The 'Meaning' of General Election 2010
Friday 7 May 2010 at 09:08 Last night's election result, with perhaps only another forty or so results to come in as we write, has its grim aspects - the potential for weak government, administrative incompetence, the collapse of momentum for change and the serious threat of a loss of market confidence in the country.
The Momentum For Change Collapses
Our last analysis stands with one exception - the last seven days of the election did not prove as tense and exciting as we had expected. The momentum for change ended ....
If anything, the election became dulled, as if the two both challengers, Clegg and Cameron, feared that they would lose their assumed leads by becoming more exposed to questioning. They allowed New Labour the leeway to rally its coalition.
Cameron was probably wise to do this but Clegg's lack of flair and drive in these last days allowed too many people to wobble back home to their respective tribes.
It would have been a high risk strategy but a determination to follow Vince Cable in telling the truth about the economy and setting clearer terms for a coalition might have made a difference but we will never know.
The technical analysis of the results is available in many places on the internet and we generally recommend the BBC. It is solid, experienced and non-partisan but it is also a little restricted in what it can say about the 'meaning' of events. As usual, we will try and abstract that meaning ourselves.
The Conservative Achievement - The English Party
The Conservatives' achievement was actually quite remarkable, given their position only three or four years ago, but they have still not established themselves a truly national British party.
All three of the petty 'nations' have remained in the hands of others. The question often arises why the Tories cling to a Churchillian British Imperial perspective instead of seizing the post-imperial moment for an English Parliament where 'conservative' values would become embedded in the bulk of the nation.
In fact, the Tories know that appearing to be 'British' increases their acceptability to the English and it maintains their hold in the non urban and suburban South. Yet it is an internal contradiction that leaves it caught between two stools, not truly national in either a British or an English sense.
This tension has been brilliantly exploited by New Labour (or rather its Mandelsonian-Blairite version) in building up an 'inclusive' political model that is less ambiguous about its appeal to anti-nationalist British votes in the Celtic areas and in winning over ethnic block votes in the 'English' cities.
New Labour - Ersatz National Interest
The way the swings operated also showed that the 'one nation' concept that had applied at almost any election until the Conservatives alienated Scotland and the bulk of Wales under Thatcher, as well as much of the urban north, is well and truly defunct.
In Scotland itself, there was actually a swing to New Labour with local support for the Prime Minister increasing significantly in his own constituency. If anything, the attacks on him by the national media look as if they strengthened his position and mobilised resentful tribalists into coming home.
Similarly, Battersea may have fallen to the Tories but the neighbouring constituency where a popular Asian could call on the local ethnic vote saw the Labour vote increase.
Yet in the North East, traditional 'English' territory but a Labour heartland, there were swings to the Tories very early in the evening that would have translated into a full Tory Government if they had been truly nationwide.
The pundits were undoubtedly confused throughout the first half of the evening as the swingometers, on which broadcast analysis has depended in every previous election, showed that the exit polling was correct in substance but was no guide to which seats would be won or lost in practice.
The Return Of The Tribal - From 'Class' to 'Identity'
This is the second 'meaning' to hold on to - New Labour's political strategy of using the State and its funds to embed its coalition has worked. Its vote stayed solid as its tribe turned out to vote (indicating that local machines may not be in quite as distressed a state as many have thought).
Key interest groups were able to put their local, ethnic, regional and class interests behind the Party created with great skill by Mandelson, Blair and Brown in the 1990s. New Labour is not only not dead. It has been strengthened.
What is dead is any serious Old Labour or libertarian Left challenge to the dominant order within the Party that was created at the 1996 Party Conference. Dissent is now idle (if it ever was not since 'Partnership in Power') - you are either in or out of the machine.
Given the history of credit crunch, this is the worst that it is likely to get for New Labour until and unless the United Kingdom breaks up or the IMF smashes its coalition by demanding cuts that it has to administer itself in Government. The first is unlikely, the second worryingly more so.
Liberal Democrats - Last Chance Saloon
The third 'meaning' arises from the illusions of those who thought the Liberal Democrats offered an opportunity for change. I doubt whether those high poll results for Clegg were false reads but it was, in fact, a 'bubble' and the Liberal Democrats must take responsibility for not seizing the moment.
By any objective standard, the Liberal Democrats had the most mature approach to the coming crisis (though we advisedly say merely 'the most') but their results were all over the place - wins here and losses there that amounted to no real net gain. Given the expectations, this is a disaster for them.
Elsewhere, TPPR got into a debate about the influence of the old and new media that now seems futile because it appears that none of the media had the influence that they believed they had or might have.
The Clegg bubble was overwhelmed not by media criticism or made stronger by new media support in the middle classes but by the inability of Clegg to exploit his one shining moment in the broadcast sun - he was clearly as surprised by it as anyone - and by the usual mix of fear and anxiety in the street.
The processual message of 'change' needed far more inspiration from the 'change merchants' (who really are only another faction of the political class when you get down to it). Without that necessary sense of drama, Tweedledum-Tweedledee tribalism had an opportunity to recover.
On the one side, Labour somewhat brilliantly exploited the fears of a Tory Government to the 'turkeys who feared Christmas' and brought its coalition back together.
Labour heartlands have never really cared much about refining democracy, plebiscites will do. What we noticed in the social media was a new surge of energy amongst New Labour progressives in those final vital days while Clegg seemed to sit around like a pudding waiting for the diners to arrive.
On the other side, the Tory strategy of advising the wobbling middle that a vote for the Liberal Democrats would allow Brown to stay in office shifted his wobblers back to him and it kept floaters floating with turnout not as high as expected.
If you are not inside the New Labour coalitional machine, you really are outside it and much of the Southern English middle class remains terrified at the thought of New Labour remaining in power. Cameron's team got that argument spot on!
Our Twitter feed was filled with local people unable to make a decision until the last minute with a sort of wobbling between the Tory Establishment and the Liberal Democrat protest vote that seems to have been resolved in different ways in different areas but generally against radical change.
Again, the role of Twitter and Facebook as viral medium needs more research because, if it contributed to the creation of the Clegg bubble, it also contributed to its pricking as caution, fear and anxiety were conveyed back through the system.
A Very Conservative Election
Taking these three 'meanings' and weaving them into a whole, we have seen something very 'conservative' re-appear in British politics. The British people are not fools. The events in Greece were the biggest story in the media that was not domestic or related to the Icelandic ash.
Every voter knows that we are living on borrowed time in an uncertain world where we do not set the agenda. Two emotions are dominant at such times: fear and a determination to survive. Optimism and imagination, required for reform, are in short supply.
At the theoretical national level, everyone might witter on about the need for strong government but they always mean 'our' strong government. They want a strong government that advantages their interest in the competition with others for a decreasing economic cake.
This is the overall 'meaning' of this election - the two great coalitional tribes have recoalesced at the expense of 'change' and are in a struggle now to control the State's mechanism for taking cash in taxes and redistributing it (or not) for political reasons.
From a market perspective, this is grim because we now have days or weeks in which minority parties with no national mandate may be dictating policies that are either distractions from tough decisions (such as referenda on reform that few now really care about) or expensive.
Meanwhile, not only economic recovery and the confidence of the markets is at stake but social cohesion. The Tories certainly cannot go much further in seducing the liberal centre-left and are under pressure on their radical nationalist and English Right. Losses to the Right cost them some seats.
New Labour has implicitly promised to protect its own but it can only do so if it disproportionately hurts the middle classes and takes the markets to the limits of their tolerance.
Administrative Incompetence - Africa Comes To Europe
Meanwhile, there is one other factor to take account of - the gross administrative incompetence of local government in many areas in their handling of the election.
We have not researched whether the Government in Tehran is crowing over this and other serious allegations of irregularities in ethnic-dominated constituencies but they have every right to do so.
What it really tells us is something we have known and observed for a very long time - that the British administrative system, constructed in the nineteenth century and built up over the decades since, is no longer fit for purpose.
The electoral errors of organisation and judgement are not exceptional but are standard fare yet the chances of reform are minimal under a Lib-Lab coalition because the transfer of resources from the private to the public sector in order to maintain full employment is central to the New Labour coalition.
High regulation levels (largely to meet trades union requirements), morale-damaging risk-averse target-setting (rather than the exercise of judgement) and a refusal to hire and fire on merit or make workers and managers truly accountable on actual results have created the 'turkeys' that cannot be killed.
This would not be a problem in a prospering economy. The 'turkeys' would live because the 'geese' (the private sector) was perpetually laying golden eggs - but the eggs are drying up and some of the geese now fear that they will be slaughtered for turkey feed.
This is really what is at stake in the creation of the next Government - not processual reform.
The question is whether one faction can deal with a massively over-engineered public sector without splitting the Kingdom or having to deal with Athens'-style riots or whether the other faction can hold things together long enough for an otherwise globally important economy to recover and lay eggs again.
If you want to know the real 'meaning' of the election, don't worry over much about the factional struggles in our political elites, look at the markets, look at Greece, Spain, Portugal and Eire and keep a close eye on sterling.
STOP PRESS: Nick Clegg has just announced that he thinks that the Conservatives, as the largest party, should form the next Government. This is not a surprise, partly because the Liberal Democrat Party grassroots has hardened its position on New Labour over the last decade.
The price is likely to be a Referendum on electoral reform which should be easy for the Conservative Party to concede so long as it is free to campaign against change.
The likelihood now is of a Tory minority Government taking unpopular decisions but restrained by the Liberals and minority parties and with New Labour both sniping from the side and seeking to detach the Liberal Democrats from the Tories at the first serious sign of a vote of no confidence.
The logic is of a second election within the next eighteen months when either it suits the Tories to go to the country on 'administrative competence' or the Liberals think they have got all that they can from the Tories and can cut some electoral pact with New Labour.
One Liberal Democrat strategy (though 'once bitten, twice shy') is to revisit the approach discussed between Blair and Ashdown but now with Cameron in which key policy changes are matched, later if not earlier, with Government positions for the Liberal Democrats in a key Ministry or two.
We may expect Gordon Brown to stand down or be challenged and there will be no progress on that side until a new Leader is appointed - probably a relatively young Blairite who can 'understand' the needs of the machine.
In terms of policy, the Party will probably try to appear 'responsible' to the middle classes whilst channelling public sector and regional fears of spending cuts to maintain the coalition in shape. It is quite possible for New Labour to be returned with a working majority within eighteen months.
All in all, we have a period of considerable political excitement ahead amongst an anxious public and jittery markets with no clear resolution for some months to come.