WE ARE in a bizarre situation where the leaders of the two parties of government — for the moment let’s forget the Tory’s “first reserves” gathered in the ranks of the Lib Dems — are barely trusted by the electorate.

Rishi Sunak has an unfavourable rating of 49 per cent while 38 per cent are unfavourably disposed towards Keir Starmer.

In a YouGov poll carried out in July, Jeremy Corbyn — despite years of vilification by the media and the New Labour restoration regime  — emerged as the most popular living Labour leader.

Three years into Starmer’s time as Labour leader, only 22 per cent of Britons, and 37 per cent of Labour voters, say he has been a “great” or “good” leader.

Barely more than a third of Labour voters rate Starmer and only 22 per cent of the electorate.

There is a natural tendency to put this down to his repeatedly demonstrated mendacity, less-than-charismatic personality, robotic diction and the sheer unpleasantness of the party’s internal regime he set in motion.

Yet Labour as a party is 20 clear points ahead of a desperately unpopular Tory government.

The issue is, of course, the economy. Getting on for two-thirds of the electorate believe the economy to be the most important political question with voters, ranking it above even health or the toxic immigration issue which remains, as ever, the wedge issue most favoured by our government and reactionary, millionaire-owned press.

A combination of a deep-seated and systemic crisis of capitalism combined with a spectacularly incompetent Tory administration has put the squeeze on living standards, particularly for workers, but now encompassing ever wider sections of the middle classes.

The political effect of this is that Tories are set to lose most of the so-called Red Wall seats they won last time, and face strong, if varied, challenges in areas where they imagined they were impregnable.

Labour is on level pegging with the nationalists in Scotland — and is set to decisively erode the bonus in seats that first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting delivered to the SNP.

Nationally, Labour is predicted to win up to 460 seats, with the Tories reduced to just 90 Members of Parliament.

Yet barely more than a third of voters trust either of the two parties of government.

If under a pure form of proportional representation (PR), the number of MPs reflected the real desires of the electorate there would still be just 90 Tory bums on seats.

Does this prove that FPTP voting is just as accurate in reflecting the popular will as PR?

Err, no.

The 2005 election saw a Tony Blair government elected with just 35 per cent of those voting (barely 21.6 per cent of the electorate) with Scottish Labour harvesting the FPTP bonus of 41 seats, to the Liberal Dems 11, the SNP's six, and the Tories one. Labour holds just one seat in Scotland.

In 2015 the SNP gained 59 seats with just 4.7 per cent of the vote while UKIP, on 12.6 per cent had just one MP.

It’s all desperately unfair but should we care? This takes us back to the question of trust.

Supporters of FPTP argue that it drives politics to the centre ground where the main parties of government are compelled to devise policies which appeal to their main adversaries and marginalise extremes.

In contemporary Britain, we see this effect in the way Westminster Labour tracks Tory government policies on big-ticket issues like inflation, public spending, immigration control, Nato’s proxy war in Ukraine and privatisation.

And a situation where trust in politicians is at rock-bottom levels, millions can’t be bothered to vote and millions of voters feel unrepresented.

Of course, if there was a guaranteed correspondence between the political preferences of voters and the result, then people would have a better chance of electing someone they actually agree with.

This was clearly demonstrated when people were asked to decide whether the country should leave the European Union. Even then more than a quarter didn’t vote  — turnout was 72.1 per cent compared with the 2019 general election with a turnout of 67 per cent when abstentions were almost a third of those entitled to vote.

Even the highly contested 2017 election which produced a hung parliament achieved only a 68 per cent turnout with a characteristically unrepresentative result. During the campaign, where election rules compelled a marginally more equitable media regime, Labour put on 20 percentage points. But this, in turn, generated a bigger Tory turnout.

The Conservatives won 317 seats (42.2 per cent of votes) compared with Labour’s 262 seats (40 per cent). The SNP harvested 35 seats for just over 3 per cent of the votes, and the Lib Dems lost out with just 12 seats, where under PR they would have gained around 50 seats. On their opinion poll figures — around 3 per cent — the Greens should have up to 15 seats but gained just one.

In local elections, at the moment the Greens are reaching beyond the environmental vote and are, where they are seen as best positioned to challenge the two major parties, harvesting disillusioned left-wing Labour votes, and liberal-minded Tory votes while poaching Lib Dem votes.

For socialists who are serious about working-class political power, the democracy argument trumps all other considerations. If we are to remain rooted in the material world it is better that shifts in mass consciousness are reflected in the political superstructure rather than, as at present, masked by Labour’s compulsion to match right-wing policies.

This is a practical argument for democracy that has the added advantage that it is philosophically and morally coherent. PR is just fairer while backing for grossly unfair systems like FPTP put into practice the manipulative compulsions of elites who don’t trust the common people — who the 19th-century French bourgeoisie saw as the “vile multitude.”

We are presently marking the 50th anniversary of the CIA-backed coup d’etat that saw socialist Salvador Allende gunned down in his presidential palace and a dictatorship that lasted decades in a subcontinent where US-backed military regimes kept millions under the rule of dictators.

It is instructive that both the Chilean ruling class and the US empire saw Allende’s plan to nationalise Chile’s copper industry as a threat. As the New York Times reported: “The International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation submitted to the White House ... an 18‐point plan designed to assure that the government of Chile’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende Gossen, ‘Does not get through the crucial next six months’.”

There are no guarantees that the election winners can rule. Something more than popular will is at play when capitalist ownership and state power are at stake.

We see this today when popular majorities here in Britain are firmly of the opinion that mail, rail, utilities and energy should be collectively owned, but among the leaders of the “parties of government,” there exists complete opposition to even such a modest return to the post-war consensus.

Karl Marx was emphatically in favour of the most advanced democracy. And he was conscious of the potential to achieve what he called the “political supremacy of the working class.”

To check the dangers of the bourgeois preference for representative democracy he was decidedly against long parliamentary terms and favoured the Chartist demand for annual parliaments and the right of recall. He was remarkably clear-sighted about the realities of political power.

Writing on the civil war in France, he quoted the manifesto of the central committee of the First International: “The proletarians of Paris, amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs ... They have understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.”

Marx went on: “But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”

The pitfalls of PR: a cost worth paying

The cost-of-living crisis has laid bare the contradiction between the drive by capital to maximise its profits and the consequences this creates for the routine functioning of Britain’s bourgeois democracy.

If FPTP delivers a new majority, Starmer has already convinced our ruling class that their system is safe in his hands. But it is entirely possible that British capitalism’s present-day problems of legitimacy might be mitigated by a form of PR. One that might strengthen the illusion that the direction of the nation’s affairs is more subject to the democratic will than the facts support.

Some evidence for this accommodation to reality lies in the introduction of some limited forms of proportional voting in Scotland, Wales and London and, for a while, in elections to the EU’s pretend parliament.

Would this be a good thing? Unequivocally yes. PR would put Labour’s right wing on the back foot by allowing for the direct expression of majority opinion on the policies a majority back but which have no parliamentary expression.

A “transferable vote” system like that used by the highly sophisticated Irish electorate enables preferences to come into play and would end the situation where a vote for a left-wing or Green candidate or party is wasted as it is today when FPTP produces a combination of reluctant left-wingers voting for people with who they profoundly disagree and/or massive working-class abstention.

The unreflective Labour loyalist might argue that FPTP offers a better chance for a majority Labour government. To which serious socialists can argue that such a Parliament would be full of people — like today’s Parliamentary Labour Party — who regard the policies which even a majority of Tory voters prefer with fear and loathing.

Of course, a Parliament composed of a majority of people committed to progressive policies would still face opposition from the present-day ruling class and their Nato, and EU reserve forces, the IMF, World Bank, City bankers and the global bond markets.

When we look at what these forces did to Liz Truss’s mildly deviant monetarist policies or what the political elite did to Giorgia Meloni’s perfunctory charge on bank profits, imagine what measures they might deploy against a socialist government that would take into public ownership the “means of production, distribution and exchange.”

Next time we look at what can be done about it. Salvador Allende presente!

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.