The performance of UKIP in the Eastleigh by-election has generated a great deal of comment in recent days. The party took 27.8 per cent of the votes cast on 28 February 2013, and beat David Cameron’s Conservatives into third place. The Liberal Democrats won the by-election with a record low vote in the postwar era of just over 32 per cent. Yet the UKIP vote should not be seen as some sort of advance for the right in British politics. Rather, it is the opposite. Far from marking a moment when a rightwing tide started to sweep across the UK from its south coast, the by-election confirmed that the right now has a potentially major problem in winning parliamentary elections.
Historically, it has been the right that has benefitted from splits on the left. In the early 1920s, as Labour became a governing party, the Conservatives benefitted from the split between the Labour and Liberal votes, particularly in the trio of elections between 1922 and 1924. In 1922, the left was split three ways: Labour won 21.5 per cent of the vote, the Lloyd George Liberals took 9.9 per cent, and the Asquithian Liberals 13.3 per cent. The total, 44.7 per cent, was comfortably ahead of the Conservatives’ 38.5 per cent, but it was the Tory Andrew Bonar Law who won the keys to No 10 with an overall majority of nearly 50.
Even with the Liberals reunited in 1923, the Conservatives still emerged as the largest party, with 38 per cent of the popular vote and 258 seats. Labour won 191 seats on 29.7 per cent of the popular vote, while the Liberals took 62 seats from 18.9 per cent. The combined Liberal-Labour vote of 48.6 per cent was over 10 per cent more than the Conservatives, yet this only yielded a total of five less seats. In 1924, the first ‘modern’ general election result with the Liberals well behind the two main parties in third place, the Conservatives won a landslide victory on a comparable scale to Labour’s 1997 win, with over 400 seats to Labour’s 151 and the Liberals’ 40. This was on 46.8 per cent of the vote, with the Labour (33.3 per cent) and Liberal votes (17.8 per cent) totalling 51.1 per cent.
This same trend was evident in the 1980s, after the SDP-Liberal Alliance was formed in 1981. In the 1983 general election, the combined Labour and SDP/Liberal Alliance vote was 53 per cent, but the Conservatives won a landslide victory with a majority of 144 on 42.4 per cent of the vote. In 1987, the combined Labour and SDP/Liberal Alliance vote was 53.4 per cent of the vote, but the Conservatives again won with a majority of over 100 seats on 42.2 per cent.
Today’s party politics is a mirror-image of the past. With declining Liberal Democrat opinion poll ratings, the major split in British politics is on the right. This can only be an advantage to the left. It is perhaps supremely ironic that the very phenomenon that led to Margaret Thatcher’s large election victories in the 1980s has returned – and on her key issue of Europe, to boot – to cause such a headache for her political children.
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Nick Thomas-Symonds is the author of Attlee: A Life in Politics published by IB Tauris (2010). He writes the Labour history column for Progress tweets @NThomasSymonds
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I think some of this is simplistic in terms of the left and right vote in the UK. In the 1983 and 1987 elections, when people were polled as to a two-party preference, the Alliance vote split around 50%. to each party so Thatcher would have won probably 57-41% in 1983 and 54-44% in 1987. The evidence from Lib Dem withdrawals from fighting seats they fought in the 1920-50 period was they they also tended to split evenly and perhaps even leaned slightly to the Tories. The shift in the Liberal vote away from ‘equidistance’ comes in the early and mid 90’s. Paddy Ashdown’s Chard speech of 1992 http://www.liberalhistory.org.uk/item_single.php?item_id=82&item=history reflected research they had done into post-materialist values and where they perceived they would pick up their vote in future. I recall a New Statesman article on this at the time. In the 1997 we saw a massive 3-1 or even 5-1 preference of Lib Dem voters for Labour. This remained as over 2-1 through the Blair era and I recall was still at 60-40 in 2010. Now half the Lib Dem 2010 vote supports Labour, but I think there is still a majority preference for Labour amongst the 2013 coalition Lub Dem supporters. Thus the ‘Lib Dems on the left’ is really a modern narrative and does not necessarily reflect the past.