What would a Labour landslide mean for parliament?

As Rishi Sunak faces electoral oblivion today, his final gambit before polling day is to threaten voters with the risk of a Labour ‘super-majority’. The term ‘super-majority’ is constitutionally meaningless in the UK: in our system of government a majority of one gives a party the same right to make and unmake laws as a majority in the hundreds. But voters should care about the impact of a large Labour lead.

Arguably, a Labour landslide could have a practical impact on the way parliament works. Parliament’s two core functions are making legislation and holding the government to account. The most obvious concern is the effect a landslide would have on the quality of scrutiny.

The precipitousness of the Conservative party’s fall from grace is almost unprecedented

It is already broadly accepted that the House of Commons does not do a great job of scrutinising legislation. Line by line scrutiny of new laws primarily occurs in the House of Lords. Over recent years, the government has also increasingly made use of secondary legislation and what are known as ‘Henry VIII clauses’ to avoid any meaningful scrutiny.

This is nothing new – if Labour achieves a massive majority, it’s hard to see why anything would change. Conservatives were warned, during Brexit and the Covid years, that playing fast and loose with parliament would come back to haunt them one day. Now that day has come. While the Conservatives cannot credibly complain, that is not to say that the electorate should be happy with this outcome.

Yet that is just the tip of the iceberg. Compared to the law-making process, the Commons select committee system is fairly well respected. Cross-party departmental select committees scrutinise government policy and produce reports examining successes and failures, often arguing for much needed reforms. They have had increasing influence in recent years, particularly after 2010 when their chairs became directly elected. 

Since select committees reflect the balance of the parties in parliament, if Labour wins the vast majority of seats, then Labour MPs will make up the vast majority of select committee members. While this doesn’t mean that select committees will necessarily become ineffective overnight, it is certainly plausible that if a committee of 11 members contains eight or so Labour MPs, then the dynamic could be changed significantly, and scrutiny of government policy could be diminished.

It is also a sad truth that a great many of those who enter parliament have ambitions for ministerial office. If there is increased pressure on obtaining ministerial jobs (due to the number of Labour MPs in the House), fresh-faced new MPs may well be less keen to blot their copybook by immediately criticising the new government on contentious issues, such as the current prisons crisis, or how to stop small boat crossings. 

The second area where the impact of a Labour landslide is relevant is when it comes to the quality of candidates who are elected to parliament. The precipitousness of the Conservative party’s fall from grace is almost unprecedented. To go from a majority of around 80 in 2019 to a situation where the party is predicted to win somewhere between 50 to 150 seats is truly remarkable and the Conservatives may well end up short of high-quality MPs to make up their front bench and chair select committees. 

The quality of candidates may also be an issue for Labour. As recently as 2023, polling expert Sir John Curtice was suggesting that an overall Labour majority was not guaranteed and that a possible outcome of the 2024 election was Labour being the largest party, while falling short of a majority. Those put forward for target seats then will have been heavily vetted. But many of those put forward for marginal seats with large Conservative majorities would not have expected to become parliamentarians. Some of these candidates may be inexperienced, or simply not in the first rank. Many of them will now end up as MPs in the new parliament.

With the huge turnover of MPs we will inevitably have an inexperienced House of Commons. The Institute for Government says that 132 MPs chose not to contest their seats – including the chairs of ten select committees. 

All this change in the Commons may well be exacerbated by Labour’s proposal to tinker with the make-up of the House of Lords, expelling all the hereditary Peers immediately. While the presence of the hereditaries is hard to justify, many of them do a useful job. Labour has a reasonable complaint that the party is underrepresented in the Lords. But this move does seem like a rather cynical way to change the composition of seats overnight.

A massive Labour win, it seems, will have an impact on the nature and perhaps even the quality of our next parliament. As a non-partisan supporter of our first past the post voting system, which is (at least in theory) designed to result in a relatively strong governments, I will not complain about the disproportionate number of MPs that Labour is likely to see elected on Thursday. Nonetheless, having an effective opposition is also constitutionally important and those arguing for the destruction of the Conservative party should look carefully at the alternatives.

None of this should be taken as an argument on who to vote for today. But while Labour may rightly cheer their victory tonight, we should also be vigilant in ensuring that our parliament continues to function as an effective vehicle to hold the government to account.