Stand down Starmer, stand down please

Politics Notebook #20: The petition that aims to bring down the government.

Image by Andy Reed from Pixabay

Well, have you signed it?

The petition, I mean. It’s what all the cool kids are doing, two million of them — including Michael Caine. The proposition, titled ‘Call a General Election’, was posted on Parliament’s petitions website by a small business owner called Michael Westwood. It reads: ‘I would like there to be another General Election. I believe the current Labour Government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election.’ Having passed the 100,000 signatures threshold, it stands a good chance of being debated in Westminster Hall.

However, the enthusiasm for the petition on social media suggests that at least some signatories believe it can compel a general election, or that such an instrument ought to. This is where viral shareability meets the UK constitution, and it’s going to be rather a bracing encounter for both parties.

To state the obvious, this petition will not prompt a general election. We had one of those less than five months ago and the Labour Party won it comprehensively, with a majority of 174. It did so on the lowest share of the vote in history for a majority-winning party (just shy of 34 per cent), but this is simply an extreme case study in the distorting effects of first past the post on an increasingly multi-party electoral landscape. It has no constitutional significance: a low-share landslide is still a landslide.

On the strength of that landslide, the King invited Sir Keir Starmer to form a government, which he did. That government will remain in place until it calls an election or loses the confidence of the House. That this government has proved so unpopular so early on is certainly a political problem for the Labour Party but it does not revoke the mandate secured in July. Ours is a parliamentary system, not a direct democracy.

It is immaterial that the signatories believe Labour misled the voters, or that they consider Sir Keir a rubbish prime minister, or that they are hopping mad over Rachel Reeves’ budget. Governments can’t be sacked by the voters except at general elections, and for very good reasons, not least that it would make governing almost impossible, with the Prime Minister forever one petition away from the collapse of his ministry. Affairs of state would go unattended, Britain would become the butt of jokes worldwide, and in the chaos hostile states and other malign actors would seek opportunities to do us harm.

It’s not about numbers, either. It doesn’t matter whether two million or ten million sign the petition: Sir Keir Starmer is no more obligated to call a general election because a petition says so than Margaret Thatcher was to resign because The Beat’s ‘Stand Down Margaret’ spent seven weeks in the top 40 in 1980.

There is another principle at stake: losers’ consent. Without it, democracy cannot function properly and the legitimacy of the entire political process is called into question. When you are on the losing side of a free and fair election, civic honour demands that you acknowledge the other side’s victory and agree to abide by the electorate’s decision. Attempting to negate an election five months later via online petition is an supreme act of sour grapes, an undemocratic tantrum, and tantrums are only as successful as the willingness of their targets to give in to them. And the Prime Minister is not going to give in.

A commonplace from those sharing the petition on social media is that no one signing it actually expects an early election to take place. They are simply registering a protest against the government. No doubt they are but they have chosen the most impotent means of doing so. A surge in membership in the opposition parties, regular mass demonstrations against disfavoured policies — these are the forms of protest that rattle a government.

Unfortunately, the British right is in no mood to be constructive. It has descended into right-wing Remainerism, launching madcap petitions in a fit of pique against the electorate for getting the last election wrong. Like the Remain diehards who tried to stop Brexit with a people’s vote, the election petitioners of the right mistake their very online social media silos as representative samples of British public opinion. The modal voter would sooner see MPs’ salaries tripled, bin collections go monthly and Rose West paroled to appear on I’m a Celebrity than have to vote in another election.

Just like Continuity Remain, petition-wielding right-wingers will have to come to terms with the fact that they lost on July 4, lost monumentally, and now come the consequences. That means roughly four more years of Labour pursuing its agenda, which is sure to contain many more policies that right-wingers will hate. This is undoubtedly a frustrating time to be a conservative but the right will have to channel its frustrations into more constructive avenues.

You lost and the longer you refuse to confront that, the likelier it becomes that you’ll lose again when the next general election is called. By the Prime Minister. Several years from now. With not a thought given to your petition.