Yesterday I observed that the outcome of this year’s election, despite representing a similar reversal in the political fortunes of the two main parties to that enjoyed by New Labour in 1997, has failed to stir anything approaching the sense of excitement and optimism that greeted that historic result. I also described British party politics in 2010 as being tribal, given the regional variations that are clearly in evidence within this year’s results. Today I want to expand on these two themes, find reasons for them and explore their potential implications.
The most obvious explanation for the first observation is that, although both elections – 1997 and 2010 – took place with the economy emerging out of recession, this year differs from thirteen years ago, in that the recovery is much younger and more fragile, and the medium-term future is much more uncertain. Consequently, the pessimistic air that can be felt across the country could hardly be more different to the wave of optimism that swept the nation the last time a long-serving governing party was ousted from power.
But as my second observation suggests, there is something else holding the country back from embracing this latest incarnation of ‘new politics’ as enthusiastically as its exponents would like – it is the increasingly regionalised nature of party political support, with Labour in particular staying strong in its historic heartlands.
Nowhere is this more true than in my home area, the North East of England, where there was, to all intents and purposes, no ideological shift away from Labour – the two defeats they did suffer – in Stockton South and in Redcar (which saw a swing of 22%, the largest of any English seat) – were delivered by an electorate still frustrated by the government’s failure to halt the mothballing of the nearby steelworks with the loss of 1600 jobs; four other nearby seats all saw swings in excess of 6% away from the entrenched Labour incumbents.
Elsewhere in the area, though, no seats were even realistically targeted by the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats – with the exception of the City of Durham, where after much speculation, support for the sitting Labour MP hardly moved. No wonder the region was billed as the ‘most boring’ at the beginning of the campaign.
It’s a similar story in urban areas across the North and the Midlands, with only a couple of seats in each of the North West, West Yorkshire, the East Midlands, and East Anglia bucking a trend of Labour resistance; only in the West Midlands did Labour lose its grip on some urban areas, and even here, a number of Birmingham constituencies saw pro-Labour swings.
The consequence of these results is that across the North East and elsewhere, thousands of people – a majority of people – are left wondering why it is that they will be governed by a combination of the two parties they so emphatically rejected. Given the impending cuts in government spending, it is no surprise that anger and anxiety is particularly keenly felt in a region with one of the highest levels of public-sector employment in the country.
However, the sense of discord between electorate and government is surely greatest in Scotland, where not a single seat changed hands last week, and where Labour’s share of the vote actually increased by 2.5 points to 42%, with the party crossing the 1 million mark in terms of votes won. In the central belt, only two seats are held by any other party (the Lib Dems hold both), and one of these – Edinburgh West – saw an 11.4% swing from Lib to Lab.
As for the Conservatives, hopes of adding to their solitary seat in Dumfriesshire were dashed, with target seats like Dumfries and Angus returning swings against them. It’s a far cry from the last change of government, when the incumbent Tories were kicked out of Scotland altogether – a humiliation from which the Scottish wing of the party has yet to recover.
All of which raises some intriguing questions about the role of Scotland and the Union, and – despite their failure to make any in-roads towards their embarrassingly optimistic target of 20 seats – surely strategically empowers the SNP administration in Edinburgh. Elections for the Holyrood Parliament are just 12 months away and it is the Scottish Government’s intention to hold a landmark referendum on its flagship policy of independence before then.
Alex Salmond’s tedious railing against his party’s (wholly justified) exclusion from the leaders’ debates may have got him nowhere, and his apparent belief that Scotland should somehow be immune from the tax rises and/or spending cuts to come may be naïve in the extreme, but he did at least succeed in keeping his face, and with it his party, in the media spotlight ahead of an election that he did not contest – and his arguments may curry favour with the many Scots who remain either undecided or unconvinced about his ultimate goal.
David Cameron may be making all the right moves on ‘the Scotland question’, making a priority of visiting St Andrew’s House to have what appear to be amicable and constructive talks with Alex Salmond and his Finance Secretary John Swinney yesterday, but the tough decisions and the difficult truths remain. The critical issue of the size of the Scottish pot now pits the Treasury in between an increasingly confident Scottish public that overwhelmingly rejected the Conservative Party, and a restless English electorate that is responsible for 340 of the coalition government’s 363 seats.
The politics of Scotland and its future role in the Union have been the subject of surprisingly little debate in recent days and weeks, and it’s an issue that I will return to many times over the course of the critical twelve months that lie ahead.
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