Three Lessons from the last British General Election

In the British General Election the Conservative Party (The Tories) won a majority of seats in the House of Commons, a result none of the pollsters, or even the most die-hard Tory pundits though possible. Everyone expected what the polls had been saying for weeks, that the election was an absolute dead-heat between the Labour and Conservative parties. This was not, however, the case. In the event, the Conservative gained a 12-seat overall majority, out of 650 seats, a small margin, but crucially nearly a hundred seats more than its nearest competitor, the Labour Party, which won only 232 seats, and which was hampered by an unprecedented hemorrhaging of votes to the Scottish National Party in Scotland, which took 56 seats. The Liberal Democratic Party, for 5 years part of a governing coalition with the Conservatives, won only 8 seats, down from 57 seats won at the last election in 2010. How did this happen? The answer can, I think, teach us much about the nature of campaign politics. I have divided these lessons so as to fall under three major headings. Firstly,

1. Popular Credibility is more important than Ideology:

One of the most remarkable results of this election was the precipitous fall in vote share for the Liberal Democrats, the traditional “third party ” of British Politics , a group of self-styled moderates who gained a lot of credibility in 2003 as the only party to oppose Tony Blair’ s participation in the invasion of Iraq. Twenty three percent of the voting public choose them at the last election, and as a result, no party having gained an overall majority of seats, they were left as “king-makers”, whose support the Conservative party then needed to form an governing administration. British tradition dictated that they should have offered the government support on a vote-by-vote basis, while nevertheless pledging themselves to support the Conservatives on more general motions “of confidence”, which give an administration the constitutional authority it needs to stay in office. Any such support of the Labour party would not have produced sufficient votes to maintain an administration run by that party. Yet the Lib Dems (as they are known) broke with that tradition, and formed a coalition-government (a formulation previously used only in wartime) in which both Conservative and Lib Dem members of parliaments took seats in Cabinet, Conservative leader David Cameron was declared Prime Minister, and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg Deputy Prime Minister .

The trouble was that this involved a lot of compromise on policy, especially from the Liberal Democrats. Party leader Nick Clegg, and other Lib Dem members, had publically signed a pledge during the 2010 campaign not to raise the fees British students must to pay to attend University. Instead, by the end of that year, they agreed to a Conservative plan to treble them. Almost exactly at this point, support for the Liberal Democrats began to plummet. Some abandoned ship the minute they “got in to bed” with the Tories, but after supporting a rise in tuition-fees they had pledged to oppose, the Lib Dem’s fall from popular grace was all but complete.

It stands to reason that the nearly 15 percent of the electorate who broke with the Lib Dems at this point would have decided to support the only major party which had consistently opposed the rise in tuition fees, and also pledged to lower them should they return to power. But this is not what happened. Bizarrely, many former Lib Dem supporters seem to have switched to supporting the Conservatives, the very party whose association with the Lib Dems they thought so infamous. How can such a thing be explained? Let me explain. After the tuition-fee controversy, the Lib Dems became a kind of blighted product, which it was no longer modish for people to buy. Yet many voters obviously lost sight of why the product became so blighted in the first place. Similarly, many of these same people did not clearly see which party should have been their only logical alternative, if indeed they were absolutely determined not to vote Lib Dem. All they knew was that the Liberal Democrat leadership had broken a solemn campaign promise, without any extenuating circumstances, and were therefore no longer worthy of popular support. Many of them appear to have voted Conservative. Though they may have agreed less with Conservative policy, the Tories at least retained more credibility, in their eyes, for not having so flagrantly gone back on their word. These voters could not, for some reason, vote Labour, though that would have been the most ideologically consistent thing for them to to do , because Labour itself had itself became a blighted product, which brings us to the next lesson of the British Election:

2. Sleaze works:

One of tenants of the Tory Campaign Strategy, probably devised by its shameless Australian political Strategist Lynton Crosby, was to tell all and sundry that a Labour Government could only survive with the support of the Scottish Nationalist members of Parliament who would, in this context, use their new-found influence to sabotage the United Kingdom and force it to split apart. This was dishonest on many levels. Firstly, it was perfectly possible for the Labour party to win enough seats so as not to have to rely on Scottish Nationalist support, so long as it did much better than the Conservatives in England and Whales (ironically, a possibility, if it hadn’t been for the Tory scare campaign about the Scottish Nationalist Party). Second, the Labour party never had any intention of making compromises with the Scottish Nationalist Party (or SNP) on matters of policy. As anyone who understands British Politics knows, all that a Labour government would have to have done was to put forward its legislative program in toto, trusting that the SNP would vote to support them in any votes of no confidence that might arise, even if it refused to support specific elements of that program on certain occasions. If SNP members had refused to support specific measures introduced by a Labour government, the Labour party could easily have turned to members of the opposition Conservatives to get them though. It was, after all, not the fault of the Labour party that that the SNP disliked them less than they disliked the Conservatives, and that the SNP would have rather supported them in confidence votes when a Conservative Government was the only real alternative. It was utterly dishonest for the Tory Campaign to say, as it repeatedly did, that a Labour government would necessarily be “in hoc” to the SNP. But, as we saw last week, dishonesty can work wonders. The Tories had spent years before the official campaign began deriding Labour leader Ed Milliband as a Marxist loony, without supplying anything in the way of facts to back up that claim. Their SNP scare campaign was only the crowning glory in years of political dishonesty. Yet all of this gave the Conservative Party a majority of seats nobody thought even remotely possible, which brings us to our final lesson from the British election:

3. Nothing is impossible until it doesn’t Happen:

Following the paradoxical rise of the Scottish National Party, after they lost the Scottish independence referendum, it became the universal consensus of British pollsters and pundits that the Labour party could no longer win an overall majority of seats in the House of Commons. It had, however, been the consensus of many months, even years before this, that the Conservative Party could definitely not win such a majority. They could not do so in the election that first brought them to power; and it is almost unheard of, in British politics, for a sitting Prime Minister to win a higher share of votes in his bid for re-election, than in his first campaign. In addition, there was the well-known depletion of the Liberal Democrat vote share, which nobody could reasonably think would result in more votes for the Conservatives, as has been explained. Yet the Conservatives did with a majority, as many voters did in fact seem to switch their allegiance from Lib Dem to Conservative. For election results do not always correspond to what you might reasonably expect. As shown last week, even things that were long ago declared to be absolutely beyond the realm of possibility can come to pass. So if anyone tells you Bernie Sanders has absolutely no chance of winning the Democratic Primary, or even that Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina are nor serious candidates, by all means feel free to agree with them. But do not accept what they say as gospel truth. For in Politics, literally anything, even the most inconceivable and illogical election results, is possible. Yogi Berra once said that in sports, “It ain’t over till its over”. Well, in politics, nothing is impossible until it doesn’t happen.