Responding earlier today to my posting on the two UK by-elections, Martin Hutchinson rejects my conclusion that the big UKIP advances in both of them were anything to write home about.
“Teeny weeny earthquake,” Martin writes, “not many dead, is my view. As I said in response to Andrew, UKIP is simply replacing the Lib-Dems.” He augments this point in his response to Andrew Stuttaford, predicting that the Lib-Dem vote will collapse and UKIP will be “confined to a few weirdo downmarket places like Clacton” in next year’s May general election.
Maybe I should preface my reply by stating that Martin is and old friend and a former colleague at UPI who, as well as writing a brilliantly rambunctious financial column weekly, is both a mathematical genius and a history-of-conservatism buff. So I take his criticism seriously.
Nor do I disagree strongly with its main point: that what is going on in British politics is the replacement of the Lib-Dems by UKIP. That prediction was advanced a few months ago in the Daily Telegraph by its doughty (American) columnist, Janet Dailey. And it’s undoubtedly one possible outcome of the current political turbulence. But I think that Martin is quite wrong in thinking such an outcome to be no big deal — or, in his words, a “teeny weeny earthquake.”
If UKIP does replace the Lib-Dems as the third party in Britain’s two-and-a-half party system, as he suggests, that would be a massive shift of the whole political spectrum to the right. It would mean that the anti-political protest vote would be cast for a party on the right rather than in the “Centre” — though these are terms of art rather than simple descriptions. Admittedly, this would mean that occasionally a Labour government would be elected because the Right was divided. But the fact that two right-wing parties — the Tories and UKIP — always gained more votes and sometimes more seats would ensure that the dominant political issues were broadly conservative. The Tories would then be the centrist party pulled towards UKIP rather than Labour. And the growth of tactical voting will means that transfers between the Tories and UKIP would weaken Labour’s prospects of outright victories.
How likely is that outcome? Well, it’s one of several possible outcomes of an election that more than most will be a re-aligning one on the model of 1974. Six parties will be contesting it with some hope of winning seats — Labour, the Tories, UKIP, the Lib-Dems, the (angry and passionate) Scottish Nationalists, and the Greens. The usual rule that marginal seats change hands and decide elections while safe seats are pretty irrelevant won’t apply. Some safe seats will be lost; some highly vulnerable marginals will remain loyal to their current party. My guess is that major parties will suffer more, minor parties gain more. And I share Andrew’s view that even today a Labour victory is more likely than the outright Tory one that Martin thinks likely.
But when you shake up a kaleidoscope, you can’t forecast the pattern into which the colors will settle. And some will be more attractive than others.