‘Result by violence, not by voting’: House majority leader’s concerns over voting system legitimacy, 2014–15
by a record low-turnout of 1.5 per cent — not, as the ‘liberal’ media would have you believe, an endorsement.
This time, ‘vote’ was the wrong word.
When, in the 1990s, Labour’s Ken Livingstone called for the introduction of pre-poll voting, his suggestion was welcomed as the ‘natural’ solution to the problem of the two wings of the party – the left-wing, committed supporters and the ‘Boris B-led minority’ who did not. But when, in the early 2000s, Blair’s then-deputy David Davis suggested a two-tier system of voting in order to endow the leader with a majority for the first time, his suggestion was greeted not with universal plaudits but with mass condemnation.
In 2011, Blair responded. ‘I would rather have no majority at all, rather than a minority that is so slim that it is not worth a majority,’ he said. That this was his response did not matter to those who, like Davis, argued that Blair was giving up on his party by suggesting a two-tier system. Nor was it enough for Davis to say his system would make victory at the next election – whether Labour won or not – more difficult. He had to pretend that Blair was abandoning democracy in order to boost his own authority.
The ‘liberal’ media went mad with outrage, as though a suggestion that the leader of the opposition should be entitled to choose the electoral system, rather than the other way around, was tantamount to the abolition of democracy. But, in fact, when Johnson suggested that the Conservative leader could decide the electoral system, the media called on him to put his suggestion to a vote in parliament. When, in 2014, we were led to believe by the media that he was not going to do that, we were treated to a list of his’suggestions’, with each one accompanied by a headline in the same media outlet that had attacked the idea of pre-poll voting. It was a list that included a’referendum on whether the electoral system should
