Although those opposed to the new Conservative government have a right to protest, I’m not sure what they hoped to achieve in demonstrating outside Downing Street yesterday. At a different stage in the process – sure – but the day after an election?
Some were calling for PR – but that wouldn’t only have favoured parties on the left. Based on the votes cast, UKIP would apparently have secured 82 seats in a PR system. (In fact they’d probably have gained more, as I assume many people currently feel that a vote for UKIP may be wasted.) The Greens would also have picked up seats, but, as Phil notes here, most further left candidates fared poorly.
Another banner read ‘39% is not a majority’. Presumably this was a reference to the Tory share of the vote, although according to this article the correct figure was 36.9. It’s quite a low share, but obviously the Labour share was lower still, on 30.4. Labour has, in the past, won a election on a narrower vote share margin.
Imagine if the exit polls had produced a different kind of surprise, and election night had ended with a narrow but legitimate win for Ed Miliband. It’s rather irritating to reflect that it’s improbable that a miscellaneous assortment of Tories, UKIP and the further right would have descended on Downing Street in that event.
17 arrests were made and four police officers injured. Graffiti – ‘ Fuck Tory scum’ was scrawled on the Women’s War Memorial in Whitehall. If a parallel demonstration against a Miliband victory had featured posters insisting ‘get Labour out’, references to ‘socialist scum’ and people tweeting that they supported violence against Labour supporters, I’d feel pretty alarmed.
Obviously most on the left accept that the election result was legitimate, and are looking to reverse it through democratic mechanisms. The choice of Labour leader is going to play a crucial role in this process. Chuka Umunna – to quote Mehdi Hasan – is out of the traps, with an article which suggests he agrees with Tony Blair’s verdict on the election:
Why did we do so badly there? First, we spoke to our core voters but not to aspirational, middle-class ones. We talked about the bottom and top of society, about the minimum wage and zero-hour contracts, about mansions and non-doms. But we had too little to say to the majority of people in the middle.
Although Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper are the other obvious front runners, Dan Jarvis is described here as the candidate most feared by Tory voters. It’s interesting to see how Mirror readers voted when asked who they’d like to see as leader:
