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Date: 10/05/15
Rounding Up (Part One)
I know that I promised an analysis of the election, but I can't really justify using that word to describe what follows. Instead, I can only call it a sequence of disjointed comments and thoughts which occur to me having looked at the numbers and at what has already happened since Thursday night.
One thing which is striking is how little the vote share of the two main parties changed compared to 2010. Yes, Labour's all-GB increase was nearly double that of the Conservatives, but they were starting from a far lower baseline anyway. But even in England, their increase was two-and-a-half times more than the Tories'. The key difference - and what has led to David Cameron chillaxing in Checkers this weekend rather than having to call in Pickfords - was that almost the whole of that increase was to be found in seats which Labour already held. The number of constituencies in the North East of England, Liverpool and inner London which returned MPs with even bigger shares of the vote than before is quite striking; four Merseyside seats and one each in London and Birmingham giving Labour over 70% of the votes, for example.
But where it mattered - in the Nuneatons and Thurrocks - Labour made no inroads at all. Indeed, in those 'key marginals', the seats which Labour simply had to win to have any chance at all, they actually lost ground, surrendering places such as Telford, Bolton West and (a sort-of Portillo moment) even their own Shadow Chancellor in Morley And Outwood.
Wales was much the same, with three of the parties remaining within a little over one per cent of their 2010 positions, and Labour not only failing to pick up seats such as Cardiff North but actually losing two seats - Gower and Vale Of Clwyd - to the Conservatives, who picked up their best haul since the high-tide of Thatcherism. Plaid - despite the greater media exposure - flatlined as well, failing to pick up Ynys Môn, not getting particularly near regaining Ceredigion, and actually falling back in Llanelli (a seat which many - and not just within the party - felt was eminently winnable).
Northern Ireland was - as ever - a law unto itself, with one seat moving between the euphemistically-termed 'communities', and two more switching allegiances within the Unionist bloc. The UK parties which stood here - Conservative and UKIP - were the expected irrelevance, as were the hardline TUV.
It was Scotland's results, of course, which were The Big Story Of The Night. Even the most feverish dreams of the SNP going into Thursday could not have adumbrated what was to follow later that night. Seat after seat fell - be they Labour or Liberal Democrat, urban or rural, highland or lowland. The only resistance was met in the northern isles (where it seems that Alistair Carmichael's personal vote on Orkney was the only thing which saved him), in the far south (where there may well have been some tactical voting by Labour supporters), and in Edinburgh South, where the combination of that rare creature - a well-regarded, left-wing, anti-nukes candidate - and a Labour-orchestrated smear campaign against the SNP contender stopped The People's Party™ from becoming The Nowhere League.
And it wasn't as if the SNP just edged all of their fifty gains, either: only six of them can be counted as marginal on the standard definition (that is, where the winning candidate and the second-placed one finished within ten per cent of one another). No fewer than 35 of the remainder were won with half the total turnout or more, including all six Glasgow constituencies. It wasn't so much a victory as an absolute bloody rout.
Apart from Northern Ireland (an irrelevance on this point) and Scotland (where other forces were at play), the biggest factor in the outcome which played itself out in the early hours of last Friday morning was, of course, the differing fortunes of the Liberal Democrats and UKIP.
That the Cleggotron was going to have its batteries ripped out was near enough a given going into Polling Day, but the sheer scale of the Liberal Democrats' defeat was without precedent for any major political party since the coming of universal adult suffrage. They didn't merely lose - they lost badly. In England, they lost nearly two-thirds of their 2010 vote and over four-fifths of their seats. If you draw a straight line between the Dee Estuary and the mouth of the Humber now, you will find just two remaining LibDems - one on the Norfolk coast, and the other in north Surrey. In all the other four, their majorities were slashed, with (one strongly suspects from the figures) only tactical voting by Tories in Sheffield Hallam saving Clegg himself from a double humiliation (his majority dropped to 4.2%, whereas the Conservatives' share - on a night when their vote across England held more or less steady where it didn't actually increase - fell by nearly 10 per cent). It wasn't quite Scottish Labour territory, but in some ways it was worse. Sitting LibDem MP after sitting duck not only lost their seats but some of them fell down to third place behind UKIP or Greens.
(The Green Party had a pretty good night, reaching over one million votes in England, holding their one seat comfortably and gaining four creditable second places, although only in Bristol East did they come anywhere remotely close to winning).
What the LibDems' catastrophe meant, of course, was that it was as easy as you like for the Tories to pick off their seats in the south west of England one by one. I don't remember any time in the last half century that there wasn't a single Liberal/SDP/LibDem MP in the whole of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, but that's what we find today.
Almost a mirror image of the fate of the Liberal Democrats can be seen in the seemingly inexorable rise to destiny of UKIP. Well, up to a point Mr. Desmond. Although they - as I confidently predicted last week - held only one of their two recent by-election gains, their haul of second places was impressive (120 in all), although only in two seats - one Tory (Thanet South, where the leader of our beloved Inane Clown Posse was standing) and one Labour (Hartlepool) - did they get within ten per cent of victory.
As I also suggested before, their main effect was on the share of the vote gained by the main three parties. But, contrary to what was the tacit assumption on the part of many (myself included) that this would hurt the Conservatives' prospects of gaining the seats they needed, UKIP seems to have attracted far more votes from disaffected Labour voters in the north of England and - if you extrapolate that to the marginals - may have been the single numerical factor in preventing Labour from gaining the ground it needed.
Combined with the collapse of the Liberal Democrat vote everywhere, it is clear that there is something going on regarding where the loftily-dismissed 'protest vote' went this time around; but I will return to such points tomorrow.
Just looking at the electoral arithmetic for next time around, what I have found leaping out at me from my LibreOffice spreadsheets are: firstly, how much fewer marginal seats there are after this election than there were five years ago (126 as opposed to 198); and how many seats now have an MP who gained more than half the votes cast (up to 318 from 219). This means that it will be even harder for Labour to gain even the slimmest of majorities in 2020 (or whenever), as only forty-odd marginals have Labour in second, and not all of them will be Tory seats. They would need an almost Blairean swing to achieve it, even if the LibDems were no longer in real contention.
Another thought which occurs to me - and to which I made reference during the night itself - is the remarkable similarity between the electoral map of Englandandwales today and how it looked in June 1983: apart from inner London and the odd seat in cities or large towns, the southern half of England is a Labour-free zone, with swathes of blue from Lincolnshire right down to Scilly. Unlike then, however, there is scarcely a patch of orange - however small - to relieve the monotony of the view. Labour has been penned back into its remaining badlands - inner London, urban Lancashire and Yorkshire, the old mining areas of Durham and South Wales. It is now possible, at least in theory, to travel the length of England from the Tweed to the Tamar and on into Cornwall without setting foot in a constituency which doesn't have a Tory MP. Indeed, but for one seat - Carmarthen East And Dinefwr - it would be possible to make a similar journey from St David's Head to Lowestoft. The dominance of England - and the central and southern parts of it in particular - by the Right is total, and the fact that this is the area which determines the nature of the government which - for all the devolutionary waffle - rules over the whole of this ever-less-United Kingdom brings with it some intruiging and worrying questions regarding how unbalanced a governmental structure can be before it loses all semblance of legitimacy.
Note: At this point, I had thought of going on at some length as to the fate of the various parties. Sensing that you would despise me for such a wanton act, however, I intend holding that over until tomorrow. 
