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Off The Cuff
DON MILLIGAN’S
May 10, 2015
Here we go again . . .
ONCE MORE the working class has failed to live up to
expectations. Two thirds of the electorate voted in last
Thursday’s General Election - well over thirty million
people. More than eighteen million voted for
conservative, English nationalist, and liberal parties.
This has to be set against the fact that only twelve and
a half million people in Northern Ireland, Wales,
Scotland, and England, voted for socialist or social
democratic parties. Regardless of how small David
Cameron’s parliamentary majority is, the right
outvoted us by more than five and a half million.
The response to this on the left has been little short
of comic. Dismay and distress at the Tory victory has
led to idiocy ranging from assertions that the election
was rigged to rumours of a Tory coup d’état. There
have even been bad tempered demos and run-ins
with the cops on Whitehall. On Saturday morning I
was regaled with the notion that you could tell the
election was rigged because all the voting was done in
pencil - I think this person imagined a large number of
people in a corner somewhere busily rubbing out the
crosses for Labour candidates and replacing them
with ones for the Conservatives.
Many people on the left seem to be blithely
unaware that there is an argument in society that we
keep losing, rather than a conspiracy orchestrated by
tycoons and press barons.
Whatever one thinks about bourgeois democracy in
Britain, or the manner in which an oligarchy of vested
interests quite evidently runs the country on behalf of a
wealthy elite, the electoral process is reliable. The
guarding, sealing, and transport of ballot boxes to the
count is supervised by thousands of council workers
with police escorts and protection. The process is
entirely transparent. Supporters of each candidate
© Don Milligan, Off The Cuff, No. 204, May 10, 2015, at
Reflections of a Renegade, www.donmilligan.net.
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patrol the rows of trestle tables on which the ballot
papers are piled up, keeping an eagle eye on the
tellers. The returning officer, along with the candidates’
agents, scrutinizes which ballot papers have been
disallowed and why. All this takes place in full sight of
print, radio, and TV journalists and dozens of
campaigners from the competing parties.
However, the problems with the system are
numerous. Most importantly, there is no consistent
relationship between the number of votes cast for a
particular party and the resulting number of
parliamentary seats. For example the Scottish
Nationalists got 56 seats in return for 1.5 million votes,
whereas the Greens got one seat despite having won
1.1 million votes. Clearly some form of proportional
representation would deliver a more rational outcome
by consistently matching parliamentary representation
to the number of votes cast. It is abundantly clear that
proportional representation would deliver a much fairer
distribution of seats.
This being said, in last week’s election, Cameron’s
parliamentary majority was not the disproportionate
result of the ‘first-past-the-post’ system. The Tories
garnered more votes – the right decisively won the
election.
Labour Party
9,347,326
Conservative Party
11,334,920
SNP
1,454,436
UKIP
3,881,129
Green Party
1,157,613
Liberal Democrats
2,415,888
Plaid Cymru
181,694
DUP
183,260
Sinn Fein
176,232
Ulster Unionists
114,935
SDLP
99,809
Alliance Party
61,556
TUSC
36,327
Traditional Unionists
16,538
NHS Action
20,210
English Democrats
6,531
Respect
9,989
Christian Alliance
3,260
SLP
3,898
Yorkshire First
6,811
WP
2,724
BNP
1,667
Class War
526
12,490,784
18,027,495
© Don Milligan, Off The Cuff, No. 204, May 10, 2015, at
Reflections of a Renegade, www.donmilligan.net.
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However, our electoral system does need to be
changed and we also need some form of federal
arrangement to ensure that different national and
regional governments within the United Kingdom can
exercise a large measure of autonomy. The monarch
needs to be relieved of all of political duties from
inviting the majority leader to form a government,
opening Parliament, signing bills, appointing judges,
and advising or warning the prime minister of the day.
While the monarchy probably enjoys the support of
more than eighty per cent of the population, the public
does not believe that the Crown should hold reserve
powers or exercise political influence. Most people
believe that the Queen is merely the titular head of
state and a personification of the nation.
Consequently, the monarchy should be completely
disentangled from the political state; the Privy Council
and the House of Lords should be abolished and all
formerly royal appointments should be made by
elected politicians and be publicly scrutinized in
parliament, rather than being drawn up behind closed
doors by commissions and committees organized by
Downing Street under the cover of royal patronage.
That being said, these constitutional matters, while
important, are not nearly as important as winning a
majority of the population over to the idea that the
economy, as well as the civil and military state, should
be controlled by popular institutions and run along
democratic lines. A communist society in which the
majority of the population played an active role in the
management of economic and political affairs is surely
what is needed.
This is an extremely tall order and could not
possibly be attempted without two thirds of the
population being actively in favour of such a revolution
in our affairs - if it was to succeed at all it would also
need the acquiescence of a fair proportion of the
remaining third of the population in order to avoid a
prolonged and catastrophic civil war between die-hard
reactionaries and the socialist majority.
In the here-and-now a far more modest prospectus
© Don Milligan, Off The Cuff, No. 204, May 10, 2015, at
Reflections of a Renegade, www.donmilligan.net.
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is what is needed, one which sets out a political
strategy for strengthening social solidarity and
cooperation. At a minimum we need generous welfare
benefits, and the public provision of services, rather
than deregulation and continuous reductions in state
spending. This perspective is familiar and entirely
uncontroversial on the left.
The problem we face, however, is that a clear
majority of the population is opposed even to this most
modest socialist agenda. This is not because the
public is composed of greedy money-grubbing Tories;
it is not even because the majority of the population is
balefully selfish or opposed to socially altruistic
activities or purposes. Indeed the level of social
activism, mass charitable events, and enormous
amounts of unpaid work carried out in communities
throughout the length and breadth of the country –
long before David Cameron insulted us all with his
patronizing “Big Society” rhetoric – is testament to the
falseness of the notion that people vote for right wing
parties because they are heartless bastards.
No doubt some are, but most are simply
unconvinced that the socialist agenda is either
practical or relevant. Above all they do not believe that
a socialist government can deliver stability or the
conditions in which ordinary people would be able to
improve their own circumstances and those of their
kids. This is why the Labour Party will almost certainly
tack to the right by recasting itself as a ‘party of
aspiration’ in the hope of attracting the millions who
view socialism, at worst, with suspicion, or at best, with
a sceptical eye.
For resolute socialists and communists however,
the inescapable question remains how are we to
overcome this suspicion and scepticism? How are we
to win over the majority of the population to the need
for policies which privilege social solidarity and
cohesion above and beyond the overriding common
sense and authority of capitalist competition?
I don’t know how to do this. Clearly there are no
easy answers, but I am absolutely sure that blaming
© Don Milligan, Off The Cuff, No. 204, May 10, 2015, at
Reflections of a Renegade, www.donmilligan.net.
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the millions of working people who voted for Cameron,
UKIP, and the Liberal Democrats, for our collective
failure is nonsensical, and will as far as most of the
working class is concerned, simply reaffirm our
irrelevance.
© Don Milligan, Off The Cuff, No. 204, May 10, 2015, at
Reflections of a Renegade, www.donmilligan.net.