SECOND HUNG PARLIAMENT AHEAD

Ashcroft to Ashes: How his Lordship’s polls give comfort to Britain’s true Radicals

Conservative Rightist Lord Ashcroft wrote a blog yesterday on his website reporting the rise and rise of UKip, and how Cameron can’t win in 2015. But within the data – and without its narrow focus – there are reasons to be encouraged about the real rise in ‘firm alienation’ among the electorate. The Slog analyses the numbers.

If you are radical enough to realise that the UK’s political problem is systemic rather than strategic, Ashcroft’s findings (perhaps unwittingly) offer those of us who share that view a reason to be cheerful. The powerfully unelected pollster points out that:

‘More than a third of 2010 Conservative voters say they would not vote for the Party in an election tomorrow. These Defectors tend to have a low to middling view of Cameron, and doubt the Tories stand for fairness or are on the side of ordinary people. Less than one in five have gone to Labour or the Lib Dems; about half say they support UKIP (compared to just over a quarter in my poll of specifically Tory-held marginal seats last year) and a third say they do not know how they will vote or will not vote at all.’

At the last Election, 36.1% (10,726,614) of those who voted plumped for Camerlot. Of these, Ashcroft knocks 18% off who don’t like any of the “main” Parties – in round figures, two million people. Half claim they’ll vote UKip, so that leaves a million…of whom about 330,000 say they don’t know how or whether they will vote.

So at the moment “on the Right”, about 3.5% of Tory supporters have become disillusioned with the entire farce. That’s not a lot. But, if you assume that UKip supporters will be disillusioned after 2015 – and systemically hacked off voters would go for a new alternative that seemed radical enough without being leftie-hairy – then the figure could be as high as 18% of the electorate. Which end of that things go towards depends, as always, on events.

Labour’s 2010 voting share was 29%. If there was an Election tomorrow, they’d get around 38%. The Fabian Society’s research since 2010 has shown that almost no Tory defectors or systemically disillusioned would support Labour. It seems the Ed Miller Band’s new voters are chiefly disgruntled LibDems, and the idealist young who have never voted before. (Hence Labour’s cynical desire to lower the voting age, and Camerlot’s equally cynical desire not to). Interestingly, the Fabians fall back on process, saying that what the Party “needs” is ‘best practice to get the vote out, with big data and candidate-to-elector contact’. So then, not much in the way of tribal enlightenment there…or indeed, ideas.

That said, if Labour can hold that support, they will have an entirely workable majority of 58 seats. I doubt if they will, however, because (as the Tory recovery-bollocks tsunami blasts from almost every right wing medium) it does seem that the Opposition is going backwards or, at best, stuck in the mud of trench warfare. Indeed, Ashcroft confirms this, noting that ‘while Labour were thought the best party on the cost of living, their lead vanished when it came to introducing practical policies that would work in the long run’. He is making a crucial point here.

Let’s have a look again to the 40% who didn’t vote at all. Quite a few of these dropped into the disillusioned bucket: during New Labour’s 13 years in power, a staggering 4.9m people deserted the Party.

That’s 44% –  an unprecedented figure. When you put it next to 33% deserting the Conservative Party since 2010, I would argue it’s good news for true radicals, and worrying for the British Establishment.

Indeed, the 2013 Political Engagement Audit found that the number of people who, in the event of an immediate General Election, said they would be certain to vote, had dropped to 41%, the lowest level ever recorded. A disturbingly minute 12% of people aged 18 to 24 said they would be certain to vote, down from 30% two years ago. Labour is keen to grab every ‘untainted’ new voter in 2015, but they’re going to find it hard. Researchers working on behalf of BBC’s Newsbeat programme surveyed more than 1,000 18-year-olds in June 2012. They found that 63% were interested in politics, but the same number didn’t like the behaviour of politicians and political parties. So the Yoof end of the abstaining minority are almost certainly looking for something fresh and believable. As I was at their age. It almost certainly isn’t the Two Eds.

Even more damning for the political Establishment, however, is the 20% of people who say they are certain not to vote. That statistic is an interesting one for any radical, in that it shows a massive growth in what I would call ‘firm alienation’ from the existing political system. (Although 47% agree that Parliament ‘holds government to account’ – up from 38% last year – in my view this merely reflects the difficulty Cameron is having with his Rabid Right and Young newcomers at Westminster….for example, in the case of the Syria intervention vote).

This, then, is my interpretation of what these numbers really mean.

First and foremost, for radical realists who believe only root-and-branch change will do, they must recognise that those most likely to be in that camp come (say) 2017 will be a motley crew: young idealists, older more liberal one-nation Tories, thoroughly disgusted UKip deserters, the increasingly desperate LTU unemployed, 55+ bourgeois Old Labour fans, and the harder Left Occupiers. One ‘political Party’ will not be able to hold them together.

Second, the Conservatives can’t win outright in 2015 given current economic conditions…and my hunch remains that by May 2015, the real nature of our parlous position will be more obvious than at present. Things can only get worse.

Third, In last September’s local elections, UKip did exceptionally well in Labour wards. And in other research, self-appointed Pollseeker General Lord Ashcroft at the time observed pointedly:

‘Labour’s lead in these [marginal battleground] seats has grown from 9 to 14 points over the last two years, largely because of the defection of Tory (Conservative) voters to UKIP. UKIP has tripled its share of votes in such marginal seats since 2010.’

However, despite the UKip surge, minority Parties need nothing short of a landslide to cut it in a FPTP system, so the Faragistas will probably wind up with the same number of seats they have now: none. Although Lord A is beating a well-worn drum here (Ukippers will, if they carry through their voting intentions, hand the election to Labour) what emphatically won’t happen is a surge of UKip seats: support remains too thinly spread, and its electoral strategists are, like Farage himself, not that bright.

There is (for me anyway) a rib-tickling possibility that UKip could go into the history books as giving an assist to the last Party it wants in power….without electing a single MP to Westminster. But as I suggest below, this is unlikely to happen, because…

Fourth, Labour will suffer from abstentions on a pretty large scale, while some newer UKip supporters, Tory deserters and don’t-knows will balk at the sight of an Ed Miller Band victory (largely on economic mismanagement grounds) hold their noses – and vote Tory again.

Finally, although a truly barmy piece in the Express three months ago argued that UKip would be bigger than the LibDems in 2015 (and thus “Britain’s third Party”) this is piffle based on the idea that we have some kind of fair and democratic voting system. Eastleigh showed how – even in the face of criminal corruption – it’s very hard indeed to win a seat off the Liberal Democrats. They are Premiership quality local organisers and professionals: UKip’s local workers are Isthmian League standard by comparison. The Cleggies have some marginal seats and will probably lose one or two; but I doubt that they will evaporate into oblivion.

The bottom line as I see it is this: given more of the same* between now and 2015, we are heading for another hung Parliament.

This time, such an outcome could very well lead to considerably more chaos than in 2010. Observe how, during 2013, Teddy Testicles was at last persuaded by others in the Labour Party to shut TF up about how much he hates “the Liberals”. My educated guess is that Labour’s leadership is expecting a hung Parliament, and as and when it happens – as very probably the largest Party by votes – they will lunge at the LibDems and form a Coalition. For some – like Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander – that is going to present something of a dilemma. For some who are further Left in Labour, the idea of a deal with the same people who collaborated with the Tory Monsters will be seen, very simply, as a sellout.

Come 2020, therefore, the disillusioned ranks of the electorate could be as swollen as 65% of the electorate. But as I wrote some paragraphs ago, tribalism amongst them will remain an obstacle to real Opposition. It’s why I’ve been writing for over two years to the effect that what Britain does NOT need right now is another political Party attracting the same power-seekers….who go to Westminster and then sell out like all the others have.

What we need is a constructively activist online alliance of decency – something to which Old Labour and New Voter, hacked off UKipper and Green – can all belong without feeling like deserters. The task, it seems to me, is to persuade deserters that they are in fact volunteers: which I genuinely believe they would be.

The role of this movement would not be to elect MPs, but to demonstrate concentrations of power through peaceful action coordinated on the Internet. To doubters who snort and say it can’t be done, I say this: go tell George Galloway that, and he’ll laugh in your face.

A LabLib Coalition unable to address Britain’s problems (for me, that’s a racing certainty) would lead to two developments after 2015: a  UKip-backed takeover of Camerlot by the Rabid Right on the one hand, and mass abstention in 2020 on the other. If that led to a clear majority for Torykipper sociopathy, you could kiss liberal democracy in Britain goodbye.

Yesterday at The Slog: The brass neck of Ben Baernanke earns him a gold watch

* It is of course a mug’s game hoping for more of the same with no surprises. Any number of left-field missiles could upset this outlook for better or worse. In no particular order, these might include a Tory-orchestrated bombardment from the Markets insisting that a Labour win would undo “all Osborne’s good work” and leave Britain at the mercy of Hedge Funds; the final act dénouement of the Central Banker/EU implosion saga; a backlash against whatever the Old Bailey verdict is on the Newscorp Lovers; even 15% of the current Boris Johnson sleaze coming to light in an authoritative medium; Johnson himself deciding to make London City State his power base, and become more populist; the real story of the Co-Op rape coming out; and perhaps the loosest cannon of all, the police/Tory/Newscorp stitch-up of the BBC Seven turning into an almighty scandal that washes back towards Elm House, Boris Johnson, Rebekah Brooks, an aged Tory paedophile, and his connections to Nick Clegg and David Cameron.