Policy, Personality, Petitions and Prime Ministers

Yesterday we learned that Theresa May will become the UK’s new Prime Minister. This has led to calls for her to hold a general election.

Some of the reasons given are tactical — mainly to take advantage of the current omni-cluster-fuck-shambles going on in the Labour Party (I’d link to articles about this but there are, frankly, too many).

Other reasons though are more fundamental. They’re about democracy itself and the relationship between us and our elected representatives. From the Daily Mirror:

“199 Tory MPs have chosen Theresa May as new PM — just 0.0004% of the population.”

I’m not sure the web address for the article is quite what the Mirror intend though:

In another Mirror article there is this:

“If Britain really is one of the world’s great democracies, then there should be a snap General Election to decide our new Prime Minister.”

It’s pretty clear. We the people (99.9996% of us anyway), haven’t chosen Mrs. May. This is undemocratic and we should have the chance to decide in a new general election.

Seems legit.

Except Prime Ministers have only ever been elected by their MPs (and many without a formal vote, just a chat amongst the party grandees). Only 2 party leaders (Blair and Cameron), who went on to be PM, received votes from their parties’ membership.

Besides, a general election wouldn’t actually let most of us decide who our next PM should be.

In all but one constituency, Theresa May’s name won’t appear on the ballot. We don’t even really vote for a political party. We vote for a representative who is free to join any party at any time and can (with enough help) even change that parties’ leader (which could mean a new PM — unelected again!).

I know. I know.

Although this is really how it works, it isn’t really how it works. And therein lies the problem. The Mirror shouldn’t be calling for a general election to “elect” a PM, they should be calling for a debate about how a Prime Minister is elected.

You could argue that it’s one and the same, but it’s not. As we increasingly rate personality politics above policy politics we have to look at the current system and ask if it’s fit for purpose.

More and more we see people saying things like:

The current government don’t have a mandate because “only” 36.9% of people voted for them (or even more dramatically only 24.4% of the electorate).

The EU referendum was a farce because only 37.4% of people voted Leave.

The three links above all point to petitions. A curious way to complain about democracy.

Only 17 million people voted Leave so listen to the 4 million who have signed this petition (because somehow 4 million > 17 million in the battle for a true democracy).

Even the first Mirror article above links to a petition demanding an election because the (as of now) 6,311 people who have signed it so far outweigh the 199 MPs who voted for Theresa (as long as we conveniently ignore that these MPs represent millions of people).

I’m not against the above points being made (although I am against many of the points), but they’re all made retrospectively and redundantly. We need a debate about where politics is going and where we want it to go. Not where it has been.

Instead of saying, “look at that result — isn’t it unfair?”, we should acknowledge that under the rules it is fair.

Maybe it’s the rules, not the result, that we should be talking about.

Maybe it’s the rules, not the result, that are unfair.

Maybe it’s the future, not the past, that we should focus on.