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Poll suggests Scottish Lib Dems to be cut from 11 to 2 at next election

Mar 9

Posted by Jeff in Elections, Parties | 10 Comments

Despite there being many possibilities for Scotland’s future between now and the next UK General Election, one intriguing consideration since Clegg and Cameron took to the rose garden to announce their parties’ coalition is – to what extent can the Lib Dems survive as a political force north of the border.

The party is enjoying the power and trappings of Government, and being relevant to national political discussion. It is easy to forget that Labour MPs used to walk out of the Chamber when it was the Lib Dems’ turn to ask Prime Minister Questions. Not any more, now they must face them from the opposition benches and even watch on occasionally as Nick Clegg takes to the lectern in the Prime Minister’s absence.

It has been, of course, considerably more bruising for Scottish Lib Dem MPs, wrestling with their consciences over votes on tuition fees, bedroom taxes and spending cuts, knowing that they have to compromise their principles and shred their constituency mandates in order to vote Yes. A commendable number have voted against their party and against their Government, but will this be enough if they have to face the voters again in 2015?

A recent poll by Lord Ashcroft has helped shine a light on the Scottish Lib Dems fortunes, and, well, it doesn’t look pretty.

The party currently holds a mighty eleven seats north of the border, a figure that far outweighs the number of seats they deserve based on national voteshare. These seats were the population for a poll of voting intentions, with a sample size of 1,151, and resulted in the following:

Voting intentions
SNP – 31%
Labour- 26%
Lib Dem – 20%
Conservative – 16%
Others – 7%

The analysis concluded that the Lib Dem seats would change hands as follows:

Aberdeenshire W & Kincardine – SNP GAIN

Argyll & Bute – SNP GAIN

Berwickshire, Roxburgh & Selkirk – TORY GAIN

Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross – SNP GAIN

East Dunbartonshire – LABOUR GAIN

Edinburgh West – LABOUR GAIN

North East Fife – SNP GAIN

Gordon – SNP GAIN

Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey – SNP GAIN

Orkney & Shetland – LIB DEM HOLD

Ross, Skye & Lochaber – LIB DEM HOLD

A lot can happen between now and 2015 of course, not least a referendum that would mean zero Scottish MPs of any party. However, any suggestion that the success of Eastleigh could be replicated north of the border in 2015 appears to be a very faint one indeed. There is, seemingly, no escape from a very public evisceration, except through independence.

An independent Scotland would start with a clean slate, with an increased number of MSPs at the Scottish Parliament with relatively few experienced politicians ready to hit the ground running. There may be no space for Jo Swinson, Mike Crockart or Danny Alexander. Even Michael Moore, Charlie Kennedy and Menzies Campbell won’t be returning to the UK Parliament on the basis of this poll, but all eleven Scottish Lib Dems would quite reasonably expect to be voted back into power at an enlarged, empowered Holyrood in an independent Scotland.

Politics, they say, is the art of the possible and all too often is simply driven by the need for survival. There are nine Scottish Lib Dem MPs with coats on very shoogly pegs, all supposedly signed up to a party policy for home rule and federalism, and this high watermark of representation realistically won’t be reached again for decades.

In order to save their political careers, who would blame them if they became independence converts in the next year or so?

Does the General Election hold an unexpected result?

Feb 27

Posted by Guest Blog in Elections, International, Westminster | 9 Comments

A wee Italy-via-Eastleigh guest today from Scotland’s super-punter Ross McCafferty, who’s got previous here with us. Thanks Ross! Oh, and the picture choice isn’t his fault. Apologies to anyone scrubbing their eyes.

Beppe and his laptopBritain is not Ireland. Nor is it Italy, but the respective hammerings of largely centrist Parties in austerity governments should terrify David Cameron. In the 2011 election to the Dail, Fianna Fail, who had dominated Irish politics since the inception of the Republic, were beaten into a distant third, going from over 40% of the vote to 17. In an onimous sign for Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems, the junior coalition partners, the Irish Green Party, saw their vote share halved and they lost all of their seats. In Italy, incumbent parties who saw themselves as the guarantors of belt tightening economic credibility fared little better. Technocrat Mario Monti’s austerity coalition was beaten into a distant 4th, to have little or no say in the future governance of the country.

Having staked their economic credibility to both the elimination of the deficit, the strength of the pound, and Britain’s international power, David Cameron’s Tories are in dire straits as we come to the halfway stage of this five year term. Indeed, as we get closer to the 2015 election than we are from the 2010 election, the “Last Labour government” line stops having any credence. Where Labour could move into landslide territory, for me, is two fold. 1) Sacking Ed Balls, a man with a reputation for being pure poison, not to mention being an unfortunate relic – despite his weepy conversion and revisionist approach to his own role in Blair/Brown conflicts – of a bygone era in Labour history. 2) Stepping up attacks on Tories. There was little between Labour and the Tories in macro economic terms in 97-2010. They should press Cameron on what money he wouldn’t have spent in the New Labour years he derides as being so profligate.

But, despite cruising in the polls, Ed’s appeal thus far has been limited. He came to Scotland plenty in 2011 to support Labour, and lent his voice  to the AV campaign, both of which were soundly beaten. He lost battles in formerly fertile Labour ground in Bradford and the London mayoral election.  His best hope in tomorrow’s Eastleigh by election is now a UKIP win, which would focus attention on the coalition parties, and divert comment and introspection away from his parties now seemingly  inevitable distant fourth.

My central question is: does the UK have a Beppe Grillo? The satirist and comedians anti political rallies saw him propelled from non existence to 3rd place and the position of kingmaker. Could we see this in the UK? On the face of it, it doesn’t appear so, our two and occasionally three, and if you believe Farage barely 4 party system is pretty deeply embedded. But I bet if you asked Mario Monti who his main danger was halfway through his term, a wild haired comedian convicted of manslaughter would not feature on the list. That’s not to say such an insurgent campaign would be the preserve of the left in Britain. A free speech, Englishman’s home is his castle, wheelie bin hating Jeremy Clarkson esque figure is  just as likely as a Charlie Booker (who has fictional form) or a David Mitchell.

Sadly, what might make this unlikely is that the British electorate have had their fingers burnt before. Before he was merely looking glum and slightly ill over David Cameron’s right hand shoulder, Nick Clegg was the new face of British Politics, reinvigorating the scene with his talk of breaking from the two main parties. Friends who used to roll their eyes when I mentioned politics declared they were voting for Clegg, someone who understood their disdain at the same old politics. Naturally, true to form, at the first sniff  he sold out his principles and went back on everything he had said. One thing is for sure, the 2015 General Election result isn’t guaranteed.

P.S. It wouldn’t be a guest post from me without some betting tips. You can get any other party to win most seats at 113/1 with Betfair. Ukip to win the election is 200/1 with Coral. And the Government to be ‘other’ is 8/1 with William Hill.

Should Ed turn his guns on UKIP?

Feb 26

Posted by James in Elections, Parties, Westminster | 6 Comments

farageflagPolitics is a strange game. It’s also definitely treated as a game by the participants, albeit a serious one, and the players’ moves regularly have hidden objectives and curious consequences. Right now one smart thing, in a cynical gamesmanship sense, that Labour could do at a UK level is to unleash their fire against UKIP.

As discussed here before, Bonnie Meguid has made a compelling argument about the impact of larger, established parties’ three main tactics when dealing with arriviste parties like the Greens, the hard right, and what she calls the “ethno-territorials” (nationalist or regionalist parties).

First, the big parties can choose to ignore the upstarts, which can help, she argues, if you want them to go away, because silence on “their” issue reduces the perceived salience of that issue in the public mind.

Second, the established parties can attempt to steal the newcomers’ political ideas, another move which can depress their support. This tactic was on grisly display when Nick Griffin went on Question Time and the representatives of the three largest Westminster parties queued up to spout disgraceful versions of “of course there’s a problem with immigration, but..”.

Third, broadsides can be unleashed. This what might be seen as counter-intuitive, but nothing boosts a new party like getting brickbats from the establishment, provided their response to it is relatively temperate.

Meguid’s key example here is from France, where the Socialists attacked Le Pen and simultaneously constructed situations to exaggerate the Front National’s victimhood. Their logic, which worked up to a point, was that the FN would take votes from both sides, sure, but they’d take disproportionately more from the established right, giving the Socialists an edge. Of course, the culmination of this folly was a Presidential runoff between Chirac and Le Pen in 2002, and the blame for this crisis was rarely laid at the correct door.

Over the last few years the nature of the hard right in British politics, or at least the right-of-the-Tories, has changed. Support for the BNP curved high enough to give them a mini electoral hey-day, starting in 2002, the year they picked up their first three councillors, through to 2009 when Griffin and Brons were elected to the European Parliament and 57 BNP councillors were returned.

From that point onwards, perhaps as a result of the fallout between those two MEPs (amusing YouTube here), it was downhill all the way, with just three BNP councillors remaining after the 2012 locals, plus Griffin in Europe – Brons having left the party that year.

Pulling the French Socialists’ trick with the BNP would have been hard for Labour to do, and besides, the BNP primarily took votes from white working-class ex-Labour voters.

But UKIP are a different matter altogether, despite the shared obsession with immigration and a range of other hard-right policy crossovers with the BNP. UKIP are largely seen as more respectable, not least because they definitely attract a different class of voter, and now they’re regularly polling in third place above the Lib Dems.

If Miliband were to focus a bit of fire on them, to use Labour’s current pro-European credentials as a base from which to bash Farage and his party, the rewards could be substantial. Cameron’s delayed referendum (and declaration that he wants a settlement with the EU that he can campaign in favour for) will never go far enough for UKIP, the Tory headbangers, or indeed most of the voters who swither between the two.

It’s win-win for Labour, strategically. Either the Tories move further right on the issue and cede the centre ground, or they don’t and UKIP keep chipping away at their right flank. It’s cynical, of course, and if conducted with enough vigour it would probably consolidate UKIP in third place across England. But it would be defensible, given it would look like a defence of internationalism and solidarity. The fact that Farage would be seen to sport an ever-broader Pooterish grin would hardly be laid at Miliband’s door.

And imagine a situation where UKIP get into any pre-2015 leaders’ debates. If the polls hold, a case could be made for it. Labour could even argue for that, high-risk though it would be in terms of future precedent, and in doing so they could hope to be seen to be on the side of democratic values rather than opportunism.

It’d still be unlikely to happen, not least because it’d be grossly unfair on those parties who already have MPs but who would still be excluded, but the media love a process argument, and the debate about the debates will certainly make quite a splash next time whatever happens.

If UKIP were to take even half the vote share they currently score in the national polls, a Labour victory would be almost guaranteed, and, ironically, Britain’s (or the rUK’s) place in Europe protected for another cycle.

The unbearable lightness of being petitioned.

Feb 12

Posted by Dom in Democracy, Elections, Governance, Ideology, Media, Parties, Society | Comments off

Slavoj Zizek lecturing in Liverpool

Slavoj Zizek: Taking stock from the Eastern bloc

Another email into my inbox from one of several campaigning groups, asking me to lend me name to an undoubtedly worthy cause. The mechanisms of such campaigns are fairly familiar – an issue is located and a campaign started to make those who hold power realise that it is in their own interests to listen. It is a strange manifestation of a vaguely democratic mode of thinking with its basis in the idea of a benign but uninformed leader, or if you are more cynical, of a government desperately sensitive about the ability of single issues to define or destabilise.

It is similar to what Slavoj Zizek has called the humanisation of capitalism in his thinking on the way which society is required to ‘highlight’ certain issues through consumerism, the support of charity and the construction of individual everyday people as a moral guide in the behaviour of governments, corporations and institutions. It relies very heavily on the centrist addiction to general social doxa and public opinion which has come to define contemporary British politics, evidenced by the protestations of senior politicians that they are ‘listening’.

It must be said that dogma is just as dangerous as the apparent contemporary  lack thereof (though one might argue that centrism is a kind of dogma in itself). As Milan Kundera writes on the nature of mass protest in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.”

The heart of Kundera’s argument is that any movement reliant on the orchestration of thousands of people shouting in union has closed its mind to the possibilities of dialogue, nuance, and independent thought. It is not desirable to live in a society in which problems are solved by shouting loudly – by protest instead of construction – even if we might happen to loosely agree with what is being espoused.

The same might be said for the process of governance by headline and petition. Pressuring politicians into making the decisions we might wish them to make implies a sense of resignation, or perhaps a lack of self-confidence, when it comes to thinking and speaking for ourselves.

To sign a petition asking the Prime Minister for clemency in one area or another is, on a purely functional level, a good thing. Demonstrably so in fact. The well-orchestrated campaign to save woodland in England and Wales proved that there is indeed a point in letter writing, and that governments do indeed care about what voters think, albeit perhaps only as a means of self preservation.

But to look at the genesis of these petitions is to understand how the spread and cultivation of political campaigns work. There are very few people who see politics as a distinct part of their identity, though they are generally good and fair-minded, and would indeed probably find their views in line with a particular political party when asked. By inviting people to lend their support to various worthy causes they become not instigators but respondents.

Furthermore, the petition-writing masses who operate on an issue by issue basis cannot fundamentally change the way in which a society works. This is why we have elections, and this is also why certain quarters are so terrified by the idea of the British parliament operating a system of fair elections. You might call it the illusion of empowerment. We are invited to approve or reject someone else’s ideas, but rarely are we asked by ourselves to produce a blueprint for the future.

Like Zizek’s analysis of the pitfalls of ethical consumerism, causing a bad government to make one fewer bad decision is as transformative as buying a cup of rainforest alliance coffee from a company which dodges billions in tax, and comes no closer to giving people the agency which should be their democratic right.

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The anatomy of a referendum, and the messy consequences of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Jan 4

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Elections, Environment, Europe, Governance, Ideology, Parties | 7 Comments

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I am currently writing a doctoral thesis on the dyanamics and strategies of environmental debate in Sweden, a land popularly assumed to be a paragon of environmental virtue. This is a belief apparently held by the Swedes themselves, as illustrated by their somewhat smug showing in Doha where they failed to mention the motorway the size of the Channel Tunnel they are about to build in Stockholm.

A particular area of interest is the referendum on nuclear energy which took place in Sweden in 1980, following the narrow election of a Centre-led government on a wave of anti-nuclear sentiment. As I sit here in the archives of the national library of Sweden shifting through media footage the narrative presented is all too familiar – institutionalised parties unable to accept that the will of the people may be different to their own agenda, dubious claims and character assassinations and an ultimately unsatisfactory outcome. It could quite easily be Scotland in 2013.

The Swedish referendum offered three choices, each embodying a respective ethos of social utopianism (No to nuclear power), realism (Nuclear power isn’t great, but let’s keep the power stations we have so we can carry on as now), and economic necessity (If we get rid of nuclear power the economy will collapse and your children will all live in third-world poverty).

If the third one sounds particularly familiar it is because that is more or less the same ethos adopted by the BetterTogether campaign. Things might not be optimal at the moment, but imagine all the potential bad things which could happen if you chose to change the situation.

The campaign itself was not that surprising, and it was eventually won narrowly by the middle line, in part because of the phenomenal weight of the Social Democratic Party who decided that it was the desired outcome. They successfully combined their campaigning power and a successful synthesis of the Yes and No arguments to win a substantial share of the vote. A similar tactic is being taken by BetterTogether, telling people that they understand the desire for more self-governance in Scotland but that such an outcome is achievable via a No vote without the risks and uncertainty’s of independence. In both cases the campaigners possessed the luxury of not having to specify a post-referendum course of action beforehand.

And therein lies the really interesting thing. The outcome of the Swedish referendum led to the birth and subsequent growth of the Swedish Green Party, now the third biggest party in parliament, and exposed a falacy in politics – namely the idea that there is a straight ideological dichotomy between left and right. It illustrated that the interests of large social-democratic parties which aim to reflect the experiences of normal people do not always do so, and the Swedish Green Party pioneered a kind of leftist liberalism which capitalised on a lack of faith in the institutions of state, red or blue, which had passed down judgement from on high. What was disquieting for the Social Democrats was that a large number of people abandoned the party after feeling short-changed by a lack of internal debate. It illustrated a cynical failure of leadership structures and showed that the kind of campaign tactics traditionally used by the behemoths of left and right are not suitable when the topic of discussion is anything other than their bread and butter.

The SNP, whilst obviously being a political party, is a broad church which encompasses many different types of people from centre-right Celtic-tiger growthers to leftist social democrats, nominal greens and a smattering of cultural nationalists. The party exists, to all intents and purposes, to fight for a yes vote in the referendum. The big problem with the BetterTogether campaign is that none of the parties participating were set up to fight such a referendum. By aligning their political identities completely with a fairly inflexible unionism they are putting square pegs in round holes and are unable to coherently argue for unionism, in part because discussions of Scotland’s constitutional future are taboo-laden. Rather than developing arguments for a union the No campaign relies on attacking the unknowns of the Yes campaign. This is perhaps a surefire way of winning the referendum if people can be made to err on the side of mediocre caution, but in the long term it may well be to the detriment of current political allegiances.

What people conceive of as Scotland is changing rapidly, and this is something which the SNP have capitalised on. Young and fragile it may be, but there is now a distinctly Scottish political discourse which the Labour party and the Conservatives have ignored entirely. Since Scotland ceased to be a collection of local councils with a unique legal system and became a concrete polity, both civic and political life have undergone a process of conceptual transformation. The SNP are by no means the instigators, nor are they the sole beneficiaries of this change, but they have been able to much better understand how people think, rather than telling them how they think. The cleverest move pulled by the SNP has been the name change from Scottish Executive to Scottish Government. This has permeated every aspect of public life and consciousness. In a state where government is customarily used to refer to national parliaments, it was a masterstroke. There are no longer meetings between the British Government and Scottish Executive, but between the Scottish Government and the British Government. Anyone looking to be in charge must govern Scotland rather than just administrate.

This does not mean that the SNP are in any way right in all their policy, but on the issue of the referendum they have a coherent ethos, one which says that they are governing and that increased power is in the country’s best interest. The No campaign’s parties are unable to align their political program with their referendum stance.  Between Yes and No is a realm of possibility, asking for somebody to fill it with a genuine vision for the way forward which reflects the needs and desires of Scotland’s citizens. The bottom line is that Scotland will never be the same again, and even if Scotland should remain part of the United Kingdom, there must be room for a less dogmatic unionism which is grounded not in the belief of what is but in a desire for what can be.