By Roger Kimball
“Shock,” “Anger,”
“Earthquake”—those are among the more frequent epithets employed to
describe this weekend’s European elections. All across the continent,
voters turned out to deliver a resounding defeat to the top-down,
politically correct, big-government, Brussels-centric,
rule-by-unaccountable-elites project that is the European Union. For
years, Brussels has demanded allegiance to its mildly socialist species
of transnational progressivism. Local initiatives were everywhere
forced to give way to the whimsical diktats disgorged by distant
bureaucrats. The healthy, homegrown sentiments of national identity and
robust patriotism were systematically stymied as Brussels-based
politicians set about imposing their anemic version of utopia in which
there would be no Frenchmen or Germans or Italians or Englishmen but
only that shadowy abstraction a “European,” a creature that doesn’t
actually exist but might be willed into being by a regulatory superstate
that was environmentally sensitive, always and everywhere alert to
signs of racism and Islamophobia, reflexively suspicious of capitalism,
hostile to Israel, and contemptuous of the United States. It didn’t
work and now the voters, in a gigantic act of political reverse
peristalsis, have delivered the first step in what promises to be a
thoroughgoing rejection of the European project.
The response from the organs of establishment sentiment has oscillated between astonishment and anxiety. The Financial Times,
under the headline “Eurosceptics storm Brussels,” leads with the news
that “France’s far-right Front National stormed to victory in European
elections on Sunday night, leading an unprecedented surge in support for
anti-EU parties across Europe that was set to reverberate far beyond
Brussels politics.” The fact that the FN is led by Marine Le Pen,
daughter of the much-maligned Jean-Marie Le Pen, adds a dash of horror
to the mix. How can this be happening? How is it that in Great Britain,
Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party snapped up 30 percent of the
popular vote and increased its seats in the European Parliament from 11
to 24? It was only a couple of years ago that Farage and UKIP were
dismissed as a “fringe” party, a congeries of unappealing political
neanderthals who, in a more enlightened world, would either be locked up
or not exist. And yet here they were, “the biggest winner,” as the FT
mournfully reports, in the UK’s European race. Geert Wilders, the
charismatic Dutch populist, did not do as well as many of his
euro-sceptic confrères. But “among other eurosceptic parties,” the FT
notes, “the Danish People’s party was set to become the biggest in
Denmark with about 25 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, Austria’s populist
party, the FPÖ, is set to finish third with 20 percent of the vote –
against 12.7 percent in 2009.”
What is going on? Jean-Francois
Copé, president of France’s center-right UMP, observed that the vote for
Le Pen’s Freedom Party was a sign of “gigantic anger” among the French
electorate. He got that right. But the anger is directed not just
against the confiscatory socialist policies of President François
Hollande. It is directed more broadly against the anti-nation-state bias
of the European Union. The architects of the EU envision a European
superstate in which national identity is subordinated to the abstraction
of “Europe.” The regime would be internationalist but only titularly
democratic: the real power (as has been traditional on the continent)
would reside in a technocratic elite, not the people. But the people, it
seems, have just awakened to this reality and it turns out they don’t
like it. Marine Le Pen was surely correct yesterday when she said: “What
has happened tonight is a massive rejection of the EU.”
What happens next is anyone’s
guess. But one take-away from yesterday’s election is this: when
conservative parties cease providing a natural home for the
community-binding sentiments of patriotism and national identity—when,
that is to say, conservative parties cease being conservative—those
parts of the population not indentured to the apparatus of dependency
look elsewhere. What Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, said of
the victory of Le Pen’s Freedom Party is true of eurosceptic victories
across the continent: it is, he said,“a shock, an earthquake that all
responsible leaders must respond to.” We’ll see how many responsible
leaders there are who will acknowledge the obligation.
UKIP Rising in the United Kingdom
So it is curious that almost all the commentaries underplay or
even miss the big story: This is the threat, long- and short-term, that
UKIP poses for the Tories.
To judge from the headlines, the big
losers in these elections are Labour and the Liberal Democrats and in
particular their respective leaders, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg. Both
men are being blamed for the poor performance of their parties, and
there is much speculation that they will face leadership challenges.
In
Clegg’s case, this criticism is amply justified. Support for his party
is now hovering around 10 percent both in opinion polls and in two
sophisticated calculations of what the local-election results would mean
for a general election. That’s less than half the Liberal Democrat
national total in the 2010 election. And not only did Clegg decide that
the Lib-Dems would fight as unabashed devotees of the European Union,
but he debated the UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, in two televised debates,
and Farage soundly beat him on both occasions. Clegg wagged his face in
Farage’s fist and got a bloody nose. He will probably survive, though,
because his removal might bring down the Tory–Lib-Dem coalition at a
moment when the Lib-Dems would be slaughtered at the polls. Even so, the
Lib-Dem future looks bleak. If the current economic recovery continues,
Clegg and his party are apt to derive much less benefit from it than
are the Tories, who are seen as the senior partner in the coalition. So
they will lose the “compassionate” votes to Labour on their left while
also losing the “efficient” votes to the Tories on their right.
The
obloquy directed toward Miliband needs a little more explaining. It
really arises because the government and the Blairite Labour Right both
have an interest in painting the Labour leader as a weird alien
super-geek who cannot possibly be prime minister. Tories make this
argument for the straightforward partisan reason that they think it is a
plausible way to win an election. Blairites make this case because they
want to displace Miliband before the election, some because he might
lose it, others because he might win it and take Britain and their party
too far to the left. So there is a coalition of odd bedfellows who
agree that Miliband will make a hash of everything. Unfortunately for
this argument, Labour won more votes than any other party in the local
elections. So the message has had to be massaged to the effect that
Miliband won an average of only 31 percent of the national vote when he
needed something like 35 percent to be on course for a victory in 2015.
Opinion polls seem to confirm these figures, showing Labour one or two
percentage points ahead of the Tories nationally.
But this
argument has two flaws. First, it is rooted in the past of a
two-and-a-half-party system, when any opposition needed a strong lead in
midterm opinion polls in order to survive a likely government recovery.
That happened time and again from about 1955 to 1997. But a four-party
system is much less predictable: For instance, as we saw above, a
government recovery might drive Labour voters to the Tories while
diverting Lib-Dem votes to Labour. Besides, in such a system, a party
can win power with a far smaller percentage of the vote than was needed
throughout the 20th century. Second, the anti-Miliband analysis glosses
over Labour’s advance in London. With 38 percent of the London vote,
Labour won a slew of Tory councils. The Tories were five points behind
Labour in the capital, and their sole gain was Kingston-upon-Thames,
which, significantly, had previously been held by the Lib-Dems.
Commentary on the London results has focused on the fact that UKIP did
badly here — 10 percent overall — but the Tories fell sharply, too.
London is now voting very differently from the rest of Britain because
it is culturally very different as a result of mass immigration in
recent years. And Labour is the clear beneficiary.
And this brings me to the position of the Tories. If their poor
results in London were simply the latest example of the swings and
roundabouts of electoral politics, they could shrug their shoulders and
press on. That in fact is what they are doing: David Cameron’s
spin-meisters are letting it be known that those voters who have
defected to UKIP will return by the next election in London and
elsewhere. Nothing to fret about. Steady as she goes. But these results
are merely the latest evolution of a very ominous long-term trend for
the Tories. As Anthony Scholefield and Gerald Frost pointed out in their
2011 study Too Nice to Be Tories,
the Conservative Party has been steadily losing one region of the
United Kingdom after another in the last 40 years. It used to be able to
depend on nine to twelve Unionist votes from Northern Ireland for its
parliamentary majority; it gets none now. It won half the Scottish seats
in 1955; the last three general elections each returned one Scottish
Tory to Parliament. It wins eight seats out of 40 in Wales. And from the
158 MPs elected from the North of England, the Tories got 53.
This is a dreadful record, but it could get worse. UKIP is now
starting to replace the Tories as the main challenger to Labour in
northern working-class constituencies. The new party takes votes in
particular from culturally conservative and patriotic working-class men
whom both major parties have abandoned in their pursuit of urban
middle-class progressives. UKIP may therefore be a threat to both
parties, but the local elections suggest that it is a bigger threat to
the Conservative party. Its advance is real enough, but in most northern
constituencies its success so far consists of coming in second to
Labour and of pushing the Tories down into their southern redoubt. But
if London is going Labour — and the swing gave Labour control of once
true-blue Redbridge, which is halfway to Brighton — then the South of
England is a much smaller Tory redoubt than it used to be.
Some
of these past trends explain why Tory leader David Cameron cultivated
his relationship with the Liberals. He calculated that the Tories would
find it hard to win power on their own, and by cultivating a more
progressive image, he thought to make himself a more acceptable
coalition partner for the Lib-Dems. Unless things change, however, there
will be too few Lib-Dems in the House of Commons to provide either
Cameron or Miliband with an effective coalition partner. So Cameron has
to win more votes and parliamentary seats on his own next year.
Can
he do so? One cannot rule it out entirely. Short-term factors sometimes
overwhelm long-term trends. An economic recovery that has not (yet)
overheated and gone bust. The “Miliband feel-bad factor,” rising house
prices leading to a massive “feel-good factor”: These and other
unforeseeable events might carry Cameron home to Number Ten. But it is
very unlikely. In 2010, UKIP won 3 percent of the vote; it is currently
pulling in between 17 and 29 percent (depending on the region and on the
election.) It is difficult to see UKIP’s falling to below the 6–7
percent total that would ensure Cameron’s defeat. At the same time,
because it lacks even a single seat today, UKIP is unlikely to win more
than a handful of seats even if it scores double the vote of the
Lib-Dems. So a minority Tory government could not rely on UKIP for
either a formal coalition or informal parliamentary support.
That leaves Cameron with a difficult choice.
Either he
does the electoral deal with UKIP that he now says he won’t do, in
which the Tories agree to support UKIP candidates in a given number of
seats in return for UKIP’s not fielding candidates elsewhere. In London,
for instance, that would give UKIP an electoral base of something just
above 40 percent — in Britain as a whole an even larger one.
Or
he contrives to lose the Scottish referendum on independence, which
would remove only one Tory from the House of Commons but 41 Labourites
and 11 Lib-Dems.
My guess is that he’ll wait to see how the second option pans out before deciding on the first.
Related Reading:
The Telegraph: Attention Toffs & Muffins: London-land Can’t Ignore This Protest...A Tempest In A Teapot, It is Not.
No comments:
Post a Comment