Mettle

You would never think it to look at him. But Ed Miliband’s record is that of a very ruthless man.

Never mind giving the vote to whatever negligible proportion of the tiny 16-to-18-year-old age group might ever use it.

The changes to Labour’s relationship with the trade unions would create the perfect opportunity for the incoming Labour Government to ban all personal donations to political parties above the political levy of £3:50 per year, and to ban corporate donations outright.

In the first Queen’s Speech. Entrenched in time for the General Election.

No cross-party consensus? There will be no cross-party consensus for a Labour Government, anyway. There was no cross-party consensus for the Thatcher anti-trade union legislation.

The same Bill, alas probably also including the lowering of the voting age but preferably the abolition of fixed-term Parliaments as well, might give both the “Same-Sized Constituencies” Blue Nutters and the “Proportional Representation” Yellow Nutters what they purport to want.

First, each of the 11 mainland regions would be divided equally into 30 constituencies. Each constituency would elect one MP by means of First Past The Post. Northern Ireland would be divided into 15 constituencies, each voter would vote for one candidate, and the two highest scorers would be elected, with First Past The Post retained for by-elections.

Secondly, each of the 12 regions would elect 15 MPs by means of party lists. Candidates would have to have been registered voters within the region throughout the previous 15 years, and each of us would vote for one party. The highest-scoring party would receive five seats, then next four, then three, then two, and then one.

Casual vacancies would be filled by the next candidate on the list. Loss of party membership would constitute forfeiture of the seat. And no party would be permitted to contest the list election in a region unless it forbore to contest constituencies in that same region.

Thirdly, each of the 12 regions would elect five Independent MPs, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the five highest-scoring candidates elected. When a vacancy arose, there might be a by-election by First Past The Post, perhaps if enough people requested one in writing. Or the highest-scoring candidate who had not been elected might fill it. In view of this specific provision for Independents, they might reasonably be precluded from contesting constituencies.

This would give a total of 50 MPs per region, and of 600 overall.

In Scotland and in the North East, and after the 2015 results probably also in Wales, in the North West, and in Yorkshire and the Humber, the Conservative Party, assuming that it had survived the reforms to funding, would certainly take one look at the prospect of a permanent five seats, one tenth of the total, merely for having turned up, and never bother to contest constituencies again.

The Liberal Democrats would take that view everywhere: four seats, or quite possibly five in the South West, without having to do anything at all. 44 or 45 would be a lot more seats than they would have at the time that this legislation was enacted.

Five would be only one fewer MP than the SNP has now, and the same proportion of Scottish MPs, so that that party might very well decide to contest the list. That would knock the Conservatives down to four, but still three or four more than they could otherwise expect. Four, knocking the Lib Dems down to three in Wales (their current figure, but now on a permanent basis), would be both absolutely and proportionally higher than Plaid Cymru has at the moment.

The 15 constituencies in Northern Ireland would each always elect one DUP and on Sinn Féin MP, with each of the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists always having five or four list seats, and with the Alliance Party always having three. The Ulster Unionists’ Prodigal Sons would rapidly return if four or five Westminster seats were in the bag. The Greens and probably Traditional Unionist Voice would battle it out for fourth place, with the other one coming fifth.

Meaning that the Greens would return MPs from all 12 regions. Depending on relations between the Conservatives and the Ulster Unionists at the given time, they might well be the only party to do so, although the SDLP would guarantee that everywhere had MPs who were in receipt of the Labour Whip.

Even in the absence of the Sinn Féiners, with 15 MPs from a party which had voted against war in Syria and in favour of opening the files on the Shrewsbury 24, together with four or five SDLP members and one or two Greens, Northern Ireland would tilt decidedly to the left.

The same would be true of England. Massive Labour dominance of constituency elections in the three Northern regions and in London would always be backed up by a goodly number of Labour MPs from the Midlands, and by list seats everywhere for the Greens and for formations which essentially saw themselves as Labour’s conscience: the SLP, whatever the RMT decided to fund, any George Galloway vehicle, and so on.

In fact, the hottest battles might be for those seats to the left of Labour, tribal headcounts between hipsters who were too hardline to be Green and the old working-class Left, between Tyneside Trots and the old coal and steel communities of County Durham and of south-eastern Northumberland, between West Yorkshire’s braderi and South Yorkshire’s former miners and steelworkers, between trendy-leftie Cardiff and the Valleys, and so on.

But what about UKIP? It might not live long after its failure to top the poll this year had been matched by its failure to win a single seat next year. But if it were still going, then it would enter the list elections, justifiably confident of some seats in each English region and in Wales. Not very many. But more than none.

Would Labour take the 15 seats and be done with that in the three Southern regions outside London, leaving London and the two Midland regions as the only places where it went up against the Conservatives and vice versa?

In the South West, where Labour might have to make do with four behind the Lib Dems’ five, certainly. In the East of England, very probably. In the South East? Again, probably. But rather less so. By no means would winning five or six seats out of 30 there be beyond Labour’s reasonable hopes. Still, why take the risk?

With even the small Left parties and UKIP not contesting constituencies, with the SNP and Plaid Cymru joining the Lib Dems in taking the same approach, and with Independents having their own section, exactly who would put up against Labour in Scotland, Wales or the North, or against the Conservatives, if they had found some way of remaining afloat financially, in the South outside London?

Scotland, Wales and the North would comprise five regions, returning around 150 Labour constituency MPs. The South outside London would comprise only three regions, returning only around 90 Conservative constituency MPs.

The 60 reserved seats for Independents would not only secure a platform for many a doughty community campaigner. It would also be a challenge to media commentators to put up or shut up. That challenge would be very likely to be taken up by Simon Heffer in the East of England, by Peter Hitchens in the South East, by James Delingpole in the East Midlands, and so on.

Readers of the Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and regional papers will easily be able to add their own names, again at least broadly on the Right, including uncompromising Scottish and Welsh Unionists. Even if the Republican would not attend the House, rejectionists on both sides in Northern Ireland would get someone in. As would the Old Labour Unionists of True Wales, a significant body of opinion.

If the remnant Blairite-neoconservative factions imagined themselves to have any popular support, then this would present them with an opportunity. On domestic, if most certainly not on foreign, policy, Melanie Phillips might make a useful contribution to Parliament, and would at least vote against further European integration, as would John Rentoul.

It would be wrong to hope that the likes of Dan Hodges, John McTernan, Douglas Murray and Oliver Kamm be defeated at the polls. Rather, one should hope that they would be elected, so that their monstrous egos might be torn to pieces in the cut and thrust of the parliamentary process.

Every region would elect a Peter Law or Dai Davies figure, who would have been in the centre of the Labour Party, or even a touch to the right of that, until Tony Blair. Nothing could more perfectly describe Ed Miliband’s core constituency: a dozen MPs who would be loyal to him, or to any Prime Minister in his vein, even if Labour’s own Hard Right or Hard Left were not.

(Law’s victory at Blaenau Gwent, and Davies’s double retention of his seat, ought to have been one of the biggest political stories of the last 20 years and more: not a Green in Brighton, not George Galloway in a largely Muslim constituency, but what were basically Old Labour right-wingers in an old mining and steelworking area.

If someone as unacceptable as Maggie Jones had been foisted on North West Durham in 2010, then the combination of that, general disaffection with the all-women shortlist, and assorted local grievances against the outgoing MP and Government, would easily have made a similar, especially if Consett-based, candidate the First Past The Post here.) 

Would all, or even any, of this pass the House of Lords? That is what the Parliament Act is for. The judgement pursuant to that Act is made by the Speaker of the House of Commons, who is elected by the House of Commons, and who may be removed and replaced by the House of Commons.

This same Bill might provide for matching the hereditary peers with eight elected members from each region, serving six-year terms, with five elected from party lists that all parties would be eligible to submit, and with three Crossbenchers. And for matching the Lords Spiritual with a nominee of the largest other body of religious practitioners in each region, plus each of the 12 largest that had not thus secured any seats.

That would give 12 Labour-friendly nominees of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the largest bloc in every region except the three Southern provincial ones, and the largest apart from the Church of England, with its 26 Lords Spiritual, even there. And it would give anything up to that many ethnic minority leaders. Practically internal Labour Party appointments all round, decidedly neither Marxist nor Blairite.

It might also provide for the restoration of the supremacy of United Kingdom over EU law; for the requirement that, in order to have any effect in the United Kingdom, all EU law pass through both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or other of them; for the requirement that British Ministers adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until such time as the Council of Ministers met in public and published an Official Report akin to Hansard; for the disapplication in the United Kingdom of any ruling of the European Court of Justice or of the European Court of Human Rights unless confirmed by a resolution of the House of Commons, the High Court of Parliament; and for the disapplication in the United Kingdom of anything passed by the European Parliament but not by the majority of those MEPs certified as politically acceptable by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons.

Submitting parliamentary shortlists to One Member, One Vote ballots of individual members, affiliated members and registered supporters, as for Leadership Elections, would silence any call for primaries. Recall elections are a Lib Dems’ charter for expensive nuisance. Do not even get started on referendums.

Come on, Ed. Show your mettle. Again.