Stray thoughts on the late election

Polling station at Coedffranc school

I had started jotting some immediate impressions of the December 2019 general election shortly after the final results were in. Then came the rush of views of the commentariat on social, broadcast and print media to digest. It seemed sensible to wait a little longer for the usual later, considered, academic analysis before committing my impressions to this blog.

However, I have now received the latest incarnation of UKElect which not only incorporates all the voting figures from throughout the UK, but also the ability to compare voting patterns with previous elections. So it was probably worth a look again at my immediate impressions before starting to play tunes on UKElect.

I wrote at the time:

There was not much to stop the juggernaut of the Johnson party machine. Local by-election results over the last year pointed to an increase in the Conservative vote all over the country, probably unprecedented for a party which had been in partial or whole control of the country for nine years. Those same by-election results showed a disastrous fall in support for the Labour party, again throughout the country.

This  pattern of increased support for increasingly reactionary conservative forces and a collapse in a belief in socialist solutions to our economic and social problems was not restricted to this country. It showed in national elections in Europe in 2019 and especially in the European Parliament elections earlier in the year. In the latter case, the loss of socialist MEPs was compensated for by an increase in Liberal representation. This was a result of proportional voting systems mandated by the EU for EP elections. There was a percentage rise in the Liberal Democrat vote in our general election, too, higher than that of the Conservatives, but it was spread too evenly across the country to make a difference under our antiquated electoral system.

In the face of that overarching movement in public opinion,  there was not much that the Labour and Liberal Democrat campaigns could have done to unseat Johnson's Conservatives. There were obviously flaws which, if addressed, could have improved our representation. However, I believe that the immediate recriminations - which continue in the case of Labour! - went over the top.

For instance, the Liberal Democrat policy of retracting the Article 50 letter without waiting for a further referendum was said to have been fatal. This argument fails to recognise that the Conservative position was equally firmly against a confirmatory Brexit referendum in spite of increased disquiet about the conduct of the 2016 referendum. If people had wanted more delay with a referendum at the end of it, they would have voted Labour in large numbers. As it is, those parties which took a firm and decisive line on Brexit saw their vote share go up - Lib Dems' more than Conservatives' though clearly not enough - and ambivalent Labour's went down.

The major flaw* in the Lib Dem campaign as I see it was its presidential style. (The personality of the leader impacted Labour, too - v. earlier criticism of Jeremy Corbyn.) I know it is received wisdom that success in elections derives from majoring on the personality of the leader. This belief probably results from letting people trained in journalism and/or PR run electoral campaigns, but it is a trap where a bottom-up party like the Liberal Democrats is concerned. Our local campaign leaflets emphasise that they come from a Liberal Democrat team - why does our national campaign not do the same? In the case of the December GE, we had a good story to tell in that respect: front-line spokespeople who had more experience in government than the opposition and not much less than the government front-bench junto. It was a mis-step for Jo Swinson to declare spontaneously without any hedging or provisos that she wanted to be prime minister. It was surely enough for her to point out that she could do a better job than the other two leaders (which, in fairness, she also did)  but she should also have spotlighted the talent on the Lib Dem front bench. Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May got away with presenting themselves as authority figures. It is said that they reminded Conservatives of their nannies; I would add that they probably reminded other voters of their primary school head teachers. It also occurred to me, probably unfairly, that the clearly younger Jo reminded many men of wives from whom it was difficult to take direction.

I do not repent of my decision to vote for Jo as leader. She would have made a good PM too, someone who got things done but not at the expense of the people suffering from cuts to the welfare system, who will probably continue to suffer under this class-bound Johnson government. Her own mistake, which may have cost her seat, was to continue the inflexible line on the Union which in my opinion has blighted the Scottish Liberal Democrats since the Nationalists took power in Edinburgh.

There had been a warning of the dangers of the "great man" approach to electioneering, if only enough people had remained from the 2010 campaign to heed it. In 2010, Nick Clegg was presented as the Lib Dem answer to David Cameron. Indeed, he made an immediate impact in the first TV hustings. However, in the last week of the campaign, the Conservative media were able to find weak spots in his presentation and concentrated their fire on him. It was noticeable when canvassing that the response to me as a Liberal Democrat on the doorsteps was cooler than at the start. I cannot have been the only foot-soldier to have experienced this, and surely the intelligence must have made its way up to HQ. It must have been the early postal vote, impressed by Nick, which made up for a falling-away on polling day itself. (Of course, the secrecy of the ballot ensures that I can never prove my contention; I do not have Laura Kuenssberg's X-ray eyes). I remember thinking at the time that rather than present the mainly hostile media with a static target, it would have been better to have switched back to Vince Cable for the final week. He had already impressed with his economic competence compared with that of the Labour government, and with the confirmation in 2008 of his warnings that the UK economy was headed for a crash. It might have been enough to nick a few more Conservative seats and enable us to have more meaningful coalition discussions with Labour. History would have been very different.

* Unite to Remain had a malign effect in Wales, but was insignificant in England and irrelevant in Scotland. However, I will probably come on to that in a later post.