A Tory-UKIP pact: inept politics, but don’t rubbish (all) the stats
Second, even if a bicycling Cameron fell under an actual or proverbial London bus, UKIP aren’t going to deal with anyone ahead of what in an earlier blog I described as the elections the party might have been born for: the European Parliament elections in June 2014, just 11 months before the scheduled General Election. The party’s aim is to improve on its 2009 performance – second highest vote share, equal second in number of seats – by finishing first in both and pushing the Conservatives into a humiliating third place.
At that point, and with UKIP facing a replay of the 2010 Election – a drastically post-Euro fall in its vote share and, under the first-past-the-post system, probably still no MPs – Fabricant’s offer might at least sound like a two-party pact, rather than the panic-driven buy-off bid that it appears at present.
However, just because the political timing and handling of The Pact? seem inept, it doesn’t mean that the paper’s basic arithmetic – that UKIP candidates could cost the Conservatives between 20 and 40 seats in 2015 – is too. Well, not entirely, anyway.
It does, however, get off to a bad start, by appearing to base the 20-40 seat guesstimate on an extrapolation from the 2010 Election results – in a way that almost all analysts would regard as seriously exaggerated, not least here in the West Midlands.
There were 21 seats in 2010 – 16 Labour, 5 Liberal Democrat – where the UKIP vote was larger than the winner’s majority over the second-placed Conservative candidate. Four were in the West Midlands: Solihull – Lib Dem majority 175, UKIP 1,200; Dudley North – Labour majority 649, UKIP 3,267; Walsall North – Labour majority 990, UKIP 1,737; Walsall South – Labour majority 1,775, UKIP 3,449.
In the bigger picture, it will be recalled that the Conservatives were 20 seats short of an overall Commons majority, and there were numerous excitable claims that UKIP cost the Conservatives the chance of majority government, or at least of managing without the encumbrance of the Lib Dems. Excitable, but almost entirely mythical.
Yes, if every single UKIP voter had instead voted Conservative, David Cameron would have become PM with 327 seats and an overall majority of 4. Back on Planet Earth, however, the biggest single group would probably have stayed at home, some would certainly have voted BNP, and others for other non-Conservative candidates. A YouGov poll at the time suggested that, out of every 20 UKIP voters prepared to consider voting for an alternative party, only eight would have opted for the Conservatives, six for the BNP, three for Labour, two for the Lib Dems, and one for the Greens.
All of which means that, instead of the magical 21 seats, the Conservatives would have gained, in UKIP’s absence, 5 or 6 at most – with Solihull a ‘likely’ and Dudley North a ‘just conceivable’. Nationally it would have put the Conservatives up to, say, 312 and Labour and the Lib Dems between them on 309. An anti-Conservative coalition would have been even less feasible than it was already, and a Conservative minority government rather more so – though under Cameron’s leadership the outcome would most likely still have been the one we actually got.
But that was then. By 2015 almost everything will have changed – except possibly the one thing we’d been expecting and the Conservatives eagerly anticipating: constituency boundary changes, which in 2010 might have given Cameron a narrow overall majority, but which currently look unlikely to happen. Added to which, UKIP are consistently polling far more strongly than in the midterm of the last Parliament, both in opinion polls and actual elections, and are benefiting too from the growing EU-scepticism among the electorate as a whole.
It’s prompted Ladbrokes to offer 9/2 on UKIP winning more votes in 2015 than the Lib Dems, and 2/1 on winning a seat. The additional votes alone, though, especially if boosted by more Party Election Broadcast time than UKIP have been allocated previously, could cause the Conservatives serious damage indeed. In this part of his discussion paper, I reckon, Michael Fabricant was spot on.
