Local Elections: As UKIP Voters Join the Tories to create Super-UKIP, Labour and Other Parties MUST Unite in a Progressive Resistance

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist and commentator.

 

So wretched is the mainstream media here in the UK that the results of Thursday’s local elections are being read as an unprecedented triumph for the Tories, and the death knell of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, whereas the reality is actually far more nuanced.

However, in conducting research into how people voted, I’ve discovered that finding examples of the number of overall voters, the numbers of those who didn’t vote (70% of elegible voters?), and the percentage swings since the last comparable elections (in 2013) is almost impossible. Without exception, the media has focused solely on the number of seats gained and lost and not on the percentage vote, even though, under our antiquated and disproportionate ”first past the post” system, that sort of analysis always ends up giving a skewed perspective on voting behaviour.

However, based on what I can ascertain from comparing the 2013 results to the estimates of voting in the General Election in five weeks’ time based on the polling on Thursday, the Tories’ gains were principally because they took almost all of UKIP’s votes, and the horror of that, as Ian Dunt made clear in his latest column for Politics.co.uk, Local elections: UKIP aren’t dead – they’re in charge, is that the Tories have become UKIP.

As Dunt explains:

UKIP is dead. But in reality it is more powerful than ever. It has transcended its physical body and its soul has entered the Conservative party. Its spiritual victory required the end of its physical form.

This has been happening for a long time. Theresa May opened the last Conservative party conference by announcing a hard Brexit outside the single market and the customs union. Then the party unveiled plans to phase out foreign doctors, cut down on foreign students, jail landlords unless they check tenants’ residency papers and ‘name and shame’ firms for hiring foreign staff. The prime minister ended the gathering with an attack on “citizens of nowhere”.

Since then, May has cultivated the nativist vote assiduously. She has nurtured the narrative of an enemy within — sometimes the Lords, sometimes Labour or the Lib Dems, sometimes judges, sometimes citizens of nowhere, sometimes journalists or liberal elitists — who are trying to stop Brexit, but who, more than that, are fundamentally incompatible with the reality of what it is to be British and decent and hard-working. She has encouraged talk of ‘the will of the people’, as if the nation spoke with one single voice on all matters — a harking back to a 1950s when everyone came together and thought the same and looked the same. She has promoted the idea of shadowy foreign forces out to undermine the UK. She has traded in a narrative of imagined British victimhood.

This is straight out the UKIP handbook. It is not just the policies she has stolen, but the tone, the storyline, the emotional tenor of how UKIP thinks about itself and its country.

This has proved extremely beneficial to May. She has united the right under Brexit. But that is a domestic recalibration of support. It has no contact with reality. The real danger does not come now, but when that type of vision clashes with the real world. Because the key aspect of UKIP’s policies and their narratives remain: They are wrong and they are mad.

I encourage you to read the whole of this article if you haven’t already — and to buy Dunt’s book, the excellent, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? but to return to my analysis of Thursday’s elections, the death of UKIP — and its rebirth as the Tory Party — is the most significant aspect of Thursday’s elections, although it is not one that most of the media has noted in terms of the transfer of votes.

However, a historical analysis makes the swing clear. In 2013, in their best performance ever in local elections — prior to their nearly 4 million votes in the 2015 General Election — UKIP took 22% of the popular vote. That has now slumped to 5%, a 17% drop, with 13% of that swing going to the Tories, who took  25% of the popular vote in 2013, and who, based on Thursday’s results, are projected to take 38% of the votes in the General Election.

In contrast, the losses incurred by both Labour and the Lib Dems, although noticeable, are not as disastrous as the media, in general, are reporting. Labour took 29% of the vote in 2013, and are projected to take 27% of the vote after Thursday’s vote, while the Lib Dems’s share has fallen from 18% to 14%.

As the Guardian pointed out in its editorial today, “the main parties of the right (the Conservatives and UKIP) have broadly the same level of support across the UK, 43%, as the main parties of the left (Labour and the Liberal Democrats) on 45%.”

However, while UKIP voters are helping the Tories become a super-UKIP, a horrible far-right, hard Brexit-fueled caricature of the party that even established right-wingers like Michael Heseltine condemn, the opposition — Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, the SNP in Scotland, Plaid Cymru in Wales and others in Northern Ireland — are still, for the most part, failing to understand that now, more than ever before, what is needed to stop the Tories is a progressive alliance, in which all the parties put aside their differences, and work together to defeat the Tories.

Up and down the country, the Tories can be beaten, in seat after seat, if the other parties all come together and to work out who needs to step aside to allow another party to defeat the Tories — mostly Lib Dems standing aside to enable Labour to win, or Labour standing aside to enable the Lib Dems to win, but with other permutations.

What is also needed is a clear recognition that, if the Tories were to be defeated, whatever government took over would need to get rid of the anachronistic and unfair “first past the post” voting system, which, in 2015, saw the Tories gain over 50% of the seats with just 36.8% of the votes, while, as I explained at the time, UKIP — even though I despise them — “got just one seat even though they secured 3,881,129 votes, meaning that it was 113 times harder for them to get a seat than it was for the Tories.”

On both these fronts — the need for a progressive alliance, and the need for proportional representation — what all the Tories’ opponents need to recognise, however hard it may be, is that, currently, not only are they all losers, but the system itself is also discredited, alienating people who can’t be bothered to vote because they recognise that, in most constituencies, a vote for anyone other than the leading party is, very literally, a wasted vote. Why vote when it can make no difference? Under PR, although constituency areas would need to increase in size to accommodate the selection of candidates based on the percentage of votes cast, the  almost incalculably huge benefit would be that no vote is wasted, as every 50,000 votes (or thereabouts) would secure a candidate.

Is any of this change possible? I certainly hope so. There have already been moves to get a progressive alliance going, as I reported in my article, Taking on Theresa May and Her Hard Brexit Dystopia: Open Britain Targets Pro-Brexit MPs, and in comments following its publication, but I do think that those of us who are fearful of a hard Brexit, far-right Tory landslide need to make it clearer than ever to Labour and the Lib Dems that the time of tribalism is over and the leadership of both the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats need to sit down and work out if they want to be perpetual losers in a broken system, or if they want to defeat the Tories and change the system to keep the Tories from ever having an outright majority again.

Surely that’s a no-brainer?

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.