Victory for the fringe
Rejoice, says Rod Liddle. Last week we rejected the status quo and voted for nutters, outsiders and misfits The scariest thing about the election, the thing that really mystifies me, is how come down in Exeter a total of 22,619 people found it in their hearts to vote for Ben Bradshaw. More than a thousand years after the noble Bishop Leofric was enthroned in the city, Exeter is now represented in Parliament by an extra from Trumpton, albeit a very ambitious one.
Watching these results come in late on Friday morning, the alcohol having long ago dried up and a dull, nagging ache establishing itself in the cranium, the perverse will of such local people seemed a calculated act of spite against the rest of us. Why, Exeter, why? You must know what he’s like. And so we have five more years of these cheerfully earnest, fervent, cropheaded übermoppets telling us what to do. It’s all too much to take. No wonder the Greeks grew tired of democracy 2,400 years ago. They saw Ben coming.
Apparently, nine and a half million people voted for the Labour party this time around, which is another mystery, because I haven’t met a single person who will admit to having done so. Before 5 May, everybody I asked said they’d vote ‘anything but Labour’ — even, if it came to it, for that sad divvy from the Militant Church of Elvis. And now they’re all wandering around in a sort of narcoleptic daze, like the inhabitants of one of those alien-possessed villages in a John Wyndham novel. Maybe soon all of our womenfolk will give birth to tiny Ben Bradshaws.
As has been pointed out, nine and a half million may seem an inexplicably large number of people, but in actuality it represents the smallest mandate of any governing party in Britain ever. Scarcely what you would call a mandate at all, in fact: some 22 per cent of people eligible to vote signed up to New Labour and it is they who have determined our future. The party’s vote throughout Britain was down by almost four million (or roughly one third) on its total for 1997, a fairly profound statement of disillusion and indeed disfranchisement.
But what of the Conservatives? My jubilant right-wing friends and colleagues busy celebrating the rebirth of the ‘natural party of government’ can think again. The truth is that the Tories performed abysmally against a deeply unpopular government. Remember that crushing, soul-destroying annihilation in 1997, the worst election for the Tories since that split over the Corn Laws in 1846? Well, the Conservative party polled almost one million more votes in 1997 than it did last Thursday. Hell of a recovery, guys. Way to go.
The politicians and most of the Westminster commentators will tell you to look at the vastly lower turnout in 2005 and thus adjust your expectations for each party accordingly. But there is a decent case for not doing that at all. One million fewer people wished to vote Conservative last week than wished to do so in 1997: that is a simple fact. And almost four million fewer people wished to vote for the likes of Ben Bradshaw in 2005: this, too, is a simple fact. So that’s nearly five million people estranged from our two main parties in the course of eight years — or possibly more, because the electorate is slightly larger. Where did they all go? An extra 700,000 or so voted for the Liberal Democrats, so credit where credit is really due — and an awful lot of people stayed at home, suffused with terminal boredom, quite possibly wishing they were dead. But not all. Because, in a way, the most spectacular result of the election last week came in the performance of the so-called mavericks, the misfits, the curmudgeonly one-issue independents, the nutters, the people who the mainstream politicians and commentators are accustomed to telling us are no accounts and who are, often, quite beyond the pale.
The votes for these candidates almost doubled from 1997 to 2005, from 1.2 million to 2.1 million. And this remarkable feat was achieved despite the fact that there was a vastly lower turnout and — crucially — that this was an election with an abnormally large number of major party marginals within which, traditionally, the minor parties feel the squeeze.
They gave us our finest, most memorable moments of the 2005 election, too. The bereaved father of an Iraq war veteran on the podium at Sedgefield eviscerating a blank-faced Tony Blair, buttressed by his remarkable 4,000-odd votes. The gimpish Peter Law in Blaenau Gwent overturning one of the safest Labour seats in the country solely through a clearly focused, local loathing for the authoritarian instincts of New Labour. And then, of course, there was George.
Mr Galloway may have an unfortunate predilection for the unmitigated drivel of John Lennon, but it was hard not to exult along with him as the foxy Oona King was despatched to political history in Bethnal Green and Bow. Galloway’s victory and the Respect–Unity coalition vote in nearby West Ham was, when you think about it, a quite staggering achievement.
But the general willingness to embrace fourth, fifth and sixth parties was not confined to those who opposed the Iraq war. Almost 200,000 people voted for the BNP, including 16.9 per cent of electors in Barking; 34 of its candidates polled more than 5 per cent of the vote. The Green vote increased dramatically and the 22 per cent polled in Brighton Pavilion was quite unprecedented. And then there were the 660,000 Ukip voters and even that handful of misguided souls who thought that Veritas was a political party rather than a cunning endorsement for a tanning salon.
The point is this: there is now a far greater propensity to vote for parties or individuals who are divorced from the mainstream and who do not accept the status quo. And, we might add, a growing proportion of the electorate is fervently tired of the main parties, with their refusal to offend, their blandishments and their relentless concentration on that tiny handful of voters deemed to be electorally significant. The stultifying nature of the political debate we have endured these last five weeks had its expression on polling day, with a huge reduction in the votes for the two main parties. It is not the journalists who are to blame for this disaffection; it is the parties themselves.
The more controlled and constrained our main parties become, the more people will turn away, towards the fringe parties or they will stay at home with their feet up watching any TV channel which does not mention the election. In a sense, while we may feel disfranchised by the fact that we have a government which secured the support of a little more than one fifth of the population, Thursday evening was, in one way, rather uplifting.
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