Keir Starmer’s middling performance in last night’s debate against Rishi Sunak has done little to quell talk of a coming “supermajority”. According to some forecasts, the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) will have so many seats that it will actually spill out from the Government benches and overflow.
However they arrange themselves, the result will look strange and unnatural. The Palace of Westminster itself will seem to be revolting against it. To some this will be fitting. As we’re often told, the United Kingdom is a country of evolution not revolution, and has a political culture that is keenly adversarial. Parliamentary majorities of this size, then, are aberrant, un-British, and — according to the Conservatives’ latest campaigning literature — constitutionally suspect.
Surely, the natural balance will eventually reassert itself. A sprawling majority will be hard for Starmer to control. Without the discipline that an opposition instils, boredom and loopiness will set in, factional hatreds will reappear, and we’ll soon be back to the old political see-saw.
Don’t be so sure. Such will be Starmer’s freak preponderance over the House of Commons that he can probably defy if not political, at least parliamentary gravity.
For one, the candidate selection process has produced a slate of true Starmerites. The tilt towards the local hero in Parliament will abruptly end: the archetypal new PLP member will be young, ambitious for office, an alumnus of the Oxford or Cambridge University Labour Clubs. With deep local majorities and their careers ahead of them, few will have any reason to make trouble.
This is genuinely unprecedented. Even the 1997 cohort of supposed placemen included John McDonnell alongside Gisela Stuart, the future chair of Vote Leave. This class of 2024 will be numerous enough to swamp what remains of the Corbynite Left, and the party’s soft Left besides. As a result, the first great test — Gaza — will be no test at all, and the leadership will be free to take whatever position it likes.
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