James Campbell: Britain’s new house could be as messy as this one
Predicting a winner for Britain’s December 12 election is proving to be even harder than last time. James Campbell explains why.
James Campbell
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This House of Commons deserves to join the Long, Short, Rump and Cavalier parliaments of the 17th Century, consigned to history by a nickname.
Unfortunately, the handle most appropriate for the body conjured by Theresa May’s disastrous 2017 election campaign — the Addled Parliament — has been taken since 1628. But addled this parliament has been. Divided between passionate Leavers and Remainers with seemingly every shade of opinion in between, it has proven itself confused and unmanageable.
But while its end will come as a relief to Britons sick to death of arguing over Brexit, there is a good chance the new House could be as big a mess as this one. Even though the polls have the Conservatives and Prime Minister Boris Johnson well ahead of Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system could easily throw up another hung parliament.
What makes predicting a winner even harder than last time — when the Tories snuck back in with the support of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland — is the addition of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, which didn’t exist in 2017.
For Johnson to get a majority in the 650-seat Commons, a lot of things will need to go right. On paper — ignoring defections — the Tories start with the 317 they got last time, but the expectation is most, if not all, of their 13 seats in Scotland will fall to the resurgent Scottish Nationalist Party.
The Tories can also expect to lose seats in the southeast to the middle-of-the-road Liberal Democrats, if a recent poll in Margaret Thatcher’s old seat of Finchley — which had them up 34 per cent since 2017 — is replicated across the capital and up the Thames Valley.
The Lib Dems are the only out and proud Remainers — in the remote chance they win outright, Brexit will be cancelled — which has them in the mix for votes from Brexit-hating Tories and Labour folk angry at Corbyn for his equivocation on the issue.
But while the chances are the southeast will see a net loss to the Tories, in some cases, the Lib Dem surge could actually cause them to pick up seats. That’s because even if Johnson doesn’t get any more votes than May did in 2017, there are places where it wouldn’t take much of a drop in Labour’s vote for the Tories to finish on top.
To win a majority, however, Johnson is gambling he can resonate in the traditional Labour areas of the north of England, which voted Leave.
This was May’s plan last time but the areas turned out to be more Labour than Leave.
It’s Labour’s hope this time too — that tribal loyalty and historic hatred of the Tories will win out again. Johnson will be hoping Farage can woo enough Labour Leave voters away to allow the Tories to come through the middle.
To win regional Labour voters, Johnson is planning an election campaign built around big-spending promises on public services aimed at revitalising regions that have still not recovered from the recession of the early 1980s.
The problem is, if the election turns into a contest to show who loves the NHS more, your money would be on Corbyn. Not enough for him to win but enough to stop Boris achieving a majority.