Some general election thoughts

So the election is over and the polling industry had a bit of a nightmare. We'll get to that in a few days time as we pore over spreadsheets and come up with explanations and solutions. Our initial statement is here and we'll be putting up a more detailed breakdown later this week..

So here are some more general observations that came into my head as I powered myself through election night and the day after with eye watering quantities of coffee and red bull.



1. 2015 was like the epilogue to the Labour slaughter we all expected in 2010
In James Graham's excellent "Coalition", the one-off drama about the days between the 2010 election and the announcement of the new government, a huge cheer goes up in Labour HQ when the exit poll and seat totals are announced. Despite the lowest share of the vote since 1983 Labour held on to a disproportionate number of seats and managed to deny the Conservatives a majority. This allowed the idea to build up, seemingly logical at the time but brutally disproven on Thursday, that this was as bad as it could get for Labour and as good as it could get for the Tories and that this wasn't actually that bad. Combined with the expected destruction of the Lib Dems and the arrogant belief that most Lib Dems are really just Labour supporters in disguise we got the 35% strategy based on scraping over the line in an era of hung parliaments.
2015 was the follow-up that was never delivered in 2010 and has now shattered that complacency within Labour. Nobody writing the 35% strategy seemed to imagine that many of those Lib Dem defectors might continue their journeys to the Greens or that the remaining Lib Dems might drift to the Tories instead of Labour. Combined with the superficial assumption that UKIP were a Tory problem and we are where we are which is...

2. Labour's challenge is that they're leaking votes in opposite directions
Labour are in exactly the position they thought the Conservatives were in in 2014, at risk of losing support to UKIP if they try to win Green or SNP voters but losing it the other way if they try to win UKIP or Conservative voters. The grand coalition of New Labour only really worked when the 'old Labour' voters in the North of England had nowhere else to go. Now they have UKIP whose second places in so many Labour seats were one of the underreported events of the night. How does Labour address the twin challenges of being too left wing for the South, too right wing for Scotland and too middle class for the North?

Do they elect Andy Burnham to shore up support among working class voters in the North or Chuka Umunna to appeal to socially liberal voters in the South who value economic competence above all else?
Not for nothing did a UKIP source promise to contribute personally to any Chuka Umunna leadership bid.

After 1997 Labour could claim to be the only truly 'national' party competing in all parts of the UK. The 2010 election (and the numerous local and European elections preceding it) kicked them out of Southern (non London) England and now the 2015 election (and, again, the Scottish parliament and local elections preceding it) have kicked them out of Scotland. Combined with a better than expected Tory performance in Wales and Labour basically have two safe areas: London and the North of England.

3. Scotland's parties need full autonomy because the SNP will always win a "who's more Scottish" competition
In a way it's hard to believe nobody saw it coming but the 1980s and 1990s, when Labour campaigned on the idea that the Tories weren't really Scottish, were a preview of what the SNP have done to Labour since the referendum. Scottish politics is no longer about left vs. right but about unionist vs. nationalist. More Scots identify themselves as "Scottish not British" than ever recorded before and view the relationship with the rest of the UK not as being part of one larger country but in the way that many in England view the EU: a transactional relationship only worth as much as it benefits the economy. "True Scots" vote SNP so if Labour is to have any chance of rebuilding (and really the most optimistic 1997 type scenario is that they retake about 3 seats in 2020) then Scottish Labour needs to become a fully independent party in a loose alliance with the UK party. There need to be some high profile bust-ups and the general agreement that, like the SNP, Scottish Labour votes would support a Labour government in Westminster but otherwise be only loosely connected to UK Labour. This is how the Greens and the various Northern Ireland parties have worked and, given the likely further devolution in England and Scotland. Does this rule out any Scottish MP becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom? Probably but I expect that this would be the case anyway given the future direction of devolution.
Alex Massie said that nobody who voted for independence would see the point in voting for a party that didn't support it and while Scottish Labour still wouldn't be able to compete with the SNP for those votes they'd likely do a bit better if their bosses were in Edinburgh and not London.

4. Labour won London and places that look like London but little else
In 2004 the Democrats in the US could take comfort that the groups they did best among (ethnic minorities, young people, unmarried women) were those that were expanding as a share of population while those they lost (white evangelicals, older workers without college degrees) were shrinking. In 2008 and 2012 these growing groups came out and delivered big wins for Barack Obama. Labour could try and claim the same thing, winning in London and other cities with more highly educated, younger and more diverse populations. But that doesn't work for two reasons.
First these groups aren't nearly as big a proportion of the British population as their US counterparts and the second is that if Labour moves too far to the centre or the right then they can always vote Green (or depending on any rehabilitation they have, the Lib Dems). Waiting for the dynamics of the electorate to turn in your favour doesn't work, after all the collapse of the Lib Dems was meant to make it structurally impossible for Labour to win less than 35% of the vote this time.


Looking at the Tories then:

5. David Cameron is a "winner" but will this be enough to silence his backbenchers?
There is a sizeable number of Conservative MPs who despise David Cameron and always have. Had the Conservatives lost the election then they would have found many sympathisers calling for his resignation but now that he has done the seemingly impossible he should have more political capital and greater leeway to remake the party in a more centrist mold. John Rentoul says that Cameron's detoxification of the Conservatives is complete but I don't agree, the Tories may have won but this was not a 1980s level 40%+ share of the vote. The Conservatives won on Cameron's appeal and economic competence but perhaps the lack of Lib Dems is now a way for Cameron to show that the Tories don't need their influence to do more liberal things like same sex marriage. This should be helped by the fact that so many of the Tories' new MPs replaced Liberal Democrats and should, with exceptions, bolster the liberal wing of the party rather than the right.

In another way though the loss of the Lib Dems is bad for the PM, he now depends on Peter Bone's vote where before he depended on Nick Clegg's. But the simple act of winning the election and being a Conservative majority government should impose its own discipline on the Tory MPs. The other thing to remember is that although John Major's larger majority (21 vs. 12-16 for Cameron depending on how you count) disappeared over time the reasons for it doing so are unlikely to occur to the same degree in this parliament. Four of Major's MPs died and four defected. Defections depend on the political context and the Tories did lose two MPs to UKIP in 2014 but four deaths seems unlikely as the number of MP deaths per parliament declines due in part to the fact that our MPs are generally younger and healthier than in the past. In the 1992-97 parliament 18 MPs died compared to 10 in the 2005-10 parliament.

Nevertheless, life as a prime minister with such a small majority will be difficult and this is before we factor in the likely EU referendum and the effect it will have on the party that, UKIP aside, is more obsessed with Europe than any other.


6. An EU referendum is now on the cards but also more winnable for the "in" side
In a post a few years ago I said that pro-Europeans should hope for a Conservative win even though they may not want a referendum. This really depends on whether you think a referendum is inevitable and there's an argument that the lack of prominence given to Europe in the campaign means it's not a naturally important issue for the majority of voters.
However, it will always be an important issue for the Tories and thus for the country as long as the Tories are one of the major parties. A referendum under David Cameron therefore takes place under the best of circumstances for pro-Europeans. Labour, the SNP and what's left of the Lib Dems will be supporting an "in" vote, as will the bulk of the Conservative party along with their election-winning prime minister and other leaders along with the business community.
Compare this to the idea of a minority Labour government being forced into a referendum they didn't want to have by a combination of eurosceptic backbenchers and a Conservative party that would have elected a bonafide "outer" as their leader following David Cameron's resignation and it's hard not to see how the present situation is more favourable for pro-Europeans.

As things stand there is a strong chance that David Cameron's legacy will be to rehabilitate the Conservative party to win its first majority in 23 years, preside over an extended period of austerity but also to preside over three referendums which could have fundamentally reshaped the British state but in which the status quo largely prevailed. Conservative indeed.


2016 looks like being a year of big elections, the Scottish Parliament, London Mayor and a once-in-a-generation referendum on the country's place in Europe. Let's hope the polls have been sorted out by then.