13 Comments

• paul barker 19th May '10 - 2:02pm

  I wonder if you could show the average Lab + Con vote & the LD vote , with trend lines from 1951. I reckon the lines would cross around 2020.

• Andrew Suffield 19th May '10 - 2:08pm

  Interesting how apathy has gone up.

• David Allen 19th May '10 - 5:52pm

  Fascinating! A very clear linear decline in (Con plus Lab) votes over 65 years.

  With a little sting in the tail. Up to about 1990, we were the main gainers. Since 1990, apathy has been the only gainer.

• Paul McKeown 19th May '10 - 9:16pm

  @David

  No. What is missing is “others”. They have gained dramatically. We should encourage right-wing Conservatives to vote UKIP and hard left Labourites to vote Green. Without necessarily increasing our own vote, we would certainly increase our share of parliamentary seats. To do this, we should point out the incongruity of a “broad church” political party which includes, e.g. Bill Cash and Ken Clarke. They have no views in common, only their mutual interest in getting to returned to parliament, and the Conservative Party spends all its time “triangulating” Bill Cash in order not to lose the electors who share his views. Labour has similar problems.

• Dave 19th May '10 - 9:40pm

  @ Paul
  Two (or rather three) can play at that game! Is there much more obvious cohesion to a party that unites people who’d rather ally with the Conservatives and others who prefer Labour? Yet somehow all three manage to muddle along.

• Paul McKeown 19th May '10 - 11:59pm

  @Dave

  The difference is that, looking only the Conservatives, but bearing in mind that similar observations can be made, that Conservative rhetoric is typically very different from Conservative policy. For someone for whom, for instance, a strong line on Europe or immigration was important, then it should be pointed out that the policies that the Conservative party was actually putting forward would almost certainly not match with expectations. The official Conservative line, rather than the often frightening Conservative mood music, is, perhaps, closer to the Lib Dem position, than the UKIP position. I think that in future election campaigns, the LDs must make it clear where Labour and Conservative present policies that differ from the noises that their supporters anticipate and should indicate where the LD position is not, in fact so radically different. This puts the squeeze on red and blue, who both have potentially strong stalking horses threatening to outflank them.

  One example I would like to give concerns the amnesty for illegal immigrants, which, in the end was poorly promoted or, indeed, defended by the LDs. The LD policy was to regularise (and providing stringent safeguards to) an existing, but unspoken, policy implemented by the Major government and continued by the Blair and Brown governments. Basically let the people know, rather than lie to them. I was disappointed that Clegg didn’t respond by challenging Cameron to discontinue Major’s policy; he wouldn’t have had an answer. Essentially only the LDs and UKIP were at all honest on the topic, although they choose radically different ways to deal with the fact. If you really wish to end the amnesty for long-stay illegal immigrants, you should not vote Conservative, as it is their policy, after all.

  This is the sort of political point I think we should be prepared to make. Let the stalking horse eat into red and blue. I don’t think our vote would be affected by such a line.

• Democratic Socialist Dave 23rd May '10 - 2:22am

  I just wasted more time reshuffling the columns in my charts to show absolute votes more clearly, and also to show Lib-Lab and Tory-Lib totals (as opposed to C+Lab vs the rest). As someone here observed, the Lib-Lab share does seem relatively constant both in votes and share; this may be less true of the Tory-Liberal aggregate. Of course the rise in abstentions and Other Candidates is also striking.

  See:

  More British Election Statistics since 1945

  Your comments and analysis are of course more than welcome (why else would I make those tables?)

• Dave 23rd May '10 - 5:05am

  @ Democratic Socialist Dave, 2:22 am
  In terms of votes relative to the total electorate there is some stability to the Con-“Lib” share too, particularly if we count its 1983-92 bounce as reflecting 1981’s Labour split rather than as a strict Liberal gain. There’s a low in 1997-2005 comparable to the Lab+Lib one in 2001-10, with a return this year to something approaching the 1935-79 average. So the constancy’s less marked, but it’s there. If Labour’s overall vote loss is LibDems’ gain and vice versa, the same applies to a lesser extent to Tory/LibDem over the long term.

  But since 1981 it’s the LibDem and Labour votes that have tended to move in opposite directions at each election. The implication is that LibDems’ greatest opportunities – and vulnerabilities – lie on the left. And the conclusion I’d draw is that the party needs to be very wary of becoming too closely identified with the centre-right. That’s not a case against coalition, but rather a reason to be cautious in adopting a stridently anti-Labour tone – easier said than done when they’re the newly-dethroned Opposition and still smarting and it’s their job to throw everything they’ve got at you, but sometimes you have to be a little thick-skinned if you want to get ahead or even hold your own.

• Democratic Socialist Dave 23rd May '10 - 7:07am

  I had to recreate my posting to my own blog after accidentally deleting it, and in the process changed the URL slightly, so the link above is broken. Here’s a good one:

  More British Election Statistics since 1945

• Democratic Socialist Dave 24th May '10 - 2:37pm

  After doing some thinking, let me respond to a couple of the broader strategic points.

  I should first declare my interest, which is as a UK citizen who’s lived in the U.S. since 1960 and doesn’t identify himself with the (British) Liberal Democrats at the same time he’s not positively hostile to them. I didn’t watch the debates and haven’t read the manifestoes, so I’m a bit vague about the current topical differences between the three main British parties. I’ve belonged to several U.S. members of the Socialist International and done most of my political work within the Democratic Party rather than outside. In Britain, I sympathize with both the libertarian wing of Old Labour and with those Old Labourites like Shirley Williams who helped to found the SDP.

  (1) Overall, it’s not at all clear to me that the Liberal Democrats will outvote the Tories or Labour, and cross one of those lines in any of the next few elections. It’s certainly possible, but what seems just as likely (if not more likely) is that the Lib Dems will occupy the place of semi-permanent Third Party of the Realm, analogous to the New Democratic Party (NDP) in Canada and the Irish Labour Party. Those parties contest almost all the parliamentary seats and certainly aspire (as very well they should) to first place, but they haven’t broken the two-party dominance of Conservatives and Liberals in Canada (which operates first past the post) or Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in the Republic (under pure STV).

  [It’s worth noting that while at the federal level, the NDP has never come close to reaching 30% of the vote, it’s often one of two alternating parties of government at the provincial and territorial level (e.g. British Columbia), while being hopelessly out of the running in other provinces and territories (e.g. Québec). A parallel British situation might occur in the devolved governments of Scotland and Wales, where the Liberal Democrats offer as credible an alternative to Labour as the Nationalists or Tories.]

  There was certainly a breakout in the 1970’s where the Liberals made it clear that they weren’t going to vanish, split or merge into nothingness as seemed possible between 1929 and 1959. And it seems unlikely that they will be eclipsed in the conceivable future by the Greens, UKIP or BNP, let alone (at Westminster) by the Nationalists or Ulster Unionists. So a place among the top three parties seems assured for as long as we can reasonably predict.

  However, in 2010, the Liberal Democrats did not do as well as the Liberal-SDP Alliance had done in 1983, and as Dave has shown, a fairly constant share of the electorate (about 40%) has split its votes between Labour and the LDP. So a quarter century of credible effort has not shown, at least by the numbers, a steady climb towards second or first place.

  No one can confidently predict the effects of coalition or a change in the voting system. But I think that those would be more likely causes of a further Lib Dem resurgence (or decline) than some perceived continuing trend extrapolated from past election figures.

  (2) It’s early days for the Coalition, but it seems to me that it could cement the Liberal Democrats’ third place, swallow them into a junior partnership with the Tories as did the coalitions of 1916 to 1945, or split the Conservative Party. David Cameron (after three unsuccessful predecessors) will have difficulty holding the allegiance of those who see the Thatcher Years as ones of triumph and prosperity. If, on the other hand, Cameron makes too many concessions to his Right, he will of course risk alienating or splitting the Liberal Democrats.

  (3) Paul McKeown’s suggestion of appealing, from well on the outside, to non-Liberal Democratic voters on the fringes of the Tories and Labour to vote for some relatively-hopeless minor party in order to increase the relative chances of the LDP seems unpromising as well as cynical. Perhaps that’s because I come from a political tradition that’s been urging leftists, liberals and socialists for fifty years to do almost of their electoral work within the Broad Church or Big Tent of the Democratic Party (“yes, George Wallace and LBJ are Democrats, but so are Walter Reuther, Ron Dellums and Michael Harrington”); I’m used to big tents and broad coalitions.

  I think the traditional strategy of appealing directly for Liberal Democratic votes from like-minded moderate members of other parties (Conservative, Labour, Green, nationalist) holds far more promise, while avoiding all kinds of strange rhetorical and ideological contortions.

  ¶ I wish I could arrange my thoughts more concisely and coherently, but I wanted to put them down while at least a few people are still reading this thread.

• Paul McKeown 25th May '10 - 8:15pm

  @DSD

  Sorry Dave, it isn’t meant to be cynical. What I find cynical is the attempt to smother debate by the red and blue broad church parties, which cover such large political ground that there are many people within those political parties who would struggle to find a political philosophy in common. I stand by my comment (and resent any imputation of cynicism) and would urge all voters to vote for what they believe in, rather than vote against what they fear.

• Paul McKeown 25th May '10 - 8:27pm

  And frankly DSD the idea that I should vote for either the so-called progressive red party appalls me as much as the idea of voting for the blues. This idea that because I’m LD means I should have some sympathy for Labour is an insult. Labour has proved (yet again) regressive, illiberal, warmongering, in favour of overarching central government, uninterested in genuinely helping the poor and on an economic suicide mission. It finds support for the most part in vested interests, fear of the blues and traditional and regional voting history. Your message that voting for a big tent progressive party is simply what Labour does at every election: don’t vote Liberal Democrat, you might let in the Conservatives. It is fundamentally a message of fear and an attempt to deny choice. In a system of voting where I could make a second choice, I would (in most circumstances) bullet vote, 1. LD, 2. get lost.

• Democratic Socialist Dave 26th May '10 - 1:35am

  Thanks very much for your comments, Paul. I have to go now, and will study them more closely when I return, but I do want to apologize (apologise) for not catching one reasonable inference from my previous post. When I was talking about big tents, I was assuming that there is a place for a Liberal Democratic Party and its voters, and not trying to sell Labour to Lib Dem voters. If I were in Britain, I can’t say with reasonable certainty whether I’d support Labour or the LDP because I don’t know enough now.

  [Even in Rhode Island, I may very well end up supporting an independent moderate candidate, former Sen. Lincoln Chafee, for Governor over whichever candidate the Democrats nominate; and that’s despite the fact that I opposed his re-election to the U.S. Senate as a very liberal Republican in 2000 and 2006 precisely because the Senate’s partisan balance was so delicate and so important.]

  The American analogy comes from the impregnable nature of the 2-party system here, reinforced not only by First-Past-the-Post but by the Electoral College; there’s a place, and always has been, for third parties, but they never last, so most progressives now work within the Democratic Party rather than outside it. But the UK (or rather Great Britain) today has something like a three-and-a-half-party system, once you count the nationalists, which is very different from days of Churchill and Attlee (Prof. Bogdanor says that in the election of 1951, Jo Grimond was the only one of the six Liberal MP’s elected without the aid of a Tory withdrawal). Those who feel that Labour’s too far “left” and the Tories too far “right” have a reasonable choice in many constituencies (even more so iwith STV or even AV) in the Liberal Democrats (or perhaps the SNP or Plaid Cymru). The career of Ross Perot’s Reform Party is just the latest example of why American voters and activists usually don’t have that kind of choice.

  I’ll comment later on the more sophisticated and difficult question of what (in the absence of true proportional representation or even alternative votes) is reasonable to tell voters, sympathizers or activists on the far right of the Conservatives or the far left of Labour.