What do 4,522 people in Keighley and Ilkley want?

A general election. When do they want it? Now.

Close to three million people in the UK want another general election, despite the fact that we’ve only just had one, five months ago, when Labour won a convincing if not complicated and threadbare landslide on 4 July.

In doing so, Labour secured a mandate to change Britain, which, the party argued, has been drifting aimlessly and unproductively because of the chaotic, badly managed and inward-looking Conservative government for the last 14 years (even more so since the 2016 Brexit referendum, which aside from the protracted negotiations, had seen the Tories get through four prime ministers and two general elections instead of delivering for the country).

While the accuracy of the number of people signing the online petition may be up for debate – there is some discussion around the authenticity of signatures – it is, nevertheless, a big enough number to attract our attention and warrant a discussion not just in Parliament, but in pubs, homes, offices and WhatsApp groups (less so on Twitter/X, which is a poor shadow of its former self).

The conversation we should have, though, shouldn’t be focused on the merit of the ask – for there to be another general election – but what has convinced around 4% of the population and, closer to home, around 4,522 people in Keighley and Ilkley (which equates to roughly 6% out of an electorate of 74,367) that this would be a sensible decision.

While this story has attracted headlines and the habitual rabble-rousers to jump on the back of it to argue that great swathes of people are fed up with the direction the country is going in since Labour got elected – and that’s not to say they haven’t made a mess of their comms, because they have, and, to quote the Guardian, their “tepid” programme for so-called national renewal isn’t exactly an inspiring response to the deep, structural problems the UK faces – it ignores the fact that this is a minority view both nationally and locally.

Most people, in fact, don’t want another general election. They respect the idea of democracy, which, for all its flaws, save for a crisis, generally invites its citizens every few years to cast judgment at the ballot box. If you like what the government has been doing, you give them another term. If you don’t like what they’re doing, you vote them out.

What you don’t do is sign a petition that reveals, if anything, a lack of seriousness about politics and the general outrage culture of being online, where everyone feels, anonymously or otherwise, emboldened to behave in a way they wouldn’t necessarily do outside of digital spaces. More so, a petition like this also underlines the reductive approach to anything and everything online, where depth, balance and rigour, especially on social media – including YouTube – struggle to compete in an age of instant gratification and the fast, disposable culture of capitalism.

And to what end would another general election actually serve? Another six or so weeks of campaigning would take the government away from doing what it ought to be doing and another 100 days would be needed to get the proverbial ball rolling and, all the while, we wouldn’t be any better off. Is there a genuine belief among the 4,522 petitioners in Keighley and Ilkley (at the time of writing) that an alternative to Labour, at present, and so early on in its term – whether that’s a return to Conservatives or, as with the recent surprise re-election of Donald Trump in the US, a radical swing even further right, towards, for instance, the cheap but effective big slogans and populist rhetoric of Reform UK – would hold true to their word, demonstrate genuine probity and, above all perhaps, come up with a better, faster way of fixing long-standing low growth and exceptionally high inequality in the UK (the most unequal large economy in Europe, in fact).

Although it’s a tough sell, because life, for many, is hard now, big changes, the ones being proposed by Labour and the ones that need to be developed – i.e. more ambitious (radical even) ideas – will take time. As the sociologist and political theorist William Davies noted recently in the London Review of Books, we’re in a dire state. Quick fixes might get you a bump in the polls, but in the end, they’ll come back to bite you.

“The combined effects of the financial crisis, Brexit, Covid and war in Ukraine have resulted in economic conditions far graver than those on which McKinsey was consulted at the end of the 1990s,” he explains. “It may be an act of noble honesty, political naivety or both, but Starmer and Reeves have evidently reasoned that they cannot set about promising a brighter future without confronting the present blight.”

So, have patience. Let’s see what this Labour government is made of. Saving for any major crisis, the next general election will be upon us in 2029. And, if you can’t wait, while local politics exists, in part, outside of Westminster, you can certainly make your voice heard regardless. Labour will be listening.