Beneath the unswerving lines of deadlocked polls in the race to control the British Parliament, runs a strong current of uncertainty. Britain's long-established Labour-Conservative duality, first shaken in 2010, is likely to be shattered this year as codified electoral distortions and voter discontent reveal themselves in full force on May 7. Why will the Scottish National Party sweep into a kingmaker role with dozens of seats despite registering in the single digits in the polls? What kind of coalition will emerge - or will one of the two major parties carry a Queen's Speech and oversee a minority government? Will Nigel Farage fail to win his own constituency, blunting the euroskeptic UKIP's recent rise?
With two weeks left before Britons head to the polls, RealClearWorld caught up with Peter Allen, lecturer in British Politics at Queen Mary University of London, to unpack some of the trends leading into election night. The following interview has been edited slightly for length and clarity:
Our own columnist Alex Deane has written about the problems with the way the UK counts votes. According to Alex, the Conservatives get the short end of the stick. Is he right?
The way it works is we have a first-past-the-post system, with single-member constituency seats similar to the U.S. House of Representatives. People vote for a candidate, and the candidate with the most votes in each constituency wins. So you don't get rewarded for votes that don't make you win. The way the Conservatives are done over is geographical. As a kind of historical rule, Labour seats will be underpopulated compared to Conservative seats. Say you have two blocks of 100,000 voters. Labour might get five seats out of that 100,000 votes, whereas the Conservatives, if they got 100,000 votes, they might only get three or four seats, because more people live generally in Conservative-held seats. if you think about the Southeast of England, that's where it tends to happen.
So seats are not appointed by population, it's geographical. It's also interesting that the more populated areas vote Conservative.
Where we're sat right now (London) is a massive exception to that rule, because this is very densely populated and it's a Labour stronghold. But as a rule, when you think of the North of England , it's very underpopulated compared to the South. And Wales and Scotland historically both lean heavily toward Labour, and are very lightly populated compared to England. They have tried to change this. We have what are called boundary reviews roughly every 10 years, but they don't keep up with what's actually happened. They have a boundary review, and they might implement changes, but by the time the election comes around, the changes are already outdated. I don't think it's necessarily a conscious thing, it's just an accident of the system. But there's a vested interest for Labour certainly in not changing the way the system works.
Do the Conservatives have a realistic outlook of changing the Labour bent of those areas, of breaking out of their strongholds?
They could do. But they tried to redraw the boundaries in I think 2011, and were voted down in the House of Lords. The argument from people who didn't want to redraw was that it would be gerrymandering in favor of the Conservatives. Generally these things are done by an impartial body, the Boundary Commission. But the Conservatives are trying to force their hand to redraw them in a more fair way. They could try to have a stronger appeal in the north of England, but it's just not a traditional Conservative stronghold.
This election, being as unpredictable as it is, how has it changed campaigners' judgment of marginal (competitive) seats?
If a seat is held by someone with a less than a 5 percent majority, that makes it a marginal seat. That's where the election is won and lost. We have a lot of what are called safe seats where people are just never going to lose, barring some massive seismic shift, which is actually exactly what is happening in Scotland right now. You are seeing a lot of people lose safe seats in Scotland, or we will, in two weeks time, see people lose safe seats. A safe seat being where somebody had a majority of more than 10 percent, for example.
And because the seats are geography- not population-based, there are a lot of those seats in Scotland.
Yes exactly, and the SNP can pick up a lot. Scotland was redrawn, with a reduced number of seats, but Wales in particular still has a lot more seats than arguably it should. If you compare what they call the electoral quota between England and Wales, Wales has a significantly lower quota than England. Wales has far more seats than it should, and that benefits Labour.
In a future election, could we expect a Scotland-type phenomenon in Wales?
Plaid Cymru is still the third or fourth party party in Wales, depending on the poll. Labour and the Conservatives are still the biggest parties in Wales. I can't see that changing unless there was a real serious independence movement, which i don't expect any time soon. The Welsh are generally more happy with the settlement, or at least less willing to challenge it, than the Scots.
Let's talk about the losers in this seismic shift. Who are some of the bigger names who might lose their seats? What are some of the most important individual races to keep an eye on?
Well there's some very very famous people. Charles Kennedy, he used to be leader of the Lib Dems, he looks like he might lose his seat. Douglas Alexander, who's currently in the Labour Shadow Cabinet and actually part of the Labour election leadership, he looks like he may well lose his seat. Danny Alexander, who was chief secretary to the treasury, he might lose his seat as well. So you're going to have a lot of very famous high-profile politicians at risk. It's always hard to tell whether people will on the day suddenly change their mind. But it does look like some of them are in real trouble.
I think one really important seat to watch this time is going to be Nigel Farage's seat in Thanet South. That will be tight. There are some seats that are always kind of tight - a lot of the seats in Birmingham are usually quite close. So there's a few Labour MPs, one in particular called Gisela Stuart, I think she won election last time by a few hundred votes. Hampstead and Kilburn in North London - actually one of my friends is running there, taking over from Glenda Jackson, who was a famous actress, she won an Oscar. She won by seven votes last time.
In Scotland, it's not even the case that they're necessarily marginal seats. They wouldn't have been considered marginal (before), they've just come into play. But now a lot of those are marginal. Generally you see it in the outskirts of urban areas, where social change can have an effect - where something might have happened in the social fabric of that area that would have changed the way that people would vote. Those would be the seats to worry about if you're a political party.
What strategy might UKIP follow? Polls have them at 15 percent, yet they aren't going to pick up a lot of seats.
Obviously they want as many seats as they can get. But they are, like you say, in a very difficult position. This is another example where a national swing isn't going to benefit smaller parties, because you really want a concentration of votes as opposed to a national swing in the electoral system. The electoral system is biased against the smaller parties. So the Lib Dems still are the third party, on paper at least. The polls suggest they're going to be in trouble, but they'll probably bounce back.
Why do you say that?
I think their ground support should come through in the end. The polls have them anywhere between 6 percent and 15 percent. I think it will probably be closer to the 15, although you can't really say with any certainty. But they have had a very good ground campaign for years. They were really good at going into constituencies, building up lots of local activists who then go out and knock on doors.
UKIP haven't had that. They're really new, so they haven't been so good at campaigning in the way that someone like the Liberal Democrats do. They're getting better at it, and people like Matt Goodwin, a political scientist at Nottingham, he's looked in depth at how they campaign, and he suggests they're getting better as well. But that's why UKIP will not be able to have that kind of instant effect that the Lib Dems built up over years - they just haven't had the time to build it up yet.
Having said that, they've got Nigel Farage. He's basically a celebrity. It would be a disaster for them if he doesn't win Thanet South. That would probably would be "it" for them in terms of any sort of credible attempt at making a real difference, because he is the party. I don't think many people would even be able to name anyone else, though there are some interesting characters in the party - Douglas Carswell, for example.
If they fail, I think someone else like them will come around, or Conservative or Labour will have to move in a way that picks up the lost votes.
What will things look like on May 8, and what will happen then?
I can't see a full coalition between anyone other than what we have at the moment, probably. And I don't really see the numbers working out on that front. If you look at every projection, it looks like (another Tory-Lib Dem coalition) is a pretty unlikely outcome. The Conservatives may well get more seats than Labour, but it's going to be very close - it could be a 2-or-3 seats difference based on some projections.
And does the party with the most seats get first crack at putting together a government?
It's not entirely clear. The precedent seems to be that the current prime minister will be asked if he can first. So the Queen will ask David Cameron to try. What (a ruling party) would want to be able to do is to carry a queens speech, which is where they outline their policy agenda for the year, and they would need enough votes to get a majority in the House of Commons. And if Cameron can't, which it may well look like he can't, then it goes to the next, which will be Miliband probably. I think it's most likely that Ed Miliband will be prime minister after May 7, simply because he could put together a minority government. Labour with the support of the SNP, maybe on that one vote, or on an ongoing vote-by-vote basis, could do that.
I don't think Miliband would want that, necessarily. Minority governments are generally unstable, for obvious reasons, and it's highly likely that we'll have another election pretty soon if that arrangement doesn't work out.
Even though the rules have changed for calling elections.
We've got this thing called the Fixed Term Parliaments Act. And I must admit it's very confusing, what the different permutations of it are. Basically it means the next election date is set in stone: It takes place five years after the prior election, so we already know that we're going to have an election in May 2020.
The Act removed the power of the prime minister to call an election whenever suits him or her best. It's a bit more boring form our point of view, but a minority government could still collapse. We wouldn't be bound to hobble on for five years. Ed Miliband, I heard a rumour yesterday that he's now considering scrapping the fixed terms act anyway if he became prime minister. If push came to shove, they could remove a government that didn't command the confidence of the House.
So a Labour-led government would probably not be done by coalition?
It'll probably work on a vote-by-vote basis, or by some sort of agreement. It's almost certainly not going to be a coalition - well, it won't be, they've all said it won't be. What it will probably be is on a confidence basis. Labour will only pursue legislation that it knows the SNP will support - and presumably the one or more Green MPs if they are returned.
And the Lib Dems aren't in this picture?
There just aren't the numbers for the Lib Dems, the only way it makes sense is for (Labour) to ask the SNP. If the SNP have upwards of 40 seats, that's when they become the ones who decide. And in a best case scenario, the Lib Dems look like they'll lose half their seats anyway, so they'd be down to about 30.
This has precedent in Britain, governments working on a confidence basis. It's not unheard of. In one sense this happens already in a very non-formal way. You get people like the Democratic Unionist Party always voting with the Conservative government - or with the coalition government in this case - on a number of issues. So it'd be more about formalizing something that would probably happen anyway. Because the SNP and a lot of the Labour party are ideological bedfellows, even if some of them can't publicly admit it. Quite a lot of the stuff that Labour want to do, the SNP want to do as well. According the Institute for Fiscal Studies this morning, the SNP and Labour plans are quite close economically. It looks like it would make sense for that to happen.
Why does SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon suddenly have this UK-wide appeal?
It's hard to unpack whether it's because she's an actual left-wing politician who's got a national stage, or how much of it is because she's a woman, and she's refreshing compared to Clegg, Cameron and Miliband. But equally, there is something about her. She's got a lot of charisma, she's very good at giving speeches. But also there is the reality that she's probably popular for a lot of people because she's not really in the mix. It's easier to covet something that you're not necessarily going to have to deal with. Even if they were in a powerful position after the election, which it looks like they will be, her aim is still focused north of the border. So for a lot of English people, their idea would be that eventually she won't be an issue anyway, if she's as successful as she aims to be.
(AP photo)
