Tories might be wise to rip off the plaster and call an election

We were treated to a sliver of information last week when Rishi Sunak ruled out a May 2 vote during an interview on ITV West Country, rendering an election any time in May less likely due to proximity to local and mayoral elections taking place south of the Border on May 2.

Holding an election is costly and time-consuming and for the Tories to call a vote so close to another polling day would be an open goal for criticism of wasting public funds. I doubt even they would be so daft as to allow that to happen.

That means an autumn election is looking increasingly likely – but as to the actual date, those of us who aren’t Sunak or his Tory Party allies will just have to keep guessing.

Isn’t that wild?

That the leader of one of the parties can simply call the regularly scheduled election on a whim, and can spend time planning and preparing while the rest of us stay in the dark?

While I’m doubtful that anything can save the Tories from electoral doom this year, it’s pretty obscene that as the incumbent party it can choose the election to be at the time most strategically convenient for it.

The timing of a General Election can be hugely influential – not just in terms of the ebbs and flows of polling but also in terms of voter turnout and which demographics might be more or less likely to make it out to the polling stations at certain times of the year.

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And with new voter ID laws coming into force for this election for many parts of the UK, the short timeframe in which the election will likely be announced may not be enough time for many voters to jump through the hoops they now need to go through in order to undertake their democratic duty.

Both voters and parties (other, of course, than the Tories) suffer as a result of this set-up, and as usual smaller parties will be disproportionately affected.

While the Tories can take multi-million-pound donations from super-rich racists and other establishment parties, such as Labour and the Liberal Democrats, racked up donations of £30 million and £8m respectively in 2023 alone, smaller parties simply can’t afford to waste money preparing for all the different possible election dates. Yet that is what they are forced to do.

And parties aren’t the only ones – civic society organisations, charities, unions and other groups will understandably seek to use an election to promote their causes but are forced to spend significant amounts of money and resources on different mitigation plans to suit the unknown election timescales.

It results in an uneven playing field, with only those with the cash to spare able to plan effectively.

Of course, it wasn’t always going to be like this – in fact, following the last election in 2019, the next ordinary general election was indeed scheduled for May 2, 2024, as per the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011.

But as per their manifesto pledge, the Tories repealed the Act in 2022, returning the power of setting the date of the election to the hands of the prime minister.

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act came about as a result of the coalition government between the Tories and the LibDems and while the short-lived act was important, it was almost completely ineffective and sits in the fairly miserable list of LibDem achievements negotiated in exchange for supporting huge university tuition fees and the cruel hostile immigration environment.

The political turmoil of the past decade meant the act only resulted in a single scheduled General election, in 2015.

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The 2017 election came about as a result of the act’s provision allowing a two-thirds majority of MPs to vote for an early election, and the 2019 election the result of a bill by Boris Johnson which circumvented the act entirely.

With the act’s repeal in 2022, the assumed General Election date of May 2, 2024, was no more, and that leads us to now.

The ever-more democratic (albeit still imperfect) Scottish Parliament uses a different model, under which elections will almost always take place on the first Thursday in May every five years regardless of circumstances.

Although yet to ever actually happen, a snap Holyrood election would take place in addition to the regularly scheduled election rather than instead of it.

The system has its own flaws but it does mean the people and political parties of Scotland can always be fairly confident that an election will happen on the first Thursday of May in 2026, 2031, 2036 and so on.

It’s a system which, if nothing else, promotes political stability and cross-party co-operation, with an extraordinary General Election only there to be used as a last resort, as opposed to the seemingly eternally politically unstable Westminster system.

The Tories are floundering, with scandal after scandal and sleaze after sleaze, meaning this election is unlikely to be pretty for them regardless of when they call it.

With the party under Sunak now polling lower than during the depths of the disastrous Truss premiership, the “banter timeline” polls showing complete electoral annihilation and either the LibDems or SNP as the official opposition against a Starmer government are looking increasingly plausible.

Intent on causing as much destruction to our political institutions and people’s lives before they go, the Tories might well be wise to rip off the plaster as quickly as they can, take their medicine and finally let us have the election we’re all waiting so desperately for.

But ever power-hungry and uncaring as to the hurt their overstay is causing to ordinary people, it looks like we’re all going to have to wait a painful few months longer.