Yesterday I voted against the government’s motion for an early election. Not because I want to see the Tories in office for another day, of course – I want to see them out of power and would have voted against them in a confidence motion without a second thought – but because this is yet another example of their cynical contempt for democratic norms.
The Fixed-term Parliaments Act was already more about the fix than about parliament. It suited the Tories to bind together the coalition at the time. Now it suits them to rip it up.
And so much for the prime minister’s promise – to her own MPs and to the rest of the country – that there would be no snap general election.
This is far from her only broken promise, of course. We all watched her most recent budget collapse into chaos when its centre-piece broke a manifesto pledge on national insurance – something the chancellor apparently only realised when the BBC pointed it out.
When Theresa May launched her campaign for the Tory leadership she set out a vision for workers on company boards and a crackdown on runaway executive pay. She said that “a vision is nothing without the determination to see it through”. As shadow business secretary, I saw her determination melt in the face of big business opposition, and her vision was only that – an illusion.
And my constituents in Norwich South have borne the consequences even more directly. The Tories made solemn promises to increase NHS spending every year, and that funding for every school pupil would increase. Yet Norwich and other Norfolk and Waveney health staff are being told to make £300m worth of cuts by 2021, and May now proposes a new funding formula that would see local schools lose £41m by 2019 – equivalent to 1,100 teachers.
But it is not just in our public services or pay packets where we see the cost of these broken promises. It’s now seeping into the very fabric of our democracy.
Theresa May’s snap election stunt was more than just political opportunism. All parties will use events to their own advantage. The difference now is the sheer scale and scope of the attack on our democracy by the Tories in government.
Take their plans to create sweeping temporary powers for ministers, via the “great repeal bill”, to change legislation without Parliament’s approval. Or its decision to limit Ofcom’s investigation into Rupert Murdoch’s Sky bid to the woefully inadequate 40 days.
Wherever you look, from full-spectrum dominance of the UK media, abuses of 2015 election spending, to the ever encroaching power of unaccountable private providers in public services – the shift of power to the wealthy and already powerful is proceeding at an unprecedented pace.
And it is part of a pattern. Conservatives used to be committed to protecting the constitution. But since taking power, they have used every trick in the book to make sure they can keep it, including rewriting the rules.
They have already cracked down on trade unions and charities, undermined the BBC in favour of rival broadcasters, attempted to reduce our rights in areas such as judicial review and freedom of information, stacked the House of Lords while trying to rig the Commons and disenfranchising swaths of the electorate, and choked off funding for opposition parties while politicising the civil service and protecting the millions they get from big business.
And May is continuing in the same vein. She does not look like someone intending to lead a one-nation party so much as a one-party nation.
That is what is now at stake in this election. Another five years of Tory rule with all the terrible consequences that will have is bad enough. But it is clear they will attempt to use those years to reshape our politics in a far more fundamental and sinister way.
Theresa May is not just breaking her promises, she is breaking our politics. Thursday 8 June is the day she feels she has the best chance of finishing the job. She must not be allowed to succeed.