Writing for Public Service Europe, Lib Dem campaigner Richard Marbrow has an interesting piece on the distinctly geographical ‘success’ of Ukip.
Here’s an excerpt:
For those of us who ply our politics in the north or the west of the United Kingdom, the inability of the British press to understand the existence of parts of the country more than an hour from London is a source of never ending frustration. The game changer of UKIP gains in the county council elections is a phenomenon largely contained in the South and East of England. Their breakthrough did not even extend into the South West, in theory one of their strongest areas.
In terms of seats won, UKIP did not beat the Liberal Democrats in any European region and only beat Labour in one – the South East. Two thirds of their seats came in just two of the eight English regions with widespread elections – the East and South East – and the further north you go, the fewer seats UKIP won. In the two northernmost regions – the North West and North East – UKIP did not win a single seat and in Yorkshire and the Humber they won just two. While the East Midlands result flattered them with 16 councillors in Lincolnshire in the West Midlands, they only scraped home in 6 seats.
Just to put the UKIP victory in further perspective they got less than half as many seats as the Liberal Democrats and less than a third of the Labour total. The Tories got seven times as many seats as the party being treated as victors. The number of councillors elected as independents also handily beat UKIPs ‘earth shattering’ total. So UKIP are largely a party of the South East of the country. Unfortunately, the British media is a creature of broadly the same geographical confines and does not understand the polarisation of politics between the North and South of the country.
Already there is speculation that UKIP will win the European elections in 2014. While their fifth place showing in 2013 will continue to be portrayed as a glorious victory for some time to come – the media are a fickle, capricious bunch and with more than 150 UKIP county councillors now joined to Nigel Farage in a political family with some very interesting characters, the opportunity for bozo eruptions is greatly increased and their performance in 2014 cannot be predicted with any certainty.
The true impact of UKIP as we approach the 2014 elections to the European Parliament will largely be the way in which they affect the major political parties and the messages they campaign on. All three major party leaders seem to be prepared to pander on immigration despite many well-known ‘facts’ being completely untrue. Will one of the leaders ever be brave enough to point out that UKIP leaflets – about 29 million Bulgarians and Romanians being able to come to the UK – are scaremongering of the basest kind, or will they all agree that ‘something must be done’?
You can read the rest of Richard’s piece here.
* Nick Thornsby is a day editor at Lib Dem Voice.
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22 Comments
As supporters of proportional representation, we should not be arguing just in terms of seats won, as is being done here. We ourselves have often argued on the basis that the number of seats we actually win does not represent our true share of the vote. And I’m afraid “UKIP are largely a party of the South East of the country” really is nonsense when you look at past election results for them. In the last European Parliament election they gained substantial shares of the northern constituencies.
I agree it is an interesting phenomenon to see UKIP gaining plenty of county council seats in the south but little in the north. However, I’d like to see a more considered analysis of exactly what is happening than what we have here.
Fenland (parts of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire) is fertile territory for UKIP. Remote, empty and unloved by the rest of the nation, and annoyed by immigrants taking low-paid jobs in agriculture. If they had a Rennard, I guess he would be targeting there.
UKIP ought to have a stronger appeal in the South East than anywhere else, because the rest of the country is run by the South East (/London). So if it believes it is being “run by Brussels”, that represents a loss of status for the South East. This doesn’t apply anywhere else.
I haven’t read the full article, but the part quoted seems to be a little complacent. For starters, in a lot of places this will have been the first electoral attempt by UKIP and even then they still didn’t stand everywhere.
I’ve had a look at the Cumbria results where (on pure guesswork) I would imagine there were a lot of first attempts, they competed in 52 of the 84 seats (approx 61%) and their percentage vote banding would appear to be:
0 – 4% = 0
5 – 9% = 5
10 – 14% = 9
15 – 19% = 12
20 – 24% = 12
25 – 29% = 13
30% = 1
So in 26 of the seats they competed for they managed to get at least 20% of the vote, which I would have thought isn’t bad if it is their first attempt in these places.
Also, in Cumbria the LDP won 16 seats, but 13 of those were in one division (South Lakeland), the other 3 came from 2 divisions and they didn’t get any seats in the remaining 3 divisions. So it would seem that the LDP has a lot of eggs in one basket and quite a large area of Cumbria is LD free. Some of the vote share outside Lakeland was also pretty dire, in Wigton the LDP candidate finished 5th (behind the BNP) with 4.3% of the vote.
So while the article might help people feel better, I actually think it may only tell half the story.
The difference in Lib Dem performance overall between regions is largely a demonstration of what a difference a few percentage points on average in an area makes to what the result is in seats. UKIP also seem to have done better in Torier areas because although their support overall is quite diverse, it tends modally to be more Tory in origin. Hence: more votes in those areas and crossing the threshold into more seats.
UKIP are still a serious threat in places like the North West on a proportional list basis.
Joe Otten
UKIP ought to have a stronger appeal in the South East than anywhere else, because the rest of the country is run by the South East (/London)
Never mind “the inability of the British press to understand the existence of parts of the country more than an hour from London is a source of never ending frustration”. What I find a source of never ending frustration is the inability of the elite in the south-east and everyone outside the south-east to understand the existence of people in the south-east who do NOT have senior executive or financial jobs. Here we go again, what Joe Otten has written here is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever read in LibDem Voice.
Most people in the south-east of England have mundane jobs. They are not running anything, or they are at most small cogs in the machinery of administration. There are millions of people in the south-east in manual jobs. There are millions of people in low-grade white collar jobs. These people vastly outweigh those who are of yhe stereotypical image of a “southerner” as a senior civil servant, or a City fat cat. Indeed UKIP seemed to be getting its support from people in the south-east who are NOT in senior positions running things, perhaps because politics and commentary in this country is dominated by those like Joe Otten who don’t acknowledge their existence.
@Matthew Huntbach
“What I find a source of never ending frustration is the inability of the elite in the south-east and everyone outside…”
Similarly, a source of never ending frustration for me is the inability of the elite in the south-east and everyone inside the south to understand the existence of people in the north that do NOT wear flat-caps and own whippets. As demonstrated by Chrish_sh’s comments, rural areas are much more inclined to vote UKIP/Tory in the North just as they do in the South (outside of London). The South of England is largely rural, hence the large swathe of blue, The North has many more large conurbations, hence the islands of red between the blue bits in the North.
@Nick Thornsby
“the British media is a creature of broadly the same geographical confines and does not understand the polarisation of politics between the North and South of the country.”
I was brought up in a safe Tory seat in Lancashire. Other than a 1 year interruption by the Lib Dems in 1991-1992 the seat has been Tory since 1950. The reason the Tories didn’t always win before 1950 is because the boundaries were subsequently re-drawn to include large swathes of countryside surrounding the market/industrial town at its centre. The polarisation of English politics has remained the same in the post-war period. There is a sharp divide between rural and urban areas. If there is North/South divide it is at the very most a marginal effect and pales in comparison to the rural/urban divide across the whole of England.
In the North we have the Respect Party.
Well it’s true they got fewer seats in the north, but they still did pretty well in terms of votes. They got about 15% of the vote in both North Yorkshire and Lancashire. In the South West, they got about 23% in both Devon and Dorset. As a comparison, they got about 25% in lincolnshire, and about 26% in Kent.
In all of these places they outpolled Lib Dems. The only difference is that Lib Dems are much more effective at turning votes into seats than UKIP – and in some areas of the country, UKIP happened to be more effective at turning votes into seats than others. In general, UKIP are more popular than Lib Dems pretty much everywhere in England (at least on the evidence of the last elections).
In other words, they’re about as much a party of the south east as Lib Dems are a party of the South West…
Steve
The South of England is largely rural, hence the large swathe of blue,
No it is not. Rural culture is almost extinct in the south-east. Most people live in towns, and many of the places which aren’t towns have more of a suburban feel than a rural feel. As elsewhere, geographical maps mask the fact that the more urban parts are much more densely populated, so you get a big blue semi-rural constituency, but a tiny red urban one. There aren’t many of the latter, true, but just because the electoral system distorts the results so that the Tories are largest almost everywhere does not mean almost everyone is a Tory.
The distortion of the electoral system meant the Labour vote there never elected many MPs even though it became quite substantial in the 1950s. Also the nature of industry in the south-east was less conducive to the formation of trade unions and the Labour culture that came with it. So Labour came to be identified as a northern party, and the sort of person who in the north would be a strong Labour voter in the south tended to drift and become apolitical, because actually no-one seemed to be speaking for them. But that does NOT mean such people are naturally right-wing, even if being apolitical they might go Tory – it’s more of a random choice thing. They can often be won over by a good Liberal Democrat campaign. However, if the only ones that talk to them are UKIP, well, they’ll go UKIP. In particular, if the Liberal Democrats seem to be a party obsessed with trendy metropolitan obsessions, they’ll go UKIP where they once would have gone LibDem.
I hadn’t realised this article was up but it is nice to see that I managed to start a row!
The difference between a county like North Yorkshire and Kent is minimal. Both monolithically Tory, rural and rich. The difference in UKIP results both in votes and seats was enormous.
UKIP themselves accept that they failed in the North, the North has the only Region with no UKIP MEP (NE England (Scotland isn’t a Region)) and their percentages were significantly lower the further North and West you go.
I thought this was an interesting phenomenon, my article wasn’t intended to ‘make people feel better’ rather it is part of my ongoing narrative that all political parties (including ours) need to accept that things don’t actually tend to sweep the whole UK at the same time, they affect different areas differently and the South is different to the North. My wider point is that I think the party campaigns to the South far more (and we do have more seats there) and that we need to consider more diverse messaging and campaigning techniques to support different parts of the country better.
Matthew,
‘Rural culture is almost extinct in the south-east.’
Hahaha, you really ought to consult a reputable oracle because you’re obviously drunk on car pollution.
@Richard Marbrow
“nice to see that I managed to start a row”
Darn kids, turn your back for one minute and they’re squabbling again 😉
“The difference between a county like North Yorkshire and Kent is minimal.”
Well I suppose it depends what your definition of minimal is. The population of North Yorks is approx 600k, the population of Kent is approx 1.4 million (both figures from their Council web sites). In terms of size, North Yorks is the largest County in the UK and Kent is ranked number 10 (from Wiki), so the population densities are very different. Perhaps the old rural/urban argument doesn’t fit so well in the modern age, would it be better to assess results by population density?
“… all political parties (including ours) need to accept that things don’t actually tend to sweep the whole UK at the same time…”
Perhaps it’s my bad for not belonging to a political party, but I can’t understand why they would think that anyway – do they really?
“My wider point is that I think the party campaigns to the South far more (and we do have more seats there) and that we need to consider more diverse messaging and campaigning techniques to support different parts of the country better.”
Again, I’m not a Party member so I don’t know, but I thought your local campaigns were supposed to be all about local issues (and how you can make local life better obviously)?
Actually, what I find interesting is that UKIP seem to have decided that they no longer want to be so one dimensional and are trying to build a political party. To do this, they seem to have decided to follow the same sort of strategy as the Lib Dems, i.e. get a toe hold, work hard and build. Whilst I’ve not really got the time to go trawling through thousands of results, Wiki does have partial results for Kent and they show that UKIP were building support in seats were they competed last time (including seats that they won previously).
So if UKIP have decided to follow your lead, why don’t you analyse what they are doing to see if they have made modifications that challenge your current thinking?
The UKIP performance in the recent elections represents a reemergence of the outside right as a potent force in British politics. We’ve been here before. During the late 1960s and early to mid 1970s, Enoch Powell was by far the most popular politician in Britain, winning support and admiration across class, ideological and regional divides. Powell’s political ideas were very similar to those of UKIP. He was a nationalist, a staunch opponent of British membership of the EEC (as it then was), he wanted to repatriate non-white immigrants, he was a free market fundamentalist, and he appealed to those who hankered after the days of short hair and Empire, as well as others simply fed with the main parties (Heath, Wilson and Thorpe). While Farage comes nowhere close to Powell in terms of intellect and charisma (and isn’t overtly racist), he has something that Powell never had, and that’s a political party. The outside right has always been with us, but it now has a political voice disconnected from the established party of the right, the Tory Party, whose purpose is and always was to promote and preserve the interests of the ultra-rich elite.
Sadly, politicians to the left of UKIP have eased this movement’s rise in two ways. Firstly, out of fear of the print media and sections of public opinion, the main parties, the Liberal Democrats included, have shied away from making the positive case for the EU and measured immigration. Given our silence on these issues, and UKIP’s and the print media’s vociferousness, is it surprising that so many of our fellow citizens have such prejudiced and ill-informed views? Secondly, some of these areas where UKIP won seats are those where both the Liberal Democrats and Labour have failed down the years to provide an alternative to the stagnation over which the Tories are only too happy to preside. The Liberal Democrats failed in Folkestone. Labour failed in Thanet. Both parties failed in Swale. There is a swathe of Southern and Eastern Britain where economic misery, low educational attainment and unenlightened opinions thrive. Unlike the North, we don’t think of these places as poor or having problems. Progressive politicians don’t seem to care about them. I’m talking about seaside towns lacking any tourist trade, serried ranks of bungalows with peeling paintwork, and empty prairies run by agribusiness. They are our West Virginias and Eastern Kentuckys. There’s nothing to stop the Liberal Democrats from offering these places something more positive than anti-immigrant scaremongering and eulogies for the 1950s, apart from a lack of will and timidity. Oh, I forgot. There’s also the “coalition”.
Richard Marbrow wrote:
“The difference between a county like North Yorkshire and Kent is minimal. Both monolithically Tory, rural and rich. The difference in UKIP results both in votes and seats was enormous.”
I cannot speak for North Yorkshire, but I can certainly speak for Kent, because I live there. Kent is not monolithically rich. Go to Sheerness or Lydd and you’ll find levels of social deprivation to match pretty much anywhere in the North. Go to Margate and ask yourself why a third of the shopfronts are boarded up and the beach is empty even in August. A few parts of Kent actually are rich. Principally Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells and the villages of the High Weald. Around this tongue of relative prosperity is a horseshoe of misery and stagnation, stretching from Dartford along to Thanet and around the coast through Folkestone to basically Bexhill in East Sussex. Within the “tongue” there are also pockets of deprivation. Even Sevenoaks has council estates. Maidstone has some quite big ones. Kent is not monolithically rural. How many people in Kent work in agriculture? I don’t know the figure, but I’d be surprised if it’s more than 1%. Cross the High Weald or the North Downs, and you’ll see plenty of fields, and plenty of hops and apples picked by cheap labour, but most of the people living in those hall houses and converted oasts work in towns, or are fortunate enough not to need to work. Those in humbler abodes (and there are plenty in most Kent villages) likewise work in towns. I would also dispute that Kent is monolithically Tory. Labour under Blair picked up 8 seats in Kent (if we include Medway, which went Unitary).
What we’ve seen in Kent is an outside right insurgency by a movement that dishes out plenty of rhetoric and appeals to base instincts but offers no realistic solutions. Liberal Democrats could offer solutions, but generally don’t, because we’re propping up a Tory government, and don’t have the resources to do so even if we had the gags removed from our mouths.
Oranjepan
‘Rural culture is almost extinct in the south-east.’
Hahaha, you really ought to consult a reputable oracle because you’re obviously drunk on car pollution
OK, so what proportion of the population of the south-east works as agricultural labourers? By “rural culture” I do not mean people with City jobs living in big houses and commuting to London. Neither do I mean people who have made their money that way and are playing at being farmers.
chris_sh
Again, I’m not a Party member so I don’t know, but I thought your local campaigns were supposed to be all about local issues (and how you can make local life better obviously)
Yes, but see for example how our party leadership decided to turn the Party Political Broadcasts which were supposed to be about the local elections into broadcasts focused on itself and national government. It’s playing the game that was played in the 1980s by the SDP and the right-wing of the Liberal Party – dismissive of local campaigning, and believing that a strong leader-focused national image was the way to win votes.
Richard Marbrow
My wider point is that I think the party campaigns to the South far more (and we do have more seats there) and that we need to consider more diverse messaging and campaigning techniques to support different parts of the country better.
By “South” do you mean the real south or the image of the south held in the heads of northerners and the metropolitan elite?
Like a lot of other people I’ve been thinking about the UKIP surge in the last week. Looking at results around the country, the polling data, and anecdotal evidence it seems to me that there are a number of different strands to it, the particular intertwining of which can explain a reasonable proportion of their success on May 2nd. There are the BLURs – “Modern life is rubbish”: tend to be middle aged to elderly, retired, living in culturally featureless places; there are a lot of areas like this in the south of England. SOTLOYs – “Sod the lot of you”: pretty evenly distributed around the country. INARBs – “I’m not a racist, but…”: I don’t want to stereotype areas because there are clearly serious problems in some places, but this does seem to have been a crucial factor in UKIP successes in parts of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. I haven’t been able to think of an acronym for the final category which is places which feel themselves to have been abandoned like Fenland (as David Allen pointed out above), or Thanet; which have weak or complacent political leadership; which have lost the economic raison d’etre and self-confidence they once had. There are also a few places where a strong UKIP candidate campaigning on community politics issues has built up personal support (Stubbington in Hampshire, for example).
I hope and expect that most UKIP councillors will be pretty useless and that they will lose their seats at the next election, but that doesn’t mean that we should not be learning the lessons of their success and doing what we can to address the dissatisfactions of our communities that led them to vote UKIP this time. The problem is that Clegg’s leadership has pretty much destroyed our party in many of the areas that UKIP is succeeding in, leaving a political vacuum that we will be unable to fill.
Thought you might find this amusing.
There’s an old (cockney?), phrase ‘ stitched me up like a kipper ‘. Which is exactly what the three main parties thought they had done to the voter, with their shameful ‘cartel’ of “Listen lads,….lets all stick together, and refuse em a Referendum”
How ironic, don’t you think, .. that finally, an old Kipper breaks up their deceit?
Good sense from many people here,particularly Tony Hill. I am looking at the seats UKIP fought and particularly the wons they won and would appreciate local anecdotal evidence that explains otherwise curiously good results such as that provided by Tony. (Send to [email protected]).
There are obviously some interesting factors in some areas eg – lots of wins in some areas with transient agricultural/food processing gang type labour from Easter Europe. And they have picked up quite a lot of seats in more run-down less prosperous parts of otherwise more affluent counties (not least in Eastleigh town). In a lot of which we have previously done well, often winning seats originally from Labour..
A curious thing is the number of coastal divisions they seem to have picked up. Some are explainable as decaying seaside towns with all their specific problems, but a lot of others too.
One final point: it’s obvious that the difference between a “rural” county and “urban” areas and authorities is not simple and the proprotion of people working in agriculture is of itself not a statistically significant factor. On the other hand there IS a real difference between a county like North Yorkshire or either Sussex and one like Lancashire or indeed a unitary like Bristol. And within Lancashire there is a real difference between rural West Lancs and urban East Lancs.
The fact is that North Yorkshire looks and feels like part of SE/Eastern England (even if people sound a bit different). It’s a more subtle cultural thing in many ways.
Tony Greaves