THE TORIES ARE THE CARELESS PARTY
“To lose one parent, Mr.
Worthing, may be regarded as a mistake, to lose both looks like carelessness.’” [Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The
Importance of Being Earnest]
Following a recent
conversation with probably the most experienced election analyst in the country
who told me that we were heading for “a hung parliament”, I have revisited the
problem of Tory electoral weakness.
Since 1970 the Conservative Party has been careless about its core vote. It has allowed no less than six parties to take bites out of its core electoral strength. These are the Ulster Unionists, the Democratic Unionists, UKIP, the BNP, the English Democrats and the Christian party. The roots of this carelessness lie in the Heath era, one that was characterized by the high tide of liberal managerial conservatism and disdain for the core Conservative interests and ideals. The breakaway new parties, as set out in their titles, were grounded on formerly traditional Conservative beliefs of democracy, patriotism and the protection of the interests of the British people especially its working population.
CORE POLICIES
Once a new party rises and establishes itself, it can prove remarkably resilient so long as its core policies are relevant and have a small but solid support. It is quite clear that UKIP and the BNP plug into separate but vital core areas of politics and offer a distinctive policy from the three main parties. It is hard to see them going away. The Christian Party and the English Democrats also plug into parts of the political waterfront neglected by the main parties but are also outside the rather single issue approach of UKIP and the BNP.
Heath directly lost the 10/12 Unionist MPs who were incorporated in the Conservative ranks up to 1970. Once a certain period of independence had passed, it was inconceivable that the Democratic Unionists and Ulster Unionists would rejoin the Conservatives. The parties drifted further and further apart. The current rapprochement with the Ulster Unionists seems to be a sign of that party’s weakness.
Heath’s enthusiasm for Europe did not do immediate damage to the Conservative’s ability to win elections but the European issue eventually exploded in the 1990’s with the formation of the Referendum and UK Independence Parties. Once again, what was a substantial opinion in the Conservative Party was so estranged that it split off. Moreover, its policy stance was continually vindicated by the collapse of the support for the EU by Conservative voters and the chronic evasiveness of Conservative politicians on the EU.
Finally, the ruling liberal conservative elite showed little interest in the impact of mass third-world immigration on British working class areas. This enabled the BNP, despite problems with some of its leadership, to gain a foothold. In fact, the impact of the BNP is probably underestimated since it presents a real obstacle to Conservatives recovering in the metropolitan areas outside London where they now hold only 5 out of 124 seats. In most of the West Midlands and urban Yorkshire and Lancashire, the Conservative vote dropped in 2005 while the BNP saved deposits all over both regions. In effect, the Tory working class vote cultivated by Conservative leaders so assiduously in the nineteenth century has been ignored and has now collapsed in most of the Midlands and the North of England.
ELECTORAL BIAS
At the same time the Conservatives became careless about the state of the electoral system. The massive electoral bias in favour of Labour is, to a large extent, the product of decisions about the electoral system taken when the Conservatives were in office. In 1987, following a House of Commons’ Committee study of the electoral system, the decision was taken to retain the over-representation of Scotland and Wales. The Tory leadership also failed to set principles for the Boundary Commission which would reduce bias in the electoral system, particularly to reduce the gap between the size of the average Labour seat and the average Conservative seat which in 1997 still amounted to 6,500 votes. The more efficient distribution of the Conservative vote in the 1980s masked the other biases in the system in Labour’s favour.
It is a salient point that, on the basis of the current bias in the Westminster electoral system, the Conservatives would have only won one post-War election (1983) according to Butler & Kavanagh’s ‘The British General Election of 2001’.
In 2005 the result in England alone was 286 seats for Labour against 193 seats for the Conservatives despite the Conservatives being slightly ahead in the number of votes.
ANTI-DEMOCRATIC
Even now this staggeringly anti-democratic state of affairs is being treated as a second order issue by Conservative politicians. It also has another important effect. The poorest regions, which are massively over-represented, supply most of the governing party which colours policy and pulls it into a welfarist direction.
THE NEXT ELECTION
According to the Electoral Reform Society’s Report on the General Election of 2005, the Conservative Party needs a swing of about 7 per cent and a lead of about 11 per cent to win an absolute majority at the next election. This allows for the Conservatives achieving a net gain of about seven seats after the Boundary Commission Report. In elections since 1945, such a swing was only attained once, by Tony Blair in 1997.
Given these self-inflicted handicaps, where are the Conservative votes to come from?
If we add up the votes for Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists we find that they totalled the following in the last nine general elections (% of the voters):
1974 59.0%
61.0%
1979 52.8%
1983 54.5%
1987 55.1%
1992 54.5%
1997 62.5%
2001 61.5%
2005 59.4%
The bedrock of this Left Bloc is thus about 55 per cent. In addition there is Northern Ireland which is a further 2.5 per cent of the total electorate. So the Conservative ceiling, assuming they collected all the votes outside the Left Bloc and Northern Ireland, would seem to be about 42.5 per cent of the vote.
The best Conservative performances were in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992 when they won 42/43 per cent. Their success in numbers of seats in 1979, 1983 and 1987 was due to the split in the Left Bloc with a great deal of the LibDem vote wasted. This is no longer the case.
But the crucial point is that up to 1992, the Conservatives did not face any political party attacking them from the Right. They could assume that, except in Northern Ireland, they would sweep up all voters outside the Left Bloc while covering all the traditional Tory bases of support, Christian, democratic, independence, national identity and a fair Union. In the last three elections all changed. In 1997 these new parties (UKIP/BNP) attracted 2.9 per cent, in 2001 1.7 per cent and in 2005 3.5 per cent of the electorate.
Moreover, in England only, the parties of the Right attracted just under 4 per cent of the votes in 2005 – votes that, in the past, would normally have mainly gone to the Conservatives.
Of course, one should state that not all of those who vote for these parties are former or potential Conservatives but their main appeal is to interests which were formerly catered for by the Conservative party.
No wonder that the UKIP vote alone was in excess of the Labour’s winning margin of the vote in 25 constituencies and the BNP/UKIP vote combined exceeded that vote in a further 5 constituencies despite the BNP concentrating on Labour heartlands and not standing in many marginals.
The results of the 2009 European elections show further advance by parties of the Right on to ground formerly held by the Conservatives. We see the following percentages of the vote:
UKIP 16.5%
BNP 6.2%
Christian Party 1.6%
English Democrats 1.8%
Now, of course, it is expected that, as in 2005, most voters from these parties will revert to their traditional allegiance in a general election, mainly Conservative (who only got 28 per cent of the vote in the EU elections) and their likelihood of winning seats is virtually nil. I would concur with that but there is good reason to think that a considerably greater number of voters who have sampled the new parties will stick with them in a general election, bearing in mind that all these parties are likely to put up a wider geographical coverage than in the past.
Partly this is a question of habit. Breaking with voting for a major party is hard the first time but gets easier each time you do it. After all, in voting for a new party you do not just follow your father’s voting pattern, you think about it. Nor have the Conservatives confessed error and taken note of the discontents which have led to the creation and rise of smaller parties. The drivers of discontent, mass third world immigration, growth of EU power, special treatment of the Celtic fringe, marginalization of the Christian ethos, have not been addressed and, in some cases, have been scorned by intemperate remarks about UKIP and the BNP and the promotion of homosexualism as a defining mark of the new Tory Party.
There is also the question of all the major parties being tarred by the MPs’ expenses scandals. And the minor parties always run well ahead of their position in the polls.
The Norwich North by-election should have been a red light. Here the Tories campaigned massively with David Cameron visiting six times but the UKIP/BNP vote was almost 15 per cent of those who voted. (It is worth pointing out here that the Left Bloc has also suffered some disruption from the rise of the Greens.)
To actually win with the Cameron strategy of targeting Left Bloc voters, the voting figure would have to look like this:
Conservative 42.6%
Labour 30.1%
LibDems 19.5%
Scots/Welsh 2.2%
Northern Ireland 2.5%
Others 3.1%
This would give the Conservatives a lead over Labour of 12.5 per cent, just enough to form a government. In this scenario the total of the Left Bloc is 51.8 per cent. In other words, the Tories would have to push the Left Bloc into a lower percentage of the vote than in 1979 when the Left Bloc totalled 52.8 per cent - lower than in any election since the 1950s. Is this really a possibility?
In this scenario, which is roughly that showing in recent opinion polls, one notes that the Left Bloc totals 51.8 per cent of the vote. The Northern Ireland vote is 2.5 per cent of the total, so this leaves about 46 per cent of the vote available to the Conservatives. Bearing in mind that the new right parties got 3.5 per cent of the vote last time in 2005, the 42.6 per cent the Tories need is just attainable if they restrict the new parties to the same percentage of votes as in 2005. I would regard this as totally implausible on the basis of the Norwich North result.
In the analysis above, it is assumed that the Left Bloc total falls from 59.4 per cent in 2005 to 51.8 per cent and that the new right parties obtain 3.1 per cent of the vote. Yet UKIP alone collected 3.2 per cent of the vote where it stood in 2005. The average BNP vote was 4.3 per cent. Their combined vote doubled between 2001 and 2005 and, while there is some overlapping and competing, it is quite possible to envisage a combined vote of 7/8 per cent with a further 2/3 per cent for the English Democrats and the Christian Party, totalling say ten per cent in hundreds of constituencies, as opposed to 3.1 per cent in the above scenario and 3.5 per cent in 2005.
One difficulty is guessing where this extra support for the new parties, say an increase from 3.5 per cent to ten per cent will come from.
An optimistic scenario would be if half the increase came from the Tories and half from the Left Bloc, equally from Labour and the LibDems.
This gives the following result:
Conservative 39.3%
Labour 28.3%
LibDems 17.7%
Scots/Welsh 2.2%
Northern Ireland 2.5%
Others 10.0%
This is ‘hung’ parliament territory with the Tories as the largest party.
To emphasise, there are two reasons for the scale of the challenge the Tories face. The existence of the new Right Parties compresses the total available vote for the Conservatives. Second, the LibDem vote is much more successful in turning votes into seats than it was in the 1980s.
Conservatives have ignored the two basic canons of electoral warfare. They have failed to fight on fair electoral ground and they have failed to secure their base. The Left Bloc may shrink from 60 per cent to 51.8 per cent of the electorate if the Tories detach some of it with their current strategy but, historically, it is unlikely to go very much lower unless there is a leakage to the new parties. Remember that Mrs. Thatcher was neither handicapped by the bias in the electoral system nor by the existence of small but crucially important Right Wing parties.
The overall efforts of the Tory party since 2005 have seen a switch of Left voters into the Tory Party and a switch of Right voters out of the Tory party.
Failure to sweep up all the voters outside the Left Bloc means that the outcome of the general election is incredibly hard to forecast with each seat being uniquely determined by the direction and quantity of change in voting patterns. With many small parties winning small shares of the vote, the actual winning percentage may be quite low in many seats. For example, defections from Labour to the BNP in the 124 metropolitan seats are only 50 per cent as effective for the Conservatives as votes that cross directly from Labour to the Tories. Voters that move from the Tories to the new Right parties are 50 per cent as damaging as direct crossovers to Labour. 50 per cent damage is, however, a very large figure.
The rise of the new parties always undermined the Tory electoral strategy of trying to attract voters from the Left Bloc while neglecting their base. Now, party strategy is wholly committed to a major Labour collapse and the Tories coming through with a majority in a very fragmented election.
Even supposing this strategy actually works and delivers an election victory, the leakage of Right voters may continue to grow if a new Conservative government continues to neglect core Conservative interests and ideals and will store up even further problems at ensuing elections.
The election result of 2010 is impossible to forecast but, if the Conservatives fail to win, the main cause will be the failure to observe the No. 1 maxim of war: ‘Secure Your Base’.
The new parties of the Right were formed and began to grow under a Conservative government operating in more benign conditions and with a less aggressive liberal agenda than David Cameron will operate under. The scope for them to grow if the Cameron government goes off the rails is quite spectacular.
For some time, it has seemed that it is the election after 2010 which has seemed to have the scope for a major upset in British politics.
Futurus/25 October 2009
Since 1970 the Conservative Party has been careless about its core vote. It has allowed no less than six parties to take bites out of its core electoral strength. These are the Ulster Unionists, the Democratic Unionists, UKIP, the BNP, the English Democrats and the Christian party. The roots of this carelessness lie in the Heath era, one that was characterized by the high tide of liberal managerial conservatism and disdain for the core Conservative interests and ideals. The breakaway new parties, as set out in their titles, were grounded on formerly traditional Conservative beliefs of democracy, patriotism and the protection of the interests of the British people especially its working population.
CORE POLICIES
Once a new party rises and establishes itself, it can prove remarkably resilient so long as its core policies are relevant and have a small but solid support. It is quite clear that UKIP and the BNP plug into separate but vital core areas of politics and offer a distinctive policy from the three main parties. It is hard to see them going away. The Christian Party and the English Democrats also plug into parts of the political waterfront neglected by the main parties but are also outside the rather single issue approach of UKIP and the BNP.
Heath directly lost the 10/12 Unionist MPs who were incorporated in the Conservative ranks up to 1970. Once a certain period of independence had passed, it was inconceivable that the Democratic Unionists and Ulster Unionists would rejoin the Conservatives. The parties drifted further and further apart. The current rapprochement with the Ulster Unionists seems to be a sign of that party’s weakness.
Heath’s enthusiasm for Europe did not do immediate damage to the Conservative’s ability to win elections but the European issue eventually exploded in the 1990’s with the formation of the Referendum and UK Independence Parties. Once again, what was a substantial opinion in the Conservative Party was so estranged that it split off. Moreover, its policy stance was continually vindicated by the collapse of the support for the EU by Conservative voters and the chronic evasiveness of Conservative politicians on the EU.
Finally, the ruling liberal conservative elite showed little interest in the impact of mass third-world immigration on British working class areas. This enabled the BNP, despite problems with some of its leadership, to gain a foothold. In fact, the impact of the BNP is probably underestimated since it presents a real obstacle to Conservatives recovering in the metropolitan areas outside London where they now hold only 5 out of 124 seats. In most of the West Midlands and urban Yorkshire and Lancashire, the Conservative vote dropped in 2005 while the BNP saved deposits all over both regions. In effect, the Tory working class vote cultivated by Conservative leaders so assiduously in the nineteenth century has been ignored and has now collapsed in most of the Midlands and the North of England.
ELECTORAL BIAS
At the same time the Conservatives became careless about the state of the electoral system. The massive electoral bias in favour of Labour is, to a large extent, the product of decisions about the electoral system taken when the Conservatives were in office. In 1987, following a House of Commons’ Committee study of the electoral system, the decision was taken to retain the over-representation of Scotland and Wales. The Tory leadership also failed to set principles for the Boundary Commission which would reduce bias in the electoral system, particularly to reduce the gap between the size of the average Labour seat and the average Conservative seat which in 1997 still amounted to 6,500 votes. The more efficient distribution of the Conservative vote in the 1980s masked the other biases in the system in Labour’s favour.
It is a salient point that, on the basis of the current bias in the Westminster electoral system, the Conservatives would have only won one post-War election (1983) according to Butler & Kavanagh’s ‘The British General Election of 2001’.
In 2005 the result in England alone was 286 seats for Labour against 193 seats for the Conservatives despite the Conservatives being slightly ahead in the number of votes.
ANTI-DEMOCRATIC
Even now this staggeringly anti-democratic state of affairs is being treated as a second order issue by Conservative politicians. It also has another important effect. The poorest regions, which are massively over-represented, supply most of the governing party which colours policy and pulls it into a welfarist direction.
THE NEXT ELECTION
According to the Electoral Reform Society’s Report on the General Election of 2005, the Conservative Party needs a swing of about 7 per cent and a lead of about 11 per cent to win an absolute majority at the next election. This allows for the Conservatives achieving a net gain of about seven seats after the Boundary Commission Report. In elections since 1945, such a swing was only attained once, by Tony Blair in 1997.
Given these self-inflicted handicaps, where are the Conservative votes to come from?
If we add up the votes for Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists we find that they totalled the following in the last nine general elections (% of the voters):
1974 59.0%
61.0%
1979 52.8%
1983 54.5%
1987 55.1%
1992 54.5%
1997 62.5%
2001 61.5%
2005 59.4%
The bedrock of this Left Bloc is thus about 55 per cent. In addition there is Northern Ireland which is a further 2.5 per cent of the total electorate. So the Conservative ceiling, assuming they collected all the votes outside the Left Bloc and Northern Ireland, would seem to be about 42.5 per cent of the vote.
The best Conservative performances were in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992 when they won 42/43 per cent. Their success in numbers of seats in 1979, 1983 and 1987 was due to the split in the Left Bloc with a great deal of the LibDem vote wasted. This is no longer the case.
But the crucial point is that up to 1992, the Conservatives did not face any political party attacking them from the Right. They could assume that, except in Northern Ireland, they would sweep up all voters outside the Left Bloc while covering all the traditional Tory bases of support, Christian, democratic, independence, national identity and a fair Union. In the last three elections all changed. In 1997 these new parties (UKIP/BNP) attracted 2.9 per cent, in 2001 1.7 per cent and in 2005 3.5 per cent of the electorate.
Moreover, in England only, the parties of the Right attracted just under 4 per cent of the votes in 2005 – votes that, in the past, would normally have mainly gone to the Conservatives.
Of course, one should state that not all of those who vote for these parties are former or potential Conservatives but their main appeal is to interests which were formerly catered for by the Conservative party.
No wonder that the UKIP vote alone was in excess of the Labour’s winning margin of the vote in 25 constituencies and the BNP/UKIP vote combined exceeded that vote in a further 5 constituencies despite the BNP concentrating on Labour heartlands and not standing in many marginals.
The results of the 2009 European elections show further advance by parties of the Right on to ground formerly held by the Conservatives. We see the following percentages of the vote:
UKIP 16.5%
BNP 6.2%
Christian Party 1.6%
English Democrats 1.8%
Now, of course, it is expected that, as in 2005, most voters from these parties will revert to their traditional allegiance in a general election, mainly Conservative (who only got 28 per cent of the vote in the EU elections) and their likelihood of winning seats is virtually nil. I would concur with that but there is good reason to think that a considerably greater number of voters who have sampled the new parties will stick with them in a general election, bearing in mind that all these parties are likely to put up a wider geographical coverage than in the past.
Partly this is a question of habit. Breaking with voting for a major party is hard the first time but gets easier each time you do it. After all, in voting for a new party you do not just follow your father’s voting pattern, you think about it. Nor have the Conservatives confessed error and taken note of the discontents which have led to the creation and rise of smaller parties. The drivers of discontent, mass third world immigration, growth of EU power, special treatment of the Celtic fringe, marginalization of the Christian ethos, have not been addressed and, in some cases, have been scorned by intemperate remarks about UKIP and the BNP and the promotion of homosexualism as a defining mark of the new Tory Party.
There is also the question of all the major parties being tarred by the MPs’ expenses scandals. And the minor parties always run well ahead of their position in the polls.
The Norwich North by-election should have been a red light. Here the Tories campaigned massively with David Cameron visiting six times but the UKIP/BNP vote was almost 15 per cent of those who voted. (It is worth pointing out here that the Left Bloc has also suffered some disruption from the rise of the Greens.)
To actually win with the Cameron strategy of targeting Left Bloc voters, the voting figure would have to look like this:
Conservative 42.6%
Labour 30.1%
LibDems 19.5%
Scots/Welsh 2.2%
Northern Ireland 2.5%
Others 3.1%
This would give the Conservatives a lead over Labour of 12.5 per cent, just enough to form a government. In this scenario the total of the Left Bloc is 51.8 per cent. In other words, the Tories would have to push the Left Bloc into a lower percentage of the vote than in 1979 when the Left Bloc totalled 52.8 per cent - lower than in any election since the 1950s. Is this really a possibility?
In this scenario, which is roughly that showing in recent opinion polls, one notes that the Left Bloc totals 51.8 per cent of the vote. The Northern Ireland vote is 2.5 per cent of the total, so this leaves about 46 per cent of the vote available to the Conservatives. Bearing in mind that the new right parties got 3.5 per cent of the vote last time in 2005, the 42.6 per cent the Tories need is just attainable if they restrict the new parties to the same percentage of votes as in 2005. I would regard this as totally implausible on the basis of the Norwich North result.
In the analysis above, it is assumed that the Left Bloc total falls from 59.4 per cent in 2005 to 51.8 per cent and that the new right parties obtain 3.1 per cent of the vote. Yet UKIP alone collected 3.2 per cent of the vote where it stood in 2005. The average BNP vote was 4.3 per cent. Their combined vote doubled between 2001 and 2005 and, while there is some overlapping and competing, it is quite possible to envisage a combined vote of 7/8 per cent with a further 2/3 per cent for the English Democrats and the Christian Party, totalling say ten per cent in hundreds of constituencies, as opposed to 3.1 per cent in the above scenario and 3.5 per cent in 2005.
One difficulty is guessing where this extra support for the new parties, say an increase from 3.5 per cent to ten per cent will come from.
An optimistic scenario would be if half the increase came from the Tories and half from the Left Bloc, equally from Labour and the LibDems.
This gives the following result:
Conservative 39.3%
Labour 28.3%
LibDems 17.7%
Scots/Welsh 2.2%
Northern Ireland 2.5%
Others 10.0%
This is ‘hung’ parliament territory with the Tories as the largest party.
To emphasise, there are two reasons for the scale of the challenge the Tories face. The existence of the new Right Parties compresses the total available vote for the Conservatives. Second, the LibDem vote is much more successful in turning votes into seats than it was in the 1980s.
Conservatives have ignored the two basic canons of electoral warfare. They have failed to fight on fair electoral ground and they have failed to secure their base. The Left Bloc may shrink from 60 per cent to 51.8 per cent of the electorate if the Tories detach some of it with their current strategy but, historically, it is unlikely to go very much lower unless there is a leakage to the new parties. Remember that Mrs. Thatcher was neither handicapped by the bias in the electoral system nor by the existence of small but crucially important Right Wing parties.
The overall efforts of the Tory party since 2005 have seen a switch of Left voters into the Tory Party and a switch of Right voters out of the Tory party.
Failure to sweep up all the voters outside the Left Bloc means that the outcome of the general election is incredibly hard to forecast with each seat being uniquely determined by the direction and quantity of change in voting patterns. With many small parties winning small shares of the vote, the actual winning percentage may be quite low in many seats. For example, defections from Labour to the BNP in the 124 metropolitan seats are only 50 per cent as effective for the Conservatives as votes that cross directly from Labour to the Tories. Voters that move from the Tories to the new Right parties are 50 per cent as damaging as direct crossovers to Labour. 50 per cent damage is, however, a very large figure.
The rise of the new parties always undermined the Tory electoral strategy of trying to attract voters from the Left Bloc while neglecting their base. Now, party strategy is wholly committed to a major Labour collapse and the Tories coming through with a majority in a very fragmented election.
Even supposing this strategy actually works and delivers an election victory, the leakage of Right voters may continue to grow if a new Conservative government continues to neglect core Conservative interests and ideals and will store up even further problems at ensuing elections.
The election result of 2010 is impossible to forecast but, if the Conservatives fail to win, the main cause will be the failure to observe the No. 1 maxim of war: ‘Secure Your Base’.
The new parties of the Right were formed and began to grow under a Conservative government operating in more benign conditions and with a less aggressive liberal agenda than David Cameron will operate under. The scope for them to grow if the Cameron government goes off the rails is quite spectacular.
For some time, it has seemed that it is the election after 2010 which has seemed to have the scope for a major upset in British politics.
Futurus/25 October 2009