News from the New Party

Scotland has spoken, and what it is saying is not entirely clear.  It is evident that what it doesn't want is Labour, and Scottish independence. It is far less clear on what it wants instead.

 

Proportional representation has delivered confusion - in more ways than one.  The electronic voting fiasco that has rendered about 100,000 Scottish votes null and void has invoked the ghost of the Floridian hanging chad in an unexpected habitat.

 

It is right that there should be an inquiry into this scandal, and even more urgent that further innovations to our voting systems (let's not forget mass postal voting in England) that have so damaged the integrity of our democratic process over the last ten years should not be pushed through in future without very much greater care.

In Wales, the result of the Assembly election has been bad news for Labour, though not as alarming as the Scottish result.  Plaid Cymru is light years away from repeating Alec Salmond's achievement of making the SNP the largest party in the land.  Labour in wales will no doubt continue to govern, barring an unlikely rainbow coalition stretching from the leftist Plaid to the Tories.

In England, the picture is mixed.  The Tories have done well, especially in the South, Labour have done badly, and the Lib Dems very badly.  But in terms of national voting projections, the figures are virtually unchanged since last year.  The Conservatives are doing well in the south, which will punish both the Lib Dems and Labour, but are not really gaining any traction in the North, which is what will make the real difference in a general election.

Overall, then, the picture is a confusing one.  In some respects, this is right and proper - local issues will obviously differ across the country, and it is hardly surprising that Party A will take much the same line against Party B in one part of the country as Party B will take against Party A in another.  With the best will in the world, local representatives will sometimes find the task of balancing local needs and issues against wider political imperatives an insuperable challenge.  All of which means that transposing local voting figures and patterns onto the national scale is a hazardous activity.

On the other hand, voters are as likely as not to treat local elections as a national referendum as are the national media and party machines.  We can however say with certainty that Labour is currently unpopular.  People generally throughout most of the country don't want the Labour Party any more.

 

Unfortunately they don't know what they want instead.  And this is understandable: across the country the British people are not being given a real choice.  The Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems sing more or less from the same hymn sheet, or at any rate interchangeable hymn sheets, on many issues.  Plaid Cymru are on a planet of their own (laptops for all eleven year olds), and even Alec Salmond is quietening down on independence in order to attract coalition partners.

 

A principled, ideologically-based politics scarcely exists anywhere in the United Kingdom any more.  A political revival is urgently required.