When considering this supposed earthquake, we should be mindful of the fact that nobody can confidently predict its order of magnitude. George Eaton, at The New Statesman, reminds us that the European contest should not be seen as a reliable forecast of the general election. We will see, in the intervening period, no small amount of fanciful conjecture offered up by analysts in the media, but it is only after the general election that the true force of this earthquake, and any subsequent aftershocks, will be known.
Friends, colleagues, and comrades (such as Joshua White, whose excellent blog can be found here), are wont to point out that, for all the flashing purple on Jeremy Vine's grandiose re-imagining of Risk, UKIP failed to gain overall control of a single council. They also point out that turnout in the UK fell slightly, resting at a measly 33.8%. (To put this in context, turnout for the 2010 general election was 65.1%.)
They are right to do so. But I caution against the desire to read too much into either statistic, and, more generally, against the desire to downplay the performance of Nigel Farage and his lackeys. It will have far reaching effects. (I speak in terms of domestic politics, but the rise of UKIP must be put into an international context, too. These elections have seen notable victories for Marine le Pen's Front National, the Danish People's Party, and Hungary's vile Jobbik movement. We have reason to be thankful for the presence of Alexis Tsipras and Syriza from Greece, but any Leftist jubilation should be tempered by the knowledge that Golden Dawn will be sending at least two MEPs to Brussels.)
The all but total annihilation of the Liberal Democrats hints at widespread public disaffection with the traditional third wheel of British politics. Whilst Nick Clegg (the skirting board of the establishment which so riles UKIP's supporters) performed abysmally in his ill-advised debates with Nigel Farage, I find it hard to accept the suggestion that the Liberal Democrat stance on Europe is the sole cause of their demise. Local council elections appear to support this thesis. There is a groundswell of anger and bitterness, directed at the Liberal Democrats, and, with only a year until the general election, they will be hard-pressed to win back those whose trust they betrayed when last they were given it.
Clegg still has the support of Mr Ashdown, but there is a faction, somewhat nebulous in nature, which would gladly see him resign. (What better demonstration of his fall from grace than the suggestion that he may now be more popular with the Conservatives than with members of his own party!) Already we have seen John Pugh, Liberal Democrat MP for Southport, advocate a "Cable succession" during a BBC interview.
I do not intend to make a habit of citing opinion polls. Fraudulent pseudo-science rarely makes for a decent source (and you can often guess at the findings of the poll by the name of the think tank or newspaper that commissioned it). But, for the sake of argument, let us take as gospel, or as at least a vision of truth, the figures from UK Polling Report.
Further, let us assume that, in the absence of any defining, opinion shifting events between this moment and the day polls close next year, Labour will go into the election with a projected lead of no more than three or four points. The BBC published the findings of its own poll on the 24th of this month, predicting a Labour victory on 31%, with the Conservatives trailing on 29%, UKIP in third place and with a 17% share of the vote, and the Liberal Democrats in fourth with 13%.
Based on these (admittedly ambitious) assumptions, or assuming that the figures are very close to the eventual truth, we can predict (and here I have used the 'swing calculator' from the UK Polling Report) the number of seats won and lost by each party. In this case, we that find Labour (with 320 seats to the Conservative's 246) are 6 seats short of the number required to form a majority government.
I should mention another disruptive variable: we have no way of knowing how many people who have voted UKIP in the European elections will stand by the party in a general election. I know of many, some in my own family, who have voted UKIP in these elections but do not plan on repeating that act next year. Tom Clark, in The Guardian, claims to have collated evidence which suggests that 50% of UKIP voters intend to make that description of themselves a lasting one. If we accept that figure (and we have reason to doubt it, as we have reason to doubt every figure I have quoted in this section), we assume that UKIP maintains a share of the vote amounting to around 14%; still enough, Mr Clark suggests, for another 'earthquake'.
Now, allowing that all of this transpires to be true, we enter into the complicated business of negotiations, with the aim of forming a coalition government. And this is one of the two principal reasons for which I have warned against downplaying or understating UKIP's performance thus far. They might well replace the Liberal Democrats as the third largest Westminster party. In that event, it is they who will hold the most valuable cards; it is they who may make or break a prospective coalition government.
Already we see some amongst the Conservative back benches who are advocating if not a coalition than an electoral pact with UKIP, to be drawn up in advance of the election in 2015. Now, a decent argument is presented in The Times, in the dubiously named column UKIPWatch, which suggests that such a pact is unlikely. As is so typical of reactionaries, those who advocate this pact operate under a false and naive assumption: that UKIP is a breakaway wing of the Conservative Party. In fact, if we look at those who have voted for UKIP, and those who are likely to do so again, we find that UKIP is as appealing to the 'grassroots' of the Labour party as it is to the same tier of the Conservatives. (This fact was picked up and reported in the press some time ago, but appears to have escaped the attention of some concerned Tories.) The column claims that almost as many UKIP voters are in favour of a pact or coalition with Labour as are in favour of a pact or coalition with the Conservatives. (The bipolar nature of its support base may well do more damage to UKIP's future prospects than the weighty and mostly justified political and social media campaigns did in the run-up to the European elections.)
Fine. We can dismiss the prospect of a pre-election pact as being unlikely. However, it hints at something which is potentially more troubling, and which is certainly more realistic: a reaction, expressed through unwelcome policy changes. It may well be the case that, if they are able to complete the apparently difficult task of getting their act together, Labour will not need or seek to depart drastically from its centrist position. A simple but effective step toward winning back disaffected Labour voters might be to signal an end to the party's absence from the debate over Europe and, at the very least, mimic David Cameron's pledge to push for reform. (That said, the promise of a referendum would carry more weight.)
However, for the Conservatives, the instinctive reaction is likely to be a slip to the right. It is, after all, a common criticism of David Cameron's version of the party (put with trademark wit and uncomfortable accuracy by Peter Hitchens in his blog for the Mail Online); they are too centrist. Too Blairite.
A fear of this sort of reaction is my second argument in favour of caution. It does not require a pact or a coalition, and it does not require UKIP to maintain or increase its support between now and the general election. All it requires is fear, on the part of the Tories, that UKIP will scupper their chances at reelection, and sufficient pressure from within the party to prompt David Cameron to do what critics on his right believe him to be incapable of: to try and look like a Conservative prime minister.
Except, of course, that he quite obviously is a Conservative prime minister. And this leads me to the conclusion of this post. Originally from a conversation held over Facebook, I have repurposed my reply, and given it a title of its own.
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A Brief List of Our Ills.
The current government is overseeing the clandestine privatisation of the NHS.
It has orchestrated the selling off of Royal Mail under the advice and to the benefit of certain select investors (including the sovereign wealth funds of Kuwait and Singapore), none of whom could be described as standing for or representing the people.
It has pumped billions into bank subsidies and bailouts with one hand, and pushed working people to take jobs on exploitative contracts with the other, whilst refusing to levy any meaningful tax or place any meaningful limit on the bonuses and salaries paid at the top of those institutions; paid to those whose reckless gambling with the money we earn (in an attempt to generate substantially more with which to polish their own accounts) is largely responsible for the collapse of the economy that they, and their allies in government, would have us worship.
The government has been reluctant to take any step toward the closure of the tax loopholes, through which £35 billion disappears every year.
It is scrapping hardware and cutting jobs in the military in order to finance a renewal of a nuclear deterrent which may well cost us up to £130 billion over its lifespan.
It is also presiding over a simmering housing crisis, with homes now costing upwards of 5.5 times average earnings, to the benefit of wealthy landlords and at the expense of working and lower-middle class individuals and families.
It prefers to award bloated contracts to companies who overcharge for awful service on the railways than to nationalise them, and it prefers the prestige of HS2 to investment in our otherwise ancient and deficient rail systems.
It has done nothing to break up the monopoly of the energy companies, or to prevent them profiting from the fraudulent practice of raising energy bills when the price of oil and gas rises, fixing the price even when the price of oil and gas falls, and raising it again when the price of oil and gas increases. It would rather listen to lobbyists from those same companies than the people crippled, by the hand of the monopolies, by the prices of basic commodities. It would rather, at the behest of these companies, wreck the environment and peoples' quality of life by pummelling more gas out of the ground than by making any meaningful investment in renewable energy.
If these are the actions of a Left Wing Conservative, I shudder to think what will happen if the Right get the prime minister they wish for.
I could go on. But this is all made particularly relevant to the question of Europe because the government's own rhetoric has fuelled the rise of UKIP.
To the people suffering under the combined weight of these (and innumerable other) injustices, they say: Yes, isn't it terrible, and by the way, it's someone else's fault. Blame the homeless, blame the disadvantaged, blame those unable to work because they have been failed by the education system, and those left to rot with the refuse of modernity, and modernisation. But, most of all, blame Them. The Foreigners. Blame the rest of the world; it's their fault, after all.
And the funny thing is: this seems to be the message coming from all across Europe. The problems in France, Germany, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Denmark: it's all somebody else's fault. It begs the question: how can it be the fault of foreigners when the foreigners think it's the fault of foreigners. Who exactly are these foreigners?
So, you see, whilst I hope you're right, that this will be a one-off (though I fear you might be wrong), it doesn't make any difference. This one vote demonstrates how effective the politics of blame can be. The true cause of our problems continues to be ignored.
