UKIP's activist base is incandescent at Nigel Farage's treatment of Godfrey Bloom and of David Silvester. Not unconnectedly, that party itself is not going to top the poll at the European Elections, despite having spent almost the entire time since the last one saying that it would; indeed, it might very well come third.
What if UKIP and the Lib Dems, who are disintegrating between traditional Liberals who believe in due process and radical feminists who believe that certain types of allegation in themselves constitute conviction, had both ceased to function as serious political forces by May 2015? That will also be many months after the defeat of Scottish independence.
Everywhere outside parts of North Wales, and possibly even there, from one end of Great Britain to the other, and from one side of Great Britain to the other, we are shaping up for the first "normal" General Election since 1979: a straight fight between Labour and the Conservatives, with negligible numbers of anyone else likely to be elected. Including, as ever, no one at all from UKIP.
The difference being that Labour now massively dominates great swathes of the country and sections of the population, whereas Conservative support is very highly concentrated in geographical, generational, socio-economic, ethnic and sectarian terms.
You have to tick pretty much every highly specific box in order to be a Conservative supporter these days, and very few people do. If you are anything else, then you are Labour, and that is most people who are at all likely to vote even in 2015, never mind in 2020 and beyond.
The strange little True Blue Thatcherite remnant tribe is now almost as detached from mainstream society as ultra-Orthodox Jews are, but without their reproduction rate.
In fact, entirely regardless of income or anything like that, most of that tribe's grandchildren do or will vote Labour without a second thought. It would never occur to them to do anything else.
Yet even that tribe is many, many, many times larger than the support of any other minority party.
So, ours is a time like the pre-Thatcher and thus the pre-SDP period in many ways, and especially in that only the Labour and Conservative Parties really exist.
But ours is a time unlike that period in many other ways, and especially in that the core Labour vote is already almost, and may very soon end up, large enough to deliver never-ending General Election victories on its own.
Welcome to The New Normal.
I would not be so assured in ruling out UKIP topping the popular vote in May - this far out from the Euro elections polls on the subject will broadly reflect general voting intention. When that election comes into view I would expect to see the UKIP numbers surge. Also, I imagine that for European elections UKIP activists would be far more motivated to vote than the other parties', since they are far more enthusiastic about their own party's European parties than other activists are about theirs. But you are right in saying that UKIP have bet everything on succeeding in this regard.
ReplyDeleteAnd for about a year, since the question started to be asked, the polls have shown them tied with the Conservatives for a fairly distant second place.
ReplyDeleteIf I were a betting man, then my money would be on a challenge to Farge's leadership after the Euros. UKIP will be nowhere by the General Election. Nor will the Lib Dems. Nor will the SNP.
First normal election since 1979? what about 1992, that was a very straight race with only 3 SNP MPs and 20 LibDems being elected? LibDems got 17% of the vote, Labour 35% and Tories 43%.
ReplyDeleteAs it turned out.
ReplyDeleteThat was not what most people expected, and a very few votes cast differently would have delivered an entirely different result.
Everyone knows what is going to happen in 2015. And it will.
17 per cent was still a lot more than the pre-SDP Liberal norm, and a lot more than they are going to manage next time.