 73 (drought orders)

The rule of six regulations, SI 2020/986

The amendment of 23 September 2020, SI 2020/1029

I noticed back in February that the Restoration and Renewal Client Board published its costed proposals for what to do about the Palace of Westminster, which frankly is falling apart. Two options exist. One, both Houses move out entirely, the building gets stripped back and done properly. That takes between 20 and 25 years and costs up to £15.6 billion. Two, they stay in it, the work happens around them in bits and pieces. That takes up to 60 years and costs just short of £40 billion. More than 2.5x the amount.

Read those two numbers again, because everything else in this piece follows from them.

Staying put costs £24 billion more and takes 35 years longer. It is not the careful option or the thrifty one. It is not a case of hard-headed people declining to spend public money on a palace. In fact it’s the opposite of that. It is one of the most expensive things anyone has ever proposed doing to a building in this country’s history. It rivals the Sizewell C project for price. And nobody thinks the Commons and the Lords are going to produce enough energy to power 6 million homes no matter how much hot air they emit (Quentin Letts should be quaking in his boots when I’m dishing out top-quality biting satire like that for free).And of course the reason option two is on the table at all is that the people who will vote on it are the people who would have to move out.

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What They Are Actually Voting About

We should be clear about the condition of the place, because "needs work" does not cover it. It needs work in the same way The Titanic needed a gentle course-correction.

The Public Accounts Committee has said there is a real and rising risk that a catastrophic event will destroy the building before the restoration is done. Their description of it is leaking, dropping masonry, at constant risk of fire, and rammed full of asbestos. Fire wardens patrol 24/7. There have been dozens of fires in the past decade alone. Pipes burst, sewage comes through ceilings, and there are mice the building cannot get on top of. MPs were warned in 2023 that simply patching it up was running at around £2 million a week.

This is the building Labour MP Chris Curtis was describing when he talked about cabling nobody dares pull out because nobody knows what it is connected to on a recent podcast. This is the literal version, and unlike the constitution it has a price tag and a fire risk.

The decision has of course been pushed back (yet again) to “no later than 2030”, at a cost of somewhere between £320 million and £420 million for every year of delay. We are paying roughly a million pounds a day to not decide.

The One Where I Get to Say I Told You So

In October 2009 for the POWER2010 campaign, I wrote down what I would change about the Commons. It was a five point plan and the first point was this:

The chamber is too small to fit all MPs in. On budget day they end up standing at the back and sitting on the stairs. It's ridiculous that a chamber designed for 427 people is still being used for 646. It should be updated to seat all members. If it can be done in situ, fine, otherwise it may mean moving the location of the chamber. So be it.

So be it. That was written before Restoration and Renewal existed as a programme, by someone with no professional knowledge of the building and 17 years later it is the position the costed proposals have arrived at by a much more expensive and circuitous route.

The rest of the plan was desks for members, an end to heckling, and electronic voting from your seat. Hold that thought, because it turns out I was picking a fight with somebody.

Why Nobody New Ever Fixes This

Here is the thing that took me a while to see. Institutions normally change through turnover. Those who are attached to the old arrangements retire, new people arrive who have no particular sentimental attachment to it, the balance tips and eventually stuff gets fixed. Or changed. Or completely binned. Give it two or three generations of new intake and a majority emerges that simply does not care about the panelling.

But of course, uniquely at Westminster that never happens. The reason is inextricably linked to who becomes an MP.

New members are not noobs with no view about the building. They are almost exclusively people who have been obsessed with politics for most of their adult lives. They will have watched Geoffrey Howe resign while Thatcher was forced to sit there stony-faced at the despatch-box. They saw the Maastricht rebellions and vote after vote on all sorts of other contentious issues of the day with the chamber packed and the aisles full. They have seen Budgets, Brexit and Blair at his most imperial. Many of them worked as researchers or advisers or lobbyists and came into the building as outsiders, repeatedly, and felt what that feels like.

I know exactly what it feels like, because I have been in there many times over the years myself and the place is genuinely incredible. The sheer size of it as you first enter. The gothic majesty of the huge walls and the statues. The history dripping from every nook and cranny. That is not a grudging concession, it is the whole point. If you have any interest in this country's politics and history at all, walking through that entrance at St Stephen’s Gate does something to you.

Now put yourself on those green benches in your first term having longed for this moment since you were fifteen and listening to Neil Kinnock’s speeches on your Walkman (Anybody? No? Just me? OK.) Now imagine someone asks you to vote to spend 25 years in an anonymous, brutalist converted office block off Whitehall.

The reforming majority never arrives because the selection process filters for the Kinnock/Walkman contingent. Every intake is if anything, more in awe than the one before. Because there is even more history to layer on top. When I was a kid it was the place of Thatcher, Wilson, Attlee and Churchill. But to today’s incoming cadre you can add Blair, Cameron and even Johnson. And so instead of a decision you get a never-ending series of pretexts: the cost to the taxpayer, the heritage, the security, the disruption, the need for further work on the options. Oh the need for the further work on the options. Now is not the time. Humphrey Appleby would be issuing a wry smile from his fictional grave.

There will always be another excuse, and the can will be kicked down the road for exactly as long as we collectively allow it to be.

This is turkeys and Christmas, except the turkeys keep being replaced by turkeys who are even less keen on Christmas.

We Shape Our Buildings

Some will say that eventually their hand will be forced. Falling masonry kills somebody or a fire gets away from them and takes half the Palace with it. Then surely, surely to God they will have to act?

I thought that too until I checked and the honest answer is that this experiment has already been run. Twice.

In 1834 a fire destroyed most of the old Palace of Westminster. What Parliament did next was commission Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin to build the Gothic fantasy we have now. That was a project that ran 30 years, overran its budget and killed both its architects before it was completed.

Then on 10 May 1941, in the heaviest raid London suffered in the whole war, the Commons chamber was completely destroyed. Gone. A blank site. A national emergency. That was the point if ever there was one to finally build something better.

In the rebuilding debate of 28 October 1943, Winston Churchill argued for putting it back exactly as it had been. The chamber should be oblong rather than semi-circular, because “a horseshoe lets a man drift by degrees from one position to another whereas the oblong shape sustains two parties facing each other”. It should be deliberately too small to seat all its members, because a chamber that is full only on the big occasions produces a sense of crowd and urgency that a half-empty hall never will. And members should certainly not each be given a desk to sit at and a lid to bang.

Those arguments seem utterly preposterous to modern ears but, spoiler alert, he won. The chamber was rebuilt on the exact same footprint, too small on purpose, deskless on purpose and finished in 1950. It is the room they are sitting in now. It’s the equivalent of taking the shell of a crashed aeroplane and rebuilding it exactly as it was before deliberately including the design flaws that made it so rickety in the first place.

That is where the phrase comes from, incidentally. "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us" is not a piece of general wisdom about architecture. It is Churchill, in that debate arguing that the dysfunctionality was the point and should therefore be preserved.

So my 2009 plan wanted the chamber to seat everyone and wanted members to have desks. Those are precisely the two things Churchill ruled out in 1943. I had no idea at the time that I was arguing with him. He has been winning for 80 years, and he is still winning now from beyond the grave with the assistance of a building that has been on fire dozens of times in ten years.

The Same Reason We Still Have First Past the Post

None of this is a new problem and I have written about its general form more than any other subject.

In June 2009, in the middle of the expenses scandal, I said what I actually thought about MPs and electoral reform:

MPs as a group cannot be trusted to act in the best interests of democracy or of the country when it comes to the system that is used to elect them. They have too much vested interest in the existing system. Whatever they might say, they have already proved themselves incapable of doing what is right for the country/taxpayers with the expenses debacle.

The building is just another example of this insular, conservative tendency. Ask MPs to vote on the system that elected them and they will of course not reform it. Ask them to vote on their own expenses and they will continue to give themselves generous allowances (until the Telegraph did it for them). Ask them to vote on the House of Lords and as I put it when the 2012 bill was published, you are asking several hundred people to vote away a fifty-fifty chance of a comfortable job for life and to then take their “constitutional objections” entirely at face value.

I want to be fair about the motive, because I was fair about it in 2010 and it has not stopped being true. Most people would find it difficult to vote for something that threatens their own position. I certainly would. That is not a defect of MPs in particular. As I have written about many times before, as any economist will tell you people respond to incentives. The failure is structural, not moral.

But notice what the structure produces. In each of these cases the arguments deployed against reform are constitutional, high-minded and expressed in the language of principle: the primacy of Parliament, the constituency link, the risk of deadlock, national heritage. And in each case the people making them have a direct personal interest in the outcome that they are not required to declare, because of course the whole chamber shares it.

No Other Employer Gets To Do This

Try the same facts in any other workplace in Britain.

A firm occupies a building where masonry falls, fires start dozens of times a decade, sewage comes through the ceilings, the wiring is way beyond what even the most lax health and safety inspector would permit and the whole place is riddled with asbestos and mice. The professional advice would be that it needs to be emptied and stripped back. The staff vote to stay in it instead and choose an option that costs two and a half times as much and takes thirty-five years longer on the grounds that they are fond of the building. And someone made a good speech in it 85 years ago.

They would not get through the first 30 seconds with an insurance broker. The reason no other employer faces this problem is not that other employers are more responsible, it is that in every other workplace in the country the decision does not belong to the people who like sitting there.

There is a version of this argument that says leave the Palace as a museum and build Parliament somewhere purpose-built. I have some sympathy with this. Like the apocryphal man responding to a request for directions, a country that wanted a working legislature would not start from here. But it is not necessary to win that argument because the professionals have already produced the cheaper, faster, safer option and it has been point-blank refused anyway. Repeatedly.

Take It Away From Them

The fix follows from the diagnosis, and it is the same fix as everywhere else this problem shows up.

You cannot trust a body to make a decision about itself in which it has an unavoidable personal interest. What you need to do instead is take the decision away and give it to somebody professional, independent and with statutory powers to insist their decisions are enacted. This is exactly what eventually happened with expenses after MPs demonstrated over decades that they could not be trusted with them. But that only happened after years of obfuscation because weeks of headlines about duck-houses and moats forced the hand of MPs.

What is needed is for them to recognise the inherent conflict of interest, set up a body with the authority to determine the works and require the move and let Parliament get on with legislating from wherever it is told to sit.

But here is the bind. And it is why I am almost certain it will not happen.

Handing over that power is itself a decision for MPs. The only route out of the trap runs through a vote by the people who are in it, on a motion whose entire purpose is to remove their ability to keep saying no. There are no external actors who can impose this. There is no referendum. No mechanism at all except the good sense of several hundred people being asked to evict themselves from the building they spent their whole lives wanting to enter.

So it will be 2030 before there is a decision and I would not put money on 2030 either. When a can is this easy to kick a bit further down the road the temptation for MPs will be to keep doing just that. The bill goes up by a million pounds a day while we wait, the fire wardens keep walking their rounds and slowly, gradually, the day when it could all just collapse comes nearer. Very slowly and then all at once.

We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us. Churchill meant it as an argument for keeping this one exactly as it was. 83 years on it reads less like a principle and more like a warning that nobody heeded.

Delivered by the man who made sure it came true and through him still persists to this day.

Further reading

Restoration and Renewal: developing the strategic case and costed proposals, House of Commons Library · House of Commons Rebuilding, the debate of 28 October 1943, Hansard

Back in April something I have been waiting a long time for finally happened. After 27 years hereditary peers were finally completely banished from the House of Lords. Actually I say completely but as is so often the case with changes to the UK establishment it included a grubby compromise that allowed 20 of the 92 to remain as life peers. But at last the principle of heredity was erased from our legislature.

The Commons had passed the bill a year and a half earlier, at third reading, by 435 votes to 73, which in a chamber that will argue black is white when it suits their side counts as unanimity. The government's word for the arrangement it was ending was "indefensible", and by the end nobody was seriously arguing the principle. You should not get to help make the laws of this country because your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather lent some money to a king.

The ninety-two who left had been sitting there since 1999 on what Parliament's own account calls "a temporary basis", pending second stage proposals that were going to be agreed shortly. The temporary arrangement lasted twenty-seven years. I mention this only because it will be relevant later, when we get to the question of how long things take.

But the bit I cannot get past is this. Having decided that inherited position has no place in our legislature we wandered out of the building, past the throne and went home. Or to the pub.

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What I Said in 2012

I have form on this. In March 2012, in the run-up to the Diamond Jubilee, I wrote a post called You can't be a monarchist and a meritocrat. It was 375 words and it did not trouble itself with evidence.

I still think this argument is correct. I was not trying to persuade those strongly in favour of monarchy - they’re beyond redemption! I was targeting those who talk “social mobility” on the one hand but then meekly row back into line when it comes to an hereditary head of state. In my opinion those views a mutually incompatible and yet they are very prevalent at the top of politics.

I then said something that I also still think is true. That the monarchy in particular and the aristocracy more generally prop up the entire class system. That with an hereditary head of state at the top a genuinely meritocratic society is that much harder to build.

I asserted that. I did not demonstrate it. Bear that in mind.

The Trap I Set for Nick Clegg

Six months later I got an opportunity most bloggers do not get as a result of winning Lib Dem Blog of the Year in 2012. First prize was an interview with Nick Clegg. Second prize was two interviews with Nick Clegg.

Joke.

So I got 25 minutes with the then Deputy Prime Minister and I used part of it on exactly this question as he was one of those at the top of politics who had used this exact framing (“Birth should never be destiny”) and shortly afterwards was perfectly happy to attend the wedding of Kate and William. The full exchange is here. Reading it back 14 years later is a somewhat uncomfortable experience for reasons I will come to.

I opened with the trap. How did he square his comments about birth and destiny that with supporting a hereditary monarchy?

He did not take the bait. He said abolishing the monarchy would not fix poor housing, poor infant health or poor primary schools and that it was "the wrong answer to a much more profound social problem". He also claimed the whole thing was a distraction from the actual machinery of disadvantage.

I pushed. Does having a head of state who is there by birth rather than merit not undermine the case for meritocracy at a fundamental level?

"I'm going to give you an answer which is really based on real world pragmatism rather than theory," he said, and then listed what he would put ahead of it: education, taxation, housing, health, jobs. "I just wouldn't put fiddling around with the monarchy anywhere on my shopping list of things to do."

I tried once more, with America, where in principle any child can end up as head of state. And this is where he said the thing I have been thinking about ever since.

"To displace the failings of the political class or decant them into an argument about the monarchy is slightly letting the politicians off the hook. We have a political class, people like me, dare I say it people like you: Blokes In Suits."

(I told him I did not normally wear a suit and had put one on especially for him. He jokingly laughed that he was very flattered. It was that sort of interview.)

My reply, on the record, was: "I hear what you say but I don't share that view."

Where He Was Right and I Was Not

I have come round to thinking that he had some good points I had been unwilling to concede at the time.

Not on the logic. The logic of my 2012 post is bang on and I would write it again. You cannot coherently hold that positions should be earned but that somehow the top one is special and different and should be inherited.

Where he was right is about the target. The person at the top of our constitution has never claimed to have earned it. There is no pretence involved. The monarchy is a lot of things but it is not a lie about merit because it has never once made the claim.

The political class is. The people who really do decide how this country is run mostly do claim their positions on merit, and the route to those positions turns out to run through a startlingly narrow set of schools, universities and internships that the vast majority of the country cannot access. That is a system that presents itself as open and functions as closed which is worse than one that is honestly closed, because it tells everybody who does not make it that the failure was theirs.

Eight years after Clegg said this to me, Michael Sandel published The Tyranny of Merit, which is essentially the same argument with footnotes. The problem with meritocracy is not that we have failed to achieve it. The problem is what it does to people when they believe we have.

So I no longer think a meritocracy is the obvious good I took it for in 2012. I think it is a better organising principle than heredity, and I think it curdles into something fairly ugly when the people at the top start believing their own selection process. My 2012 self treated "meritocrat" as a compliment and used it as one. I would not do that now.

This has at least partly been influenced by an interview I did with Dr Franz Buscha for a radio show I used to host in 2016 where I discussed how for Social Mobility / Meritocracy to work properly it requires people to move down as well as up, as this is an aspect that is often glossed over. Dr Buscha was very persuasive on this topic and it has influenced my thinking on this ever since.

Where Clegg Was Wrong

Clegg’s defence was not really about meritocracy. It was about priorities. Basically, don't bother with the constitutional symbolism, it can't be done, it’s Britain, it’s constitutionally ossified yada yada yada. Instead his argument was that we should spend the effort where the damage is. And to make the point he offered his own scars.

"Heaven knows I've tried to get rid of some of the obvious bastions of privilege and patronage in the House of Lords which was difficult. In fact it proved to be impossible because of the vested interests in the establishment parties."

Impossible. That was September 2012.

Twelve years later it turned out to be entirely possible It was not even close actually. Four hundred and thirty-five to seventy-three. The vested interests folded, the establishment parties voted it through, the Lords swallowed it, the sky did not fall, and this April the last of them went home.

This inconvenient fact rather undermines his entire pitch. If the reason not to touch the hereditary principle was that it was futile we now have absolute proof that it was not. The pragmatic case has expired. What is left is the principled one and that says the same thing about the Lords and about the throne.

Because it is the same bloody principle!

Why It Stops Where It Stops

Nobody has explained the stopping point. I for one would actually like to hear it attempted.

Parliament has just accepted that inherited position is indefensible in a body that makes law. That was literally the government's own word for it. And yet it has left in place inherited position in the office that opens that Parliament, assents to its legislation, appoints its Prime Minister and sits at the top of the honours system that distributes status downward through the whole of the rest of us. If the principle was good enough to clear the Commons by nearly six to one, it is logically impossible to explain why it evaporates at exactly the point where it would apply to one family.

The honest answer is that it is not a principle at all. It is a boundary drawn where the public stops being comfortable, which is a perfectly reasonable way to run a democracy and a terrible way to pretend you have a constitution.

Not in My Lifetime

Abolition is the obvious next step. It is the same argument, one rung up, and the vote in April makes it harder rather than easier to argue against.

I am fifty-two today, and on my fifty-second birthday I can say with increasing confidence that it will not happen in my lifetime. The polling has moved but nothing like far enough. This is a country that took twenty-seven years to end an arrangement it had already agreed was temporary, and on that sort of timetable an institution nobody has formally agreed to end at all has a good deal of road in front of it. I would need to get to about 110 (and frankly, looking at my blood pressure that’s unlikely) and even then I would not fancy my chances.

So I am in the odd position of half agreeing with 2012 Clegg. He was right that this is not where the damage is, and right that going after the crown is easier than going after the people who actually run things, most of whom look and sound like him and, as he was kind enough to point out, like me (although tbf I was cos-playing for the day). I was wrong to treat the monarchy as the load-bearing wall of the class system when it is much closer to the decoration on the front.

I just do not think being decoration is a plausible enough defence.It is also worth bearing in mind this very salient point. Every single time this country has actually got round to removing an inherited position from its constitution nobody, but nobody has subsequently made a serious case for restoring it.

That one stark fact tells you a hell of a lot about how defensible the current position actually is.

Further reading

Everything is linked above where it is used. If you want the full parliamentary history of how the ninety-two finally went, the Commons Library has it: House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill: progress of the bill.

Back in August 2009 I wrote a post on my old blog called Why is numeracy so undervalued in the UK? which was prompted by a throwaway line on Twitter (which tells you roughly how long ago 2009 was), and the argument went something like this: Nobody in this country is comfortable admitting that they cannot read, and people will go to considerable lengths to hide it, but announcing that you are hopeless at maths is not merely acceptable, it is basically a boast. I said at the time that I had lost count of the number of people who had told me, with a shrug and something close to a smile, "I'm no good at maths!". I also said that I thought this was cultural rather than innate, on the basis that plenty of other countries manage it perfectly well, and that if we treated literacy the way we treat numeracy we would be appalled at ourselves.

Seventeen years is a decent interval. It is long enough to find out whether I now need to revise my opinion so I went and had a look.

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Where I Was Wrong

I’ll do the most uncomfortable part first because I was leaning on a statistic that has not aged well and I should probably be up-front about that.

My evidence in 2009 was the International Numeracy Survey of 1996, which put the UK last of all the countries tested. 20% of British adults got all twelve questions right compared to 43% in Japan. It was a very useful stick and I have enjoyed hitting things with it. Quite hard. Repeatedly. For years.

But that is no longer where we are. The OECD's Survey of Adult Skills reported again in December 2024 and on numeracy England now scores above the OECD average, with a significant increase since the previous cycle in 2012. Within the G7 we come third, beaten only by Japan and Germany and the proportion of adults at the lowest proficiency levels has fallen from 57% to 52% over roughly the same period. The under-35s now outperform the 55 to 65s, which is exactly the direction of travel I want to see. The coming generations are the people trying to work out what 25% off actually means tomorrow.

So the gloomy version of my argument, the one where Britain is uniquely and permanently hopeless with numbers, was simply wrong. Something has improved. If you spent the 2010s teaching maths then you appear to have got somewhere, and it would be pretty shabby of me to pretend otherwise just because it spoils a tidy line.

Where I Was Right, And It's Worse Than I Thought

Here's the thing though. The claim I actually made was not about scores at all. It was about status. I said we do not value numeracy and that the tell is how comfortable people are announcing that they lack it.

That claim can now be tested, because somebody has gone and tested it. Ipsos surveyed 2,007 British adults for National Numeracy in April 2019 and asked them, among other things, how they felt about being bad at each of the two skills.

Look at the top pair, because that is the one that stopped me in my tracks. Half of British adults would be proud of a child who was good at reading and writing, whereas only 21% would be proud of a child who was good at maths. Not hostile to it, not indifferent to it, but simply less than half as likely to consider it a thing worth being pleased about in your own child.

The embarrassment gap runs the same way and I find it quieter but rather more damning. 58% would be embarrassed to admit that they were no good at reading, against 47% for maths. That is eleven points of difference in what we are prepared to own up to.

I suppose what strikes me most is that this is my 2009 post sitting in a spreadsheet. I described a national shrug and assumed I was generalising from my own irritation, and it turns out the shrug is measurable and it is roughly the size I said it was.

The Bit That Should Worry Everybody

The same survey set five numeracy questions pitched at around GCSE grade C. 20% of respondents reached that standard, 6% got all five right and 10% got none of them at all.

And what is it that the OECD says those 52% at the lower proficiency levels cannot reliably do? It is not abstract. It is working out 10% off, or 50% off, reading a payslip, or turning a monthly bill into an annual one. In England that comes to around 8.5 million working age adults with low proficiency in literacy or numeracy or both.

Half the country cannot confidently work out a sale price. That is not a lament about standards, it is a fact about the audience for every economic argument that anybody in public life is ever going to make.

Why This Is A Politics Post

I have been writing recently about the interview ritual where a presenter demands to know where a few hundred million pounds is coming from, as though a number that size were a household expense rather than a rounding error in a £1.4 trillion budget, and I argued that the whole thing is theatre. What I didn't say (because I hadn't at that point gone and looked at these numbers) is why the theatre works quite so well.

It works because it cannot be checked. If half your audience is not confident calculating 10% off a coat then "five hundred million" and "five billion" and "fifty billion" all land in exactly the same place (which is the place marked "a lot"). A presenter who says the figure sternly enough is not conveying information at all, he is conveying a mood, and the mood survives contact with the audience precisely because the arithmetic does not.

This is where the pride problem does the real damage. Innumeracy that people were embarrassed about would create a demand for better, and journalists would be expected to put figures in proportion in the same way that they are expected to spell. Innumeracy that people are perfectly relaxed about creates demand for exactly what we get, which is big scary numbers delivered with feeling, unchallenged and unscaled.

You can see the same asymmetry inside the trade, incidentally. A political journalist who wrote ungrammatically would not last a week. A political journalist who cannot tell a million from a billion, or who reports a change in a rate as though it were a change in a total, will do so on the evening news and nobody will write in.

Seventeen Years On

So the score is mixed and I will take the correction on the chin. British numeracy is better than it was and better than I predicted, the teaching worked, and that 1996 table I was so pleased with doesn't describe us any more.

But the thing underneath it, which is the reason I wrote the post in the first place, has not shifted at all. We remain a country where being bad with numbers is a personality quirk rather than a gap, where we are twice as pleased to have a child who reads well as one who calculates well, and where a substantial chunk of the population is durably unable to check the arithmetic of the people who govern them.

It is worth saying that I am not asking anybody to love maths. I'm asking for it to be embarrassing not to have it, in the same modest way that it is embarrassing not to be able to read. That is a considerably lower bar than curriculum reform and we have spent seventeen years not clearing it.

I would write the post again. I'd just have to change the graph.

Further reading

Survey of Adult Skills 2023 (PIAAC): National Report for England from NFER for the Department for Education, and the OECD's Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies.

In 1995 I watched a BBC documentary called Westminster's Secret Service by Michael Cockerell (who has made a great many programmes of that sort over the years). It was about the dark arts of the whips office, and the phrase was very much in quotation marks.

The bit everybody remembers now is the interview with Tim Fortescue, who had been a whip in the early 1970s. He made an off-the-cuff remark about the sort of thing whips dealt with, which was the problems MPs would have and how the office would handle them, and one of the problems he mentioned as he was talking was small boys.

He did not elaborate, and at the time it seemed to pass. Not unremarked exactly (there was some reaction) but nothing like the reaction you'd expect now.

And yet the remark surfaced many years later, when the whips office came into sharp relief again over things other people had said in Parliament, and suddenly Fortescue on small boys was a serious story. I was left wondering why it had not caused such a big problem at the time.

I am not sure I know the full answer. Partly cultural, presumably, but mostly I think it is the institutional frame these things get looked at through now: post-Savile, so post-2012 or 2013, and after MeToo in the late 2010s. They are viewed differently.

Here is the part that ought to bother us more than it does. That programme went out in the 1990s and nothing changed, and nothing changed when the story resurfaced either, which tells you how sticky these institutions are, how deep the roots go, and how hard they are to shift.

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Answerable to themselves

The whips office bothers me because it isn't elected by anyone, it sits in the shadows, and there is no accountability for it at all as far as I can tell. It does an important job in keeping party discipline, but its members appear to be answerable only to themselves and, ultimately, to the leader of the party.

You would not know any of this from the job titles. The Chief Whip is formally the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, the Deputy Chief Whip is Treasurer of the Household, junior whips are Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, and others hold offices like Comptroller and Vice-Chamberlain. Those titles give them a place in the infrastructure of parliament and government, and a veneer of respectability, when what the whips office is actually about is the enforcement of party discipline using tactics that are in some cases brutal and in most cases eyebrow-raising.

And then there is the Vice-Chamberlain, who is still held hostage at Buckingham Palace during the State Opening as a guarantee of the monarch's safe return.

It is all jolly hockey sticks. Yes, we are going to take someone hostage and stick them in the palace, but what does it achieve? It belongs with the pomp and ceremony, the carriages and Black Rod knocking on the door, and it serves no purpose at all. It is just a waste of time and, frankly, money.

The whip is also a document

I should be clear about what the job involves, because the word does a lot of work.

Whips exist to make sure MPs do what they are supposed to do as far as the party is concerned, so they turn up to the right debates, they ask the right questions, and they vote the correct way. That last one is the point of the exercise, because without it a government would struggle to get legislation through and an opposition would struggle to defeat one when the arithmetic is close.

The whip is also not merely the name of the people who go round enforcing discipline. It is a document, a physical document that gets issued. A one-line whip is, I think, optional, and gives guidance on what needs to happen (which debates to attend, how voting should work). A two-line whip is a stronger version of that. A three-line whip means you must come and vote, and if you don't, you are in serious trouble. Failing to vote on a three-line whip has in the past been a disciplinary offence, and sometimes grounds for expulsion from the party, so they take it seriously.

There is also a system called pairing, where if a government MP and an opposition MP agree that one of them will be absent, the other voluntarily stays away too so the numbers balance out.

But they do other things, and this is where the real problem lies. They keep track of MPs' personal lives and any difficulties they might have, and they are supposed to function as something like an HR department. So they enforce discipline, and they also perform an HR-adjacent function.

Those two things are in conflict with each other. The people you go to when you are in trouble are the same people who decide what happens to you when you step out of line, and everything else in this piece follows from that.

Half as much

I went and counted. I analysed the last seven parliaments worth of Hansard and found that government backbenchers speak, on average, about half as much as opposition backbenchers. In this parliament the median government backbencher makes 0.38 contributions per sitting day against 0.81 for the median opposition backbencher, and the gap holds in every one of the seven parliaments I could measure.

How much of that do I put down to the whips specifically?

Quite a lot.

When a party's in government, discipline is enforced far more strongly, because it is trying to get legislation through. Oppositions have whips and use them, but their backbenchers are given more freedom to speak as they wish (they are going to be attacking the government anyway and doing it in their own voice). Whipping makes government backbenchers much quieter than they would otherwise be.

I think ambitious new MPs keep quiet because, aside from the occasional constituency issue, the party leadership sees backbench interventions as unhelpful, because if a backbencher is speaking, the leadership cannot control what they are about to ask.

It does try, mind you. You see it at Prime Minister's Questions, where ridiculous questions are asked along the lines of, could the Prime Minister please answer why he is so wonderful and brilliant forever and ever amen. It becomes tiresome hearing these contrived questions that have plainly been geed up by the whips. But new MPs keep quiet because the whips don't want them out there speaking unless it is on their terms.

Two details sharpen the incentive. Whips draw government or ministerial salaries, which matters. They are an integral part of the machine, they are paid to do the government's bidding, and it gives them a strong reason to do the job the way they do it. If they were not paid for it and took only an MP's salary, the attitude would probably be more relaxed (whether that would suit the government of the day is another question).

And whips do not conventionally speak in debates themselves, which is understandable, since the work is supposed to be done behind the scenes. But it does mean the people doing most to determine who speaks in that chamber never have to account for it in it.

The dark arts

I am fairly sure dirt books have existed. I don't know whether they still do, but there has been enough discussion of them over the years. Off the record, never documented, and it makes sense given the way whips work. This was what Fortescue was referring to.

Does it matter whether one literally exists?

It does. You have got a function that is supposed to be simultaneously HR and enforcement, and if the people in the whips office hold secret files on their own side that can be used to blackmail them, that is a dangerous position for anyone to be in.

Nor did it stay in the seventies. In 2022 William Wragg, a Conservative MP but a very independent-minded one, publicly alleged that whips were threatening to withdraw funding from MPs' constituencies. It was officially denied, he reported it to the police, and nothing appears to have come of it. That is the end game you get when an unaccountable clique answers only to the party leader, who for reasons of plausible deniability would rather keep his hands clean and not know the murky details. I think it is shocking that it could have happened, and although we can't be certain it did, I've no reason to disbelieve William Wragg.

Not least because Christian Wakeford (then Tory MP for Bury South, who defected to Labour that same week) backed up Wragg's claims immediately. Wakeford publicly alleged that a whip explicitly told him he wouldn't get a much-needed new high school for Radcliffe in his constituency if he didn't vote with the government.

And there is more than that, because some of what has been talked about over the years, including on the Cockerell programme, amounts to literal physical threats.

Look at who traditionally becomes a whip. Not always (but often) they are big burly men, and that is not an accident: they are chosen because they can physically intimidate people. They can block them in corridors, they can stop them getting where they need to go, and they have been known to grab members by the lapels and hold them against walls. I have certainly heard the allegations.

That is bullying, and it wouldn't be tolerated in a modern workplace. Why is it tolerated in theirs?

That is the end of your career

The sanction behind all of it is the withdrawal of the whip.

Withdraw the whip from an MP and they are expelled from the parliamentary party, they lose its support, and they become effectively independent. More to the point, if an election is coming and they are not reinstated, they have to stand as an independent, and that almost always means losing the seat. Very few have held on in those circumstances (a tiny fraction), so expulsion is usually the end of a parliamentary career. If it happens at the start of a five-year parliament you have got five years to repair it, and if it happens six months before a general election you are finished.

And there are no hearings, there is no appeal, and reasons do not have to be given. They will usually know the reason, because there'll have been a vote they defied or something they said publicly, but it speaks again to the lack of accountability.

No other employer in the country is permitted to behave like this. MPs have themselves passed laws to stop precisely this happening in companies and organisations across the land, which is a double standard, and it shows that in this respect MPs are a law unto themselves.

In fairness to the whips

I don't want to pretend the job should not exist, because it should.

The strongest case for whips is that discipline has to be enforced somehow, and six hundred and fifty MPs voting whichever way they fancy on any issue of the day is a recipe for chaos. There is a democratic argument underneath that too. Most people, standing in the polling booth, are not weighing up an individual candidate's position on this issue and that issue, because they do not pay that kind of attention and there is no particular reason they should.

What they know is that Labour is broadly for higher taxes and more public spending and the Conservatives are broadly the opposite. They may have seen a party political broadcast, some posters, the odd debate, and they come away with a feel for what each party stands for. The idea that they also know how their own MP will vote, on an issue from among the hundreds or thousands that MP will face, just is not realistic.

So MPs do have to vote the party line most of the time, and I am not arguing with that at all.

What I object to is the secrecy. The behind-the-scenes shenanigans, the dirt books, the allegations of blackmail, the threats to constituency funding. Discipline isn't the problem. Nobody outside the room having any idea how it is enforced is the problem.

Kicking the can down the road

In 2009 I wrote that MPs as a group cannot be trusted to act in the best interests of democracy when it comes to the system that elects them. That was about electoral reform, and they cannot.

They have been shown incapable of handling their own expenses, and that was taken away from them. There is a real question over whether they can be trusted to vote on repairing the building they work in, which has been going on for decades. There are fires, there are mice, there are pipes bursting and water coming through walls, and it still is not fixed, because they keep kicking the can down the road, because they want to stay in the building.

This is the same thing again.

The whips, and the way the whips operate, serve the party leadership very well, because they get their policies through in government and they can vote policies down in opposition. I think it is difficult to imagine any government reforming the whips office. Andy Burnham said something adjacent to this shortly before he became Prime Minister, but once his feet are under the table and he wants his legislation through, he will not touch it.

Backbenchers are broadly content with the arrangement too, because they are ambitious. They want to get into government, and once they are there, they will want their policies to go through as well.

Which is the whole problem in a sentence. The people who could fix it are the people hoping to inherit it.

So what would I change? I would make it public, I would make it accountable, and I would make whips answer for what they do, perhaps through a select committee process, with a requirement that allegations against them are examined rather than absorbed.

I have no objection to party discipline, but the way it is implemented has to be transparent. What we have got instead is whispers and rumours about what goes on behind a door nobody is allowed through.

I just do not think that is acceptable in 2026.

But whilst I was fiddling with the code to analyse the 50% thresholds for the seats something occurred to me.

Anyone who has followed politics globally as I have for many years will be familiar with the concept of a Supermajority.

A supermajority is a mathematical safety brake. While a standard majority is just $50 + 1 (the bare minimum to pass a budget), a supermajority requires a massive, overwhelming consensus—usually two-thirds (66.7%) of the vote. It is designed specifically to stop politicians from doing impulsive things on a whim.

Here are a few illustrative examples of when countries pull out the “Supermajority” card:

1. Evicting a President (The US Senate)

In the United States, if the House of Representatives decides they’ve absolutely had it with a President, they can impeach them with a simple majority. It’s loud, it’s dramatic, and it makes great television.

But actually kicking the President out of the White House and changing the locks? That requires a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate (67 out of 100 senators).

The Logic: Because getting 67 American politicians to agree on anything—even the shape of the Earth or whether the sky is blue—is nearly impossible, a President can only be removed if they’ve done something so spectacularly egregious that both political parties stop shouting at each other long enough to agree on the eviction notice.

2. Rewriting the National DNA (The German Basic Law)

If a government wants to pass a normal law a simple majority does the trick. But if a country wants to alter its Constitution the rules change entirely.

Take Germany’s Grundgesetz (Basic Law). To amend it, you need a two-thirds supermajority in both the Bundestag (the federal parliament) and the Bundesrat (the body representing the regional states).

The Logic: A constitution is meant to be permanent, not a Google Doc that the party currently in power can edit every four years. The supermajority requirement ensures that if you want to alter the fundamental fabric of the nation, your idea has to be so undeniably sensible that even your fiercest political enemies look at it and say, “Ja, okay, fair enough.”

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So, “What has this all got to do with your amazing election analysis code Thompson?” you might ask (very elegantly put by the way).

Well, I started to wonder about something as I was analysing the 50% data. What if we went lower? A lot lower? What if we started looking at how many MPs have been elected historically on less than a third of the vote? Because in those cases the MP would technically have had the equivalent of a Supermajority of their own electorate against them. Whilst of course possible under First Past The Post my instinct was that it is unlikely to have been the case for many MPs over history because of the distinct lack of legitimacy this would connote.

And as it happens I was right. In the whole of the 1940s and 1950s only 1 MP was elected on less than a third of the vote. It was the same in the 1960s and 1970s, just one across both decades. It ticked up a bit in the 80s and 90s with 6 in total across the 4 general elections in those decades however that’s still a tiny proportion. In the 6 general elections held in the 2000s and 2010s the number ticked up a bit more to 17 but as a proportion of the total MPs elected during that period (3905) it’s a very small number - less than 0.5%.

The Fly in the Ointment

The first problem comes when we look at 2024. The number of MPs elected with less than a third of the vote in the general election that year is 51. Out of 650. That’s nearly 8%. Oh dear. As I said in my previous piece the pervasive feeling of a lack of legitimacy hangs over this parliament and the deeper I look into the numbers, the more I think I am starting to see why.

But it gets much, much worse.

Remember in my previous piece when I added in the analysis for the projected election results in the April 2026 Electoral Calculus MRP? Well I did the same thing again for this “less than a third” analysis. The finding actually shocked me.

467 MPs out of 650.

74%.

That’s right. Almost three quarters of MPs are likely to be elected at the next general election with more than two-third of their electorate having voted for someone. 3 out of 4 MPs will have a Supermajority against them in their own back yard.

I am really strongly getting the feeling now that a democratic crisis is threatening to envelope us. Our electoral system is simply not designed to cope with multi-party politics like this. I fear that the next parliament will be seen as deeply illegitimate right from the get-go that.

I don’t think there is one single answer to this. But it feels like electoral reform of some description, at the very least to a preferential system where voters rank candidates is going to be needed eventually.

Without it we’ll condemned to parliament after parliament where hardly any MPs feel they have so little legitimacy that they will struggle to get anything done at all.

Many moons ago during the MPs expenses scandal of 2009 I wrote a piece that exposed the fact that the safer an MP’s seat was, the more likely they were to have been involved in the scandal. It was a bit of citizen journalism that captured the mood and effectively launched my side-career as a political commentator.

Glass Half Full

Back in those days, although the electoral system may have incentivised naughty behaviour, at least with the duopoly of Labour and the Conservatives hoovering up much of the vote between them most MPs could at least claim to have the support of the majority of their voters. In fact my analysis showed that the most egregious offenders tended to be the ones with the largest majorities and there were a lot of offenders as you can probably recall. For every duck house and moat clearing there were of course more minor transgressors but the rule seemed to be that if you were “at it” you had probably had wide support in your seat.

One of the main arguments for retaining our First Past the Post electoral system in the UK has traditionally been that it maintains a direct link between the governed and their representatives via the direct vote for every MP in their constituency. The larger the majority, the more legitimacy the MP has to claim they represent their constituents.

It’s worth noting that under our system it is not necessary for MPs to get more than half the vote to win. In a seat with lots of different parties running it’s possible for MPs to be elected on a minority of the vote if for example Labour got 40% in a seat and the Conservatives got 35% and the Lib Dems 25%.

But back in the 1940s and 1950s more than 80% of MPs had the support of at least half of their constituents. That fact helped to cement the existing system in place, after all if most MPs have majority support in their seat then there is clear legitimacy and no problem surely? In the 1960s and 1970s this figure had dropped a little but was still above 70%.

Even from the 1980s through to 2019 this had held to a large extent. There is a bit of noise in the individual results as things bounced up and down a little between different elections but if you look at an average of each 20 year period from 1941-2020 you can see that the majority of MPs during all of those periods got the vote of at least half of their constituents at each general election:

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Glass Mostly Empty

Things changed quite dramatically though at the 2024 general election. This is what things look like when we extend the chart to include the data from that election (Source: ERS):

That’s right. The figures have fallen off a cliff. At the 2024 general election only 96 MPs or around 14% had the support of half or more of their electors.

This is a catastrophic drop and it highlights one of the reasons why politics feels so different in 2026 than it did in say 1999 two years into the previous Labour government’s term. I suspect that on some level, deep down the electorate sense that the legitimacy of this parliament is compromised. It’s evident in the timid way the government approaches things. The U-turns. The endless farming out of decisions to reviews. And above all the palpable sense that hundreds of MPs are clearly terrified they are going to lose at the next election.

This simply was not the case in 1997. In that election 54% of all MPs and 57% of Labour MPs had more than half of their electors back them. There were not a whole swathe of first time MPs convinced they were going to lose next time round. No wonder it feels different now.

Perhaps the most concerning aspect of my analysis though is what I saw when I went through the data for the latest Electoral Calculus MRP poll to see how many MPs would have majority support in their constituencies if an election was run today.

10.

Out of 650.

Or 1.6%.

Given how fragile and weak our current parliament feels with nearly 100 MPs with more than half the vote we can only guess as to the effect it will have when only a tiny fraction of them do.

The democratic cliff edge is real and is about to get ten times worse.

Literally.

Unprecedented Manoeuvring

It is being reported that Health Secretary Wes Streeting might be about to challenge Keir Starmer for the leadership of Labour and hence potentially replace him as Prime Minister.

It’s worth noting that this would be the first time this has ever happened in UK politics. A Labour Party leader has never been removed by a challenge to them whilst in office.

The reason this is noteworthy is because with all the psychodrama of the Conservative governments in that last few decades it’s easy to forget this. From Thatcher’s defenestration in 1990, to John Major’s “Put up or shut up” moment in 1995 when he was challenged by John Redwood. From Theresa May being ousted by Boris Johnson in 2019 to the rapid turnover 2022 when we had 3 Prime Ministers in the space of a couple of months. But a Labour PM has never been removed via a formal challenge from within their own party.

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What about Blair and Brown?

“Hold on”, I hear you say (somewhat shrilly for my liking to be honest), “Didn’t Brown replace Blair whilst in office?”.

Yes he did. But it was not via a formal challenge. Brown fought shy of ever directly challenging Blair. Instead he grumbled from the side-lines, briefing journalists and allowing allies to trash the then Prime Minister but never actually putting his head above the parapet.

The method he actually used in 2006 was to get a number of his allies to sign a letter and a few junior ministers to resign putting enough pressure on Blair to announce a timetable for his departure. He actually went a little under a year later and Brown didn’t even have to fight a contest, there was simply a coronation.

It’s worth just revisiting briefly as well the “Obvious Successor” graveyard from last week. Streeting needs to bear all of this in mind as he contemplates what he does next.

Where does that leave Streeting?

It leaves the Health Secretary at the time of writing in an unprecedented situation. If he does want to challenge Starmer directly for the leadership he potentially faces what I characterised last week as "The Portillo Paradox”. In that piece I argued that the lessons of Michael Heseltine and Michael Portillo are in the balance. The Heseltine experience suggests that he who wields the knife never wears the crown. But Portillo would suggest the opposite that if Streeting hesitates for too long his moment will pass him by.

But because Labour has no tradition of unseating a sitting PM whilst in office Streeting should be very cautious. There must be a reason for this.

Labour's Loyalty Logic

It’s partly that Labour have simply not been in power for as long as the Conservatives to develop such a tradition. But it’s partly something else. Labour MPs and the party members have a level of deference and respect for their leaders that seems to not be the case in other parties.

So it is for this reason that I suspect that even if Streeting does go for it, his challenge will fail. Either Starmer will retain the leadership or a different challenger who enters the contest after Streeting will have the crown when the dust settles.

Far from seeing a Coronation Street-ing, it’s much more likely that he’ll go the way of Crossroads or even Albion Market.

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The Tell-Tale Phone Lines: Portillo’s Hesitation

The phone lines were installed. It was all ready to go. And then he hesitated.

It was June 1995. John Major had just made his famous “Put up or shut up” speech in the Downing Street garden throwing down the gauntlet to his internal party rivals. Portillo was the most well-known of the cabinet “bastards” that Major had referred to in his hot-mic incident of a couple of years earlier. Everyone thought he was going to run. But despite the phone lines being installed in a house owned by his ally Lord Spicer he didn’t. Instead it was left to John Redwood to lead the charge for the cabinet Eurosceptics.

But why did Portillo “bottle it”? To answer this question we have to look deeper into the history of leadership challenges. Most notably that of Michael Heseltine who challenged Margaret Thatcher for the Tory leadership in 1990.

The Knife and the Crown: The Heseltine Curse

Heseltine had been a Big Beast in Thatcher’s cabinet until he resigned over the Westland Affair in 1986. He had become a focal point for Conservative discontent with the Prime Minister and in 1990 when Geoffrey Howe resigned from her cabinet it fired the starting gun and Hezza threw his hat into the ring. The fact that the eventual winner after Thatcher was toppled was not Heseltine but John Major became a cautionary tale summed up by the man himself in what he thought was a Shakespearian quote (but it appears he actually created it himself): “The hand that wields the knife never wears the crown”. It is for that reason that in those summer days five years later Michael Portillo hesitated and ultimately failed to take the plunge. By the time Major himself resigned in 1997 following his landslide defeat to Tony Blair’s New Labour it was too late for Portillo. He had lost his Enfield Southgate seat in one of the most memorable moments of the night and was ineligible to stand. And in 2001 when the next opportunity arose (and he was an MP again) it was too late. He was yesterday’s man by then and came third behind Iain Duncan Smith and Ken Clarke.

But it is not just the Conservative Party who have had “Obvious next leader” candidates who failed to achieve the top job. In 1980 the former Chancellor and former Secretary of State for defence Denis Healey was the clear frontrunner to succeed James Callaghan after his defeat by Thatcher in 1979. He was popular and well known in the country and was widely expected to provide strong opposition to the UK’s first female Prime Minister. But in the end Healey was seen as too combative a character to heal the party divisions that had erupted into the open following their ejection from government. Michael Foot was seen as a more emollient figure and to the confusion of the public the very left-wing Foot got the top Labour job.

The Heir Apparent: David Miliband’s Sliding Doors

It was whilst in office in the late noughties that another senior Labour politician was anointed with the curse of the “obvious successor”. Once Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair in 2007 and was then widely seen to have “bottled” the chance to go to the country and receive his own mandate from the electorate his Foreign Secretary David Miliband became the heir-apparent. Miliband had been a key adviser to Blair both in opposition and in government before himself becoming an MP in 2001. With such experience close to the heart of power and now with one of The Great Offices of State under his belt. His chance came on the evening of 4th June 2009. His close ally James Purnell the Work and Pensions Secretary resigned just after polls closed in the local and European elections. I remember the shock of the breaking news just as the 10 O’Clock news began. Having spoken to someone intimately involved in events that day I know that Purnell knew that his resignation alone would not be enough to topple Brown but that he would lead the charge and Miliband would follow soon after. But that didn’t happen. To Purnell’s surprise Miliband stayed in post although it took several hours for him to release a statement in support of Brown. This delay marked him as somewhat duplicitous in the eyes of some colleagues and the media. This wasn’t helped by a rather unusual interview he gave a few days later where he admitted having contemplated resigning on that night. He clearly thought he could wait for a better chance. A second chance did come once Brown resigned as Prime Minister in May 2010 following Labour’s defeat at the ballot box in the general election. But whether it was a better chance is highly debateable. In the end he was beaten by his younger brother Ed Miliband, the memory of David’s equivocation and his open disloyalty to Brown whilst in office still fresh in the minds of his colleagues.

George Osborne is another example of a leading politician cursed by the “obvious” moniker. David Cameron’s loyal ally through the long march of the opposition years through to serving as his Chancellor for 6 years he was seen as the clear favourite to succeed his friend when the time came. Indeed Cameron did his best to smooth the way for him as the most likely continuation of his “decontamination strategy” begun with his hug-a-hoodie/husky photo-ops in opposition. But Osborne was undone not because of perceived disloyalty but the exact opposite. He was too close to Cameron and had been a leading figure in the In campaign during the Brexit referendum that Cameron had just lost and which had compelled him to resign. The idea that Cameron could be replaced with someone just as deeply involved in this loss as he was was untenable.

It’s worth bearing in mind that not all “obvious” successors miss their shot. Blair was seen by many as the obvious successor to John Smith and in 1994 with Smith’s untimely death Blair assumed the crown even if Gordon Brown thought he himself was a more obvious successor! And Brown himself maintained the position of obvious successor to Blair for over a decade until he successfully seized the crown in 2007. But it is notable just how few examples of this I could find when I thought back through the politics of my lifetime (since 1974).

2026: The Mayor’s Tightrope

Which brings us to May 2026. There are credible rumours that Andy Burnham, current Mayor of Greater Manchester is planning a return to the Commons via a by-election in the north-west forced by an ally if the local election results this week are bad enough. There are a number of hurdles he needs to get over before he could actually challenge Keir Starmer, a by-election being called (Labour can stall this for several months if they wish), Burnham being selected as the candidate (Labour’s NEC blocked Burnham from standing in Gorton and Denton a few months ago for example), Burnham winning the by-election and then gathering enough parliamentary colleagues to force a leadership election.

Even if Burnham was able to clear all these hurdles it is unclear that he would succeed. As we have seen time and again being the obvious successor is absolutely no guarantee of success in this type of endeavour. It’s perfectly possible that he could force a leadership election but then events move against him and someone else ends up with the crown a la Michael Heseltine. Perhaps as a parliamentary re-tread he’ll be rejected by the party members and supporters whose opinion is what ultimately matters most in this as they get to narrow down the field and eventually choose the winner. Or maybe his bold move to come back into the Commons at speed to execute this plan will mark him out as a Denis Healey type figure - highly experienced and likely a safe pair of hands but too divisive to help the party stay together at a time of great upheaval.

I’m sure the Mayor of Greater Manchester will be weighing all of these issues in the balance as he decides whether to make his move in the aftermath of the local elections. At least in 2026 with everything done digitally and with mobile phones he no longer needs to worry about whether to install phone lines but the human psychology of “bottling it” remains identical to 1995.

History shows he will be walking a hellishly delicate tightrope, whatever he decides.

They were the future once

Readers of a certain vintage will remember how the SDP were the future once. When the “Gang of Four” came together in 1981 to form the Social Democratic Party it seemed like the days of the old binary party system were numbered. Surely it was only a matter of time before this new upstart party would smash the incumbents to bits? After all they had former foreign secretary David Owen and former Chancellor and Home Secretary Roy Jenkins amongst their founders. And Shirley Williams who had just handed the Conservatives their sandwiches wrapped in a road-map in the Crosby by-election under the SDP banner in the November of that year.

But readers of that same vintage will also know that it was not to be. In fact not only was it not to be, the SDP actually became a cautionary tale. A byword for how not to get ahead in politics.

“Why are you talking about the SDP Grandad?” I hear you say. Isn’t that ancient history? Surely for my first piece on this shiny new platform in 2026 I should be posting something about AI or at the very least something peppered with “6-7” memes or similar?

But the history of what happened in the 1980s is really important for the way the political landscape is looking in the UK in latter half of the 2020s. Because there was a time when it really did feel like the SDP were going to win hundreds of seats and form a government.

The problem they had is that the UK runs its elections under the “First Past the Post¹” system. This system has a very simple stipulation. The party that wins the most votes in a constituency wins the seat. And when there are two main national parties and a handful of much smaller, geographically concentrated parties (e.g. SNP in Scotland, Lib Dems in their South West strongholds) this system works passably well. Under conditions where there are two large parties (in the case of the UK since 1945 these have been the Conservatives and Labour) it has tended to pick the correct winner in most elections² albeit it tends to add a “winners premium” if one of the parties beats the other by a decent margin.

Downfall

The SDP’s downfall was that although they had strong support, their vote share was quite evenly distributed across the entire country. Under FPTP in the 1980s, getting 25% of the vote spread thinly across the country was only likely to win you a small number of seats. And indeed this is what happened. At the 1983 general election the SDP who by that point had formed an electoral alliance with the Liberal Party between them got 25.4% of the national vote share. But only got less than 4% of the seats (23 seats in total out of 650). Whereas Labour only got slightly more votes 27.6% but because their vote share was much more efficiently distributed they got 32% of the seats (a perverse form of loser’s premium given that they didn’t even win the actual election!) with 209 seats in total. It was a similar story in 1987.

It is this exact problem that all insurgent parties in the intervening decades have faced at Westminster elections. Think of the Referendum Party in the 1990s or UKIP and the Greens in more recent elections. Time and again those parties would get either zero or perhaps 1 seat despite in the case of UKIP at the 2015 election getting 12.6% of the vote. FPTP makes it hard for newcomer parties to win any seats at all and especially hard for them to win enough to make any real difference to the House of Commons. It took the Lib Dems 6 general elections from their formation in 1989 before they got a result in 2010 where they were able to get into power and even then that was only because they fluked holding the balance of power in a hung parliament.

Even at the most recent 2024 general election Reform UK only managed to get less than 1% of the seats (6) on 14.3% of the vote. And at that same election the Greens only got 4 seats on 6.4% of the vote.

So far, so standard.

The fracturing of the two party system

Except that what we are starting to see is a fracturing of the two party system. For the first time ever in the last 18 months in the UK we are seeing a sustained period of polling that shows 4 or 5 national parties all within a small number of percentage points of each other.

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As you can see in the above chart The Conservatives, Labour and the Greens are almost in a statistical dead-heat clustering a little under 20%. Reform is a little higher in the mid-high 20s and the Lib Dems are slightly lower hovering around the low-teens.

This is exactly the sort of scenario that will break the FPTP stranglehold that shut the SDP out of power in the 1980s.

Under these conditions it is perfectly possible for Reform to get the exact same percentage of votes as the SDP did in 1983 (25.4%) and for them to not only form the next government but to potentially win in a landslide. Because if they get that everywhere and in enough seats the other votes are split roughly evenly between the other parties they can sail through the middle and take seat after seat on a quarter of the vote³.

“But” I hear you say insistently (you really must stop interrupting me in a minute) “These are just polls. At real general elections we won’t see this happening.”. Well let’s have a look at the trend over the last 30 years.

In the above chart I have plotted the average winning vote share in every general election since 1997. You can see that in 1997 and 2001 the average shares of the winning vote in each seat was around 50%. This is what you’d expect to see in an FPTP system with two dominant main parties. It drops to around 45% for the 2005 and 2010 elections. There is then an uptick for the 2015, 2017 and 2019 elections with the average vote shares peaking at well over 50% in 2019.

Here comes the controversial bit

However I am going to do something a little controversial now. I am going to edit the data a little. This is bound to provoke cries of “cherry picking” from some however I think I am justified in this and I will explain why first. In 2015 the Lib Dems were coming off the back of the coalition. They were incredibly unpopular and hence we saw a partial return to the status quo of Labour and the Conservatives hoovering up most of the vote. In 2017 and 2019 the coalition was still fairly fresh in the memory but also in 2016 we’d had the Brexit referendum which had caused a temporary repolarisation of the electorate around this issue. The apotheosis of this was the 2019 “Get Brexit Done” election where Boris Johnson very effectively squeezed the smaller parties out of the game using that tactic. In other words those elections were anomalous. They came in quick succession across 4 very unusual years in the history of British politics. 2024 was the first year since 2010 where those factors did not really apply any more. The coalition of 2010-2015 was a distant enough memory that many were willing to come back to the Lib Dem fold and Brexit was now a done deal and the UK out of Europe was a political reality all parties accepted.

So if we accept the premise that 2015-2019 were held under highly specific anomalous one-off conditions that no longer apply and we “ghost” them out of the dataset to see what it looks like without them the chart now looks like this:

What I am saying is that if you look at the historical trend outside of the unusual period of 2015-2019 it is clear that the average vote share parties need to win a seat is diminishing. This is how at the 2024 election Labour were able to win 63% of the seats on less than 35% of the vote. Their average share of the vote in the seats they won was only just over 40%. For comparison in 1997 Tony Blair’s winning candidates averaged over 50% each.

And now with the vote share for Labour collapsing, the Tories not recovering at all, the Greens and Reform surging and the Lib Dems remaining around their 2024 level (but with highly efficiently distributed vote share making them a contender for dozens of seats again) we are approaching a perfect storm for First Past the Post.

The 30% government?

If the votes cast in 2029 are similar to those shown in recent polling and the historical trend of lower and lower average shares of the vote winning seats continues we could easily see Reform UK form the next government and perhaps even a majority government on less than 30% of the national vote. If things remain as fragmented as the polls currently suggest they could even do it on 25% of the vote.

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The Brexit buffer has dissolved. The 30% government is probably on its way. Quite what that will do for its perceived legitimacy we will have to wait and see.

¹ First Past the Post is actually something of a misnomer as there is no post. The “winning post” under FPTP is a moving target which depends on how many votes other parties get as illustrated brilliantly by the Fields Medal winning mathematician Tim Gowers in this piece from 2011 published during the AV referendum campaign.

² 1951 and Feb 1974 are exceptions to this in that in those elections the party with marginally fewer votes formed the government because they got more seats due to a more efficiently distributed vote.

³ In reality this won’t happen. In some seats they’ll do better than 26% and in some they’ll do worse but their vote is relatively evenly distributed around the country and they’re unlikely to get above 40% in many seats as their offering has a natural “ceiling” amongst voters