The Spectator

The snare of PR

Tony Blair will now be wholly reliant on Scottish MPs to rubber-stamp English legislation

issue 21 May 2005

If Michael Howard were a football manager, he would be entitled to some very bitter post-match expletives. Tony Blair’s respectable-sounding majority of 67 cannot cover for the brutal geometry of the election result. Labour, with a mere 36 per cent of the popular vote, lower than any previously commanded by a British government, secured 356 seats; the Tories, with 32.3 per cent of the vote, a mere 197 seats. As if that were not reason enough to cry ‘We wuz robbed!’, 41 of Labour’s seats are in Scotland; the result being that Tony Blair will now be wholly reliant on Scottish MPs to rubber-stamp English legislation which will have no effect on their constituents. So blatantly unfair is the make-up of the new Parliament that the Tories have won sympathy from unlikely sources. ‘The system is viciously biased against the Tories,’ thunders Labour peer Lord Lipsey.

How tempting it would be to agree with Lord Lipsey, to cry foul at Blair’s elective dictatorship.

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