Eyre Lines

This post is about politics; normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

We have just had an election. Well, actually, we have just had three, or possibly four, elections, as the Scottish and Welsh electorates haven’t voted anything like the rest, and the North East probably isn’t on the same page either. The Conservatives (fairly narrowly) won the rest, the Scottish National Party won Scotland and Labour (fairly narrowly) won Wales and the North East. The exit polls, which almost no-one really believed, were virtually spot on, and were nothing like the pollsters had predicted at any time before that. Except in Scotland, of course.

With a few exceptions, Labour didn’t so much lose the rest of the country (they lost hugely in Scotland) as fail to make progress. Everyone else’s gains were very largely at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, who have nearly been wiped out – share of the vote less than UKIP, single figure seats for the first time since the party was formed, and scarcely more than when, aged 16, I joined the then Liberal Party, of which I continued to be a member until a few years ago, when I couldn’t afford the subscription.

UKIP, on the other hand, gained massively, although not enough to increase their number of MPs from 1. I sympathise with their complaints about first past the post – it reminds me of my own complaints back in the 70s and 80s. Of course, proportional representation would at this point give them more seats than the LibDems, at which I shudder as a concept – but the principle is still good, it is a fairer system so far as parties are concerned.

What has happened, it seems, is that the LibDems have been hugely punished for the actions of the coalition government over the last 5 years, whereas the Conservatives (aka Tories), who were responsible for all its worst features, have not been punished much, if at all (apart from in Scotland). I’m sitting here crying gently into my tea and trying to work out how this has happened. Until those exit polls, I thought we’d be waking up this morning to another hung parliament with fewer LibDems, but still 20-30, and with Labour almost neck and neck with the Tories.

But I should have thought back to 2010, when the coalition was first formed. At the time, I said that the LibDems would probably end up reduced to the 6 MPs the Liberals had when I joined them. It isn’t much better than that.

Actually, I’ve been favourably impressed by the extent to which Nick Clegg and Vince Cable (in particular) have managed to curb what would probably otherwise have been even more horrendous attacks on our Welfare State and Health Service than have actually happened (and that’s to some extent why I was hopeful of a less thorough election disaster). It seems, however, that that message has completely failed to get over to the English electorate.

Why? Well, it has been popular in Labour circles to suggest that the Scottish support for the SNP would effectively be a vote for the Tories. In pure electoral terms, that isn’t really the case. Very few past Labour governments would not have governed had they had no Scottish MPs at all (I think 2, without looking back at the figures), for a start, and we could confidently expect that the SNP would support a minority Labour government and definitely not support a Tory one.

There, however, is where I think there’s a problem. Much as I would like the English electorate to be more radical, more communitarian and, yes, more left wing than they are, the country took a huge leap to the right when it elected Margaret Thatcher and, it seems, has never recovered. I think the average English voter, who is somewhere to the right hand end of social democracy, was scared that a minority Labour government supported by the SNP would be forced by the huge block of Scots SNP MPs which everyone predicted to adopt a “borrow and spend” policy. And they were convinced that that would be a huge mistake, having swallowed the lie that austerity is what is needed to get out of a recession (there are excellent articles showing how this is not the case, one of which I recently shared on facebook), and the other lie that Labour caused the recession (they didn’t, it was the banks – i.e. the people who bankroll the Tories and on whose boards a lot of Tories have been known to sit).

So they voted Tory in far more numbers than would otherwise have been the case, particularly in the south of England, which has not felt the brunt of the cuts so much as the north. Why would it, it’s the poor who have been targeted by the cuts, and the North is far poorer than the South?

Add to that the fact that UKIP are now collecting all the “Let’s get up the noses of both the main parties” votes (at least all those which don’t go to the Greens), and we saw a situation where, broadly, a large proportion of  the LibDem support went to one of Labour, Conservative or UKIP and UKIP also gained from Labour and Conservative; this squeezed the LibDems in all their marginals (particularly those with Conservative challengers where Labour were unlikely to gain tactical voters). As an aside, this proved the idiocy of the BBC’s “swingometers” – they kept on talking of a swing from Labour to Conservative where it was totally clear that both Labour and Conservative (and UKIP) had all had swings TO them, at the sole expense of the LibDems – it was just that the swing to Tory was bigger than the swing to labour…

And there you have it, a grin on Cameron’s face which has gone through smug and emerged the other side as something transcendent…

In more normal times, I might have thought “OK, in a few years time, the Tories will have made themselves even more unpopular and the electorate will be able to see how much better things were with the LibDems moderating their behaviour” and hoped the situation would reverse. Granted, it will be at the huge expense of the most vulnerable in our society, the sick, the homeless and those who cannot find jobs, which pains me beyond measure, but at least that way I could see a potential end. However, there are two things which militate against this.

Firstly, although it is still possible that the Tories could austerity us back into recession, on the whole it looks as if the economy is likely to keep recovering (absent something major such as my next point), and it will be very difficult for the LibDems to be able to point to how much pain they saved us all.

Worse, however, is the pledge to hold an in-out referendum on Europe. I earnestly hope I’m wrong, but I fear that this would go the wrong way, i.e. in favour of leaving the EU, and that Cameron would feel obliged to comply with it. I can think of no better recipe (other, perhaps, than another banking crash) to destroy the economy, probably for 20 years or more – and it would be a decision which could probably never be reversed. (Incidentally, I think that in the event that happened, there would be an immediate in-out referendum in Scotland on whether to leave the UK, and that would be the end of the UK – though I wouldn’t be very surprised to see that happen anyhow, given that Scotland is now very close to being a one-party SNP state and won’t like almost all aspects of Cameron’s policy. There’s a good chance that Cameron will be the last prime minister of the UK, as it won’t exist beyond this parliament).

Of course, I didn’t vote for this in any way – though this time I didn’t go out campaigning for the LibDems (not that that would have had much effect beside the national trend). On reflection, however, there’s only once I’ve ever voted for a winning candidate other than myself in any election, national or local (that was when a friend managed to take a second seat to go with mine on the Town Council back in the 80s), so I suppose I should be used to disappointment. This, however, goes beyond disappointment – it could be an utter disaster for the country.

I joined the Liberal Party in 1970, and spent over 30 years following that working for them and their successors the Liberal Democrats, standing for them and sitting as a councillor before I gave up on health grounds in 2003. In that time, they went from 6 MPs to over 60 – and now all the way back to 8. In 1970 I judged it the only place for a “sermon on the mount” social gospel Christian with a passion for electoral fairness to go (albeit I hadn’t necessarily worked out that that is what I was), the then Labour Party being largely full of quasi-stalinist trades unionists and closet Marxist revolutionaries. I still think it’s virtually the only place to go in England, the sole possible alternative being the Greens; the Labour Party is currently agonising about having being too left wing in its policies, where in fact it seems to have swallowed the big lies about economics I mentioned above, and not moved much from the Blair days when they were, frankly, “Tory lite”.

I find that I made a really substantial emotional investment in the party over that time, and the current situation makes me desperately sad for them – but it also makes me desperately sad for the demise of communitarian spirit in England. I don’t think it will recover, at least not in my lifetime.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope the next five years won’t, as a fear, completely demolish the country; I hope that by the end of it, the country will be as anti-Conservative as they were in 1997 and vote accordingly, and find again the communal ethos which created the welfare state under Liberal governments in the first half of the last century.