UK: The future of the Protest Vote

In a parliamentary election last Thursday in the seat of Barnsley, a former coal mining area in Northern England, the Labour Party candidate, as expected, was returned handsomely. There were two big surprises, however: the UK Independence Party (which campaigns for Britain to leave the EU and which, I had better declare, I helped found) beat the ruling Conservative party candidate into second place; and the Liberal Democrat Party, junior members of the ruling coalition, were beaten into sixth, behind an independent former miner and the far right anti-immigrant British National Party.

Naturally many people are asking whether this is the end for the Liberal Democrats and whilst we shouldn’t draw too many conclusions from one result, I think there are points of interest here.

Just twenty or twenty-five years ago there were effectively three parties: you voted Labour or Conservative and if you wanted to register a protest vote you voted Liberal. There were of course others on the ballot paper- the excellent David Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party, for example – but they were cranks. The Liberals were slightly cranky but they had party conferences and party political broadcasts on the television so were a sort of institutionalised protest.

In the 1980s and early 1990s three new national parties emerged: UKIP, the Green Party and the British National Party. They stayed way behind the Liberals (now the Liberal Democrats) but changes to the political broadcast rules meant the smaller parties got more airtime, so the electoral position outside the top two was LibDems (institutional protest), UKIP / Green / BNP (semi-institutional), others. But note that whilst the semi-institutional three had defined core beliefs, the LibDems, to maintain themselves alone in the second division, did not (or at least the notion of 'Liberalism' was sufficiently hazy to adapt to changing circumstances). So only a percentage of LibDem voters voted that way because of what was in their manifesto. It is thought that their core vote is only around 5% of the electorate whereas UKIP, for example has a (total) vote of around 7%.

Now with the LibDems joining the government, their share of the ‘none of the above’ vote may be lost in whole or in part. Of course the core beliefs of the others may hold them back from capturing all these protests: you might be in favour of the EU, anti-environmentalism and pro immigration, but few, I think, share that exotic eclecticism - there is something for everyone.

The LibDem position would seem to be this: if, as we near the next election, the Coalition is seen to have failed, they will reap in full measure what they have sowed. They might well split up into single issue parties, pro-EU for example. If, by contrast, the Coalition is a success, there is the serious risk that Mr Cameron will allow himself to be talked into governing alone (most of his backbenchers don’t like the coalition). In this case the LibDems will find it hard to return to being the principal recipient of the protest vote. They will have been tainted.

Mr Clegg’s best hope is that Mr Cameron still needs him in five years’ time.