Measure for Measure, Step by Step

This week: why the local election results show Labour is still comfortably headed for government. Also, some curious notes on the history of measurement.

An announcement/sales pitch bit before we get started. Next Wednesday, 17th May, the other half of my shadowy cabal Tom Phillips and I are doing a turn at Nerd Nite London on the history of conspiracy theories, as outlined in our book (now available in paperback!) Conspiracy: A History of B*llocks Theories, and How Not To Fall For Them.

Why not come along and throw things at me? It’s at the Backyard Comedy Club, Bethnal Green. You can buy tickets here. I’ll probably say hi, if you seem nice.

That’s enough of that, here’s some content:

Labour will win. This is why

First Past The Post can be very cruel. In 2015, Ed Miliband’s Labour party actually managed a 1.4 point increase on the vote share it had recorded five years earlier. Thanks to the vagaries of the electoral system and events in Scotland, however, this resulted in a loss of 26 seats. On the other side of the House, the Tory vote share increased by just 0.7 points. But thanks to the implosion of the LibDems – who lost two-thirds of their vote and five-sixths of their MPs – that translated to a gain of 24 seats and the first Tory majority in 23 years.¹

We all know, in the abstract, that our electoral system can lead to anomalies and unexpected results. (Favourite fact to prove this point: Labour recorded its highest ever vote share – higher than the Tories – in 1951, an election that the party lost.) But I don’t think many of us have entirely internalised the fact. I’m all but certain assorted Tory outriders haven’t, which is why, in the wake of the local election results, they’re all banging on about hung parliaments and coalitions of chaos. 

It’s true that the Labour party has a long and proud history of losing elections, and that the 2019 result leaves it with a mountain to climb. It’s true, too, that the party’s nine point lead in projected vote share (Lab 35%, Con 26%, according to BBC calculations) is lower than the 15-ish point lead it’s been posting in opinion polls recently – lower, indeed, than any poll since September last year. 

This has been taken in some quarters, especially those quarters paid to take these things in such a way, as a sign that the not especially inspiring Keir Starmer has yet to close the deal. In this week’s Mail on Sunday, the always entertaining Dan Hodges argued that, “The nightmare is looming of Starmer as a marionette PM dancing a maniacal jig to the tune played by an unholy alliance of Scottish Nats and Corbynites”, which is a terrifying mental image and a future Tory election poster all rolled into one.

For several reasons, though, I am not buying a word of this. Firstly, Labour tends to underperform its polling at local elections, as the excellent Beyond The Topline explains here. I’d always assumed the reason for that was that, if you want people to bother to come out and vote for you midterm, it helps if your voters are disproportionately retirees. BTT suggests another reason: in short, the large number of contests that aren’t Labour vs Tory – far larger than in a general election – borks the average. 

Secondly, there are the results which suggest the return of tactical voting, with votes moving to whichever party is best placed to defeat incumbent Tories. So it is that the Greens took overall control of a council for the first time in Mid-Suffolk. The LibDems, meanwhile, posted victories in formerly safe Tory councils like Stratford-upon-Avon and Brentwood, and won so widely that you can now walk from Plymouth to Hammersmith Bridge and never leave Lib-Dem governed territory.

Image: Alistair Simpson. Give the man a follow.

No, these places are not voting Labour. But they were never going to: the point is they’re rejecting the Tories. This is a phenomenon – last a major factor in British politics back in the mid-1990s – that that political scientist Paula Surridge has termed “negative partisanship”, and which I’ve more colloquially been referring to as an all-consuming desire to get these bastards out.² 

Lastly, there’s the improved efficiency of the Labour vote share. It’s been a truism of British politics for some years now that the party needs a double figure lead to have a hope of winning a majority, because of the unhelpful way it piles up votes in safe seats. But as multiple clever people (Sam Freedman, Lewis Baston, the aforementioned Beyond the Topline) have argued, First Past the Post tends to make a party’s vote share “more efficient” as it moves into first place, winning more councillors and more MPs for any given share of the vote. This would certainly explain why, back in the 2000s, the truism was that the electoral system was actually biased against the Tory party instead:

Exhibit A. Image: Wikipedia.

Put all this together, and it means that the widely reported lack of enthusiasm for Starmer’s Labour should provide the Tories with no comfort whatsoever: on the contrary, it should terrify them. The governing party is doing this badly, even though no one likes Labour.

Does this make Labour victory guaranteed? Of course not, nothing could do that, right up until the vote – it didn’t feel guaranteed at 9.55pm on 1 May 1997, either – all of which makes it pretty likely that the next election will be about as late as Rishi Sunak can make it. Nonetheless, there is absolutely nothing in these local election results to shake my belief that, as things stand, Labour is on course for majority government. The Tories, meanwhile, are on course for a once-in-a-generation wipe-out. 

If right-wing commentators want to spend the next 18 months lulling the government into a lovely warm complacency that none of this is going to happen, that’s absolutely fine with me.

Some notes on the history of measurement

Back in the early 1990s, my grandfather liked to record improving documentaries for me, little realising the outsized influence he’d thus have on the sort of things I’d be writing decades later. One of them was a BBC documentary strand, concerning the history of measurement. It had four episodes (length, weight, temperature, erm). It had linking narration from a northern actor who I’m moderately confident was Brian Glover. It had a silent actor playing a character called Mr Measure, who acted out various measurement-y things, and clips of minor celebrities like Prue Leith, talking about how she’d once got some measurements wrong and thus ruined a cake. The reason I am being a bit vague about all this is because the people who’d made it had given it the title Measure for Measure, a Shakespeare play the BBC would adapt in 1994, and thus made it all but impossible to find information about on the internet of 2023.

I loved these documentaries. I watched them again and again, learning a lot about the history of length and weight and temperature and something else in the process, and I was devastated when a friend with access to the BBC archive leaked me some copies a couple of years ago and it turned out that the memory cheats and they weren’t actually very good. Oh well.

It does mean, however, that I have been interested in questions about why the metre is a metre and where we got pounds and ounces from for much of my life, and included a couple of entries about such topics in my book The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything. It also means that I was hugely excited to read Beyond Measure: James Vincent’s 2022 book on the history of metrology.³ The reason that book is so great is that it’s not just about the history of how we measure weight and length and everything else. It’s also, in a way I wasn’t expecting, a sort of history of philosophy, too; of how the human species has seen the world.

You should all read that book ASAP – honestly, you’d love it – but to give you a flavour, here are some of the things I learned from it that still stay with me.

1) The Ancient Egyptians used “Nilometers” for their economic forecasting.