Waiting for the inevitable Conservative split

The universe does not want David Cameron to lead a united Conservative party.

To an extent, I think what we're seeing here is party sorting whereby politicians (and "civilians") held together in uneasy coalitions within parties start to rearrange themselves into structures that fit their views better. Namely, someone like Mark Reckless moving from the Conservatives to UKIP because of his views on immigration and the EU.

Despite them being personally very close (along with Daniel Hannan), Reckless is quite different to Douglas Carswell, the first UKIP defector (with apologies to Bob Spink). The article I linked to there mentioned that for Carswell, his Euroscepticism stems from his convictions about direct democracy and legitimacy while for Reckless, his belief in referendums comes from his desire for one on EU membership where he believes people will vote to leave. In this way, Reckless seems a more appropriate fit for UKIP than Carswell who seems closer to a Whig than a Ukipper. In a fascinating interview with the Guardian just after his re-election there is clearly a thought out and coherent philosophy to Mr Carswell's beliefs but the overwhelming question you are left with is "why did this man join UKIP?!"

Mark Reckless is closer to what the media think of as a typical UKIP defector. Not withstanding the compelling evidence that most UKIP support since 2010 has come from working class voters, Mr Reckless is a typical small state Thatcherite and it appears that it's his views on immigration and the EU that have caused his defection. UKIP itself is starting to see the contradiction between its Thatcherite origins and the more left wing views of many of the voters who have joined it in the last year or two as the attempted defenstration of former Express journalist Patrick O'Flynn demonstrates.

All of which draws attention to the ongoing civil war taking place within the Conservative party which has been simmering away since Margaret Thatcher's resignation. The tensions between the various factions that make up the Tory tribe are becoming harder to contain and more than one columnist is talking about the benefits of the 'UKIP' faction leaving for the benefit of the remaining party.

The Conservatives have always been a combination of "patriotism" (stressing the importance of state institutions and 'traditional values' like the family and church) and what we'll call "economism" (pro-business, resistant to new protections for workers or new forms of state spending). In other words, between social conservatism and what the Americans refer to as fiscal conservatism. Traditionally the interests of those groups have aligned, or at least not directly conflicted. The last time they conflicted was when the Tories split over free trade and the corn laws in the 1850s. There are starting to conflict again now, most clearly over Europe and immigration.

Whatever the complaints about over-burdensome regulation, the free trade and pro-business side is firmly pro-immigration and is happy to take the rough with the smooth of EU membership as long as it retains access to the single market.

In the other corner is the "patriotism" side, concerned about being told what to do by foreigners and the disruptive effect of immigration. Despite the economic benefits of immigration they dislike it on a cultural and emotional level which trumps any perceived benefit. Nigel Farage indeed once said he'd be happy for the country to be a little poorer if it meant less immigration while Jose Manuel Barroso's criticism of the current Conservative line on Europe is that it is a betrayal of the Thatcher era when the economism side was firmly in control but, more accurately, when the conflicts between the economism and patriotism sides weren't sufficient to affect the party system.

Even if the Conservatives don't win a majority in 2015, holding a referendum on EU membership will be a deal-breaker for any coalition agreement with another party, particularly since David Cameron has promised to give Tory MPs a vote beforehand. The pro and anti EU sides will split and become viceral enemies and, as Scotland has shown, divisions are hard to heal after taking a different side in a high-stakes referendum.

If UKIP is here to stay then the potential is there for a much more significant realignment than has taken place so far with Nigel Farage's party becoming a primarily socially conservative party.

All parties are coalitions based on the compromises of members and voters between competing values. Wealthier voters for whom social liberalism was more important than potentially higher tax rates voted Labour. Socially conservative working class voters went with the Conservatives. What's happening now is that there is a new party which, unlike almost any other, social conservatives are more influential than social liberals.

Labour, having absorbed much of the social democratic faction of the Liberal Democrats (in many ways reversing the original split from 1981),  is finding splits between wine and beer drinkers pitting socially conservative working class voters against the 'metropolitan elites' epitomised by Ed Miliband. It's not hard to imagine a large chunk of the beer drinking faction who value social conservatism over economic interests, moving to UKIP.

There's a line in one of the later, more forgettable, series of the West Wing where someone says "if this were Europe the Republican party would be three parties" and there are a few interesting models for how British parties could divide if we had a more proportionate, continental style electoral system.

Tim Montgomrie, the conservative commentator who had a fascinating debate with Matthew Parris a few weeks ago on this subject, wishes there were a "National party" of the kind in this split and the Economist has another inspired by the excellent Danish series Borgen. In both cases, there's a party containing Nigel Farage and prominent Tory right-wingers (Norman Tebbit or Liam Fox).

It's hard to believe that David Cameron wouldn't prefer to be in a party with Kenneth Clarke than with either of those two.

Lessons for Britain from the US Midterm elections

Nothing.

No seriously there's almost nothing here that's relevant for Britain from the US elections and that's for a two main reasons:

1. This was a mid-term election, not a presidential-year election and the electorate that turns up for each one is completely different. Mid-term voters, particularly 2014 and 2010 are older, whiter, richer and more conservative than in presidential election years. Yes the entire House of Representatives was up for re-election and that is extremely important and analogous to the House of Commons but American voters don't treat mid-term elections the way British voters treat General Elections. The proper parallel is with presidential elections and even then the lessons are slim because...


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Voting is an effort and the Police and Crime Commissioners weren't worth it

Daniel Hannan has a few interesting thoughts on why the Police and Crime Commissioner elections have proven to be such a disaster.

I haven't read his book but I read his blog and Mr Hannan is extremely consistent on a few key themes, one of which is that more democracy is always better. Hannan has been an advocate of open primaries for MPs (of the type that chose Sarah Wollaston) and he was one of the strongest advocates of electing the PCCs. Unfortunately voters didn't exactly embrace them with the first PCC elections producing a turnout of about 15% and the recent West Midlands by-election going as low as 10%.

There were, of course, a number of structural factors that caused this and Hannan points some of them out. Elections are normally held in May, these were in November. They were for a new position so people weren't expecting them and there was relatively little coverage of them in the media, likely influenced by the fact that the UK-wide media is London based and there were no elections happening in London.

The part that I disagreed with though is Hannan's surprise that the elections turned out to involve political parties rather than independent candidates. Independent local champions running local police forces is a fine idea but I don't think it's surprising (or unnatural) that political parties turned out to be a dominant factor in the elections. Most people don't pay attention to politics more than is absolutely necessary. Life is complicated and people have far more to worry about than voting for an obscure election. The great ideal of Athenian democracy with citizens acting as legislators and voting on every important decision was only possible because these citizens had wives, servants and slaves to manage their households while they legislated. In a society when everyone is a citizen such an arrangement is not possible and devoting such time to politics is impractical.

What's far more practical is taking a quick shortcut and basing your voting decision on a party. I think I have the qualifications to call myself a political nerd but in the last local elections I had to force myself to actually find out some information about the Tower Hamlets Mayoral candidates so that I could make an informed decision. Tower Hamlets is a strange case and not all the information was available even then but reading through the documents was additional effort and it would have been far easier to just vote based on which party I supported.

I wrote a few years ago about the "1975 Public Affairs Act", an experiment in which people were asked whether to repeal the Act or keep it in force. Most Americans polled didn't have an opinion, quite sensible considering the Act doesn't actually exist and had been invented for the experiment. However, when told that Barack Obama wanted to keep the Act and Republicans in the US Congress wanted to repeal it, most people developed an opinion that they were confident enough to give to a pollster. This was presented as showing how sheep-like people are in following politicians for their views but I argued that it was just the opposite: people don't have the time or inclination to gather all the information about every single issue so taking a steer based on what politicians you tend to agree or disagree with think makes perfect sense.

Voters don't have enough time to be citizen legislators so they take shortcuts and party labels make that easy. That's how local council elections tend to work and I suspect it's how most other elections such as PCCs would work.

On turnout more generally, democracy is an effort and in not turning out, voters have sent the message that PCC elections are not worth their time or effort. Turnout in the last Scottish Parliament election in 2011 was 50% and in the 2010 UK General Election it was 65%. The message: these are the elections important enough to be worth spending the time to vote. If you want people to vote in other elections, they need to feel it's a better use of their time than whatever else they may have been doing.

Of course voters prefer single-party governments!

For the political geek there were some interesting stats in this week's Opinium / Observer poll, centred around what should happen if there's another hung parliament in 2015.

We asked whether government made up of just one political party or governments made up of multiple parties in coalition best served Britain and the result was fairly overwhelming support for single-party governments by 55% to 15%.

There are a few explanations for this and one is that the majority of governments since our political system began its current incarnation in 1945 have been single party and all of the ones that are remembered generally as successful are single party including the icons of the left (Clement Attlee) and the right (Maggie). Aside from the national government during the second world war, which I expect most simply associate with Winston Churchill rather than parties, the only period of multi-party government was the Lib-Lab pact of the 1970's which few remember fondly.


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AV must look pretty good in hindsight for the Tories

Full disclosure: I voted "yes" in the Alternative Vote referendum in 2011. Not only did I vote "yes" but I volunteered for the "yes" campaign, making phone calls to random sections of the London electoral roll, wearing a little purple "Yes!" badge and defacing any misleading NO2AV ads I saw in free newspapers on trains.

And we got absolutely crushed. Seriously. The final result was more than 2:1 in favour of the status quo (an example of the 'Smithson rule' for referendums in the UK favouring the status quo), the image at the end of this (after the jump) shows the areas which voted "yes" vs. those that voted "no" and it's entirely red.

The reason why I bring this up though is because the recent UKIP surge has got some Conservative commentators talking about how the right will be divided in 2015 and Nigel Farage's success will probably cost the Conservatives some seats. Even if, as seems likely, the surge peters out as we draw closer to the 2015 election, they only need to win around 6% to cause decisive damage to David Cameron.

If only there was a voting system that would save them from this?

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Gun control in the US and UK

It seems to happen with depressing regularity, a lunatic in America takes a gun and shoots a collection of innocent strangers. The event is a tragedy, days of news coverage are devoted to it, talking about how the killer was disturbed or a "loner" and coverage in the UK nearly always involves being told (yet again) about how the American relationship with guns is just different to the rest of the world.

It's "part of their culture", part of being an American and outsiders just don't understand.

This idea of all Americans as crazy, gun-toting cowboys is obviously a colossal exaggeration but I think a huge part of it comes from our disbelief when, even in the wake of something like Newtown, the US still doesn't pass any sort of restriction on who can own extremely dangerous weapons and this is down to the US constitution as much as cowboy culture.

This is kind of a long post so there's a jump:

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