Did the UK electorate really intend to keep David Cameron in power?

What happened in the May election was an extreme outlier.

Let’s imagine elections are basically referendums on how a government is doing. Governing parties or coalitions either hold on to their voters, or they lose them. If they lose enough of them, usually the opposition gets in. Let’s look at the history of post-war UK elections before 2015:

1945 Conservative government loses 11.6% of its vote share, loses power, Labour gets in.

1950 Labour loses 1.6% of the vote share, holds on to power.

1951 Labour gains 2.7% of the vote share, loses power, Conservatives get in.

1955 Conservatives gain 1.7% of the vote share, holds.

1959 Conservatives lose 0.3% of the vote share, holds.

1964 Conservatives lose 6% of the vote share, loses power, Labour gets in.

1966 Labour gains 3.9% of its vote share, holds.

1970 Labour loses 4.9% of its vote share, loses power, Conservatives get in.

1974 Conservatives lose 8.5% of its vote share, loses power, Labour minority government gets in.

1974 Labour government gains 2% of its vote share, holds.

1979 Labour government loses 2.3% of its vote share, loses power and the Conservatives get in.

1983 Conservatives lose 1.5% of its vote share, holds.

1987 Conservatives lose 0.2% of its vote share, holds.

1992 Conservatives lose 0.3% of its vote share, holds.

1997 Conservatives lose 11.2% of its vote share, loses power, .

2001 Labour loses 2.5% of its vote share, holds.

2005 Labour loses 5.5% of its vote share, holds.

2010 Labour loses 6.2% of its vote share, loses power, Coalition gets in.

The gist is that if an electorate supports the existing government they keep voting for them, and if they want to throw them out then they desert them, If that really simple idea is correct we should be able to get some neat graphs. So, here’s one, where I’ve grouped the elections where the incumbent government was either kept “In” as blue dots and where it was thrown “Out” in red, and ordered it by the gain or loss in vote share the government party or parties received:

That looks pretty clear- if the government in power loses more than 2.5% of their vote share, they are pretty much guaranteed to be thrown out, and if they lose less than that, or even gain vote share, they are pretty much guaranteed to be kept in. The two relative outliers on this chart to my eyes are the 2005 Labour hold (blue arrow), despite losing 5.5% of the vote share, and the 1951 Labour loss (red arrow), despite gaining 2.7% of the vote share. Labour’s 2005 hold can be explained by a strong Lib Dem showing, efficient distribution of Labour votes, and the Conservatives still failing to recover significant vote share. Labour’s 1951 loss can be put down to a falling Liberal party and inefficient distribution of Labour voters grouped into safe seats- Labour won the popular vote 48.8% to the Conservatives’ 44.3%, but were still thrown out.

Putting these two outliers to one side, the verdict is pretty clear: if a government can hold on to most of its voters, losing less that 2.5% of vote share, they will stay in power. If they lose more, they will be thrown out, you can bank on it, right?

Well, you could until May 2015. The Tories and Lib Dems had won a combined 59% of the vote share in 2010, and the Coalition could be genuinely said to be democratically legitimate.

Let’s imagine for a second that the electorate liked what the Coalition government was doing between 2010 and 2015. The 17.5 million people (59% of the electorate) who voted for the Lib Dems and Tories would have grown, or perhaps shrunk only a little. As the chart above demonstrates, if the electorate wants a government to stay in power, the voters stick with it, with perhaps only a few becoming disgruntled. Instead, the 17.5 million voters who had voted for Coalition parties in 2010 shrank to 13.8 million.

So let’s add the 2015 data to our chart, with the Coalition government losing over 14% of its vote share, but resulting in David Cameron staying on as PM (BIG BLACK ARROW).

That is by far the biggest outlier on the chart. Now, people might immediately say that the Conservatives themselves gained vote share, slightly. Yes, that’s true, and that would reflect, in my view, the fact that the Coalition was mostly Conservative in its policies. The people who were happy with Coalition government were… Conservatives, and those voters stayed. Those unhappy with the Coalition voted for a non-Coalition party.

But while the Conservatives might content themselves in thinking that they made small but significant gains in seats and vote share, the chart above paints a different picture. It shows that, more than any other post-war government, the electorate wanted to throw this Cameron-led government out. But no single party presented a unifying viable alternative.

The parties that did present a real alternative, the SNP, UKIP, and the Greens, all saw their vote shares go up massively. Were they all proposing the same alternative? No, of course not, the SNP and Greens are arguably leftist parties and UKIP is difficult to define. It is considered hard right because of its anti-immigration talk, but the party is actually thriving on the economic insecurity felt by working class voters. In Scotland, the SNP easily picked up those voters (UKIP only got 1.6% of the vote share in Scotland, compared to 14% in England and Wales), so these voters are clearly not dedicated to a fringe right-wing party, but rather any party that sounds like it will fight for their economic interests.

So, why was Labour not that unifying alternative? There are a lot of possible explanations, from Miliband being a personally unappealing leader, to people having bad memories of the last Labour government and not trusting the party on key issues. For what it’s worth, my view is that it was a combination of Miliband’s lack of appeal and the fact that Labour policies were not presenting a real alternative for voters. Labour did not present an alternative to austerity, and few if any alternatives to the millions of voters who have not seen their real wages rise in years and have been left behind by rising inequality under all shades of government over the last three decades. The SNP, UKIP and Greens did present a real alternative, and they picked up the votes, votes which should have naturally been Labour’s if they had had the courage to claim them.

Instead, David Cameron’s government lost 14% of its electoral support, a record for any post-war government, yet managed to stay in power.