Is there real reason to fear a Labour 'supermajority'?

Wisely or not, the Conservatives have tacitly conceded not just defeat but an appalling humiliation on polling day, and are now begging for mercy.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Somewhat unconvincingly. The prime minister himself, in the dying days of his administration, has declared: “I don’t want Britain to sleepwalk into the danger of what an unchecked Labour government with a supermajority would mean.”

The home secretary, James Cleverly, agrees and says that Labour would “distort” the constitution: “I think there’s a real risk that they take a majority, if that’s what they get, to try to lock in their power permanently, because they don’t really feel confident they’re going to be able to make a credible case to the British people at the next election.”

Not all such fears are fully justified.

What is a supermajority and what would it mean?

The concept of a “supermajority” in the usual constitutional sense doesn’t exist in the British system. It does in other countries, where, typically, a two-thirds majority in a parliament is required to enact major constitutional change. There was one such provision in the UK, under the 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act, to authorise an early election, but that was abolished a couple of years ago.

What Rishi Sunak, Grant Shapps and others really mean is just “beyond a landslide”, because there is no word for the scale of the unprecedented majority Labour is about to win – perhaps 250 seats over all other parties and a staggering 350 over the Conservatives. Historic.

But won’t Labour be able to do what they want?