James Campbell: Clarity still elusive as UK poll circus nears finale
Britain is ready to vote in one of its most important elections but the big unknown is how many people will go to the polls in a nation where, unlike Australia, voting is not compulsory, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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When Boris Johnson called the first British election to be held in December since 1923, few expected the result to hinge on Scotland and Wales.
For decades in the Celtic Fringe, where memories of Margaret Thatcher’s linger unhappily, the Conservative Party’s performance in national elections has hovered between wretched and diabolic.
True, two years ago Theresa May surprised everyone by winning 12 extra seats in Scotland, which while impressive, only took her total there to 13, while her opponents had 48. Moreover, going into this election most pollsters had been forecasting for months the Scottish Conservatives were set to crash back into single digits.
It looked then that Prime Minister Johnson would need to break through Labour’s “red wall” in northern England and the midlands if he was to win the majority he needed to stay in Downing Street.
The Tories’ electoral history there is, if anything, worse than it is in Scotland but in 2016 voters in a string of traditionally Labour seats voted to leave the European Union. Ever since then, Conservative strategists have dreamt of converting those Labour Leavers into Tories. It was the central strategy of May’s disastrous 2017 election when those voters turned out to be a lot more Labour than Leave.
Still, the dream did not die and at this election the Tories have sallied forth again under the slogan “Get Brexit Done” in the hope of overcoming decades of tribalism. It might have seemed a forlorn hope but to be fair, they didn’t have a great deal of choice because as well as facing a wipe-out in Scotland, the party was bracing for losses in the Remain-voting areas in London and the south of England.
The main danger there was not Labour but the middle-of-the-road Liberal Democrats.
One would have to be a very Remain-obsessed Tory indeed to contemplate voting for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, a man of the 1970s who puts a whole new construction on the word unreconstructed, a man who, if even he hadn’t been a keen supporter of the IRA, Hamas, Cuba and what’s-his-name who used to run Venezuela, would be beyond the pale for Conservatives for his plan to tax the living-daylights of them.
Moreover, the Lib Dems seemed a good chance to get the votes from Labour supporters disgusted that under Corbyn their party has become an anti-Semitic swamp. But as polling day dawns, the election has not played out as most experts thought it would. The Liberal Dems, of whom so much was expected, have, flopped, in part because the more the public see of their new leader, Jo Swinson, the less they seem to like her. In going all out for the anti-Brexit vote they have appeared to have overreached.
Unlike Corbyn, who is saying he will seek new exit deal from the EU and then put it to a referendum — while refusing to say if he will advocate for it — Swinson is saying she will vote immediately to revoke Article 50, cancelling the whole thing. Not only do many Remainers seem to regard that as undemocratic, it has absolutely no chance of happening as her party’s vote is hovering at about 13 per cent.
The failure of the Lib Dems to surge has meant Tory Remainers have been denied the easy out. If they want to stop Brexit they are going to have hold their noses and vote for Corbyn which, it would appear, not enough of them are prepared to do. Most pundits now think that while the Lib Dems will do OK in their traditional strongholds of the west of England and make a few gains in and around London, the Tories aren’t going to be belted in the south.
But nor does it appear as though they are going to do as well as they had hoped in the north and the Midlands. Though Labour seems certain to lose some seats, it won’t be the catastrophe it might have been. But as it turned out, that might not matter after all. Because according to recent polling, it looks as though the Tories will hold most of their Scottish seats after all.
The Scottish National Party, which was expected to take most of them, is not having a good time of it. Its former leader Alex Salmond is likely to be tried for rape, there have been scandals at the local hospitals and after 12 years in office in Edinburgh, voters are growing weary of the habit of blaming everything that goes wrong on Westminster.
There doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for a second referendum on Scottish independence either, which would be a non-negotiable demand for the party’s support for a Labour government.
The big surprise, however, has been Wales. At present the Tories hold eight of the 32 Welsh seats at Westminster but recent polling suggests that could jump to 16. If that pans out and Scotland holds, then Johnson should be able to pick up enough seats in England to govern in his own right.
The big unknown is how many people will go to the polls in a nation where, unlike Australia, voting is not compulsory. Britain hasn’t voted in winter since 1974, so pollsters have no real data on which to model voter turnout.
If older voters are reluctant to queue up to vote in the cold, we could be in for or a shock. Especially as two thirds of the three million people who have registered to vote since the election was called are under 35.
James Campbell is a Herald Sun columnist in London for the election.