I am so, so very bored of typing out the same rebuttal to this every 2 pages.
Nobody is saying the public directly decides the date of a general election. Of course they don’t. The Prime Minister requests dissolution, and the government chooses the timing within the five-year limit. That is literally the point.
The argument is not “the public can force one tomorrow”. The argument is that a new PM, installed after a catastrophic collapse in public support, has a legitimacy problem. They may be legally entitled to govern, but legality and political legitimacy are not the same thing.
Yes, Labour has a huge majority. But a huge majority won in 2024 by Keir Starmer, on Keir Starmer’s pitch, does not automatically give some replacement leader a moral blank cheque to run a different government for years without asking the country.
And “they know they won’t get this majority again” is exactly why it looks so grubby. That is not a principled democratic argument. That is just “we know the public no longer wants us, so we should cling on as long as possible.”
There is plenty of precedent for going early to get authority: Eden in 1955, Wilson in 1966, Heath in February 1974, Wilson again in October 1974, May in 2017, Johnson in 2019. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but the reason is obvious: a Prime Minister often wants a mandate for their own leadership and programme.
Of course Labour might try to hang on. Parties often do. But if they dump Starmer after a terrible local election result and install a new leader, I think they will be under enormous pressure to go to the country. Not because the public sets the date, but because a government that is clearly unwanted cannot just hide behind parliamentary arithmetic forever without damaging itself even more.