What is a supermajority and should we be worried about it?

Amid dire general election poll ratings, the Tories have gone on the defensive.

Senior party figures have warned of a Sir Keir Starmer “supermajority” for Labour, suggesting the Conservatives are now focused on damage limitation rather than winning the vote on 4 July.

Chief among those figures has been defence secretary Grant Shapps, the first senior Tory to publicly use the term in this election campaign. “A blank cheque, a supermajority, is a dangerous thing,” he told Times Radio this week.

The narrative has been so pervasive that BBC Radio 5 Live presenter Nicky Campbell this week referred, tongue in cheek, to the "spectre of Kim Jong Keir" - after North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un - hanging over election discussions in a reference to a Conservative attack ad showing the Labour leader being applauded by Kim, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

But what is a supermajority and is it really something to be worried about, as Tories like Shapps have warned? Here, Yahoo News explains.

What is a supermajority?

Technically, a supermajority doesn’t exist in UK politics.

As per the Electoral Reform Society, it is a term “commonly used in the USA to describe what is technically called a qualified majority. Qualified majority provisions are used to entrench important pieces of legislation by setting a higher bar than a simple majority to pass legislation. Commonly, this level might be two-thirds.”

Instead, Tories like Shapps are referring to a “supermajority” in the figurative sense: essentially saying Labour could win an enormous majority of MPs.

To have a simple majority of one seat in the House of Commons, a political party must win over half the 650 seats: at least 326.

This is where the Tories’ dire polling comes in. A major YouGov study from Wednesday said the Conservatives are projected to slump to their “lowest seat tally in the party’s almost 200-year history” at the election.

YouGov said its latest study - based on the multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) technique and the responses of 36,000 people - projects Labour to secure 425 seats, the Tories 108, the Liberal Democrats 67, SNP 20, Reform UK five, Plaid Cymru four and the Green Party two.

It noted such a scenario would hand Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer a 200-seat majority in the Commons. This is the “supermajority” that the Tories are worried about.

Why are the Tories warning about it?

The Conservative strategy, backed by a social media advertising campaign, is aimed at persuading Tory backers tempted by Nigel Farage’s Reform party not to risk giving Labour a majority which could eclipse even the 1997 landslide under Tony Blair.

“All that a vote for Reform does is give Labour an even bigger majority," Jeremy Hunt has said. “And that is a polar opposite of what most Reform voters want. So it doesn’t solve any problem to vote Reform.”

However, when the governing party is urging voters, amid dire polling, not to give the opposition party a “supermajority”, it’s not a sign of confidence in its own electoral prospects.

Instead, as the Electoral Reform Society said, it is more likely “Grant Shapps was merely suggesting people vote for his party” to minimise seat losses.

Shapps himself said on Monday: “We’re still fighting for absolutely every single vote, which is absolutely the right thing to do and warning of the dangers of Labour. But what I said last week stands, a blank cheque, a supermajority is a dangerous thing."

Should voters be worried about it?

Not according to some. As the Electoral Reform Society points out, "all it would take is a majority of one to pass any legislation the next government want to pass" anyway.

Technically, there is no difference between a majority of one or a majority of 200, as the YouGov study projected.

It is true that it would be hard for an opposition Conservative Party to make an impact within the House of Commons under such a scenario, but it has also been hard for an opposition Labour Party to make an impact in the Commons since the 2019 election, when Boris Johnson won an 80-seat majority.

"The Conservative argument that a Labour supermajority would lead to a sudden dramatic loss in the effectiveness of parliamentary scrutiny is untrue," the Institute for Government (IFG) said this week.

"This is first because the rules of the House of Commons have always provided significant advantages to the party of government - being one of the most executive-dominated parliaments in the world."

The IFG said a government's "attitude to scrutiny" is more important than the size of its majority.

"Will Keir Starmer ensure ministers turn up to be grilled by select committees? Will he allow time for challenging debate over Labour’s legislative plans, including the idea of changing the voting rules? Will ministers shift the balance back from secondary to primary legislation, even where the previous government has handed it the tools to proceed without allowing MPs a say?"

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