Abstract
In the wake of a UK general election, there always is another horse race among three to four teams to produce a book analysing the results. First again, as usual, is the Hansard Society/Parliamentary Affairs volume, with this highly readable collection of political commentary, including extensive figures and tables, authored by a large, well-known team of mostly senior British-based academics.
Its 17 chapters offer broad, although not comprehensive, coverage of the preparations for the election, the campaign itself, the results, and a bit on the aftermath, prior to the post-election Labour leadership campaign. In addition to the introduction and conclusion by the editors, there are chapters on voting and turnout, the electoral/party system, five individual party campaigns (including the Greens and Scottish National Party [SNP] but excluding United Kingdom Independence Party [UKIP]), party finance, media, national results (excluding England), groups (women, but not ethnic minorities), issues (the economy and immigration, but not the National Health Service, welfare or the European Union) and, unusually, a chapter on ‘anti-politics’. While there is inevitably some overlap of information, for the most part the chapters complement each other well.
The overall theme is encapsulated in the title of the concluding chapter: ‘Economic Narratives and Party Leaders’. According to the contributors, these turned out to be the most influential issues of the election: Enough of the electorate thought that the Conservative-led government was making progress on the economy and consistently considered Cameron to be a superior leader to Miliband to provide the Conservatives with the margin of victory. There are several sub-themes. These include (i) the Conservative dominance of the governing coalition, especially in its economic policy; (ii) the inability of Labour to shake blame for the Brown government’s ties to the Great Recession; (iii) the English-based appeal of Conservative campaign charges of possible Labour-SNP ‘coalition chaos’; (iv) the Liberal Democrats’ collapse; (v) UKIP assuming ownership of the immigration issue; (vi) opinion poll shortcomings; (vii) marginal seat targeting; (viii) the SNP sweep in Scotland; and (ix) the quirks of what became a more fragmented multiparty system. Thus, the SNP achieved third party status in seats, UKIP became the third party in votes and the Liberal Democrats lost 2/3 of their votes and over 80% of their seats.
With so many riches, what’s to complain about? There are three notable shortcomings. First is the relatively short-term time perspective, with many references to 2010 and some back to 1992. But the United Kingdom has been a multiparty system in the electorate since the first election of 1974, now covering 11 general elections and 41 years. Yet there are still references in this book to the outmoded concept of two-party ‘swing’.
As indicated above, what changed in 2015 was that, while both the Conservatives and Labour recovered somewhat in their overall vote shares from 2010, there was increasing fragmentation in the rest of the party system. This led to such hitherto unexpected features as Labour winning more Conservative-held seats than the reverse (10 versus 8), UKIP finishing second in more seats than any other party (120), and the SNP overturning what had been a Labour-dominated Westminster party system in Scotland since the 1960s. In effect, Labour was ‘whip-sawed’, to the ultimate benefit of the Conservatives, by the Liberal demolition across the United Kingdom, the Labour decline in Scotland, and the contrasting appeals of UKIP and the Greens, all within a plurality electoral system. Multiparty, evermore fragmented electoral politics was signified by the sole official leaders’ debate in which David Cameron participated, with seven leaders taking part. These conflicting voter tendencies led to Labour’s post-election turmoil over having lost what seemed to be a golden opportunity.
The second shortcoming is the lack of a comparative perspective. There is some discussion of the Conservative and Labour importation of campaign specialists from Australia and the United States as well as glancing references about how the United Kingdom fits with some economic/electoral/institutional developments in other Western democracies. But no extensive analysis of such claims is provided.
Furthermore, even the UK depictions do not go into much academic depth, settling for recent references, many of them journalistic ones. Summary numerical appendices and constituency maps would also have aided the narratives. But the chapters should provide plenty of source material for PhD theses and other, more in-depth analyses of particular phenomena.
Inevitably, several of the contributions touch on what might be expected in the next election, especially one in 2020. With the unexpected Conservative victory in 2015, plus boundary changes expected by the next election likely to harm Labour’s prospects, the Conservatives appeared to be in a favourable position to repeat their success. But few scholars or journalists expected the 2015 outcome after the indeterminate results of the 2010 election produced the unlikely Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition. Scholarly studies provide significant trend data, but Harold Wilson’s famous aphorism still appeals. In the light of the events of the 2017 general election, perhaps that should be changed to ‘a few weeks are a long time in politics’.