Election 2015: A Little Post-Match Analysis

  Well, I did not see that coming.

  The fact that nobody else did either is little consolation: the Conservative Party has won a majority of 6, and David Cameron will return to No.10 Downing Street as Prime Minister. Whilst most people anticipated that the Tories might well win largest party, no-one thought that they would manage to win outright. The pre-election polling has never been so drastically wrong, even in the 1992 debacle.

  So, is it time for everyone to the left of the Tory neoliberals to curl up in a corner and cry? Well, no. The temptation may be great, but I feel it is one that we should resist; for now, at least. All is not quite lost just yet. Here is a quick rundown of the major events of election night, and exactly what they mean for the future of this country.

The Conservatives won a majority of twelve. Clearly, a Tory government is not the result I or many others on the left wanted. The failures of the Conservatives over the last five years are stark: Real wages have entered their longest period of sustained decline in at least 50 years, the UK's GDP per capita is still lower than its pre-recession peak, the deep cuts to welfare have resulted in dozens of deaths and left hundreds of thousands of people destitute, the top-down reorganisation of the NHS has wasted millions and allowed creeping privatisation to continue... I could go on, but I'd only bore you. Suffice it to say, the Tories have had a terrible effect on this country.

However, all is not entirely lost. The Conservatives may have won a majority, but it is a small one; a much reduced majority, in fact, from that the Coalition has enjoyed since 2010. This means that Cameron will find it increasingly difficult to govern as backbench rebels - of which there will be many, you may be sure - hold his party to ransom. The corollary of that, of course, is that he may have to step up the anti-Europe and socially conservative rhetoric to appease the Tory old guard. So, the effects of this small majority may be good or bad, but the new government is certainly going to be far from stable.

The leaders of the three main opposition parties have resigned. Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage have all resigned as leaders of their respective parties. In Miliband's case, this is reasonable; under his leadership, the party lost seats and suffered electoral wipeout in Scotland, due at least in part to his personal inability to connect with the electorate. He represents the metropolitan champagne socialist branch of Labour, and this was obviously not something the people of the UK could believe in. 

Clegg's departure is also fair enough. The Liberal Democrats have been reduced to just 8 seats in the Commons, putting them in joint-fourth place with the DUP. From their impressive performances at the 2005 and 2010 elections, this is a long way to fall, and Nick Clegg's decision to take the party into coalition is certainly responsible.

The resignation of Nigel Farage (having failed to win South Thanet) is, quite frankly, the best news I've had all day, but it is also worrying. Farage has been the figurehead of UKIP for so long that his departure (however temporary I suspect it may be) could cause UKIP to collapse (a very good thing), or it could allow the far-right elements within the party to take over. Make no mistake, Nigel is by no means the worst of the bunch, and a UKIP pulled even further to the right is a scary prospect.

Scotland went SNP in spectacular fashion. The SNP swept to victory in Scotland, claiming all but three of the country's 59 seats. The huge bloc of nationalist MPs that Nicola Sturgeon will be sending to Westminster (led pretty soon, I suspect, by our old friend Alex Salmond) will be a thorn in David Cameron's side. He know's that his small majority means that a few rebels could rob him of the ability to govern, and the SNP will hammer home any advantage they get. However, their principled tradition of not voting on matters which do not affect Scotland will limit considerably their effectiveness. This may leave David Cameron with carte blanche to do as he wishes in England, a worrying prospect.

Turnout remained low, though it increased slightly to 66.1%. The continued refusal of a third of the country to cast their vote is a problem. Those who do not vote as a point of principle are unfortunately indistinguishable from those who simply can't be bothered; those who are frankly unable to find any political party they are capable of giving their support to count just the same in the minds of our political masters as those who just don't care. The fact that turnout is traditionally lowest among those groups (young people, ethnic minorities, the unemployed) who the Tory government will be targeting over the next five years makes this an even bigger issue. 

The number of big names who lost their seats is shockingly high. They call it a Portillo Moment when a political heavyweight falls at the ballot box, but there have been so many this time around that they might have to change the name. Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander, Scottish Labour Leader Jim Murphy, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, Business Secretary Vince Cable, Energy Secretary Ed Davey, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander... the list is huge. Most are from the Labour or Liberal Democrat parties, and many fell to the SNP in Scotland, but the decimation of the upper ranks of the main political parties - together with the planned departures of old leading lights such as William Hague, Jack Straw, Malcom Rifkind and Gordon Brown - means that the new House of Commons will have a very different dynamic.

The number of women MPs increased by a third. A piece of uncomplicated good news, for a change, and pretty self-explanatory. Before the election 23% of MPs were women; now it is 29%. That is, of course, still 21% short of the ideal, but it is a marked improvement and one we should be very pleased about. One of these new female MPs, the SNP's Mhairi Black, is also the youngest MP elected since 1667, a huge achievement only made more impressive when you consider she took the seat from Douglas Alexander.

The UK's electoral system is STILL very, very broken. I will end with perhaps the most important point: the discrepancy between vote share and seats in the House of Commons continues to be a huge issue. The SNP won 56 seats with just 4.7% of the vote; meanwhile the Lib Dems won 7.9% but only 8 seats. UKIP won a single seat with 12.6% of the vote, the Greens one with 3.8%. The Tories and Labour are separated by 99 seats but only 6.5% in the vote. You get the idea - there is little real connection between vote share and seat share, and this is disenfranchising madness. You can read my article on PR for a solution to the problem, but the short answer is this: we desperately need as electoral system which ensures that Parliament represents the wishes of the people. It's called 'democracy' - you may have heard of it.


  These are just some of the most important results of May the 7th - much more will become apparent over the coming weeks. In the meantime, it is important that the progressives among us redouble our efforts to convince the public that the Tory message of cuts and rampant neoliberalism is not the only way, and far from the best way. May 2020 awaits.

Politicians: They Won't Change Unless We Make Them

For decades, and particularly since the expenses scandal of 2009, politicians have grown steadily more despised - but why should they change?

  An ICM poll, published in the Guardian on October the 13th, gave us some interesting information on the state of politics in October 2014. The party polling itself was fairly standard fare - the only real point to note is the expected 5-point increase in UKIP's share in the wake of Douglas Carswell's election in Clacton - but more interesting is the data on the leaders' personal ratings, shown below:

  One point to raise straightaway is the absence of two individuals: Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party (expected, due to the outrageous anti-Green media bias) and Nick Clegg. Clegg's absence is particularly telling - it demonstrates the total lack of regard given to the now-decimated Liberal Democrats. But more important still is the data itself.

  Notice the numbers on the graphs. It will not escape your notice that they are all significantly below zero. Now, it is clear that certain leaders have strengths in certain areas: Farage leads significantly on perceived ability to understand the public and on perceived honesty, while Miliband is clearly ahead on looking after the interests of the many over the few. 

  Farage's party, then, will use these data to improve their anti-establishment credentials; Labour will (cautiously, so as to avoid cries of 'evil socialism) capitalise on the sense that they, not UKIP, are the true party of the working classes. Cameron will do his best not to mention them at all. But none of these approaches get to the real heart of the matter - and why would they? It is in the interests of all the neoliberal parties not to raise this question. So It's going to have to be me.

  The question is this: Why are our politicians so awful that we are having to differentiate between different degrees of negative publicity just to draw out some meaningful comparison?

  At the end of the day, it shouldn't matter that Ed Miliband is only 10 points below par at looking after the working classes while Farage and Cameron are 20 points below, because the key thing is this: They are ALL seen as terrible. Even 'anti-establishment', flavour-of-the-month UKIP has a leader seen as generally incapable across these three fairly broad categories. The fact that one leader might be slightly less bad than the other two should be irrelevant. The only reason it isn't is because the leaders are more or less identical, so the minutiae become suddenly vital differentiators.

  Why, then, do our political masters get away with being seen as universally useless? Sadly, the answer is because we let them. This most recent poll makes one thing clear - despite seeing their leaders (two potential Prime Ministers and a potential Deputy Prime Minister) as incompetent, 80% of the population who state they are likely to vote in May 2015 are planning to vote for either Labour, UKIP or the Conservatives. Add in the Lib Dems - whose neoliberal policies make them virtually identical to the other three, despite their current disfavour - and that's 91%.

  Even worse than this overwhelming lemming-style rush towards parties which these data prove we have no enthusiasm for is the number of people planning not to vote at all. The same poll shows that 23% of people rate themselves as 50% certain or less to vote, with 10% saying already that they definitely won't. Results from past elections show that, on average, around a third of voters do not vote on polling day. I've spoken at length about voter apathy before, so i won't wax lyrical about it here, but this also feeds into the overall issue.

  And that issue is this: Politicians won't change, they won't become any better than their current abysmal low, until we make them. And, much as Russell brand would have you believe otherwise, refusing to participate - tempting as it is - will not do that. Neither will voting for parties who espouse the same hypocritical, neoliberal-authoritarian post-Thatcherite political consensus as the Tories - and that includes UKIP as well as Labour and the Lib Dems. 

  The only way to force a change is to get involved. Campaign on issues which animate you, which make your blood boil; speak out when things occur in the world which are unfair; vote when polling day comes around, and for the Greens or the nationalists or any other party which challenges the status quo. But don't limit yourself just to voting - Brand is right about that: the once-every-five-years electoral ballot is the establishment's way of keeping us quiet in between. Fight for the things you deserve and for what you believe in, and maybe - just maybe - we might get some politicians who aren't universally reviled.

  One can but hope.

People (Without) Power

Victorious candidates by party

  It occurred to me the other day that many of my friends are astoundingly apolitical - that is, they have no real appreciation of what the political establishment is up to and, whilst they have opinions which could be described as political views, they tend not to associate problems in their own lives with the failure of the governments whose policies are ultimately responsible. Why, I wondered, is this?

Interesting map showing second-place
candidates by party

  I suspect the answer is, at least in its fundamentals, quite simple: politics is seen as boring. Politicians are grey men in greyer suits, who shuffle around on dull stages delivering bland speeches on uninteresting topics to audiences of sycophants and equally incomprehensible media types. They are not, in short, the kind of people that the public associate with the ideals and principles which motivate them. Idealism requires passion, and few of today's crop of political masters displays anything close to that.

  This basic disconnect between politicians and the rest of society, particularly the younger generation, is growing ever more pronounced. Membership of the 'big three' parties has plummeted since the high point of over 4 million in the early '50s to a low of around 400,000 today. More and more people are being turned off by the empty promises and hollow platitudes of the political class, and voter apathy is setting in, big time.

  This is a BAD THING.

  On the face of it, voter apathy looks like a bad thing for politicians - it means, after all, that they aren't connecting with the public. Time to pull their collective socks well and truly up, then? Well, no. When you think about it, voter apathy is actually hugely beneficial for the politicians. At the last general election, for example, turnout was only 65.1% of the electorate. This means that 34.9% of the adult population of the UK did not take part in the election, and therefore that the politicians could safely ignore over a third of the country. 

  If this was a freak occurrence, then such a move would be risky, but it is not - over the last five general elections, the average turnout has been just 67%, meaning that a third of the population consistently skip polling day, and therefore can have their opinions discounted by the political class. It is this kind of apathy which allowed the Labour government to be re-elected in 2005 with only 35% of the electorate's support, essentially eliminating the government's democratic mandate at a stroke. But that didn't matter - they had an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, and so could force their legislation through when nearly two thirds of the population didn't want it in the first place.

  Turnouts for local and European elections are even more shocking - 42.3% for local, 33.52% for European. And they're both averages - the most recent results are even lower. This means that local councils and the EU Parliament, often criticised for being undemocratic, really are just that.

  It's been a little statistic-heavy today, and for that I apologise. But this stuff's important - the lessening interest in what's going on around us is allowing politicians to ignore large sections of society and - since it's been shown that the younger, poorer and more ethnically diverse the cross-section, the less likely they are to vote - it's the people who are being most disadvantaged by the current political paradigm who matter least to the politicians who seem hell-bent on ruining our lives. 

  So, the moral of the story is, vote. Get yourself down to the ballot box at every opportunity and make a difference, even if it's only a small one. Sure, you have only one vote - but if that entire third of the electorate were to turn up at the polls in 2015, that's a hell of a lot of ones. And if you can't bring yourself to put a cross in any of the available boxes, so equally repugnant are the choices before you - and believe me, I sympathise - do something about it. Campaign, march, set up a political party, stand for election, write a cynical blog on the internet - anything to shift the political consensus in the direction you want.

  That's democracy, after all.