After Clacton: What’s Britain’s Political Future?

October 10, 2014, 11:07 AM GMT+0

John Humphrys asks: Where next for UKIP?

UKIP’s success in the Clacton by-election was widely expected, though no less remarkable for that. Its near miss in the ‘safe’ Labour territory of Heywood and Middleton was in many ways more extraordinary. What the results of the two by-elections show is that, in the words of the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, “UKIP are now a major presence in British politics”. But where do we go from here? And what does UKIP’s success mean for the outcome of the general election next year?

Douglas Carswell’s success in Clacton in becoming UKIP’s first elected MP was widely expected for several reasons. He had been a popular and respected Conservative MP there for several years and his defection to UKIP was regarded as courageous and honourable rather than cynical and self-serving. What’s more the previously ‘safe’ Tory seat seemed almost perfect territory for UKIP. Voters there provided a tailor-made coalition for UKIP of reasonably affluent, disaffected right-wing Conservatives and far-from affluent traditional Labour voters who felt increasingly forgotten by the political establishment. That coalition bonded to give the new UKIP MP 60% of the vote, largely at the expense of the Tories whose share of the vote halved.

In Labour’s heartland of Heywood and Middleton in Greater Manchester, John Bickley came within 617 votes of becoming UKIP’s second elected MP and gave Labour an even greater fright. He increased his party’s share of the vote from a mere 3% at the last election to 39%, just two percentage points behind Labour.

These two results demonstrate UKIP’s ability to take support from all of Britain’s main political parties. UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, said the morning afterwards: “The whole of British politics has been shaken up. Something big is happening here. People want change. They have had enough of career politicians in the three main parties”.

It is the Tory Party that has most immediately to worry about. Next month it will face another by-election in Rochester and Strood where a second of its MPs has defected to UKIP. The constituency is, on the face of it, less welcoming to Mr Farage’s party than Clacton: there is a bigger Tory majority to overcome and a smaller number of disaffected ex-Labour voters to target. Whereas in Clacton the Tories may have tacitly given up hope from the very beginning, in Rochester they are going to put everything they’ve got into trying to hold the seat. They have to: if they can keep Rochester Tory, they can arrest UKIP’s momentum. But if they fail, they risk seeing that momentum becoming all but unstoppable as other Tory MPs start to see the advantage of defecting too.

So how will they play it? The Conservatives (and the other main parties) have tried various tactics to dent UKIP and none has succeeded. They started with abuse: David Cameron famously once described UKIP supporters as “loonies, fruitcakes and closet racists”. Then they dismissed the party as simply a repository for protest votes that people would ignore when they came to the serious business of picking a party to run the country at a general election. Now they are trying fear.

Grant Shapps, the Conservative Party chairman, as good as told me on the Today programme that they virtually offered the keys of Downing Street to Ed Miliband. He said the results were “an alarm clock moment” to warn Conservative-leaning voters that if they continued to flirt with Mr Farage, the only beneficiary would be Mr Miliband: they would be voting for a repeat of all the old Labour policies of high taxing, borrowing and spending that got Britain into the mess from which it was only now emerging.

It’s not hard to see the logic of this electoral arithmetic. Although Labour appeared narrowly to miss getting a very bloody nose in Heywood and Middleton, an analysis of the underlying shift in votes gives the party some hope. Although its majority was slashed almost to the point of disappearing altogether, its share of the vote went up from 40% to 41%. What seems to have happened is that while former Tory voters in the constituency switched massively to UKIP, former LibDem voters switched in enough numbers to Labour. If this were to happen elsewhere at the general election, then Labour could hope to win a large number of Tory/Labour marginals in the north of England.

But Labour can’t be sure of this. Recent opinion poll results (which have seen the Tories move slightly into the lead over Labour) and the generally apprehensive mood of the party’s conference last month, suggest that it knows the task of winning an overall majority next May is still formidable. Indeed the emergence of UKIP as a “major presence” in British politics means that a hung parliament is more likely than ever.

It has become almost a commonplace of political commentary in recent years to assume that hung parliaments are now the norm. The sharp decline in mass support for the two main parties has been the chief cause and the result in 2010 seemed to confirm the trend. But that was a hung parliament between three parties; a hung parliament in 2015 could a rather different and altogether more tricky business precisely because of the advance of UKIP.

On the basis of current polls, the outcome of the election could be something like this:

In terms of total votes cast, the Tories could well manage to come first, with Labour second, UKIP third and the LibDems fourth. But because of the way the first-past-the-post system works with existing constituency boundaries, that result could well translate, in terms of seats, into something very different, with Labour coming first, the Tories second, the LibDems third and UKIP a poor fourth, and with no party having an overall majority.

So the question becomes: How do you create a sustainable coalition government out of that?

The most obvious solution would be for Labour and the Liberal Democrats to form a coalition. But that would mean a government made up of parties that had come second and fourth respectively in the popular vote. Many would howl that this was not democratic. Instead a minority government might try to chug along until it were defeated, sparking another election. But that could lead to much the same result. In other words, we might easily find ourselves in a long period of indecisive election results, hung parliaments and unstable governments.

The only way out of this in our first-past-the-post system is for one of the two main parties to find a way to secure an overall majority. Some are now saying that Labour can’t do this while it has Ed Miliband as its leader and the only way for the Conservatives to get a majority is for it to do some sort of deal with UKIP. The problem here is that for all its eurosceptic talk, the Conservative leadership does not agree with UKIP’s main policy, to take Britain out of the EU. Indeed, David Cameron’s policy could be seen as being the exact opposite: to renegotiate our terms of membership and then, in a referendum, to lead the campaign to stay in. Mr Farage would in any case demand Mr Cameron’s head as the first requirement in any deal with the Tories.

In the end of course it is you, the voters, who will decide what happens. Are you so disillusioned with the main parties that you are determined to cast your votes for new forces in British politics, not only UKIP but also the Greens and nationalist parties? Or, having decided in the referendum a couple of years ago to stick with the first-past-the-post electoral system, are you ready to return to the fold of one of the main governing parties in order to make stable government easier to achieve?

Let us know what you think about the consequences of the ‘shake-up’ UKIP has brought to British politics now that it has its first elected MP.