Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: general election, uk

One Day To The British General Election – A Junior House Of Commons?

Tomorrow will see the General Election of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland being held, and everything is going to change

Rich Johnston, founder of Bleeding Cool, is a British political cartoonist. This is the sixth of several columns in the run-up to the General Election being held by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on July 4th.

Tomorrow will be the General Election. And everything is going to change. I don't just mean the party in power or the party system that will rip itself apart starting on the 5th of July, as Nigel Farage seizes power of the Conservative Party, and Jeremy Corbyn seizes power of the number 4 bus route.

In the run-up to the election, hundreds of MPs, including senior Ministers, declared that they would no longer be standing for election – especially Conservative members. Expecting they would be voted out, they quit while they were ahead.

The 1997 election, the last time the Labour Party beat an incumbent Conservative Government, named the event as "a Portillo moment", with people asking, "were you up for Portillo?". Named after Michael Portillo, then Secretary of State for Defence, he lost to the twenty-year-old Labour candidate Stephen Twigg – who no one expected to win. His own canvassers had been pulled out by the party machine to canvass neighbouring, more winnable seats.

The 2015 General Election saw Scotland move against Labour in favour of the Scottish National Party, and the Labour Party's Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander was defeated in his own constituency of Paisley and Renfrewshire South by the even-younger twenty-year-old Mhairi Black, again never expected to win.

Younger political activists are often given safe seats for the opposition party, to practice standing for election. No one wants to stand for that seat against the incumbents they are guaranteed to lose, but they do gain the experience of standing for election. Many of the more successful British politicians lost a number of seats before they were deemed acceptable to stand in a seat they could actually win. But it also means that the party machine cares less about who is picked for those seats; sometimes, they just need a place filler.

And this election, with Labour beating the Tories from the left and Reform stripping away support from the right, the Tories are going to lose bigger than ever before, and Labour is going to win bigger than ever before. The House of Commons will be filled with more newcomers than in the history of Parliament, all at once. And plenty of them will have been nominated for that seat in the belief that they wouldn't win, so it didn't really matter who they were. And now it will really, really matter. I get leaked the news that 450 of the 650 MPs elected are expected to be new to the Commons.

The new Labour Government will be backed by a bunch of unruly twenty-somethings. Probably a way to the left of the current leadership. They may split with Corbyn, Nelson, Galloway, or whoever. Or they may push Labour to be more stringent over Gaza. But all of the middle-of-the-road centrist policies that Starmer promised the electorate may be less acceptable to his own members, even though they will owe him their election.

Of course, throw in the inevitable party splits to follow, and a renewed call for a system of proportional representation that will give the Reform Party a place in Parliament that will be denied them this election, and the next General Election in 2029 will probably result in an even madder crop of MPs in five years time that this lot, who by then will be seen as senior members of the party.

One day to go… tomorrow I will look at what other comic book creators are saying and will answer any questions in the comment.

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