The Glorious Revolution

British bile at the ballot box

It’s election time here in the UK. The Metropolitan is delighted to have readers in bougie outposts across the world — well, alright, in North America and Europe — so for the benefit of those just tuning in: the strong expectation is that in early July the (broadly right-wing) Conservatives will be ejected from power after 14 years, and replaced by the (broadly left-wing) Labour Party. (I sense some of you will want to quibble with these left/right descriptors, but I’m using them purely for clarity.) But, more than that: if the election were held tomorrow, polling suggests Labour would win the biggest majority held by a single party since 1832. The British public is in the mood to dispense a punishment beating. 

You couldn’t call the brutality of this outcome deliberate, because British elections are broken down into 650 constituency elections, which between them are decided by an electorate of nearly 50 million people, each of whom is an individual with their own motivations and priorities. Except that it is totally deliberate, and we can prove it. The thing that distinguishes these punishment-beating elections is that millions of Britons suddenly decide to vote tactically. Tactical voting is well-suited to the proud British tradition of well-cultivated spite, and has the added benefit of being passive aggressive. To vote tactically is to vote not for the party you support, but for the party that is most likely to beat the party you hate. It’s one of the only fun things about living in a first-past-the-post electoral system, and it is all you need to explain the existence of the Liberal Democrats. (For whom I will be voting this time. Tactically.)

The term ‘British voters’ has essentially been synonymous with ‘Boomers’ for decades; because there are so many of them, and because they get off their arses and actually vote, they have formed around one-third of voters at each general election since 1983, a much bigger proportion than any other generation. Boomers born in the 1950s have voted with the incoming government at every election since the early 1970s, and true to form they are leaning Labour this time, although by a smaller margin than younger generations. This election, for the first time, living Millennials outnumber living Boomers and they seem to be getting their electoral shit together. Gen X is smaller than either, and our impact on British politics remains analogous to that of a small sponge falling into the Atlantic, unless we count our representatives David Cameron – who took us out of the EU by mistake – and Liz Truss, who at least conformed to Gen X type by being monstrously irresponsible with money. And on reflection I don’t think I really do want to count them.

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Comically comprehensive electoral drubbings arise in part from a few peculiarities of the British system. The first is that a governing party with a large and loyal majority is impregnable. However badly a government performs, and however much the electorate comes to hate it, nothing can bring it down until the Prime Minister gives in and calls an election. This gives unpopular governments a clinging, manipulative, wheedling quality, like weekend guests who lock themselves into your spare bedroom and pretend they can’t hear you shouting through the door. Elections in these circumstances become a punishment for trespass.

Unlike people in most other democracies — including people in Scotland and Wales — voters in England don’t have regular consequential elections to act as pressure-release valves. English people (who make up about four-fifths of the UK electorate) only get to change the make-up of their national government every four or five years. Just one, single election to decide almost everything that matters: no elections for an upper chamber or a regional government, nothing that allows voters to push and prod and work out their political frustrations every couple of years. If a government has been unusually crap, by the time an election finally arrives the English public in particular has had time to stew. 

What else? Well, the results of British elections are near-instant, and their consequences are immediately enacted. This means that turfing out an unpopular government delivers massive instant catharsis, like that scene in Trainspotting when Renton scores some heroin after trying to go cold turkey. There’s no equivalent of the US’s transition period, in which the personnel in outgoing administrations have a couple of months to gather themselves and remove all the ‘W’s from the White House’s computer keyboards. The British process is calculatedly brutal: one day you’re an MP, and then literally the next day you are literally unemployed and have to immediately clear out your office. Middle-aged ladies in Joules scarves start counting the votes the moment the polls close at 10pm, and from midnight onwards the seats start tumbling like heads into a basket. 

The reason people my age blether on about Labour’s 1997 landslide is that — after 18 continuous years of Conservative government — it was almost hallucinatory to witness the downfall: its scale, yes, but also the fact that it was happening at all. (This isn’t a party political point. The emotional impact would have been the same if it had been Labour in power for 18 years.) The memory of the 1997 effect – of what an electorate can do, if it’s really pissed off – has entered the collective consciousness. We have an itch, a muscle memory; we’ve done this before, and it was fun. 

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So we cast our votes, and then we start drinking, and then we turn the telly on and watch as the most powerful people in the country lose (or gain) their jobs in real time. In the small hours of the morning we arrive at the hallowed site of British democracy, the place where, through anointment with the holy oil of franchise, ordinary people are transformed into representatives of the people. Yes: we arrive at the declaration of the constituency result. I think it’s important to remember that to everyone else, British declarations must look flatly insane. (I’ve had a good dig around and I can’t find any other countries that have declarations in the way the British have them. If you know otherwise, please let me know.) 

For a start, we have worked hard to strip every ounce of glamour out of this process. Vote counts and declarations typically occur in a drab municipal sports centre on a ring road next to a Tesco Extra. At around 3am, having been awake for at least 50 hours, every candidate — and this includes Prime Ministers — must get up onto a temporary stage made out of modular blocks and stand in a bathetic conga line while the TV stations ready their cameras (‘I’m going to have to stop you there Peter, because we’re getting the declaration in Spelthorne’). And then some local functionary with a faulty mic and an adenoidal monotone reads out how many votes every single candidate got, accompanied by whooping and jeers and groans and quiet sobs from the people in the room. High-profile politicians can also usually count on going up against at least one ‘joke’ candidate, meaning that if they lose, the most devastating moment in the professional life of, say, the Secretary of Defence will occur while standing next to someone dressed in a dinosaur costume they got on Amazon. And then everyone, including the dinosaur, has to shake everyone else’s hand. As with so many things, Blackadder basically nailed declarations.

There’s an insistent beat under all of this. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the determined drabness, the striplight glare and hangover grease, the chorus line of lumpy politicos and local ‘characters’ and weekend fascists and carnival barkers: it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is the point. This is the moment – perhaps the only moment – when British people don’t so much reaffirm our commitment to equality as scrawl it on a rock and throw it through a window. Oh, did you think you were special? And yet here you are, getting the sack in public in the sweaty hall where Janice does Bums ‘n’ Tums every Monday. 

We don’t have a written constitution, but we have somebody whose job it is to book a same-day removals van for the outgoing Prime Minister. We don’t have portraits of Oliver Cromwell in public buildings, but we have pictures of the Enfield Southgate declaration in 1997, when top Conservative politician Michael Portillo got absolutely whalloped (figuratively) by an unusually large hamster in a suit (also figuratively, although with British elections this isn’t a given). 

I enjoy it all enormously but there is also something monstrous about it, something pungent and furious and irrational and a bit frightening. British voters are the same capricious, self-interested, illogical beasts they were when James Gillray was drawing cartoons of them more than 200 years ago. Like Regency cartoonists, we regard it as our god-given right to liken our government to turds; and like Regency cartoonists, we simultaneously reserve the right to violently assault any foreigner who suggests our government might be less than perfect. If we didn’t have these complicated mechanisms delivering shots of political catharsis, Steve from next-door would be hanging people from lamp-posts every 20 years or so. 

For a long time British voters have wanted Scandinavian-style public services alongside US-style income taxes, and Turkish-style GDP growth without letting any actual Turks into the country. Elections like these are, essentially, collective tantrums caused by the impossibility of fulfilling our stupid contradictory impulses. The Conservative Party that is about to be triumphantly arse-kicked into oblivion is the same party that won by a landslide in 2019, an election that delivered its own triumphant arse-kicking to the Labour Party. If I were Rishi Sunak I’d be tempted to scream ‘What exactly are you complaining about? You voted for this, you absolute fucking morons.’ But – and this is why I never went into politics – apparently it’s inadvisable to say this to the electorate. Especially when they’re this angry. And even more especially when it’s true.

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For more quirks of the British electoral system, how about Boris Johnson?