I’ll admit, I haven’t exactly had my ear to the ground of British politics in the last few years. So my friends over there are welcome to tell me how I’m way off base. But I do know this: when a majority government in a Westminster first-past-the-post system calls a snap election with the apparent intention of taking advantage of favourable polling and opposition disarray to cement a deeper mandate, electorates find a way to pull themselves together just long enough to say a collective “oh no you didn’t”.
I can’t claim to have done any rigourous quantitative electoral analysis to prove this law. But the Brexit referendum itself illustrates the principle as much as does any other anecdotal instance: never call an election just because you think you’ll win. Democracy has a way of punishing hubris.
Right now Theresa May’s Conservatives appear unstoppable. Polls have them some 20 points ahead of the nearest opposition; the sort of lead that in the British system makes for a crushing majority. More significantly, no other party appears to be in any position to put together a meaningful challenge in the brief month and a half before the vote. Labour is at war with itself, its leadership unable to assemble a coherent programme with broad appeal. After serving in a coalition government with Cameron’s Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats were decimated in the last election two years ago and barely have a foothold left in Parliament. UKIP got everything it ostensibly wanted through the Brexit referendum victory, leaving no further justification for its existence, its entire platform having been essentially usurped in more palatable form by the governing Conservatives. The SNP will likely sweep Scotland again, which will pretty much guarantee a new referendum on Scottish independence. But in the immediate term, who cares? This wasn’t decisive last time (except insofar as it contributed to the death of Labour); it won’t change anything this time either.
That said, polls taken before an election is called tend only to measure which party the respondent is pissed off at the least at a given moment. Confronting a choice between actual representatives and actual policies is something different. Let’s start with the fact that 48% of the population who voted in the Brexit referendum voted Remain; given turnout, that is some 35% of eligible voters. That, alone, amounts to a massive constituency of people, disgruntled over the primary issue facing the country today, whose grievances remain unrepresented. A population that, were it somehow channeled and organized, would be more than enough to shift the balance of power, even if you disregard the numbers that most polling indicates have since been added to their ranks as the true costs and complications of Brexit have become more evident.
Politics abhors a vacuum. It is hard to believe that even in the short time before the election, no one will find a way to access such a vast untapped resource of unrepresented voters.
That being said, I have no plausible story to tell as to how that could come about starting from the point where we are now. Perhaps some manner of tacit coordination between opposition parties enabling people to strategically elect popular local candidates without much consideration for party leaderships. And seriously, how is it that the Lib Dems are no longer a factor? This is where I need the insight of a local who knows what’s going on, because the way I see it, they are (in a bizarre reversal of the ordinary state of affairs, I will grant) the only party capable of assembling a coherent platform suitable to the mood of the times. Having consistently opposed Brexit, could they not find themselves the beneficiaries of an unexpected surge of disgruntled centrist Labourites and Tory Remainers, regardless of the state of their organisation? These sorts of surprises do happen in FPTP elections during times of frustration. Consider the NDP sweep of Quebec, where the party hadn’t even bothered to campaign, during the 2011 Canadian federal elections.
All I’m saying is that my instinct is that this could turn out to be a lot more interesting than my despairing British friends seem to expect. That despair has to go somewhere between now and June 8, does it not? And a lot of things, some of which no one has imagined yet, can happen in seven weeks.
The Tarragon Lectures 