05 May 2013

Has The Conservative Party Learnt Any Lessons From Ukip's Success?



Prime Minister David Cameron speaks to workers at the Morrisons Distribution Centre in Bridgewater, Somerset as he goes on the local election campaign trail. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday April 29, 2013.

There has been a groundswell in the big world – the neglected majority of conservative voters has moved on 


By Janet Daley

As recently as early last week, David Cameron was apparently telling restive backbenchers that the size of the Ukip vote wouldn’t matter because it was Just-a-Protest. What a truckload of contempt is packed into that phrase. The discontent of vast numbers of voters is dismissed like the flailing of a two-year-old having a tantrum. This is just a passing phase: when it comes to the next proper election, the country will have grown up and got its silly impulses under control. After all, Mr Cameron is reputed to have said, how serious can the threat of an anti-EU party be when voters repeatedly tell opinion pollsters that Europe as an issue is way down their list of priorities?

By the middle of the morning on Bloody Friday, the official Conservative spokesmen were saying something different – but not all that different. Just-a-Protest had become the protest which must be attended to. The Conservative Party co-chairman Grant Shapps began a chorus of, “We hear you. We’re listening.” The trouble was that they seemed to be hearing something rather different from what the rest of us were hearing. Having declared that they understood – and even respected – the message attached to the rock that the electorate had thrown through their window, they insisted that it read, “Carry on doing what you’re doing.”

All the Tory big guns who paraded through the broadcast studios – even their best performer, Michael Gove, who is only brought out when things are really bad – mouthed this bizarre formulation: the voters are telling us that they want us to get on with the job of helping hard-working people, reforming the welfare system to make work pay, and reducing the deficit.

Let me get this right – all these people voted for somebody else because they wanted to tell you to carry on doing what you’re already doing but maybe a little bit faster?

So in other words, this was not so much a mass protest (let alone Just-a-Protest): it was actually a kind of vote of confidence in the Conservatives’ present policies? Mr Shapps and the hapless team who came after him all reiterated this theme: the people are telling us that they want us to get on with it. Get on with what? What we’ve been saying we were doing all along. Good grief. Surely the party must have seen this debacle coming – even if they did not quite anticipate the scale of it. Couldn’t they have prepared something to say that was a bit more convincing than that? 

But then maybe this is not so surprising. The Tory leadership seems to have a general problem with the awkwardness of ordinary people’s views, and what to do about them. In fact, their fundamental electoral strategy is based on the idea that you can ignore most of the great mass of the population.

It isn’t just Ukip votes that don’t count – because they are Just-a-Protest. It is all the votes of people who live in safe seats, or who are so committed to a particular set of political beliefs that they are unlikely to change their electoral habits, or who are more than a degree or so off the centre ground wherever that happens to be.

In fact, the official election strategy of the Conservative campaign machine is that there are only a tiny proportion of voters in a handful of marginal constituencies, who matter at all. They are the ones – lucky them – who will determine the result of the next general election. They are, therefore, the only people whom it is worth addressing, and whose tastes and dissatisfactions need be taken into account.

According to the kind of detailed analysis of voting patterns to which the Tory leadership is unequivocally committed, there are a tiny number of voters in specific target seats – who can be identified practically down to their street addresses – on whom the general election result will hinge.

These people are not, needless to say, Conservative core voters (who have “nowhere else to go”, ha-ha-ha). They are, by definition, the sort of people who do not identify strongly with any traditional or “tribal” party allegiance. Hence, they are more likely to be alienated by a visceral Tory core vote message. These are the people whom the Tory modernisers, having memorised the scientific lesson of how elections are won by persuading people who sit in the no man’s land between parties (otherwise known as the “centre ground”) to move one millimetre to the Right or Left, have been determined to court.

There are two major problems with this super-sophisticated tactical approach to election-winning: the first is that it is profoundly undemocratic, and the other is that it is wrong. I can just about understand how the tactic geeks, who think they have discovered the philosopher’s stone of electoral success, can spout this stuff. But for the life of me I cannot see how politicians in a democracy could fail to see how repugnant it is. What? The views and concerns of ninety-odd per cent of the population can be rubbished – taken for granted, regarded as inconsequential, treated as dependable cannon fodder in the battle for office? No matter how clamorous or desperate they are, or by how many times they outnumber the potential swing voters, they must never be listened to or appeased. The wishes of the clear majority have to be sacrificed in the hopes of attracting a very small minority. I don’t know about you, but this is not my idea of how democracy is supposed to work.

For the purpose of the moment though, what may be of more urgent concern to the Conservative leadership is that their precious strategic theory could be totally false. While they have been peering through a microscope examining the habits and predilections of an absurdly small number of carefully selected voters, there has been a great groundswell of a movement in the big world around them. That vast neglected majority – or at least a significant proportion of it – has picked up its skirts and moved away.

Because here is the political truth which the geeks and the tactical anoraks do not understand: it isn’t just small numbers of chronically unaligned voters who can change their voting habits, and are therefore worthy of attentive solicitude. Enormous armies of once-loyal party followers can decamp, with devastating effect on the balance of national power. Something quite like this happened in 1979. I had – along with many people I knew – been a Labour supporter until the experience of life under the Trade Union Terror of the 1970s turned me into a Conservative. The famous bloc of C1 and C2 voters who went over to the Tories at that time constituted a mass movement, not just a miniscule shift of a degree or two among a few waverers in marginal constituencies.

Indeed, it is huge popular swings of that kind which effectively redefine the centre ground. The Tories have been staring so hard at the infinitesimal fluctuations of their favoured targets that they missed the earthquake opening up beneath them. 




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