Sir John Curtice
speaker
115 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 19 Jul
Sir John Curtice’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The difficulty, of course, has always been that...
If a party has got a majority in the House of Commons under the existing electoral system, what incentive does it have to vote to change to a system that means that lots of existing MPs are likely to use their seats?
Labour, before 1997, said that they would hold a commission on abortion representation, which they did, but that then they would hold a referendum on the recommendations of that system.
which was chaired by Roy Jenkins.
And they didn't because Labour won a majority like Keir Starmer over 170 and there was no obvious incentive to change the system.
And Andy Burnham will still face that problem because the truth is, if you change the electoral system, it's very, very unlikely, even if Labour get back to the levels of popularity that they had in 2024, which wasn't that dramatic.
It was only 35%.
There's very little
prospect of Labour once again emerging with 410 MPs.
In the end, therefore, and it's always most likely that a change of electoral system will emerge out of a hung parliament, as did indeed did the 2011 referendum, where indeed the Liberal Democrats perhaps do a deal with the Labour Party to maintain a minority Labour government, but the price Liberal Democrats extract is doing something about changing the electoral system.
No, it doesn't, to be honest.
If one was going to pick anything out from the speech, one would say it was a clear departure both from Starmerism and from Blairism.
In saying that Britain made a wrong turn in the 1980s in accepting a more neoliberal economic environment in which, for example, we denationalized telephones, energy, railways, he's arguing that Britain made a mistake, that the state needs to be involved more in the economy.
And in effect, by implication, he is saying that Tony Blair got it wrong in largely accepting the settlement that Margaret Thatcher implemented in the 1980s.
But he's also attacking Starmerism because he's also saying that Labour needs to govern as Labour, whereas under Keir Starmer and particularly his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, it always appeared to be the case the Labour Party was trying to work out what policy moves it should or shouldn't make to avoid losing votes to the Conservatives or to Reform and or the Greens.
In other words, it was very much framing policy seemingly as
in order to avoid losses rather than setting out a clear sense of direction.
And one of the constant criticisms of Keir Starmer was the lack of direction to his government.
And I think Andy Burnham was signalling he wasn't going to have any more of that either.
Be true to yourself, be confident in what you believe in, and do what you believe is right.
Showing 81–100 of 115 · page 5 of 6
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