The United Kingdom goes to the polls tonight, almost three years ahead of schedule. The Conservatives, led by prime minister Theresa May, are overwhelming favorites – Sportsbet has them at six to one on to win a majority and ten to one on to form government – but there’s a widespread sense that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour opposition has outperformed expectations.
Last time around, in 2015, the Conservatives surprised almost all observers (including this one) by winning a majority, albeit a narrow one: 330 of the 650 seats, with 36.9% of the vote.* (Pause here to be suitably shocked by those numbers. This is an unreformed electoral system if ever there was one. In fact it can get worse; Tony Blair won a larger majority in 2005 off 35.2%.)
It is not disputed that the Conservatives will increase their vote this time, probably to something above 40%. But Labour will also improve on its 30.4%, since the vote for minor parties has nosedived: particularly the UK Independence Party, which came third last time with 12.6%. UKIP achieved its goal with the “leave” vote in last year’s EU referendum and now lacks any obvious purpose except for a sort of generalised xenophobia, which the Tories seem to be catering to adequately.
Fourth and fifth placegetters from last time, the Liberal Democrats (7.9%) and Scottish Nationalists (4.7%), are also in some difficulty; the former are at best holding their vote in what should have been a comeback election for them, while the latter are bound to lose some ground in Scotland, where they hold 56 of the 59 seats. Scots have now been to the polls five times in four years, so it’s understandable that the SNP’s call for another referendum would not be popular – just as the Tories are being punished in the rest of the country for an unnecessary early election.
Beyond those limited verities, the likely shape of this result is very difficult to pick. Opinion polls have given widely different readings; their record in 2015 was poor, and no-one knows just how and how well they have adjusted their methodology to try to remedy the problem. The antediluvian electoral system makes it hard to translate votes into seats, and the opportunities for tactical voting make the problem worse.
To get a feel for things, best to start with Guy Rundle’s excellent preview in yesterday’s Crikey (perhaps leaving aside some of his ideological flights of fancy), then work your way through the poll results and associated seat projections collected by Wikipedia.
If the mainstream of the polls (as distinct from the outliers that each side seizes on when it suits them) is anything like correct, then the Tories are going to increase their majority – probably to somewhere between 50 and 80 seats (that is, a gain of 20 to 35 seats), although some estimates go as high as 100.
That’s below what many were expecting when the election was called, when a majority of 150 or more seemed possible. But it’s nonetheless a reasonable result, particularly if it’s towards the high end of that range; it will put May out of danger for the time being, although it is unlikely to make the Conservative Party any more governable in the long run.
If I was barracking for the Tories (which, as I explained the other day, I am not), the thing that would most worry me is the thought that the pollsters have over-corrected for the mistakes they made last time, and that instead of understating Conservative support they are now understating Labour’s.
In that event, it’s possible that the government will gain few if any seats, which would make May’s position a precarious one. Negotiating Britain’s exit from the EU is going to be difficult enough: the point of the early election was to reduce the power of the Tory backbench to run interference. If it fails to do so, the prime minister’s critics will be out for blood.
Worse still, if the government loses its majority, other options become thinkable. Labour has no serious chance of winning a plurality – as Rundle says, “There is no likely-at-all scenario in which the Tories get other than the largest number of seats.” But a net loss of more than 20 seats would raise the possibility of a Labour-led coalition if the Scots and the Lib Dems were willing to come on board.
Such a coalition would be an unwieldy beast, and it’s hard to think of a politician less suited than Corbyn to the task of managing it. Nor would he be at all likely to step aside and let someone else have a try. Just as well, perhaps, that it’s unlikely to happen.
Nonetheless, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the British party system is headed for a major shakeup sometime in the near future. With such unsatisfactory choices on offer, there is a big opportunity for something different, perhaps along the lines of what Emmanuel Macron has achieved in France (more about that tomorrow). But for now, Britons seem stuck in the bog into which David Cameron unintentionally deposited them.
Polls close at 7am Friday eastern Australian time, and meaningful results will start coming in about three hours later. If it’s not too depressing, I’ll do some liveblogging, as no doubt will many others.
* Note: what looks like a ten-seat majority is actually 15 seats on the floor of the House of Commons, since the Speaker and the four Sinn Féin MPs do not vote. I shall ignore this complication, but it sometimes produces discrepancies in reported totals.
The World is Not Enough 
I wrote something like that in my 2010 Crikey article on that election and its awful outcome. Since then they have had a referendum in which they voted down a preferential system and chose to keep their status quo. I don’t quite know what it is about the Anglosphere but it is extremely resistant to changing. I mean think about suggesting the Americans should change and you’d get blank looks if not a gun pointed at you. Australians don’t even think about the electoral system and instead always just moan and whinge about the politicians. The Brits are even worse, and clearly have learned absolutely nothing from the Macron and REM phenomenon; and as I have written elsewhere, while it may work for Macron and France for a while, I can’t see it as a sustainable thing either. Their left split three-ways and their right split at least two ways (three if counting the far-right who turn to Le Pen). If too many of these are in a single party for too long it will fracture; they really need about 4 to 5 parties each of which can represent genuine diversity of opinion.
The only system that can manage the fracturing of society is a multi-party system that itself can reorganise under natural forces to form a more stable workable arrangement (that doesn’t need to be stable beyond a working term).
Further, in the UK the Cons are getting rewarded and though they may have some factional trouble, winning is a big force to keep them together (unless May’s weak leadership which now stands naked, combined with disastrous Brexit outcomes ….). In Australia it is the conservatives who are fracturing and Labor are holding together. In the US it is the conservatives who are ready to shatter into about 4 factions but … they’re Americans and will die–or kill each other with automatic weapons–before they change anything. The thing about France is that both sides shattered simultaneously.
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Oh, and let’s not forget the next gen of voters. Millenials stood up for Macron: 60,000 volunteered and ran his En Marche. But they are a fickle bunch and in the US when their hero of the hour, Bernie Sanders, didn’t win nomination a lot of his Bernie Bros had a giant sulky juvenile tantrum and refused to vote for Clinton. In Australia they drive GetUp! which might bring some change though the major parties are driven by inertial momentum (to do nothing much).
In the UK they could have changed the Brexit outcome if they bothered voting. And worse the UK is riven by class issues and its education system is horrible, divided between the good, bad and ugly. I’d say it is the last country where the millenials will form a cohesive force for change. This is reflected in the crazy incoherent attitudes to Brexit.
They’re a lost cause (and I actually came to that conclusion almost twenty years ago).
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