After every election, the political stock exchange goes into a frenzy trying to work out
who is a buy and who is a sell. Thirty-six hours after the polls closed, it is a little clearer who the winners and losers of this election season have been. Here are our selections:
Winners
Alex Salmond, the biggest winner of Thursday night. Salmond has achieved what the Scottish electoral system was meant to prevent, an overall SNP majority in the Scottish parliament. Salmond now has the votes he needs for a referendum on independence. Even better for him because any referendum ordered by the Scottish parliament would be legally dubious — not that London will want to point this out and risk inflaming nationalist opinion — and Salmond will have control of the question and the timing. Expect him to push the coalition for more and more concessions and use any refusals as his argument for independence.
Now, the polls do show that relatively few Scots — about 25 to 30 per cent — actually want independence and going for it could be an act of hubris. But for us unionists, Salmond has an uncomfortable knack of achieving things that conventional wisdom holds are not possible.
David Cameron, just imagine the papers today if Cameron had lost the AV referendum. Cameron’s own leadership would have been in danger and his parliamentary party would have been in mutinous mood. But by campaigning hard and winning the referendum, Cameron has regained the respect of his parliamentary party and, in the words of one senior Tory, ‘purified’ the circumstances that surrounded the creation of the coalition.
On top of this, far from losing seats in the English council elections, the Tories have actually gained them. Cameron’s command over his party this morning is the strongest that it has been since his failure to win an overall majority at the last election.
George Osborne, for the man responsible for the government’s political strategy and for working out how to forge a Conservative majority government in 2015 these have been a very good few days. First, the English local election results show that the cuts agenda has not been politically fatal to the Tories at all. Second, AV has been defeated making the job of winning a Tory majority in 2015 far easier. The icing on the cake for the Chancellor is that the Lib Dems are blaming him for Cameron playing hardball in the AV referendum campaign. This will do Osborne’s standing in the Tory party, already transformed by an impressive first year in office, no harm at all.
The Tory right, the defeat of AV was three wins in one for the right of the party. First, it was the right that forced Cameron and CCHQ to throw their full weight behind the No campaign. Cameron’s decision to do this showed that, whatever some around him say, he can’t ignore the most numerous wing of the parliamentary party. Second, Cameron’s vigorous campaigning has made any kind of Tory Lib Dem electoral pact, which would have marginalised the right, about as likely as Heather Mills being invited to Paul McCartney’s forthcoming wedding. Finally, the retention of first past the post ensures that Britain will stick with confrontational, right-left politics of the kind that suits the Tory right and its purposes.
Eric Pickles, a few weeks ago one senior figure in Downing Street remarked to me that Pickles has picked fights with almost every council in the country and the local elections will tell us whether that was sensible or not. The implication was clear: a bad result would, at least privately, be laid at the Local Government Secretary’s door. But Thursday night turned out to be a vindication of Pickles’ combative approach. By repeatedly highlighting council waste and executive pay, Pickles made it far harder for councils to blame central government for the cuts.
John Reid, one of the most significant aspects of the AV referendum was that the majority of Labour MPs and voters rejected electoral reform. This was a triumph for the Reid wing of the party which has never wanted to get into bed with the Liberals. Remember how Reid came out to kill the talk of a ‘progressive coalition’ after the last election.
There’s another big task for Reid now, leading the fight for the Union in Scotland. Anyone who saw the eagerness with which Reid tucked into his hours-long media round after the AV vote will have thought that this is a man missing the political arena, and who better than Reid to take on Salmond over the next few years?
Losers
Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, in the words of one of his closest aides, has received “a shoeing” over the past few days. The local election results were bad for the Lib Dems across the country but they were particularly bad in Clegg’s adopted home town of Sheffield, a point that the Lib Dem deputy leader Simon Hughes rather unhelpfully pointed out on the BBC’s election night coverage. Then there was the AV referendum, the device which Clegg used to persuade his party to go into coalition and which turned into a referendum on him, which was lost by the embarrassingly large margin of 2 to 1.
As Matthew Parris says this morning, much of this was already in the Clegg price, and the Lib Dem leader can take some comfort from the fact that no MP has called for his head. But as the ramping up of Clegg’s anti-Tory rhetoric in the past few days has shown, he is no longer confidently leading his party. Rather, he is being forced to tack this way, and by the interventions of senior colleagues such as Chris Huhne and Vince Cable.
The progressive majority, it is one of the shibboleths of the leftwing intelligentsia that the reason the Conservatives won so many elections in the 20th century was the voting system. But the results of Thursday’s referendum show that even for most Labour voters rigging the electoral system against the Tories is not a priority.
Three party politics, One of the great ironies of the coalition is that the third party gaining power for the first time in more than half a century might be what propels the country back to two party politics. Westminster just isn’t built for coalitions and that is the cause of a lot of the Lib Dems’ problems at the moment.
The party is also now facing the flip side of its previous success as a party that could play in both Labour and Tory areas. The way in which the Liberal Democrats were routed in the north by Labour has been much commented on, but equally significant is the way that the Tories are beginning to squeeze them.
Scottish Labour, Labour lost constituencies in the Scottish Parliament elections that just a few years ago were bywords for Labour’s dominance in the west of Scotland. The result was a remarkable rejection of the party.
One of Scottish Labour’s problems is that the party’s brightest talents still head to Westminster leaving people as unimpressive as Iain Gray to lead the party north of the border. The result on Thursday would have been very different if Salmond had been up against a Jim Murphy or a Douglas Alexander.
Labour now need a top to bottom reform of its Scottish party. This might, as Alastair Campbell argues on his blog, require one of the more impressive Scottish Labour politicians at Westminster to follow Donald Dewar’s example and head to Holyrood to take charge from there.
Ulster Unionists, the party that used to dominate Ulster politics will—in all likelihood—finish a humiliating fourth in the Northern Irish elections. It is hard to see a way back for the party. The nature of Northern Irish politics means that Unionists will always rally to the dominant Unionist party to prevent Sinn Fein from becoming the largest party and that is now the DUP.
There might have been an opportunity for the UUP to try and become a unionist but non-sectarian party concentrating on bread and butter issues. But the party blew that chance by sabotaging its alliance with the mainland Conservatives at the last election.
Richard Kemp, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the local government association has been one of the most vociferous critics of central government’s cuts to local government. But looking at the results from Thursday it seems that this impotent drumbeat did nothing to help Lib Dem councils. Indeed, it might even have hurt them by taking up space that could have been devoted to defending their record or attacking those of their opponents.
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