One of the pillars of democracy is free elections. In the UK, elections are being cancelled in dozens of local authorities – most of them Labour-led. Now Labour and Keir Starmer are being accused of abuse of power, and the Conservative Party and Reform UK will try to prevent four million voters from being prevented from casting their votes. Where is the criticism in the Norwegian media?
There is a loophole in the law that allows Labour to cancel the local elections that were to be held in May this year. Cancelling elections is still a drastic decision and must be justified by exceptional circumstances. The government asked 63 local authorities if they wanted to postpone the elections, citing extensive restructuring, and a total of 27 local authorities said yes – that is, 3.7 million eligible voters who will not be able to cast their votes at the local level. Most of the local authorities are Labour-led.
The protests from the opposition are loud. Now it is confirmed that Reform will be able to challenge the decision in court. And it is not just Reform that is criticizing the Labour government. “We must never allow ministers to postpone elections at the stroke of a pen,” said Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, according to The Telegraph. He believes that Parliament should vote on such decisions. Kemi Badenoch and her Tory party are also in agreement. Even within Labour there is dissatisfaction with the cancellations. Jim McMahon, a former local government minister, said that Labour “should be better than this.” Labour is afraid of losing the elections, is the comment most use to explain why they postponed them. Labour is doing poorly in the polls and only gets 18 percent in the latest poll, which was on January 19, according to YouGov. That is about the same as the Conservative Party, while Reform UK is at around 24 percent.
Sir Vernon Bogdanor, a professor at King’s College London, says: “It cannot be right to give local authorities the right to decide for themselves whether to hold elections. The assumption is that those in power will prefer to postpone elections if they are unpopular.” Colin Copus, professor emeritus at De Montfort University, agrees: “Allowing the democratic right of local voters to be removed is not compatible with democracy, so this power must be removed.”
Contempt for democracy
The Electoral Commission, which regulates elections in the UK, has also warned that cancelling or postponing elections risks undermining the legitimacy of local authorities and confidence in the government. The Labour chairman has also refused to guarantee that the next general election will not be postponed – something Nigel Farage calls “a total contempt for democracy.”
It is not just the latest invention of Starmer & co. that is worrying. British democracy is also under attack on other fronts. Thanks to reforms initiated under Tony Blair, all opposition in the House of Lords will soon be history, as Starmer has ensured that only his own people have been chosen to sit there. There are also plans to introduce extra checks on who can stand for election. Not only are people with criminal records excluded, but also those with registered “non-crime hate incidents” will be denied the right to stand for election.
Ed West makes an interesting observation about all this:
“When western European countries do things like this, I try to gauge whether this is normal by asking the question: what if Hungary did this? In most of these cases, I imagine the assessment would be that it was an assault on liberalism and democratic norms. In which case, what if Britain is undergoing the sort of ‘democratic backsliding’ usually levelled at central European countries with conservative governments? What if Keir Starmer is actually one of these illiberal ‘strongmen’ we read about, just not a very effective one.”
Demonization of the opposition
There are a number of recognized symptoms of such democratic decline, West writes. The most important are a rejection of democratic rules and constitutional norms, attempts to use mechanisms in the law to circumvent democracy, and attempts to deny the legitimacy of the opposition. The opposition is characterized as “outsiders” or a threat to national security, and to combat it, civil liberties are curtailed, the media is controlled and freedom of expression is restricted. We have seen enough of the latter in recent years here in the UK. The demonization of Reform UK and Nigel Farage is also widespread, and is led by Keir Starmer. The worst and most serious mechanism is when violence against political opponents is accepted. Nigel Farage has been attacked several times, and although there have been no serious incidents, milkshake throwing, for example, has been accepted on the left when it comes to “fascists” like Farage.
“Only dictators cancel elections,” Farage writes on Facebook. It can be said that simply. It doesn’t help that Labour tries to justify it with practical reasons. Elections are not optional. But it doesn’t seem to matter when it’s a social democrat who’s behind it, as we can observe by a total lack of scrutiny from the Norwegian media. Starmer, on the contrary, is described as a progressive, modern and democratic statesman – in contrast to Trump, who is the strongman the Norwegian (and other European) media fears more than they fear any dictator.
Nevertheless, there has been a big enough political scandal over here in the British Isles that it seems like there will be a rematch. Labour and Keir Starmer deserve all the opposition they get.