The election according to Ross Mckibben
Ross Mckibben makes some interesting points in the LRB. It's subscriber only, so I'll select a few.The problem for the Conservative leadership is that at the moment there are not enough Tories. The old Tory coalition of working-class deferentials and a business and professional middle class which was Conservative by birth – if you were not in the Conservative Association you were not in the swim – has been destroyed, partly by social and demographic change, partly by the (unintended) consequences of Mrs Thatcher’s policies. The Tory working class has gone the way of the whole industrial working class, while the huge middle class is now amorphous and its political loyalties highly fractured. If you are in the Conservative Association today you are not in the swim – just an OAP. This is not to say that the old coalition cannot be reassembled: just that it is no longer the Conservatives’ by right. For the great majority in a now very democratic country the Conservative Party has no special competence or virtue, as to many it once did. Indeed, this great majority is positively anti-Conservative: in the 1950s the second preference of most Liberal voters was Conservative. Today it is Labour. It is not clear what the Tories should or can do about this: the obvious policy, and probably the best policy, is simply to wait on events and assume that Labour will sooner or later come a cropper.
The Lib Dem vote, however, is, as it has always been, unstable and volatile, and that is because it has no real class base. The Lib Dems will usually get about 20 per cent of the vote; but it is rarely the same 20 per cent. As a result they have few, if any, safe seats. What they have is safer seats. Unlike the Conservatives or Labour, they do not have a swag of constituencies which it is almost inconceivable for any other party to win; and they have no guarantee that the impressive gains they made from Labour will be long-lasting. But they are fortunate in not holding the balance in the House of Commons. That much increases their freedom of manoeuvre without putting at risk this shaky coalition, as having to support either a Conservative or Labour government would certainly do. Nor is a volatile electorate necessarily a problem. The more volatile it becomes the more an unanchored party is likely to benefit. It is just that the benefits are short-term ones.
It says much about the social composition of the parliamentary party and the attenuation of its esprit and self-confidence, that Gordon Brown should be the only plausible candidate to succeed Tony Blair.
posted by Matthew @ 5/20/2005 12:34:00 PM
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