Since the Conservatives’ narrow election victory, they have been quietly reshaping the political system to give them a permanent advantage. Will any other party be able to challenge their dominance in future?

Two months ago, the chancellor and would-be prime minister George Osborne invited an unusual visitor to Downing Street. Robert Caro, the American biographer of Lyndon Johnson, US president half a century ago, had dinner and answered questions from Osborne and selected Conservative MPs.

Johnson was a Democrat, and one of America’s most left-leaning leaders. But he was also famously ruthless. “I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me,” Caro’s biography quotes him saying. “I know where to look for it, and how to use it.”

The essence of British democracy is under threat | Letters Read more

Osborne, too, is even more interested in power than most politicians – the accumulation of it for him and his party, the denial of it to others. “Osborne is a political chess player,” writes his biographer Janan Ganesh. The chancellor’s “grand strategy”, Ganesh continues, is “the calculated use of [government] policy” to alter Britain permanently in the Conservatives’ favour. Since school, Osborne has been a keen reader of political history books. His favourite, reportedly, is Caro’s Johnson biography.

The cut in 'Short money' could make a huge difference to the capacity of opposition parties to operate

A few weeks after Osborne met Caro, on 25 November, the chancellor produced his latest economic and political blueprint, the 2015 autumn statement. Half-hidden within it, and not mentioned by Osborne in his accompanying speech to parliament, was a proposed cut in “Short money”, state funding for all opposition parties, of 19%. “It came out of the blue,” says Katie Ghose, head of the pro-democracy pressure group the Electoral Reform Society. “The cut could make a huge difference to the capacity of opposition parties to operate.”

Since the Conservatives won their crafty but narrow election victory in May, they have made other subtle and not-so-subtle adjustments to the playing field of British politics. In October, they gave MPs in England, where their majority is much more solid than in the UK as a whole, greater voting rights than non-English MPs on matters deemed to affect England alone – “English votes for English laws”, or Evel for short.

In August, the prime minister David Cameron created 26 new Conservative peers. Even the usually Tory-supporting Times was uncomfortable at what it saw as an ongoing effort to “pack” the sporadically rebellious House of Lords with government supporters: “Mr Cameron has now created more peers than any other modern prime minister.” Government proposals for taming the Lords further, by reducing its powers to veto legislation, are expected to be slipped out before Christmas.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The House of the Lords: the government is attempting to tame the Lords further, by reducing its powers to veto legislation. Photograph: Ben Stansall/PA

The current trade union bill, too, looks like an attempt to give the Tories an impregnability that their small Commons majority does not. By requiring that trade unionists take the trouble to opt in individually to union funds for political parties, even though those funds are already subject to regular ballots, the bill threatens to cut off much of Labour’s largest and longest-established source of money. Meanwhile, the bill’s many proposals to make strikes and other union activities more difficult, particularly in the public sector, suggest a state-shrinking government crudely trying to minimise opposition to its policies. In September, the Financial Times, usually no friend of unions, said the bill was “out of proportion”, and would “threaten basic rights of assembly and free expression”.

Osborne accused of ‘despicable’ attempt to cut opposition party funding Read more

This year, the government has also increasingly menaced the BBC, another potential centre of resistance, or at least, subjected it to inconvenient scrutiny. During the election campaign, according to the corporation’s then political editor Nick Robinson, Cameron responded to a BBC story that displeased him by telling journalists: “I’m going to close them down after the election.” Within days of winning it Cameron appointed John Whittingdale, long an advocate of drastically shrinking the BBC, as his culture secretary, responsible for negotiating the BBC’s charter, which sets out how the corporation operates, and which expires next year.

“The Tories have found themselves in government, probably to their surprise, and they’ve realised that their hold on power is thin,” says Norman Baker, the former Lib Dem MP and coalition minister, who lost his seat in May. “They want to make sure they stay there. There’s a window, until the opposition reasserts itself.” In August, Baker warned in the Independent that Britain was in danger of becoming “a one-party state”. He wrote: “Those interested in the continuation of a viable multi-party democracy need to wake up.” The Labour MP Chris Bryant, shadow leader of the Commons, is blunter: “I think the Conservatives are rigging the system massively.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Whittingdale, Cameron’s culture secretary, has long been an advocate of drastically shrinking the BBC. Photograph: Hannah Mckay/EPA

The part of the Conservative power grab that most alarms Bryant and Baker, and also more neutral observers, is the most stealthy and technical, but also the most fundamental. It concerns who gets to vote in general elections, and how they are arranged into constituencies.

In July, against the advice of the independent Electoral Commission, the government announced that it was accelerating the introduction of a new and controversial system for registering voters, Individual Electoral Registration (IER), so that it could be used for elections from the spring of 2016 onwards, including next year’s for London mayor. In theory, IER, which requires voters to register themselves, is a modern, much-needed replacement for the old system of registering voters by household, which was rooted in 19th-century assumptions connecting voting to property ownership. The system was occasionally exploited by electoral fraudsters, and more often was unable to cope with the fluidity of contemporary life – which meant that by 2015, one voter in 10 was left unregistered. The legislation for IER was introduced by Gordon Brown’s Labour government, with Conservative and Lib Dem support, in 2009.

I think the Conservatives are rigging the system massively

Yet since then it has become steadily more clear that, in practice, the new system does not work well for some types of voters. “Inner-city areas, especially those with young and/or student populations and high levels of privately rented property, are most at risk,” according to a report on IER published last month by the left-leaning thinktank the Smith Institute, titled 10 Million Missing Voters! Another recent study, by the pro-diversity pressure group Hope Not Hate, found IER to be most inadequate in places with a lot of “multiple occupancy housing” and “regular home movers”. London and Scotland were the worst affected areas, potentially losing 6.9% and 5.5% of their voters respectively.

The electoral consequences of all this may be profound. London and Scotland, the inner cities, university towns, voters under 25 – these are all contexts where the Conservatives still struggle. At the last general election, according to the pollsters Ipsos Mori, the Conservatives received the support of only 27% of 18- to 24-year-olds. Labour got 43%. The government’s rushed introduction of IER fits a pattern, Baker argues: “Since the election Osborne has gone round saying: ‘Where are the threats to us? Where is the opposition? How can we damage it?’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Norman Baker, former Lib Dem MP: warned Britain is in danger of becoming ‘a one-party state’. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

The government denies that its voter registration reforms are in any way party-political. “Individual electoral registration is to tackle election fraud, to remove ghost voters who don’t exist or have moved on, to make sure we have a clean and fair electoral roll,” said the minister for the constitution John Penrose last month. “The answer to under-registered groups like young people is … to run a vigorous and energetic voter-registration campaign. Which we will do.”

But there are already signs that this campaign, which has been cut short by a year by the early introduction of IER, may not have been as effective as advertised. This month, the university city of Cambridge, which has a Commons seat with a tiny Labour majority of 599, became one of the first places to publish a register of voters compiled using IER. Its electorate had shrunk by more than 10,000. In Liverpool, which has no Conservative MPs, it was down by more than 14,000.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Under voter registration reforms, the number of registered voters in Liverpool shrunk by more than 14,000. Photograph: UK City Images/Alamy

Next spring, the latest review of parliamentary constituency boundaries is due to begin, based on the contentious new electoral register. The results are to be published in the autumn of 2018, well in time for the next general election in 2020. The body carrying out the review, the Boundary Commission, is respected and independent. But everything else about the review has long filled many non-Conservatives with foreboding.

On average, a Labour-held constituency currently contains about 5% fewer voters than a Tory one. Some analysts say this is down to a long-term population drift away from the broadly Labour-supporting north and inner cities, and towards the broadly Tory south and suburbs. But others point out that some inner-city populations are no longer falling but rising, and instead blame the lower rates of voter registration in many Labour areas. Either way, evening out constituency sizes has long been a Conservative ambition.

The boundary review is also intended to cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600. The idea of downsizing the Commons was first mooted by Cameron in 2009, in the aftermath of the parliamentary expenses scandal, to “reduce the cost of politics” in an age of austerity. But this bland rationale sits oddly with Britain’s rapidly rising population, and Cameron’s enthusiasm for a larger House of Lords. Bryant says the real motive is strengthening the Conservatives’ Commons position. Inside and outside the Tory party, the expectation is that pruning and evening up the constituencies will improve their advantage over Labour by up to 30 seats.

The Tory expectation is that evening up the constituencies will improve their advantage over Labour by up to 30 seats

In 2013, a Conservative attempt to achieve all this collapsed when they fell out with the Lib Dems over parliamentary reform in general. But now the Tories are in government unencumbered by coalition partners, little can stop the boundary review – and this time, its effects will be magnified because of its use of the new electoral register. According to an investigation last year by the psephologist Lewis Baston: “It could result in a gerrymandered electoral map in which the cities are disproportionately under-represented.” The Labour stronghold of London alone may end up with at least half a dozen fewer MPs than its population merits, he writes. “Whether this is deliberate or not, it would be a disaster for democracy.”

It is possible that the idea of the Tories engineering a permanent supremacy is scaremongering by the other parties. Labour have a history of seeing every boundary review as almost an existential threat, just as many Labour supporters see every general election defeat as the start of perpetual Tory government. But the Conservative power grab fits the pattern of their spending cuts, which have affected Labour councils much more than Conservative ones, and which have hit Britain’s left-leaning young much more than its right-leaning pensioners. And the appetite of the Conservatives to rule and to marginalise their enemies should not be underestimated. In September, within moments of Jeremy Corbyn being elected Labour leader, Conservative headquarters sent an email to its footsoldiers: “WE CAN’T EVER LET LABOUR BACK INTO POWER AGAIN.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn: the Labour stronghold of London could be weakened by boundary changes. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

“George Osborne has got this hegemonic project, to construct a Conservative party state, and to reverse what he sees as the client state that Labour built up,” says Tim Bale of the University of London, a historian of the modern Tory party. “While you can’t quite say he’s gerrymandering, he’s aware that there’s quite a lot you can do on these technical, ‘boring’ issues.” Bale points out that Osborne is an avid student of both contemporary American politics, where the manipulation of constituency boundaries for party advantage is taken for granted, and of 19th-century British politics, when exactly who was able to vote was perhaps the most crucial and closely fought issue. But in today’s relatively apathetic Britain, Bale continues, “Who’s going to get exercised about this stuff? Who’s going to take the time to understand it? These are issues that get traction among the chattering classes, at best.”

The Guardian view on English votes for English laws: the problem of Evel | Editorial Read more

What interest most Britons have in electoral structures has been absorbed by the thunderous debate around Scottish independence. Meanwhile, the Conservatives’ quieter power grab has gone largely unnoticed. Ghose says: “The constitution is in a state of flux. Lots of electoral rules are being changed. But if you introduce things piecemeal, it is hard for people to understand how they fit together.”



I ask Bryant why Labour, rather than complaining about the Conservatives’ electoral and constitutional rule-bending, didn’t simply do the same when it was in office. “Maybe we’re just a bit more decent. We devolve power. We introduced Short money for opposition parties when we were in government in the 70s. We trebled it for the Tories when we came to power in 1997.”

You could see such even-handedness as a lack of ruthlessness, as part of a broader Labour tentativeness in office, a tentativeness that caused Tony Blair to govern cautiously in the late 90s, despite a majority of 179 – whereas Cameron governs with a sense of entitlement now, despite a majority of 12.

In fact, Labour governments have not always been as high-minded as Bryant suggests. In the late 60s, when Harold Wilson was prime minister and Jim Callaghan was home secretary – an effective charmer-and-hard-man combination not dissimilar to Cameron and Osborne – the government was presented with another set of boundary review results that strongly favoured the Conservatives. Callaghan simply delayed the implementation of these constituency changes, in defiance of the usual protocol, to the fury of the Tories and much of the press, and the next general election, in 1970, was fought without them.

Labour lost it anyway. “In later years,” writes Callaghan’s biographer, the Labour peer Kenneth O Morgan, “Callaghan was embarrassed by the action he had taken over the electoral boundaries, and he was right to do so. It was a cynical partisan manoeuvre.” Somehow it’s harder to imagine Osborne having such feelings in years to come.