Like it or not, there is now a sense that ‘anything goes’ in general elections. It could be that the arithmetic returns a Coalition government, where the Conservatives can only be in government with support of UKIP, or Labour can only govern with the support of the Liberal Democrats. Of course, the most preferred option for Labour members would be for a Labour government to be returned with a landslide.
The current coalition is what can only be described as a ‘miserable compromise’. As a result of the Conservatives continuing to be in denial that the explosion in the deficit had been caused by injecting money into the banks as an emergency measure in the global financial crisis, Labour still have difficult in making the case for safe management of the ‘nation’s finances’. This is of course extremely frustrating for Labour, since the facts are that Labour ran a deficit comparable to the tenure of Norman Lamont and Ken Clarke otherwise, and George Osborne, assisted by the Liberal Democrats, has managed to reverse a fragile economy into a double-dip, and now possibly a triple-dip recession, only saved by some creative accounting over the Olympics and the 4G receipts, as revealed by George Eaton.
In civil litigation, all parties are supposed to adopt a “cards on the table approach”, and given what has happened in the past, all parties should make clear, I feel, what are “red line issues” for them; in other words, what is unnegotiable. Labour might definitely wish to repeal the NHS act and to reverse Part 6 of the Act, UKIP might wish to withdraw from Europe, and the Liberal Democrats might wish to [insert a reasonable choice here]. The combined total of Conservative and UKIP polling figures suggests an alliance would significantly narrow the difference of popularity between the two parties. David Cameron has, in fact, promised the Conservatives will fight the 2015 general election as an anti-Europe party in a bid to see off the threat of UKIP. The Prime Minister delighted Conservative MPs last night when he pledged he will fight for his first overall majority from a ‘clear Eurosceptic position’. However, the chance of UKIP gaining a significant number of seats is still small. They are also dependent upon the continuation of the Eurozone crisis in order to maintain their popularity.
However, we can only really draw conclusions from by-elections, albeit they may fall under the ‘mid-term protest vote’ umbrella. According to Andrew Sparrow’s “live blog”, Nigel Farage is quoted as saying the following:
“It’s a big advance. It’s our best every byelection result. I said at Corby two weeks ago that Rotherham would move us on further. We’ve got a good, active local branch here. We fight local elections here. We are well known. The fostering row didn’t hurt our vote. But I rather agree [that] whilst people were very upset and outraged by it, not that many people changed their vote purely on that issue.”
No prime minister has improved his party’s vote share since October 1974, which is a bit of a special case anyway. The election of February 1974 had produced a hung parliament. Harold Wilson went back to the country soon afterwards to ask for a stronger mandate, repeating a tactic he had pulled off in the 1960s. The Liberal Democrats’ decision to frustrate boundary changes which Conservative high command regarded as vital to their chances of victory at the next election still is troublesome. Indeed, not all Conservatives have given up hope of getting the boundary changes through the Commons. Senior Tories have vowed to press on with changes to constituency boundaries, saddling taxpayers with a bill for £12 million, even though the Liberal Democrats have vowed to stop them going ahead. However, the Liberal Democrats have reason to wish their heels in. Tom Clark, also in the Guardian, provided a comprehensive overview of why the AV referendum was lost, with this as the no. 1 reason:
“1. If the lack of a hate figure was the gaping hole for the yes side, Nick Clegg provided an unbeatable one for the noes. The man himself recognised that voters wanted to poke him in the eye, and he dutifully kept a fairly low profile in the campaign that was by far the most visible single concession that he obtained from the Conservatives. Shrewd as it was for him to go to ground, it could not prevent the noes from warning that “President Clegg” would be kept forever in power by everybody’s second preferences. He had a horrendous hand to play last year, but he made things worse for himself by appearing to the country as a head boy thrilled at being unexpectedly tasked with helping to run the school. When the headteacher and his staff meted out their long-planned litany of horrors, it was not they but Clegg who felt the force of the pupils’ revolt. Having once dismissed Gordon Brown’s pre-election promise of an AV referendum as doomed by association with him, there is a bitter irony here. It is not association with Brown but association with Clegg that has now sunk the electoral reform he was so desperate to achieve.”
Richard Reeves, the Lib Dem leader’s senior strategist and speechwriter, has now left. Reeves, the ultimate in tong-term strategists, had personally worked out the three-step programme to see the leader through to 2015. First, the Liberal Democrats would share the spoils of a recovering economy, “after the mess that Labour had left”. Then they would move into the “differentiation” phase. Finally, they would set out their own agenda prior to a smooth disconnect at the election. The first phase is perceived to have gone well by loyal Liberal Democrats and Nick Clegg, though Labour members still think that much legislation from the Conservatives has only been enabled through Liberal Democrat votes on the NHS, education support allowance, legal aid reforms, to name but a few. Few people in Labour have sympathy with Sarah Teather, who was sacked as minister for families in September, appears to have found some reservations.
“But she also makes no bones about the fact that, for her, the cuts and caps already agreed by the coalition are unacceptable and wrong. Brent, she points out, is an area with high rents where many people are already living in appallingly crowded conditions. She is in favour of that part of government policy which encourages people off benefits into work but not when it seeks to erode sympathy and support for the poor. “Having an incentive in the benefits system to encourage people to work is a good thing,” she says. “It is a good thing because it encourages people to participate in society. But having a system which is so punitive in its regime that it effectively takes people entirely outside society, so they have no chance of participating, crosses a moral line for me.””
However, such late confessions may not be sufficient for her seat to be saved ultimately. As regards “the economy stupid”, the Bank of England now thinks it is likely the UK economy will contract in the fourth quarter of 2012, with governor Sir Mervyn King predicting a “zig-zag” road to recovery thereafter. It recently downgraded its forecast for gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013 to around 1 per cent, while the UK government’s tax and spending watchdog is not much more optimistic, at 1.2 per cent.
So, quite unbelievably, Ed Miliband and Labour might be able to win the 2015 general election in some form or other, and as per usual the policy review is still under way. However, Labour could reap much political capital by saying what it definitely will not do, given that most of the most damaging actions of this Government were not set out in front of the electorate prior to May 2010 (the £2bn NHS restructuring for example). The danger is that, if Labour actually does win a landslide in 2015, it will not use this as an opportunity to reshape a definition of the UK, away from misguided marketisation of “New Labour”, but towards a society where citizens can aspire to be fully employed in salaried work and where the genuinely vulnerable are not troubled by securities over the health and social care for example. Nick Clegg’s pathological hatred for Gordon Brown and Labour may be ‘water-under-the-bridge’ if Labour does need to work with the Liberal Democrats, but it could be that Ed Miliband states that one red line he does not wish to cross is to work with Nick Clegg.
