8 important trends in British politics

The end of one year, and the start of another, is a good time for reflection. So I thought I'd step back from the day-to-day churn of British politics and think about the underlying trends we have seen illuminated in 2015. 

It is easy to miss many of these due to a focus on the everyday or short-term, or because of the news media's habit of exaggerating some things while overlooking others. 

What, then, are the big current trends in British politics that we can discern from events in 2015? In no particular order...

1. The Tories are steady but going nowhere. 

There was a lot of exaggeration in the responses to the Tories' general election victory. The fact that nearly everyone had forecast a hung parliament meant that a tiny Tory majority appeared to be a spectacular triumph, rather than a very narrow win helped by the electoral system. The long-term trend for the Tories has been one of decline: compare its vote share from anywhere between the 1950s and 1992 with its results since 1997 and this is clear. It is also reflected in falling membership. 

It is unlikely that the Tories will ever again reach 40% in a UK-wide general election (if Scotland gains independence, it might be a different matter). There is no particular reason to believe that the Tories will improve on its 2015 vote share. They can form a majority government on no more than 37% of the votes - as we've seen - and the likely boundary changes means this will certainly be possible in future. But I don't see how the Tory Party can restore the dominance it had in the 1980s (conversely, I don't see any reason to predict a significant fall in its support).

2. The Lib Dems have collapsed. 

The Lib Dems and its predecessor parties have historically had a small core voting base. But at times this has been boosted as a result of careful positioning - or opportunism - allowing the party to pick up votes from those disaffected with other parties. The 2010 election was a peak in this respect, with the Lib Dems benefiting from widespread disillusionment with 13 years of Labour government (but also the fact that the Tories had not entirely 'detoxified' after the experiences of the 1980s and 1990s). 

Being the junior partner in a Tory-led coalition for five years led to collapse and only 8 Lib Dem MPs were elected in May. There are no indications of any Lib Dem revival, not any reason to expect one as the party has no obvious purpose. It has returned to being a party that derives votes largely from a core base of mainly middle class and centre-ground voters, polling below 10%. 

3. The SNP dominates Scottish politics.

The SNP landslide in May - taking 56 out of 59 Scottish seats at Westminster - was a genuine political earthquake. There is every reason to expect another SNP landslide in May's Holyrood elections, with the party forecast to increase its majority in the devolved Scottish parliament still further. 

This has been a long-term process and the independence referendum accelerated Scottish Labour's decline and the SNP's ascendancy. Many people on the Labour left simply don't grasp how much Scottish politics has been transformed, and naively think that Labour can win back lost support. This involves under-estimating how discredited Labour has become, how strong the SNP's support base now is, and how important the questions of independence and (more immediately) home rule, or increased powers, are for left-leaning Scottish voters. 

4. Ukip is past its peak, while the far right is defunct.

I've been saying this for over a year: Ukip has already reached its peak. It took roughly one in eight votes nationally in May and there's simply no reason to expect it to improve on this in future local or general elections. It has a fairly settled voter base and is incapable of getting people elected in first-past-the-post elections. The fact that its sole MP, Douglas Carswell, is in open conflict with party leader Nigel Farage gives a strong sense of the problems it faces. Whatever happens in the EU referendum, it is likely to damage Ukip: once it's taken place, Ukip's core aim has been removed from the political landscape. 

The rise of Ukip is one reason, of course, why the traditional far right is absolutely nowhere. Dedicated anti-fascist campaigning also played its part, as did the far right's propensity (especially when under pressure and suffering defeats) for in-fighting. The British National Party imploded a little while ago and has not been replaced.  

5. Labour is shifting leftwards. 

For those of us on the left, the most important - and hopeful- trend is what's happening in the Labour Party. This is one that has taken everyone by surprise: 2015 has been a real game-changer for Labour. It was widely assumed that general election defeat would be followed by a consensus around moving Labour somewhat to the right. Jeremy Corbyn's huge popular success in the leadership race, galvanising a mushrooming of Labour Party membership and a renaissance for the left, changed everything.

What we are seeing is the widespread disaffection with a hollowed-out social democracy finding expression - in a unique way - through the established, and largely discredited, social democratic party itself. This results from a combination of factors and has led to a fierce conflict within the Labour Party. How this plays out is not yet settled, but Corbyn and the left do have some distinct advantages. The 'moderates' in the Parliamentary Labour Party are reconciling themselves to it being near-impossible to challenge Corbyn's position. 

6. The Green Surge is a fading memory. 

The Green Surge began in summer 2014 and continued until the general election in May 2015. There was a huge increase in membership combined with a small tilt leftwards in its profile and composition. This demonstrated - together with the SNP's triumphs - that Labour can indeed leak votes to its left, and suggested there is significant electoral space for a party positioned (in however ambiguous and tricky a manner) to the left of the neoliberal mainstream. 

Corbyn's rise to the Labour leadership has changed all that. Apparently, there has been little direct effect on Green Party membership. But there's no doubt that the whole dynamic underpinning the Green Surge - disillusionment with a rightwards-leaning Labour Party sending people to the Greens - has simply gone. This will surely be reflected, in the next year or two, in membership figures, the composition of the party and the votes it receives, most likely starting with disappointing votes in London and local council elections in May. 

7. The independent left is marginalised electorally. 

While Labour's left turn may have damaged the Greens' prospects, it has wiped out any chance of explicitly socialist organisations like TUSC or Left Unity making any progress (assuming Corbyn continues as Labour leader). These outfits were already achieving miserable results in elections - and that was before a socialist was elected to lead the Labour Party. 

I also expect the new Scottish left formation RISE to do badly in May's Holyrood elections, though I wish them well. I'm not sure there is space for something new - resting on a relatively small layer of activists, with no existing profile - when the field is already crowded with SNP, Labour and Greens. I hope to be proved wrong - we will see. 

8. Strikes remain a rarity, but unions and movements are important political players. 

Since the early 1990s there hasn't been a single year when more than two million strike days have been recorded - a sustained period of low trade union combativity like never before. This is a crucial and highly significant long-term trend for the left to register. It continues to be a major weakness on our side - and the effects of the historic defeat of the unions can be seen, for example, in the downwards trend in real-terms pay for the last seven years. 

Nonetheless, trade unions and protest movements alike have played an influential role in recent years. Street protest has been, for many years and across a wide range of issues, a central part of opposition to government policies. This year, the People's Assembly's national demonstration in June was a particular high point, while Stop the War Coalition has repeatedly made the news, especially around the Commons vote to bomb Syria. It will again play an important role in 2016 around the issue of Trident replacement as well as Syria. The connection between protest movements and Corbyn's rise to the Labour leadership has in some ways amplified the impact campaigners can make. 

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UKIP and British politics today

 

This week's county council election results, together with the South Shields parliamentary by-election, appeared to represent a breakthrough for the United Kingdom Independence Party. Some caution about long-term predictions is required: UKIP hasn't yet shown it can win a parliamentary seat and the first-past-the-post system means there's no guarantee Nigel Farage's hard-right party will do so in the 2015 general election. There may, also, be a swing back to the Tories among right-wing voters in 2015, with no guarantee that a mid-term 'protest vote' can be sustained.

 

Nonetheless, UKIP's success on Thursday is substantial enough to justify taking the issue of the party's rise seriously. UKIP took nearly a quarter of all votes in the local elections. This is not representative of the country as a whole, as it was largely the 'shires' that went to the polls this week, but together with recent opinion polls it indicates clear growth in support for the party.

 

The South Shields result is also significant. Getting almost 25% in the Labour heartlands (the Tyneside seat has had a Labour MP continuously since 1935 and has never returned a Tory since the Great Reform Act of 1832) shows UKIP can prosper way beyond the semi-rural, predominantly middle class southern English seats regarded as its home turf. In South Shields UKIP functioned as a way for right-of-centre voters to register disenchantment with the coalition parties: Lib Dem and Tory support fell dramatically.

The relative success in South Shields does not, however, mean that UKIP is picking up lots of ex-Labour voters. Previous polling on this question indicates that a high proportion of UKIP voters have voted Tory in the past; traditional Labour voters are a small part of the UKIP voting base. This is even true in an area like South Shields: note that Labour's percentage of the vote held up (just over 50%). The number of votes for Labour declined, but that has a lot to do with the lower turnout which is typical of a by-election.

 

It is, however, obvious that Labour cannot assume it will pick up votes (compared to the 2010 general election) just because its opinion poll ratings are good. Nationally, Labour is benefiting from the opposition to the coalition - in particular the collapse of the Lib Dem vote after it joined the Tories in imposing austerity - but it is not winning support on the basis of any enthusiasm for a positive alternative. Labour's weaknesses also fuel a general anti-politics and anti-establishment mood that can find expression in votes for UKIP.

What is UKIP, and what does it represent?

 

The UKIP membership base is middle class, but its voter base is now clearly going well beyond the middle class. Previous polling indicates that UKIP is genuinely cross-class in its appeal. This should not distract from the fact that it is in essence a right-wing middle class party: in composition this can be seen in its leadership, activist base and membership, but it's also a matter of its politics, which are thoroughly at odds with working class interests.

It would be wrong to interpret UKIP as another far-right party comparable to the BNP (which, pleasingly, now has no councillors at all), although some fascists are sympathetic to UKIP and see it as the next best thing in the absence of a credible fascist party. But it is important to grasp that UKIP stands unequivocally to the right of the Tories and plays a dangerous role in relation to political debate about immigration and race.

 

Above all, UKIP's role is to pull the terms of political debate to the right. The party exerts pressure on a divided and fractious Tory Party, where the activist base and many backbench MPs are in fact close to UKIP politically. Strong electoral showings for UKIP also encourage a further shift to the right on immigration by Labour. This, in turn, makes it harder for left-wing arguments to get a hearing. It's also important to note that a partial revival of harder, more explicitly far-right politics is still a real possibility, as the crisis is prolonged and the 'debate' about immigration becomes nastier (especially if the Left doesn't shape things in a different direction).

The big issues motivating UKIP voters are immigration and Europe. Most people seemingly have little, if any, idea what its policies are beyond those issues. Politically UKIP is a small-government, low taxes, libertarian party that is bonded by hostility to the European Union and to immigration, with a dash of traditionalist social conservatism (e.g. opposition to gay marriage).

 

But it's specifically the question of immigration - which is tightly linked in their voters' minds with the EU - that is enabling the party's support to grow. Anti-immigrant sentiment is an important right-wing response to the capitalist crisis. That doesn't mean it is simply a product of the crisis - obviously such attitudes have much deeper and longer-term roots - but it is sharpened by the crisis, as people lash out at perceived threats and sources of economic and social problems.

 

We also need to register the role of Islamophobia. Overt Islamophobia is not UKIP's main selling point, but polling has clearly indicated strongly Islamophobic views among its voters and there's a tight connection between Islamophobia and contemporary anti-immigrant feeling. It's an important part of the ideological mix in a way that wasn't the case when Enoch Powell was stirring up trouble in the 1960s or when the National Front grew in the 1970s.

 

The notion of immigrants as both an 'enemy without' and an 'enemy within' is linked to contemporary imperialism and Islamophobia. This strand of racist ideology could yet become more prominent in the UKIP 'brand'.

 

UKIP and Tory decline

A key factor in the rise of UKIP is the long-term historic decline of the Conservative Party. In the 1950s and 1960s the Tories got close to 50% of the popular vote in general elections. In the Thatcher and Major era it was somewhat lower, but still reamined above 40%. In 1979 - the year of Thatcher's first victory - the Tories got almost 45%, then the Tories were in the 41-43% range in 1983, 1987 and 1992. In 2010, despite 13 years of a disillusioning Labour government and the economic crisis, Cameron's party could only muster 36% of the popular vote.

 

Party membership has declined massively (compared to 30 years ago never mind the peak of the 1950s) and the Tory base is no longer as cohesive as it was in the 1980s: it is somewhat smaller and more fractured. This does not, though, mean that we should disregard UKIP's growth on the grounds that it is simply a splitting of the right-wing vote. UKIP can pull British politics to the right and harden the right-wing base of the Tory Party.

 

The Tories' long-term decline overlaps with another long-term phenomenon: the decline in faith in the established political parties and the weakening of the political mainstream. In 1979 the Tories, Labour and Liberals got almost 97% of the votes between them; in 2010 it was 88%. And in many European, local and other elections so far this century it's been much lower.

 

The disillusionment with established politics expressed in that decline for the big established parties - and also in lower voter turnout - has resulted in greater fragmentation and volatility in elections. It is a Europe-wide phenomenon, not just British, and in very broad terms is the consequence of more than three decades of neo-liberalism and its hollowing out of democracy and trust in official politics. In the context of a weak Left (especially in the electoral sphere) to provide a more positive direction, UKIP can score significant electoral successes.

 

The Left's response

What should the Left's response be? Above all, we need to commit to creating a credible and broad counterweight to UKIP and the right-wing arguments (especially over immigration) which drive it, therefore offering a left-wing alternative to the crisis and pulling politics to the left. This cannot, in the short to medium term, take the form of an electoral party because prospects for the outside-Labour left in electoral politics are poor.

 

Instead our focus must be on extra-parliamentary struggle: marches, protests, strikes and campaigns. We need a united mass movement against cuts which rests upon a radically different, left-wing, perspective on the crisis. We need to popularise anti-austerity slogans and demands, alongside a left-wing interpretation of the state we are in. The People's Assembly - not just the event in Westminster Central Hall on 22 June itself, but using that gathering to build an on-going coalition that can deliver co-ordinated mass action - is our greatest opportunity here.

 

The Left also needs to directly challenge the right-wing myths about immigration and offer an alternative viewpoint, which is linked to making a positive case for multiculturalism, the role of migrant workers, and so on. This shouldn't be a purely defensive argument framed by our political enemies. A left-wing perspective on immigration has to be integral to socialists' arguments and activity in the broad anti-cuts movements of which we are a part.

 

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Lord Pearson and UKIP: not of this world

Lord Pearson has resigned as leader of UKIP, after less than a year. This video, capturing what was described as "the worst campaign interview ever", tells you everything you need to know about UKIP. Just ask yourself: what kind of party elects this man as its leader?



Via Left Foot Forward

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