Three opinion polls that are regarded in the trade as scrupulous and fair have been published since UKIP won handily over the Cameron Tories in last week’s Rochester and Strood by-election. Though they show small differences in the levels of support for particular parties, they all show rises for UKIP and Labour, a fall for the Tories, the Greens up slightly, and the Liberal Democrats becalmed in very low water. Lord Ashcroft, introducing his own Ashcroft poll results on the ConservativeHome website Monday, may be taken to speak for all three pollsters:
Labour’s share is up two points since last week at 32 per cent, with the Conservatives down two at 27 per cent, the Liberal Democrats down two at seven per cent, UKIP up two at 18 per cent, the Greens unchanged on seven per cent and the SNP up one point at five per cent.
The only unexpected finding here is that Labour does not seem to have suffered from the mini-scandal in which a Labour front-bencher tweeted a photograph of a house in Strood draped in several flags of St. George and with a white van parked outside it. Since white vans and English flags are symbols of working-class life and attitudes respectively, the tweet was taken to be a snobbish one. The entire political class was convulsed by this episode for three days, and the front-bencher resigned to avoid tarnishing Labour. Plainly, however, the tweet has not damaged Labour at all. The party is recovering from a slump in the polls that has lasted several months. Otherwise, the three polls suggest that UKIP, given a boost by its victory in Rochester, is continuing its slow but steady rise, mainly at the expense of the Conservatives.
Some commentators hostile to UKIP — notably my good friend Martin Hutchinson in the comments section — argue that this rise is a blip (albeit a dangerous one) likely to fall back sharply when voters make realistic choices on who will govern them in next May’s general election. That may be true, but it is unlikely to shrink to the 3.1 percent UKIP received in 2010. If UKIP’s share of the vote were to fall to half of its current 17–18 percent, it would inflict serious damage on the Tories, as Martin fears. And there is growing evidence that UKIP voters are likely to prove much more “sticky” than previous insurgencies. Polls show more than half of UKIP voters saying they will “definitely” vote for the party in a general election. Its share of the vote in parliamentary by-elections has been rising in a steady progression — coming from nowhere to respectable second places until its two recent outright gains. And a study of local by-election results by Daniel Regan of Cicero Elections shows that it is gaining ground in all parts of England and Wales. Its share of the vote in such elections over the last month has averaged 27.8 percent — much higher than its standing in opinion polls. As Daniel Regan argues, those willing to vote for UKIP apparently outnumber those who say they will do so. None of this is good for the Conservative party.
If we add UKIP’s threat to the fact that the U.K. electoral system is heavily biased against them, the Tories would seem to be finished. Labour should win an absolute majority in Parliament. Not so fast, however. Like the U.S. Fifth Cavalry, two other parties are racing to save them (contrary to their best intentions, of course).
The Scottish National Party has been given a vast boost, paradoxically, by its loss in the referendum on Scottish independence. The SNP won six seats in the 2010 election. But it is now scoring between 43 and 52 percent in Scottish opinion polls which predict that it would win the great majority of Scotland’s 59. Those seats would come mainly out of Labour’s hide since the Lib-Dems have eleven seats and the Tories have only one north of the border. Even in a not-very-close contest, Labour can ill afford to lose those seats.
Meanwhile, unnoticed in the background until recently, the Greens have been quietly creeping up the charts. They already have one MP, and they now score a steady 5–7 percent in the polls. That level of support, as well as sucking the life out of the collapsing Lib-Dems, also drains potential voters from the Labour party. So both major parties are reeling from electoral competition on their extremes. Together they get the promised support of only 60 percent of the electorate. The other 40 percent is distributed among political parties that have been born or (as with the SNP) raised from the dead since 1979.
As a result no fewer than seven political parties will contest the 2015 election with serious prospects of winning one or more seats: Labour, the Tories, the Lib-Dems, UKIP, the SNP, the Greens, and Plaid Cymru, the standard-bearer of Welsh nationalism. My back-of-the-envelope calculation is that there are 63 different possible permutations of vote-switching between the 2010 and 2015 elections (including a first-time vote or no vote at all in 2015 owing to such factors as death, emigration, or imprisonment.) If I am wrong, Martin (who is a human computer) can correct me. At any rate it is fearsomely difficult to forecast the outcome of a race with such a crowded field and new favorites.
But three British academics — Chris Hanretty, Benjamin Lauderdale, and Nick Vivyan — have constructed a model that attempts to do so here.
A cursory non-expert reading of it suggests to me that it has a slight and understandable historical bias in favor of the Lib-Dems and against UKIP. Thus, its main forecast of the popular vote share both parties are likely to get is 14.3 and 10.9 percent respectively. It looks to me as if those vote shares should be more or less reversed. And when the vote shares of all parties are translated into seats won, corrected for local factors (which party now holds the seat, the personal popularity of the MP, regional political traditions), the model suggests the following parliamentary scorecard: namely, Tories 286, Labour 283, Lib-Dems 24, SNP 33, Plaid Cymru 1, Greens 1, and UKIP 3. (The magic majority number, incidentally, is 326.) In other words, a hung parliament. Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, reached the same rough score and concluded that Britain would be governed for the next five years by “a coalition of losers.”
Both Fraser and the Hanretty-Lauderdale-Vivyan model may well turn out to be right. But I have a suspicion that two factors will make the result more dramatic and more unpredictable.
The first is that the prolonged Lib-Dem slump and UKIP steady rise make the model’s predictions unsafe and, in particular, more stable than reality. Both parties in their rise and fall will have a more dynamic impact on the overall result than in the above forecast. For instance UKIP is not simply a threat to the Tories; it is eating heavily into Labour’s vote in the North; while the Lib-Dems are losing votes heavily to the Greens and Labour in the South and to the SNP in Scotland. That undermines the conventional electoral wisdom: namely, ignore 600 of the 652 seats and concentrate on the 50 “marginals” where the election will be won. That won’t apply in May. It is even possible, if unlikely, that no marginal seat will change hands but that gains and losses elsewhere will bring about a change of government.
The second is that there will be nothing like a broadly similar national “swing” between parties as in the past. Each constituency will be holding a different election; overall the country will be holding 652 elections. Seats will be won and lost against the trend; next-door constituencies will swing wildly in different directions. Cabinet Ministers and Labour front-benchers will lose their seats; unknowns who ran for office in a hopeless cause to help their party will win and, as Bill Buckley promised, demand a recount.
To be sure, it is also possible that these sweeping changes will cancel each other out and that the old familiar rascals will limp back into office and front-bench splendor. But all the signs are that this will be a kaleidoscopic election. Kaleidoscopes don’t generally return exactly the same pattern two shakes in a row. And I suspect that this shake will produce more purple and less yellow in the pattern.
What that will mean for future British politics will be the next piece.