Politics & Power Quote by Roy Jenkins

Britain’s first-past-the-post system doesn’t just count votes; it disciplines ambition. Roy Jenkins is naming the quiet coercion at the heart of the electoral order: it turns political identity into a hostage situation. Parties become oversized tents not because they’re intellectually coherent, but because the rules punish anyone who tries to leave. The “freezes the pattern of politics” line is doing double work. It’s an indictment of institutional inertia and a warning about how democracy can fossilize into ritual competition between two brands, even as the country’s actual beliefs splinter and recombine.

Jenkins’s most cutting move is the phrase “holds together the incompatible.” It’s not a plea for unity; it’s a critique of forced marriages. Under FPTP, internal party factions aren’t reconciled so much as stapled together for survival. The subtext is that voters don’t get clearer choices; they get composite creatures assembled to win marginal seats. Politics becomes less about persuasion and more about containment.

The kicker is the psychological realism of “everyone assumes.” Jenkins points to a self-fulfilling prophecy: fear of “electoral slaughter” keeps breakaways rare, which then reinforces the myth that breakaways are always doomed. Context matters here. Jenkins helped found the SDP in 1981 after Labour’s civil war, and watched a substantial reformist vote translate into scant parliamentary power. His argument isn’t abstract theory; it’s a postmortem on how an electoral system can treat a significant public constituency as political noise.

It’s reformist rhetoric with a scalpel: not “the people are apathetic,” but “the system makes courage irrational.”