How to use this Page

By David Denver and Mark Garnett

The latest European Parliament and local council elections, held on Thursday 22 May 2014, has shown, once again, that it would be foolish to make any predictions about political future contests in Britain. The two most striking aspects of the results were the advances made by UKIP and the collapse of Liberal Democrat support.

In the locals, UKIP increased its roster of councillors from 2 to 163 while in the European elections it topped the poll with 27.5% of the vote and netted 24 of the 73 UK seats. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, lost more than 300 council seats and came fifth in the European elections (sixth in both Scotland and Wales) with a miserable 6.9% of the votes, retaining just one seat. Commentators and (some) politicians alike were not slow to describe these election outcomes as constituting a ‘political earthquake’ in British electoral politics.

However, we believe that features such as diversity, dealignment, and disillusion have emerged more and more strongly in British electoral politics over the past 40 years. This makes us reluctant to offer predictions about future electoral trends and the ‘earthquake’ seen recently.

Diversity is indicated by the fact that (leaving aside Northern Ireland) seven different parties won representation in the European Parliament with the largest number going to a party founded only 21 years ago. In the elections for English councils, while UKIP dominated the headlines the Green Party almost doubled its contingent of councillors (from 20 to 38), while ‘Independents’ of various kinds won more than a hundred seats. Going back 50 years, in the 1964 election the two major parties took 88% of the votes cast. This year, they had an estimated 61% of the ‘national equivalent vote’ in the locals and just 49% of the real votes in the Euro-elections.

Nigel Farage. Photo by Euro Realist Newsletter. CC BY 2.0 via Euro Realist Newsletter Flickr.

Dealignment refers to a long-established trend whereby the sense of attachment to traditional parties that voters used to feel has become progressively weaker. Rather than turning out almost automatically for the party that they (and probably their parents) always supported, they are more likely to weigh up the appeals of the various options available and more willing to switch across parties. That is why the days of two-party dominance look increasingly distant. In the elections of May 2014, by all accounts, UKIP took votes from previous supporters of all three parties while differences in the council and Euro results indicate that a significant proportion of the electorate chose different parties in the two separate contests. It is salutary to recall, too, that just four years ago during the general election campaign Nick Clegg and his party seemed to be the darlings of the electorate and ‘Cleggmania’ appeared to be about to sweep the old two-party system into history. Their performance in May 2014 shows how fickle and fluid electors can be when they lack strong attachments to political parties.

When dealignment is accompanied by widespread disillusion with the parties that have dominated elections since 1945 then the inevitable result is success for minor parties. In the past few years David Cameron’s policies have alienated many traditional Conservatives while the performance of Ed Miliband has been, to say the least, not very impressive. The Liberal Democrats used to prosper in these sorts of circumstances but their participation in a governing coalition with the Conservatives and the difficulties encountered by their leader have ensured that they have attracted more than their fair share of odium.

If the UKIP surge really did make the earth move, then, this was a seismological event waiting to happen. Apart from speculation about the fates of the main party leaders, post-election comment focused on the possibility that UKIP could translate its widespread support into a significant number of seats at the 2015 general election. A major problem here, of course, is the first-past-the-post electoral system which operates strongly in favour of two-party competition. To gain parliamentary representation UKIP will have to channel its resources into specific seats where it seems to enjoy some concentration of support.

The post-election comments of the party leadership showed that they understand this and they will use the local election results as they basis of their calculations.  Just as the Liberals did in the past, UKIP hope to build on local success to boost their chances of representation at Westminster. That is one indication of the importance of local elections in British politics. Another, quite different, indication is that a poll conducted after the announcement of the local election results but before the Euro-elections were declared found that support for UKIP had increased. Local elections in Britain have not received a great deal of attention from academics (with a few honourable exceptions) which is why we aim to publish an account of them at a future date.

Finally, will the UKIP surge be maintained through to the next election? Past experience suggests probably not but when earthquakes are going on past experience may not be a very good guide. Nonetheless, the volatility of the modern electorate offers some hope for the major parties.  Just as voters are willing to switch away from a party they could just as easily switch back in other circumstances.

David Denver and Mark Garnett are respectively Emeritus Professor of Politics and Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University. Their book British General Elections since 1964 was published by Oxford University Press in 2014.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only politics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post May 2014: a ‘political earthquake’? appeared first on OUPblog.

        

Related Stories

• After the storm: failure, fallout, and Farage
• Reflecting on the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings
• Politics and cities: looking at the roots of suburban sprawl

 

Tweet

By George Garnett

The Norman Conquest of England, recently examined in Rob Bartlett’s television series, offers some striking parallels. The term is jargon, of a type beloved by politicians, because it attempts to foreclose on reflection and debate. The manner of the ‘change’ – by armed force – is veiled, and the agent unspecified, even though both are always obvious. Less obvious is why a particular ‘regime’ requires ‘change’ by foreign military intervention. In the case of Iraq, our own regime has tried and tried again to make the requirement obvious to us, and perhaps also to itself. One such attempt was so ‘sexed up’ that it will go down in history as the ‘dodgy dossier’.

Going back almost a millennium, we find evidence for a similarly sophisticated attempt on the part of a foreign power to justify the replacement of this country’s regime. There are, of course, many differences, in particular Duke William’s claim that he was dutifully suppressing Harold II’s brief, tyrannical usurpation, and, in his own person, restoring the true heir to Edward the Confessor.  As such, the official Norman line, embodied in Domesday Book, was that English legitimacy had been restored. Old England continued, and not even under new management. In this respect, the recent forceful change of regime in Iraq was quite different. There, a pretence has been made of imposing a novel and utterly foreign system of government, on the assumption that it is the sole, universally valid type. But in terms of the elaborate efforts made to justify Duke William’s actions, to provide legal cover for endorsement by the eleventh-century equivalent of the UN – the papal curia –, the parallels in tendentious legal scrupulosity are uncanny. We tend to think of medieval rulers, and the clerics who worked and wrote for them, as crude, simple types, unconcerned with diplomatic niceties. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Our distance from 1066 makes it easier to evaluate the results of this particular regime change. The mantra of continuity with Old England, epitomised in a ubiquitous acronym for the status quo in the ‘time’ of King Edward, in turn provided cover for the systematic removal of the English aristocracy, and a transformation in the terms on which their French replacements held their new English lands. This was elite ethnic cleansing. By seizing control of England’s past, the Normans transformed its future, and reconstructed it in their own image – all the while proclaiming that nothing had changed. Harold II was soon airbrushed out of history. By the time Domesday Book was produced, at the end of the Conqueror’s reign, Harold II had never been king. Every major English church had been or was soon to be demolished and rebuilt in the new continental style. Fifty years after the Conquest, England had been rendered almost unrecognisable, and all in the name of a regime change founded on the premise that there had been no change of regime.

Justification and reality were revealingly juxtaposed in York on Christmas Day 1069, on the third anniversary of William’s coronation. In response to English rebellion in the North, he had laid the region waste. Finally, his troops had even torched York Minster. William then arranged for his regalia to be sent up to York, so that he could solemnly display his regality in the burnt out shell of the church. In Iraq thus far the conquest seems to have been much less successful, and therefore the antithesis between the theory and the brutal facts of regime change has not (yet) been as sharply delineated.

George Garnett is Tutorial Fellow in M

0 Comments on What can the Norman Conquest teach us about regime change? as of 1/1/1900

Add a Comment