British general election (16): I officially resign as an election pundit
OK – I’ve now caught up with my sleep, having gone to bed in the early hours when the broad thrust of the General Election result was clear and I could take no more blueness. When I went to bed, I hoped that I would wake up to find that it was just a bad dream. But, when I did wake up, I found it was not just a dream – it was a nightmare.
And I did not see it coming. I broadly believed the polls. Indeed I thought that Labour would do a bit better than the polls in its key marginals and it was on that basis that I forecast a minority Labour Government.
The front page article in the “Guardian” newspaper this morning states that: “The result probably represents the biggest shock in a general election since 1945“. But 70 years ago, we did not have a whole succession of opinion polls forecasting such a consistent result and a world war, with mass mobilisation of citizens and deployment around the world, might have been expected to change social attitudes profoundly. This result in 2015 is utterly amazing. Another “Guardian” writer has written: “It is the biggest electoral revolution in the British Isles since Sinn Fein obliterated the Irish home rulers in 1918”. In 1945, the revolution was one of class; in 1918 and again in 2015, the explosion is one of nationalism.
It’s no wonder that, when the BBC and then YouGov announced their exit polls last night, so many politicians and commentators could not believe them. Famously Paddy Ashdown even promised to eat his hat if the BBC poll was correct – a rare flash of humour on a depressing night. How could the polls have got it so wrong? Either the methodology is massively flawed (although they had Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland correct) or voters lied to the pollsters or there was a huge and very last-minute swing to the Conservatives or some combination.
Let’s just remind ourselves how seismic the result has been:
- The Conservatives were all ready to experience another failure to secure a majority of seats since 1992. I was a teller for Labour on my local polling station and even my opposite number for the Tories seemed to accept that this would be the case. Instead the Conservatives won an overall majority of seats for the first time in 23 years.
- Labour was not expecting to win a majority or even necessarily the largest number of seats, but it was confident that it would win enough seats that, together with the Scottish National Party, it could block a return to No 10 by David Cameron. Last Saturday, I was at an election rally in London addressed by Ed Miliband and this was clearly the mood of the activists there. Instead Labour lost 26 seats compared to its tally last election.
- At the last General Election, the SNP took a mere six seats – the same as they did in 2005. Just eight months ago, the SNP lost a referendum on Scottish independence. Yet last night they took 56 out of 59 seats.
- Five years ago, the Liberal Democrats won 56 seats and for the last five years have been in a coalition government for the first time since the Second World War. Today they barely exist with a mere eight seats at Westminster.
- The blood is all over the walls. Three party leaders – Ed Miliband of Labour, Nick Clegg of the Lib Dems and Nigel Farage of UKIP – have resigned their roles. Labour has lost a succession of big names from the Commons including Ed Balls, Douglas Alexander and Jim Murphy. The Lib Dems have seen an electoral massacre losing Danny Alexander, Vince Cable, Ed Davey, Simon Hughes, Charles Kennedy and David Laws.
- UKIP and the Green Party have each won just one seat in spite of polling almost 4M and over 1M votes respectively – compared to the SNP’s 56 seats for under 1.5M votes. I have long been interested in electoral reform and voted for the Alternative Vote (AV) in the referendum in 2011. I guess that some version of proportional representation for Westminster elections will not be on the agenda of the newly triumphant Conservatives, but our present first-past-the-post (FPTP) system was designed for a very different political situation and needs serious change.
What happens now? Sky News has produced a list of nine things we can expect in the next five years.
At the economic and social level, we will see more austerity, more public expenditure cuts, more reductions in welfare, a weakened National Health Service, and more food banks. At the constitutional level, we will have an referendum on UK membership of the European Union and great pressure for even further devolution to Scotland. The worst case scenario is Britain out of Europe and Scotland out of Britain and a smaller, weaker, more divided nation. On the other hand, it might just be that the Conservatives implode over the EU referendum …
This has been the 12th General Election in which I have participated. I have never known anything like it. I am still shocked and bewildered and very sad.
May 8th, 2015 at 4:44 pm
Labour certainly paid a price in Scotland for siding with the Conservatives in the referendum. But even adding the Scottish districts, the party would still have fallen far short of a majority. But I suggest caution to those who would “re-brand” Labour. The people have spoken and the UK apparently will enter a deeper period of austerity. Let’s see how Conservative voters react when their favorite programs are cut and their “ox is gored.” Conservatives have a slim majority. One tug–such as the debate over EU membership–could bring the Conservatives’ majority crashing like the proverbial house of cards. The pendulum of history swings back and forth. Labour would be well advised to lick its wounds, stand its ground, stay true to its principles and push the pendulum of history back in its direction. Time is on Labour’s side.
May 10th, 2015 at 11:28 am
I too voted for AV.
The nonsense size of the SNP bloc was compounded by failure to address boundary changes and ensure that votes across the UK are worth roughly the same. Cameron knows that his words about a one nation government (including sorting NHS, housing, welfare and tax avoidance) have to be followed through because his majority will evaporate unless he can sort the Scottish problem rapidly and radically: e.g Devomax in return for EVEL, an English Parliament and correcting the errors in the application of the Barnett Formula (e.g the population proportions currently used). He also has to make sufficient progress in “helping the Germans, Dutch and Scandinavians reform the EU” to win the referendum without destroying his own party.
As a levy-paying member of my Union (and of the co-op) I too have a vote in the future of the Labour Party but would ask which ‘traditions’ it should stay true to. My father’s parents voted Labour until the 1951 elections – the trigger for them was the expropriation of the Metropolitan Gas Light and Coke (which had come, over time, to be majority owned by its customers and workforce). That grandmother never voted again: albeit neither her husband nor my father were aware that she ritually spoiled her ballot paper, because she could not bring herself to actually vote Tory.
My other grandfather secretly (I was the only member of the family who knew) voted for Sidney Dye (former Secretary of the Agricultural Workers Union) because of his conduct during the National Strike (secretly helping feed the family of an agricultural labourer who had been starved back to work and then intimidated back on strike while denied access to the strike fund as a former scab). My grandfather (a small farmer, on the other side), only knew because he too was helping feed the same family. I was told, in confidence, when he discovered I might be interested in becoming an MP. He wanted to make sure that I would not put political principles before personal principles. Neither side has a monopoly of compassion. Both are capable of great brutality in the name of ‘principles’
May 10th, 2015 at 12:36 pm
As I commented last week, Ed Miliband responded foolishly, inflexibly and self-defeatingly to questions posed during ‘Question Time’ and elsewhere during his moribund campaign. What, after all, was the point of voting for a guy who explicitly refuses even to talk to other parties? This was ‘hubris’ that earned its ‘nemesis’. I don’t believe a truly left-wing Labour Party is electable any more in the UK – this is the real dilemma for socialists and it ain’t going away any time soon. Tony Blair, for all his faults and sins, understood this. There’s no point in standing uncompromisingly by principles that hold insufficient interest for the electorate (as it is, rather than as we’d like it to be), and thus ensuring five further nasty years of Tory rule, except this time with a majority.
May 10th, 2015 at 3:04 pm
4 million votes for UKIP. I think the countries 3rd party will only get bigger over time Nigel will lead us into number 10.
May 10th, 2015 at 3:28 pm
I have said elsewhere that I felt this election was rather like those in 1935, 1955, 1970 and one or other of those more recently maybe 1992. The best fit seemed to be 1955, where a sleepy summery torpor allowed a complacent Tory party to accrue a few extra seats compared to 1951 without any specific message. Their housebuilding record 1951-1955 was partly of council house building (what we would now, sadly, call social housing, a euphemism these days for safety net housing flawed by the vacancy rate being so low that demand grossly exceeds supply which is in any case leeched away by right-to-buy with no power to replace on a like-for-like basis) but also of more suburbia, continuing the ribbon development thst marked the 1930s.
And so it has proved.
SNP success wasn’t necessarily about nationalism, though their success is on a par with Sinn Fein’s 1918 triumph. I think it important we grasp that. It was in part a protest against Westminster, which is not quite the same thing as nationalism, and how same-ish politicians were preaching at Scotland from afar. It was surely mainly about the SNP having achieved an anti-austerity outflanking of Labour on the left. That the SNP figures didn’t balance is neither here nor there. They said enough is enough, Labour didn’t and duly got slaughtered.
The large Ukip vote, even with just one proto-Tory MP, means the media will still give them more air space than they deserve in 2020 and in between, and I think commentators are right that the will continue as a populist, broadly xenophobic, party of the right; for which role there is room in abritish politics. The Liberal Democrats are so tainted with guilt by association, that even wth the disappearance of two of the three culprits – Danny Alexander and David Laws – they sill have trouble morphing into a left-of-centre socially liberal party free of Victorian economic liberalism. Clegg still being Parliament would hamper that. The Greens may have reached a high water mark, where more influence might be achieved within the Labour Party than outside it.
Labour now needs to chew more and digest what has happened. Simply changing leader won’t be enough. I don’t know who should lead Labour, but I’m reminded of the Spitting Image joke about Thatcher’s Cabinet having a meal and Mrs T, having been served, being asked “what about the vegetables?” and her answering “they’ll have the same”. Our shadow cabinet seemed to lack ‘big beasts’ and I can imagine few serious discussions where Ed fought for and lost radical proposals. The two Eds were too strong a cautious partnership. The fact that few activists, let alone the general public, could name who led for Labour on housing says it all. As does the absence of even discussion on whether Trident was an appropriate weaponry for the different military challenges we now face. The timidity of Labour was not that they didn’t promise enough, promises were coming ten-a-penny right up to polling day. It was that none were radical, like public ownership of the rail operating companies, and so none seized the public imagination.
May 10th, 2015 at 3:45 pm
Oh, and I would be astounded if you really did give up on observations on British politics. It’s too addictive.
May 10th, 2015 at 6:29 pm
I agree with you, Dan, that simply changing leader is not enough. This is why we should think hard about the lessons of the defeat and not rush a leadership election.
As for my political punditry, I guess I have resigned in the sense that Farage has ‘resigned’!
May 10th, 2015 at 8:29 pm
Extracting the silver lining from this downpour, in Brent Central, a candidate who most activists did not want, polled 29,216 votes, her nearest rival getting c 20,000 votes less. That shows a group of people completely out of touch with the largely poor and disadvantaged residents. Most of them worked elsewhere, if at all. That tells you a lot about those who claim to ‘do Labour politics’.
Secondly, the citizens of our by far the largest capital city, powerhouse of the British economy and global financial big earner, swung strongly to Labour from one of the coalition government parties.
May 10th, 2015 at 9:01 pm
Contd
Thirdly, UKIP’s strong vote shows that they have appealed to the concerns of many over the weakness of immigration /cheap labour controls and the loss of sovereignty to a bureaucracy in Brussels with evident ambitions to become a military power, as in precipitating the Ukrainian imbroglio.
Fourthly, the Miliband/Balls Labour leadership has been far less effective than the Cameron/Osbourne one – piss poor ein defending the last Labour govt’s record; having little to say about EU and Cameron’s clever Referendum pitch. To pretend that they frightened the ‘middle ground’ with their much better real Labour pitch, simply won’t wash. They needed Gordon Brown to save the Union in the Scottish Referendum and generally allowed Salmond & Sturgeon to upset the English at Labour’s expense.
Finally, for all these reasons, we remain out of office and the Tories will now rule alone. It was always odds on they would get a second term – apart from our reliance on the polls/media waffle. They got a majority to prevent a Scots-dominated Labour coalition. At least, the distraction of the Lib Dems is gone. I like to think we’ll be ready with a stronger challenge next time, but -maybe even a majority Labour government? But please, not a paler shade of Toryism, nor a bunch that would throw over a black female former MP in a seat she so fully mirrors and represents.