Minor Party Concerns

A useful way of understanding the state of politics in the UK is to look at the minor parties. This is because British politics is defined by the primacy of the party system: the rigidity of the constitutional structure (first-past-the-post giving rise to alternating governments) and the dynamism of the parties as coordinated elements within it (the ebb and flow of voters from one to the other). Minor here means not just the Liberal Democrats, with their dreams of another hung parliament, or the SNP with their reality of devolved government, but the also-rans, such as Reform and the Greens. Each occupies a particular niche within the political ecosystem that is largely parasitical on the two main parties. For example, the Greens, despite not being eco-socialists in the main, are a respectable destination for leftwing protest votes in both safe Conservative and Labour seats. Likewise, Reform (like UKIP and the Brexit Party before it) offers a respectable option for reactionaries who feel the Conservatives have gone soft. The major anomaly here is the devolved assemblies, where the two main UK parties can find themselves in a minor position (e.g. Labour in Scotland or the Conservatives in Wales).

Political pundits generally ignore the minor parties at the UK level unless they can be used as a vector to attack either Labour or the Conservatives. In the case of the Liberal Democrats, the same party can be used to attack both. But this obscures the Liberal Democrats' symbiosis with the Conservative Party. The Liberal-SDP Alliance of the mid-80s confused matters by overlapping with the factional wars of Labour, but it's clear that the third party's electoral fortunes tend be an inverse of the Tories. The leap forward in 1974 from 8% to 19% under Jeremy Thorpe reflected the collapse of the Conservative government under Ted Heath. In 1979, David Steel oversaw a fall to 14% as conservative voters flocked to Thatcher's banner. The progress under Charles Kennedy and Nick Clegg was due to the toxicity of the Tories as much as the mis-steps of Blair and Brown. In 2015, the Liberal Democrats fell back to 8%, the same level as in 1970, largely because their conservative voters decided to actually vote Conservative, back-filling the died-in-the-wool Tories who opted for UKIP and so keeping David Cameron in Number 10.

While copious amounts of digital ink are still expended on the Red Wall (tm), it seems to have escaped most commentators, both those sympathetic to Keir Starmer and those hostile to him, that the strategy with regard to what we might call low-information, older homeowners in the Midlands and North is one of neutralisation rather than conversion, both in the sense of not giving them reason to vote for the Tories (or Reform) and in the sense of not encouraging expectations that a Labour government will deliver all that much, hence the emphasis on fiscal constraints and the need for business growth to fund the repair of public services. In the realm of social policy, the watchword has been caution, not so much to convince reactionary voters that Labour is on their side in a "culture war" but to reassure the merely conservative that a Labour government does not intend to change anything if it can avoid it. Progressive reform will be constrained by regulatory governance (e.g. the EHRC) and there will be a return of the language of "rights and responsibilities". 

While winning back the Red Wall is a clear objective for the party, doing so will merely return it to the situation it found itself in 2017: short of a parliamentary majority. With little scope for additional gains in the big cities, Labour has to win a swathe of suburban and semi-rural seats if it is to form the next government, and that means winning over Liberal Democrat-inclined voters in seats currently held by the Conservatives where Labour is the realistic alternative. Much of Labour's current policy statements are tailored more to the electoral constituency that David Cameron and George Osborne succeeded in winning over in 2015, with a mixture of austerity and liberal virtue, than to the constituency attracted to Boris Johnson and his promises of an activist state in 2019. Starmer is essentially running from the centre-right against historic Labour, the usual ancestor-worship of Attlee and Wilson notwithstanding, hence the symbolic importance of continuing the purge of the left beyond total victory. Nobody wants Corbyn to stand as an independent MP in Islington North more than Starmer. Without the former Labour leader on the scene, hard questions might start to be asked about Labour's actual commitment to anti-racism.

The key message we should take from the polls is not that Labour has successfully detached 2019 pro-Brexit voters from the Conservative cause by disavowing a return to the European Union and committing to socially authoritarian policies, but that the party is now dependent on remain-voting liberals who don't think Starmer is sincere in his insistence that Brexit can be made to work. This is reflected in the continuing low ratings for Starmer as an individual. It is a strange reflection of British politics for the leader of a party so far ahead in the polls to be regarded as untrustworthy and uninspiring by so many. This isn't a case of being Marmite like Johnson. Almost nobody likes Starmer or strongly identifies with him, while his champions in the media spend an inordinate amount of time explaining why this general disdain doesn't matter. I'm not even sure there's much love for him on the Labour right where it's the likes of Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting and Yvette Cooper that get the valentines while David Miliband still appears to flutter hearts among the Blairite faithful.

In Scotland, Labour remains in denial about its position as a minor party, and how it ended up as one after its long dominance from the 1980s to the 2000s. This is partly because Scottish Labour really is just a branch office, hence the assumption that a commanding lead in the UK polls must result in the party's return to prominence as the chief challenger to the SNP and its eventual supplanter as the natural party of government. But it's also because of the way Scottish politics is presented as little more than a popularity contest among the party leaders, and internally as such when a leadership contest arises (who can define the political differences among the SNP contenders?) Thus Jim Murphy, who oversaw Labour's spectacular collapse in the 2015 general election (from 42% to 24% of the vote in Scotland), reckons "Anas Sarwar will be in the unusual position at the next election of being both the most well-known leader and being the insurgent", conveniently ignoring Sarwar's achievement of further shrinking Labour's vote in the 2021 Scottish Assembly elections from 19% (in 2016) to 18%.

Independence has always been highly personalised in the UK by both government and media. This includes not only those campaigning for independence from English rule, such as Sinn Féin or the SNP, but also those urging English independence from the EU (and, by implication, from the importunate Celtic periphery), such as UKIP under Nigel Farage. This personalisation could be excused as the consequence of either a messianic politics or the nature of small polities to cleave to "the big man" - consider variously Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Collins or Éamon de Valera in the Irish case - but such personalisation was also evident in the imperial treatment of large nations with multifarious polities demanding self-rule, such as the UK's focus on the eccentric figure of Gandhi in India or the supposedly manipulative Nasser in Egypt. The advocates for autonomy were variously unwordly fools or malicious rogues, but most importantly they were held to be unrepresentative. 

You can still see this attitude in the coverage of Nicola Sturgeon's resignation speech, notably in the liberal press, with the emphasis on the wrongheadeness of her continuing commitment to independence and enthusiasm for trans rights. While Sturgeon is held to be an admirable female leader - bracketed with Angela Merkel and Jacinda Arden - her actual achievements in office have often been misrepresented. According to The Guardian, "Bolstered by Labour voters supporting yes in the 2014 independence referendum, Sturgeon had been highly skilled at attracting Labour voters to the SNP, by pulling her party firmly to the left and making the SNP the flag bearers for Scotland’s anti-Tory vote." Only someone unfamiliar with Scottish politics would consider the SNP to be anything other than a bog-standard neoliberal party. A simple comparison with Labour in Wales under the hardly radical Mark Drakeford should make the point. The actual history of the SNP, since the expulsion of the 79 Group in 1982, has been one of the marginalisation or absorption of the left as the party has shifted towards identification with the European mainstream.

Labour in Scotland has gradually increased its polling support over the last 12 months from 20% to touching 30%. This is held to be a great achievement that reflects poorly on the SNP, who are at around 45%, though it's clear much of the shift has actually come from Conservative supporters and probably reflects the changing expectations of the unionist hardcore as to who will form the next government at Westminster. Given that Labour only holds one parliamentary seat north of the border, it was always likely to do better at the next election, but the suggestion that it could win up to 25 of 59 constituencies on 30% of the vote seems a stretch. Labour collapsed to 1 seat in 2015 on 24% and then recovered to 7 seats in 2017 on 27% so 10 seems like a more realistic target. That in turn should be reason to suspect that the stonking majorities being predicted at the UK level for Labour may prove illusory. What should worry Starmer is that the Liberal Democrats aren't prospering at the Tories' expense, which means that Labour's poll lead is currently boosted by Labour-curious conservatives who may well get cold feet at the ballot box. What should worry the rest of us is that the next general election will be a contest between different varieties of conservatism.