A Luta Continua

I voted for a party that took more votes than eight parties that won seats, including five seats in one case and four in another, yet which ended up with none. But even so, is it that time again? Over the long weekend after every General Election, there is this talk about Proportional Representation. Now, it is not that I am against it. It is just that you should believe in it when you see it. The Liberal Democrats and the Greens are in favour of it as a first principle, yet they have both proved exemplary at making First Past the Post work for them. If the electoral system ever did change, then the Green Party would have to be restructured completely, and the Lib Dems, as such, might very well disappear altogether. Of course they know that.

The arguments in defence of First Past the Post are rubbish in their own terms, but so are the arguments for Proportional Representation, so the case for change has not been made. In any case, no Government elected by First Past the Post is ever going to change it. Notice that it has suddenly become a problem now that it does not favour the people who thought that they were born to rule. Well, the people like that other than the right wing of the Labour Party, anyway. The great near miss of 2024 was at Ilford North. Had Leanne Mohamad defeated Wes Streeting, as she came so close to doing, then England's National Health Service would at least have been safer than it was now.

Even so, the vote for the Workers Party of Britain alone was by far the largest ever left-of-Labour vote at a General Election, while many thousands more voted for Left Independents, five of whom were elected, as many MPs as were returned for Reform UK and more than were managed by the Greens. Just as, unless I am very much mistaken, no opinion poll showed Labour anywhere as low as its eventual vote share of 33.8 per cent, so the exit poll predicted that Reform would win two and a half times more seats than it did. Of the five, not 13, MPs that it delivered, how many will be members, both of the House of Commons, and of the same party as each other, in five years' time?

Britain is still arming Israel long after it clinically murdered three of our veterans who were engaged in the time-honoured double job of intelligence and aid work, an elimination necessitated by Keir Starmer's call for Gaza to be starved, which required that aid workers be taken out. Moreover, like anything else, Gaza is an issue if the voters say that it is. If you would tell them that it was not, then consider that at Dewsbury and Batley, a formerly Conservative constituency and half of a formerly Labour one, Iqbal Mohamed now has a majority of 6,934. An Independent. With a majority of seven thousand.

Starmer's own vote halved, while Shabana Mahmood is such a delicate flower that Starmer has made her Justice Secretary, and Jess Phillips is likewise noted as a shrinking violet. Therefore, Mahmood and Phillips were aghast at having encountered hostility on the campaign trail, and at having been heckled when making their acceptance speeches. In 1997, Jimmy Goldsmith slow hand clapped, and chanted "Out! Out! Out!", as David Mellor was unseated. In 1992, the Lib Dems in Bath almost drowned out the concession speech of Chris Patten. The Lib Dems. In Bath. But Mellor and Patten were mere Cabinet Ministers. Mahmood and Phillips are of an altogether higher order.

Phillips scraped home against the remarkable Jody McIntyre, who took the Workers Party's highest vote share in the country, surpassing even George Galloway's at Rochdale, although George did take slightly more votes. Jody won on the day, and he was denied a recount. If you want a postal vote, then you should need a damn good reason, as used to be the case. Mass postal voting weeks before the end of the campaign is an affront to democracy, at least as much as First Past the Post is.

The Daily Telegraph may have said the quiet part out loud and announced George's defeat as "a triumph for Israel", but it is hardly as if he is going away, with or without a parliamentary seat. At 70 and with a young family, he might have served only one more term. But this has probably fired him up again. The media that blacked him out all through the General Election campaign now cannot get enough of the man who beat him. They obviously think that George still matters.

As for Phillips, no one who has called her constituents what she has just called them could expect to ask for their votes again. But who needs votes? I have been telling you for months that for all Starmer's efforts to pack the Labour benches in the House of the Commons, he intended to govern through technocrats raised to the peerage for the purpose, and convinced beyond argument that they themselves had no ideology. After all that handpicking of MPs, Starmer considers none of them capable of holding certain significant portfolios. He does not even think that anyone who was already sitting as a Labour Peer was thus equipped. Or, in several cases, anyone who held a Labour Party membership card. I tried to tell you.

Where Starmer can find a Labour MP to make a Minister, then it is Douglas Alexander, who was disgraced in the expenses scandal. Rather more so was Jacqui Smith, yet she is bedecked in ermine to restore her to Ministerial office. This is the kind of thing that Boris Johnson used to do. Halima Khan, the Labour whistleblower turned Workers Party candidate who beat the Conservatives, the Lib Dems and Reform at Stratford and Bow, is already the victim of Police harassment. She will not be the Starmer State's only persecuted dissident.

Of course, I know that she is not. But I am now older than a former Prime Minister, I am older than two of my own former MPs, I am 10 years older than at least one MP who retired at this General Election, and I am old enough to be the father of more than one MP. Some things are just not meant to be. And as would have applied equally to any other outcome, everything about this General Election result has made the case for my ongoing projects, most immediately my weekly magazine and my thinktank, to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. I had better get on with them.