The aftermath of the general election

The general election is over, and the Conservatives are the clear winners, while the opinion pollsters are being portrayed in the national press as losers .  It appears that nobody predicted the late surge in support for the Conservatives, although I’m pleased to say that I was not too far out.

In September 2013, I wrote that:

The parliamentary constituency of Chatham and Aylseford is the closest I can find to a barometer constituency.  At the last general election it returned a Conservative MP with Labour in second place, the Liberal Democrats in third place, and with UKIP and BNP candidates on roughly equal votes.

Based on the logic of retained votes, the next general election will see a Labour MP returned in Chatham and Aylseford with a majority of at least two thousand votes.  UKIP will take third place from the LibDems ... It is almost certain therefore that Ed Miliband will be our next Prime Minister.

As it turns out, the Conservatives held the seat, although I was right about UKIP taking third place.  My analysis was based on retained votes in parliamentary byelections up to that point in time, but the Conservative Party’s retained vote increased thereafter, and so I was aware that a Conservative victory was a real possibility.

Another clear winner in the general election was the Scottish National Party, which secured nearly all the seats in Scotland, leaving the Labour and Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties with just one seat each.  It has been argued that the Conservative victory was largely owing to people in England not wanting to be governed by a minority Labour government supported by the SNP.  Nevertheless I am not sure that anyone is suggesting this was the cause of the late surge.

The British National Party is claiming to be responsible for the late surge in Conservative support.  They credit it to their Punish Labour onslaught in the last forty-eight hours of the campaign.  While I am not at all convinced that a party with fewer than 200,000 Facebook followers could have achieved such a coup, I am nevertheless not aware that anyone has come up with a more plausible explanation.

One of the more memorable events of the election was the failure of Labour front-bencher Ed Balls to be re-elected to parliament, and I will concede that the Conservative victory – by a margin of less than one percent of the vote – could perhaps have been influenced by BNP activity.

It appears that a lot of people in the patriotic community are ridiculing the claims of the British National Party, but it is fair to point out that people who have left the BNP to support other parties are perhaps unlikely to want to credit the BNP with any success.

Another interesting feature of the general election was the rise of UKIP support.  Although they won only one seat, this was an improvement on the zero seats they won in every previous general election that they have contested.  It is reported also that UKIP now has 120 second places, and I am prepared to believe that.  After the results were published, I chose a cluster of seven constituencies in the north of England pretty much at random, and it turns out that UKIP is in third place in six of them.

The big losers in the general election appear to be the Liberal Democrats, who were outpolled by UKIP across the country.  While this could result in a situation in which UKIP permanently replace the Liberal Democrats as the third party in British politics, a note of caution should be sounded.  The Liberal Democrats currently have more than six times as many councillors as UKIP.

Here is a quote from the website of the British National Party concerning their campaign strategy for the general election (which saw them contest just eight seats):

It has resulted in the BNP being the only political party in this country to come out of this election DEBT FREE. The comparison to five years ago could not be more stark.

We had the strength to resist the pressure of standing hundreds of candidates in seats that could not be won at this time – which Ukip have found to their detriment.

Ukip went in to this election with two MPs having thrown away £millions fighting hundreds of unwinnable seats. 

Not only have they lost one of their only two MPs, but Ukip leader Nigel Farage has been forced to resign in humiliation.

This not only demonstrates the political naivety of Ukip, but highlights the political maturity of the BNP and the advantage gained from our years of fighting elections at every level.

The British National Party did not poll well in any of the eight seats in contested, but I for one am not prepared to write them off.  After all, I seem to remember that I was inclined to write off UKIP this time five years ago.  I can also remember people trying to write off the Labour Party in the late 1980s.

There are two reasons why the recent general election can be seen to have changed the political landscape in the UK.  The first is that Scotland may soon be an independent country, in which case the Conservative Party should find it easier to win a majority in the remainder of what had previously been the UK.

The second is that the government is now free to alter the constituency boundaries so as to end the advantage the Labour Party has traditionally enjoyed from its relatively small constituencies.

Another significant change is that UKIP has shown that it can not only win a seat in a parliamentary byelection, but also hold onto it in the subsequent general election.  Maybe the next few years will see more MPs defect to UKIP.

Finally, a lot of people are complaining about the unfairness of an electoral system which allocated just one seat to UKIP, eight to the LibDems, and fifty-six to the SNP - despite the fact that UKIP polled far more votes than either the LibDems or the SNP.  I am however reminded of the words of Shakespeare:

The fault ... is not in our stars, But in ourselves (Julius Caesar Act 1 scene two)

I did not vote in the general election, because not one of the parties which contested my home constituency had policies which aligned with my strongly held beliefs.  Had there been a candidate with similar beliefs to my own, however, then he or she would have had my vote.

If you want at the next general election to be able to vote for a political party whose policies you support, then find such a party this year and join it – or at least donate some money to it.  If you cannot do that, then maybe the fault is in yourself.

Related previous posts include:

Musings on the general election