Elected some BNP MEPs that is. The Euro election was done by a party list system with quota. One of the few voting systems actually in use that is clearly worse than our traditional first-past-the-post, and last night [7th June 2009] showed why it is worse. The parties choose the list, so the parties, not the voters choose the MEPs.
The fewer votes cast, the lower the quota. The BNP vote didn't really go up - the only serious party that had a significant increase in its vote was the Greens. But loads of voters stayed at home, so the quota went down. And having fiddled with Martin Webster gets you an expenses-paid trip to sunny Strasbourg.
First thoughts, based solely on numbers. I deliberately hadn't listened to today's radio or press comment when I wrote this because its so depressing. Nor had I looked at any blogs or mailing lists or discussion websites. So these were my first thoughts, after looking at the results this morning and doing a few sums. I am a political hack.
Party by party:
Labour. Complete crappy disaster. But less of a complete crappy disaster than I expected. And it really would be a bad move for the Prime Minister to resign or call a general election right now. Reasons why later.
Once people get it into their heads that they don't like a politician, or a party, they will do them over sooner or later. Very often for something that wasn't their fault, or wasn't even bad. Its the Curried Eggs Effect. Edwina Currie did lots of bad things but got sacked for telling the truth. The Labour government in the UK has done a lot of things that they deserve to get kicked out for - but the two that are hurting them most are the global recession (for which the worst that can be said about them is they share the lower-middle-class British delusion that rising house prices are good) and the scandal of MPs expenses (which would have happened anyway whoever was in government at the time, it just happened to happen on their watch - though the opportunistic timing of the Telegraph announcements was probably governed by the electoral calendar - the coincidence of local elections, Euros, and the four-year anniversary of the last general election was too tempting to miss). The Prime Minister is being unfairly blamed for things that aren't his fault. Which is not to say that there aren't other things he should be blamed for that are his fault.
Tories. Nowhere near as good for them as they are saying, though obviously a hell of a lot less bad than Labour. Their share of the vote held up but did not significantly rise. Their actual vote fell in most regions. This is TORY VOTING FAIL 2009. Their total vote actually fell. The Labour Party is in free fall, everybody hates them, yet the Tories only managed to get one extra MEP out of it? They should sack their strategists and PR people and employ someone who knows how to do the job. Where are Josh Lyman and Toby Ziegler when you need them? Oh, don't tell me, they are fictional. And they are fictional left-wingers. Well, Toby is, Josh is more of a New Labour type. But they'd still do a lot better than whatever shower the Tories have in.
After all that bigging-up of Commander Data, sorry Daevid Camera, I mean whatsisface, the boy on a bike who is smaller than Boris, all that great free publicity the Great Unbiased British Press was giving them, and they can't manage a ONE PERCENT increase in their share of the vote? The best news for the Tories last night was the even crappier performance of...
the Liberals. (Yes, I know their official name has the "D" word in it but I like the cute way they get annoyed when you fail to use it in their executive-committee-approved manner) What did they do to deserve this? Presumably they are getting punished for being the most openly pro-EU party. This is yet more proof that a lot of the Liberal voters of the last thirty years are people who might otherwise have voted Tory but decided not to for some reason or another. It is basically a protest vote. When the Tories start looking more acceptable to decent folk, the protest vote goes down, and the Liberals get shafted.
SNP. On a roll. On a haggis even. At this rate whoever gets into Westminster at the next general election will certainly deal with a nationalist government in Scotland. After the Greens they are the party that came out of this election with the best improvement in their fortunes, They ought to be knocking back the claret in Edinburgh today.
Plaid Cymru. Disaster. Labour collapsing all round them and they didn't manage to get a single extra vote out of it. Of all the parties in this election that actually have elected representatives. Plaid is the one that suffered worst. Which they didn't deserve.
UKIP. Stunning result for them in Middle England. No, they won't replicate this in a general election. Their vote actually went down in London and some other regions. They are a single-issue campaign and they get votes when the focus is on the EU so in this election the other parties did their PR work for them. As soon as you open your mouth and say "Europe" the dog-whistle blows. (A good reason to have EU elections on a different day from other ones)
In previous years UKIP voters were mostly know-nothing xenophobic Tories who have been taught by the gutter depress that the EU is a bunch of Johnny Foreigners bent on straightening our bananas, banning our British Pounds, raping our gin fields, and spending our taxes on foods that smell of garlic. It might be that this time round they picked up some otherwise Labour-voting protectionists who couldn't bring themselves to vote BNP. And I think the chance of them causing real damage on that front is greater than the chance that the BNP will because they genuinely aren't as nasty. The UKIP are a worse threat to our freedoms and liberty than the BNP, for the same sort of reasons that the Daily Mail is a worse threat than Stormfront. The Daily Mail is actually quite a good paper, Stormfront is a load of teenage white supremacist wank, the political equivalent of the more tedious parts of 4Chan/b/. No bugger with an ounce of political nous gets taken in by the fash, but UKIP can look respectable when they want to.
It is ironic, in the cosmic sense, that the UK party with the worst track record for fiddling expenses is the one that benefits most from the fuss about them.
Green. Great day for them. Their national vote went up by more than the BNP and UKIP and SNP combined - but I bet they won't get the news coverage that that deserves. And maybe it doesn't really deserve it. They are still largely a floating protest vote I think. They haven't broken through into the big time - they are the protest vote of choice for lefties (just as the Liberals are for the managerial right & UKIP for the xenophobic right) Like I said I haven't looked at any of the commentary yet, and I haven't read any blogs. If they are being fair they will say that the Greens are the party that did best.
BNP Everyone is talking about them (though I'm not listening just yet). Everyone who is pissed off that the BNP got two MEPs should say whether or not they voted. This is a list election. If more people had voted - not many more - the quota would have been higher and this would not have happened. Like I said, If you sat at home, its partly your fault.
Let no-one say the North-South divide is dead. The regions of England voted very differently from each other. Though the real North - the one that starts somewhere round about Hartlepool - is very different from the North-West and Yorkshire. And it was the North-West and Yorkshire, and the West Midlands that voted BNP. Not London, and not the North-East or Scotland either. Forget the stereotype of the disaffected unemployed alienated skinhead on a council-estate who thinks that immigrants are taking his job. The BNP does get some of those votes, but not that many. Most of those people don't vote anyway, and if they did vote BNP the fash would be doing better than they are in London or Newcastle or Glasgow. The BNP is a party of lower-middle-class racist whingers who don't live around many blacks or immigrants and who are being led astray by a handful of neo-pagan gay Nazi gun-wankers and leather-fetishists. I don't think the BNP are a long-term threat because I think the British people aren't stupid enough to fall for the likes of them. The more publicity they get the more their voters will realise they have been duped. (And probably vote for bloody UKIP instead).
The worst threat the BNP pose is that they might cause the mainstream parties to over-react. That they might succeed in putting protectionism and immigration at the centre of the political agenda. Of frightening Labour (or Liberal or Tory) policy-makers away from decency. The Left ought not to compromise with this. We already have a full set of racist and oppressive anti-immigration laws. We should be campaigning to get rid of them, not to make them even harsher.
"Christian" This lot did better than I expected. Well, less badly than I expected, only in London could they be said to have done well. They beat all the minor socialist candidates in most English regions. They are a rather unstable coalition between the "Christian Party" (a largely black and almost entirely London-based party with more than its fair share of right-wing homophobic nutjobs) and the Christian People's Alliance, which is sort of a personal vehicle for Ram Gidoomal, and whose politics are probably pretty much in the same centre-left camp as the Liberals and New Labour on everything except reproductive rights.
and 2.9% of London voters voted for the spokeswoman of the Tamil Tigers. Add that to "Christian" vote in London and the two combined come to a lot more than the BNP got locally. Oh yes, London really is less racist than the north of England & Midlands. This proves it yet again. My wine-befuddled brain is having visions of a street fight between the BNP and the Tamil Tigers.
Libertas, Jury Team, No2EU, Yes2Europe, UK1st, Animals Count, the Scottish Socialist Party, the Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, the Peace Party, the Roman Party, Mebyon Kernow, Kermit the Frog, the Ghost of Christmas Past, L Ron Hubbard's fossilised penis and half a dozen other independents all got about five votes each from their mothers, their cats, and people too drunk to read the ballot paper.
Why there should not be a General Election right now
First, because the Euro results poison the water. There is some short-term stuff that needs doing, like the continuing economic stimulus packages. Labour is more likely to get it done than the Tories. Either are more likely to get it done that a Parliament based on last night's election which was mainly done decided on duck ponds and bent bananas.
There are probably not very many people who will decide to vote Tory or not based on their policy on the EU. It hardly matters. The truth is that the Parliamentary leadership of all three main UK parties is pretty much in the same place when it comes to Europe. They all want to stay in the EU (though the Tories dare not say so for fear they might piss off their xenophobic right-wing and lose votes). They all want slow and steady progress to further economic integration and freer markets, (deeply unfashionable as it is to say that out loud) They all want to keep out of the Euro currency zone (the Liberals pretend they want in and Labour vacillates) None of them want any greater political integration (though there are some Liberals and a few Labour who do, in both parties the real consensus is against)
But their voters differ from each other. According to a recent poll in the Economist Tory voters are perhaps now majority anti-EU. But support for the EU amongst Labour voters is actually growing - and is now higher than for Liberal voters, even though the party leadership is softer on the EU than the Liberals are. The old right-wing-Labour protectionist anti-EU faction has pretty much vanished - or stopped voting Labour. And what support there is for getting out of the EU on the Left is more likely to vote Green than Labour nowadays. So none of the big parties have any real electoral interest in pushing the EU as an issue, the Tories least of all.
The Tories couldn't give a flying monkey's about the European Parliament. They do not believe they can seriously influence the EU in any direction they would like it to go, and they have more chance to obstruct in the Council of Ministers than in the Parliament. They don't really need the Parliament to become an effective and representative institution and some of them actively don't want it to. They would rather rather see it paralysed and then they can deal directly with the other big governments over its head. What little importance it does have to them is entirely domestic.
So come the Euro election they all talk bollocks and stand on no platform at all other than tabloid grumpiness. And they abdicate the debate to right-wing journalists and minor parties based around reaction, rejection, and racism. We need some time to clear the air from the stink of UKIP and the BNP before we have a General Election.
Second, because Labour would lose, so why cut our own throats? Frankly, the Party is fucked for the next General Election. I thought we were going to lose in 2005. We deserved to after Iraq. Though the Tories deserved to as well and there were no other horses in the race.
This time round the reputation of the Government has fallen off the end of the pier, and the Party has more or less ceased to function as a party on the ground in many areas. Most old Labour hacks like me haven't got the heart to go out on the streets and campaign at the moment. ID cards pissed off the lefty activists, Blair's continuing purges made most of us unwelcome in our own branches. Activists don't win elections but you need them to fight them. You can't do it with some kind of Blairite Bonapartist-populist appeal over the heads of the parties direct to the voters. That kind of mass-production campaign doesn't work in the age of the Internet. You need people on the ground - even if the ground is virtual.
Brown is actually doing slighly less badly than Blair but the combination of the "international crisis of capitalism" (such a nostalgic phrase) with the cluster-fuck over MPs expenses means that we've got into an electoral bind that the canniest PM in the world couldn't get us out of. I just hope that the inevitable defeat at the next General election doesn't lead to another "thirteen years of Tory misrule" (another good old nostalgic phrase)
Third, and most importantly, because if only, if only, the Labour government could realise what they are faced with and start planning for the future there is good work they could do yet. They should stop tinkering with the welfare state or the tax regime - its too late, whatever they do will be implemented or dropped by the next government. Forget about ID cards, just quietly lose them and save sixty billion quid over the next ten years Let them fall of the agenda.
Instead they should get in there and make some of the constitutional changes we need. Finish reforming the House of Lords. These days legitimacy comes from elections. Fixed term Parliaments - why not have a General Election on the first Thursday in May 2010 and every four years afterwards? Some definition of constitutional law and rules to change it would be useful, as long as it was kept simple. Give some workable autonomy to local councils. And we might even think about changing the electoral system for Westminster. Though please, please not bloody PR. I hope last week has killed off any support the list system gets in Britain for ever.
Then go to the country and lose. At lest you would have done some good on the way out. And be more likely to get back in again in eight years rather than eighteen.