Category Archives: Elections

Amusing UK election aside: The EU question and UKIP

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In the unusual Buckingham constituency*, UKIP’s Nigel Farage – advocating withdrawal from the EU – ended up in third place, despite a high-profile (non-fatal) election-day plane crash**.

The amusing news for pro-EU types? Farage was beaten into second place by an independent former Conservative MEP, John Stevens.

Why is this so funny? Stevens was the co-founder of the Pro-Euro Conservative Party.

Ha ha ha! Yes, an arch-eurosceptic beaten in a direct popularity contest by an arch europhile. In Britain.

So much for us all being anti-EU, eh?

My fuller post-election analysis can be found here.

* UK convention states that the major parties don’t run against a sitting Speaker of the House of Commons, leaving the way clear for various fringe parties to get high up the results list. Buckingham is the current Speaker’s constituency, hence the high placements for the likes of UKIP and independents.

** Get well soon, Nigel – but what were you doing going up in a plane with a UKIP banner anyway? Campaigning is expressly forbidden on election day…

UK election: Where next?

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Just back from Japan, from where I was closely following the UK election on Twitter (your best place for my day-to-day political commentary these days, though be warned they’re usually more jokey – and sweary – than here…)

After 30 hours offline, and 44 hours after the polling booths closed, the UK still doesn’t have a new government. As such, witness the wonders of my jetlag-inspired political guesswork!

I’d be surprised if this lack of a government lasted beyond Monday morning, largely because the next government will want to look responsible – and we had some serious global financial trouble on Friday for a variety of reasons (NY stock exchange hiccough, Greek crisis, UK election uncertainty, etc.). They’ll want to have a government before the markets open, if they can…)

Here’s what I currently reckon will happen, rejigged from a few comments on Twitter:

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s playing this absolutely perfectly so far – he has solid offers to join coalitions from both Labour and the Conservatives, and significant policy differences with both, and has explicitly stated that the Tories – with more seats and more of the vote – should have the right to “seek to form” a government first.

But the Tories can’t get a parliamentary majority without Lib Dem support. At least, not a stable one. Not the sort of majority that they’d need to do, well, just about anything.

But Labour and the Lib Dems combined can’t get a parliamentary majority without other parties’ support either.

Clegg has also repeatedly mentioned “the national interest” and equated this with electoral reform (unsurprising, considering Labour got only 5% more of the vote than the Lib Dems, but 5 times the parliamentary seats).

The Tories are fundamentally opposed to the sort of Proportional Representation-style electoral reform that the Lib Dems want (usually single transferable vote) – which is hardly surprising, as it would almost certainly lead to a permanent Labour/Lib Dem coalition (there being very few other parties on the centre right that are likely to end up big enough to give the Tories the backing they’d need under such a system).

So, Clegg is giving the impression that he’s willing to work with the Tories – and probably is – but his one major condition is a deal-breaker for Cameron and co.

So I’m now fairly convinced that Prime Minister Cameron’s not going to happen. If Cameron rejects PR, as he must to keep his party behind him (there have already been dire warnings from the right wing of the Conservative Party about such a move, in the shape of Thatcher-era relic Lord Tebbit), then a Lib Dem/Labour/Scottish National Party / Plaid Cymru coalition has first dibs (SNP leader Alex Salmond has already openly proposed this).

Constituionally-speaking, Gordon Brown retains first right to try to form a government, as the sitting Prime Minister in a hung parliament. With Lib Dem, SNP and Plaid Cymru support, the coalition would have an outright majority – able to outvote the Tories and their allies on anything. As such, despite his unpopularity (and calls from within his own party to step down), Brown could yet remain as caretaker PM of a coalition expressly set up to bring in electoral reform.

This would actually be a very sensible option, for several reasons:

1) It would be constitutionally unprecedented for Cameron to form a minority government in the current circumstances – he is impotent until he has enough supporters to claim an outright majority. This looks to be impossible.

2) The constitution explicitly states that Gordon Brown remains Prime Minister, so using him as a figurehead for any new coalition is – constitutionally – the least harmful in the short term.

3) Anyone unhappy with Brown remaining as PM simply adds to the case for major constitutional reform with their objections.

4) This would also give both Labour *and* the Conservatives time to sort themselves out, as they are blatantly in a shambles at the moment.

So, what I’d suggest is a short-term multi-party national coalition *explicitly* for electoral *and* parliamentary/constitutional reform, as well as to maintain some form of stability in the midst of an ongoing financial crisis, keeping Gordon Brown as a figurehead Prime Minister for constitutional reasons alone, with an explicit promise that he will step down once the basic reforms are in place to have a fresh election under a new electoral system.

One final note: There’s nothing to say – constitutionally – that the Prime Minister has to be a party leader. Nor even that he has to be an MP… The question is, is there *anyone* who could be seen as a sufficiently impartial lynchpin to take on the task of leading a coalition of (at least) four parties?

Britain, the Conservative Party, David Cameron and the EU

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If you want to understand Britain’s rather odd relationship with the EU, you could do far worse than read this really rather good overview in this week’s Economist, especially considering its focus on the Conservative party – likely to form the next British government in a little over six weeks’ time.

There are only a couple of flaws (e.g. mentioning a figure of 50% for the number of European laws stemming from the EU, when readers of this blog will be aware that it’s more in the region of 10-30%, depending), and much insightful analysis that tallies 99% with my own views. It also provides one of the best short summaries of the last 40+ years of UK-EU relations I’ve seen.

Below the fold, a few highlights.

Update: It should also be read in conjunction with Charlemagne on eurosceptic think tank Open Europe and the nature of the British press to give the full picture on why the UK is so insistent on remaining utterly ignorant on all matters EU-related.

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UK EU election results: By the numbers

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In terms of change in share of the vote (which dropped in turnout from 45% to 43%), taking the major parties:

Conservatives +1%
Labour -6.9%
UKIP +0.5%
Lib Dems -1.2%
Greens +2.4%
BNP +1.3%
SNP +0.7%
Plaid Cymru -0.1%
English Democrats +1.1%
Christian Party +1.6%

And in terms of absolute number of voters:

Conservatives -198,696
Labour -1,336,923
UKIP -152,542
Lib Dems -371,714
Green +190,210
BNP +135,398
SNP +89,509
Plaid Cymru -33,087
English Democrats +149,437
Christian Party +192,722

And so the big four (Conservatives, Labour, UKIP and the Liberal Democrats) between them lost 1,907,333 voters – 70% of which is accounted for by Labour’s huge plunge in popularity.

In terms of absolute voter numbers, therefore, the Tories lost 4.7%, Labour lost 36.2%, UKIP lost 5.8%, the Lib Dems lost 13.3%; meanwhile the Greens gained 18.3% and the BNP 16.7%.

Based on data from Wikipedia (2009 results, 2004 results)

To get an idea of the EU-wide picture, the best I’ve found so far is this interactive map from the Financial Times.

The European elections and the anti-EU case

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If so many people in Britain (80% was the usual figure quoted) wanted a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, how come only 43% bothered voting?

If the anti-EU cause is so overwhelmingly popular, how come only around half of those voted for an anti-EU party? (And that’s only if you include the Tories as anti-EU.)

Let’s number-crunch: 28.6% Tory, 17.4% UKIP, 6.5% BNP, Socialist Labour c.1%, English Democrats c.2%, Jury Team/No2EU/Libertas all <1% – so that’s c.55.5% of the vote for anti-Lisbon parties, and only around 27% of the vote for explicitly anti-EU parties (the Tories are more hard eurosceptics than overtly withdrawalist, after all).

I make that, with a 43% turnout, just 24% of the electorate supporting an anti-Lisbon party, and just 11.6% of the electorate supporting a party that advocates pulling out of the EU.

Update: Sorry – forgot that the Greens are anti-Lisbon. So that’s another 5.8%, so 61.3% total for anti-Lisbon parties, or 26.4% of the electorate. But still only 11.6% in favour of withdrawal.

Twittering the European elections results

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I’m on Twitter at the moment, blathering away more or less incoherently with a bunch of other Eurobloggers (@JonWorth, @JulienFrisch, @kosmopolit, @citizeneurope, @EuropeanCitizen and a bunch of others) as the results and rumours come in.

Follow along via the hashtags #eu09 and #ep09 – your best bet is probably to use Twitterfall to follow the various tweets live. It’s fairly simple to use, it must be said – just add a bunch of searches into the “Custom” field in the left-hand column (I’m using #ep09, #eu09, EU, Europe and elections), and get real-time commentary from all over the shop. Some of it’s rubbish, naturally – this is the internet – but some is surprisingly good.

Current trend – at 8:45pm UK time, so 15 minutes from the results – seems to be a surge in support for the right (both centre right and far right), with mostly falling turnouts yet again, though ranging member state to member state from c.20% to c.80%. But with national issues likely to dominate everywhere, working out Europe-wide reasons for any apparent trends is something to be treated with great caution.

Below the fold – my Twitter contributions from the night (in chronological order, starting c.8:45pm UK time, ending c.2:30am UK time – and for Twitter newcomers, “RT” indicates where I’m quoting someone else):
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European Elections 2009: Online resources to help you cast an informed vote

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The first thing to note is that European elections (in the UK at least – though the rest of this post will apply EU-wide) have a stupidly complicated voting system. This video should explain how it works. (Likewise, a lot of us are unclear on just how the EU works and what it is that the European Parliament does – this video should explain quickly and easily.)

To make matters more complicated, political parties also tend to work slightly differently when it comes to European issues – not least thanks to the political Groups in the European Parliament.

As such, it’s worth finding out how your own opinions tally with the party you’re thinking of voting for. I’d suggest checking out both VoteMatch.eu (alternatively VoteMatch.co.uk) and EUprofiler.eu – answer their short series of policy questions, and they should give you a good indication of where you stand in relation to the parties and political groups. (Assuming they’re working – both are coming under heavy traffic at the moment, and are going down a lot under the strain.) A discussion of the pros and cons of both sites by the Telegraph can be found here.

If you’re UK based and want to check out a party’s policies in more details, check out this handy list of links to the manifestos of ALL the UK parties standing. The BBC also has a handy overview of all the UK parties on offer.

However, don’t forget that all the UK political parties (bar the Conservatives and – if they get a seat – the BNP) will be part of a political Group in the European Parliament, and each of these Groups (effectively a coalition) will also have its own policy objectives. A handy roundup of the Group manifestos can be found at the handy EurActiv EU news and policy site.

To find out who your current MEPs are (multi-member constituencies, you see – you have more than one), and how they’ve performed in the job, try MiCandidate.eu or VoteWatch.eu – which has the added benefit of a ranking system, by which we can see how MEPs compare to each other based on attendance to votes, questions asked, speeches made, and so on. Both sites also – if you have a poke around – have some handy resources for checking out the policy platforms of the various political parties and groups EU-wide.

Finally, a passionate explanation of why your vote is important, and why you should care – no matter what your political opinions.

Is there a UKIP / BNP partnership?

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Buried away in the middle of an article about UKIP’s efforts to win over middle-England in today’s Sunday Telegraph:

Accusations of racism are nothing new for Ukip. Last November a pro-BNP group stormed into a meeting of the party’s national executive and offered an alliance in which the BNP would concentrate on the north of the country and Ukip the south.

Mr Farage told the delegation to leave but the impression persists that there is common ground between them.

Nothing new there, I know. But in the following paragraph comes a fascinating pair of statistics that I hadn’t seen before:

It may not be an official pact, but the BNP is free from a Ukip challenge in 80 per cent of the seats it is contesting, while Ukip has no BNP challenger in 85 per cent of the seats in which it is standing.

That’s a mighty odd coincidence, wouldn’t you say?

So, has UKIP teamed up with the fascists? They may not agree on economic policy, but they do both want out of the EU, and they’re both strongly anti-immigration. UKIP may not have an overtly racist constitution, but the two parties share two key policy aims, and know that they are both competing for much the same relatively small fringe of discontented anti-EU, anti-immigration voters.

It would make strong strategic sense for the two main anti-EU, anti-immigration parties not to split their already limited potential vote by avoiding competing directly against each other – but is this a formal agreement, something more back room, or have the two parties’ election strategists simply ended up coming to the same conclusions about which party has the best hope in 8 out of every 10 electoral contests, and entirely independently decided to target their resources elsewhere?

I’m not much of a one for conspiracy theories, but an 80% correlation seems a tad too much of a coincidence to merely be coincidence. Then again, I’m also no statistician, and haven’t seen the figures for myself – it is possible that there’s an entirely innocent explanation. But if UKIP want to maximise their votes, a secret team-up with the BNP would be a good way to go about it. As long as the team-up remained secret, of course…

Update: In the interest of fairness, see the comments below. Given the relatively small number of seats the two parties are standing in out of the total being contested, it rather looks like this isn’t statistically significant. Coincidence or conspiracy? Quite possibly neither.

Nosemonkey on the telly

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Check me out – BBC World News Today earlier (broadcast c.7pm UK time on BBC4 and BBC World), discussing the EU Elections – I’m a regular media whore.

If you’re based in the UK, you can get my slightly nervous pearls of off-the-cuff wisdom (and check out the unflattering profile view) here for the next week or so. It’s on the BBC’s iPlayer, so non-UK Nosemonkey-watchers are out of luck, I’m afraid. (Unless you happen to know the dark arts of setting up UK proxy servers to get around the geographic block, that is. *ahem*)

Websites name-dropped for finding out more about how to come up with a considered vote were EUprofiler.eu and VoteMatch.eu – both very much worth checking out.

I’ll be back discussing the result a week on Monday, by the sound of things.

Update: Below the fold, my handsome visage. (I need to lose some weight…) And – for I don’t know how long – a non-geographically-specific video thingie
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Britain and the “unaccountable” EU

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A must-read piece by The Economist’s Charlemagne – more usually a columnist who leans towards the eurosceptic side – explaining very neatly why populist anti-EU rhetoric about democratic deficits and the EU being unaccountable is ignorant at best, and is poisoning British political debate:

“does he [David Cameron] really want British voters to believe that he believes that the EU is ‘completely unaccountable to the people of Britain’? I am not about to turn rabid federalist on you, but there are British ministers in EU meetings, British MEPs in the European Parliament, and British diplomats in every working group. They are not powerless: Britain is one of three Big Beasts, along with France and Germany, that wield serious clout in the EU. And they are all, at least last time I checked, accountable to the British people.

“He also says that when the EU does something, it is being taken out of “the realm of democratic politics”. Regular readers of this blog, or the column, will know I am not a swooning fan of the European Parliament. But the parliament does have say on quite a lot of European legislation. And though there is a great deal wrong with the way that MEPs are elected, I am not sure that laws approved by the EP have had no contact whatsoever with the realm of democratic politics.

If all coverage and commentary on EU affairs was like this, the world would be a much better place. Do read the whole thing.

European elections without Europe

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A really rather good rant about the lack of any discussion of the actual issues in the UK’s EU election campaigns. Many good points made.

Meanwhile, I’ve still not received any election material from Labour, the Conservatives or the Lib Dems (or the Greens, for that matter, but the part of London I live in is a Tory/Lib Dem area, so I guess they reckon there’s not much point – still, that didn’t stop the BNP, UKIP, NO2EU or the Christian People’s Alliance from bunging their more or less anti-EU literature through the letterbox…)

There’s also still hardly anything on the EU elections in the mainstream media, except for the occasional “think” piece about the likely impact poor results will have on the domestic fortunes of the major parties. The last thing anyone (press or politician) wants to discuss is the serious *European* issues that these elections are meant to be about – I’ve yet to decide if this is through fear or ignorance, but am leaning heavily towards the latter. I simply don’t think anyone in the press or any of the big names in Westminster politics understands the significance of the EU and European Parliament well enough to try and explain it to a cynical, politics-hating public.

European Elections: Prospects and Projections – the vote

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From a conference I’m attending today organised by Brunel University’s Magna Carta Institute. First speaker, Peter Kellner, from polling agency YouGov. Hastily-typed notes follow:

“I’ve never been so uncertain about an election that’s only nine days away than I am today”

Last time, more people voted for a party other than Labour/Conservative than Labour and Conservatives combined

Lib Dems seem to do worse in Proportional Representation elections than First Past The Post

The expenses scandal’s effect on the polls seems to have stabilised, but could be more twists

Current projections (as of the morning of 26th May, so likely to shift)

Tories – 26-28% (roughly the same as 2004) – a month ago would have been 35% at least

Labour – c.20-22%, though wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up on 18-19%
(If turnout = 35-40%, that means only c.8% of the electorate voting for the governing party)

Lib Dems – 15% last time, and likely to be there or there abouts this time – maybe 16-17%

UKIP – 16% last time; at the moment looks like they’re slightly up (17-19%) – but 3 weeks ago = 7% (Telegraph expenses stories boosted them to 19% in a week); “the key thing we find is that UKIP voters are the most determined of all the supporters to say they are going to vote”; BUT: “past evidence shows ‘certain’ voters aren’t certain at all”

Greens – 9% – last time = 6% and got two seats, but largely due to London and the South East having most MEPs, so a lower threshold – wouldn’t have got seats in any other region. 1-2 more seats maximum, depending on how close the fight is for the last seat in other regions – benefiting from the expenses scandal

BNP – last time got 5%, but no seats (their strong regions have a higher percentage threshold for election due to fewer MEPs); this time it’s possible they may get to 8-9% in London and get a seat; North West (Nick Griffin); Yorkshire and Humberside; West Midlands
Note 1:- it’s a tiny margin between getting NO seats and getting FOUR seats for the BNP
Note 2: latest YouGov poll puts them at 7%; ICN poll in the Guardian on Saturday put them at 1% – probably due to reluctance to admit to BNP over the phone; YouGov = online, so possibly more anonymous and honest

SNP / Plaid Cymru – will probably keep the same number of MEPs and similar share of the vote

Northern Ireland – different electoral system – single transferable vote, so likely to be similar in outcome to 2004, though likely with Sinn Fein with the largest share of the vote

Turnout – this was c.25% 1999, but there were no local elections; in 2004 it went up to 35% last time (almost certainly due to local elections – there were no local elections in Scotland in 2004 and turnout was only 30%)
Note: Because county elections are taking place the same time as EU ones this time around, turnout is likely to be above 30% again
Possible party effect: Local elections this year are mostly in Conservative areas (countryside not cities); Tory areas tend to have higher turnout than Labour anyway – so Tories may end up doing slightly better thanks to local election turnout boost