A Deeply Conservative Country

I had not expected any good news from the UK general election. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Labour apparatchik and Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, had lost his seat as an MP, that Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP, had failed to get his, and that I would probably in future be hearing much less from the weird Ed Miliband, now that he has resigned the Labour Party leadership. Small mercies in a result that only confirms that the UK is a deeply conservative country.

The election result unexpectedly gave the Conservative Party an outright, although small, overall majority, when previous opinion polls had only suggested it would have the largest number of seats in Parliament. The best summary of results for the UK, including breakdowns by region and constituency, the number of votes, changes in voting share, etc, can be found on the BBC website here.

In the wake of the biggest capitalist crisis for a generation or more, the share of votes for the two major political parties hardly changed. Compared to the previous general election in 2010, the share of the vote for the Conservative party went up a tiny bit; the Labour party’s vote went up by a tiny bit more. The big changes were elsewhere. The Liberal Democrat share of the total vote collapsed by 15.2 percentage points, offset by a rise in the UKIP share (up 9.5%), while the Scottish National Party got an extra 3.1% and the Green Party an extra 2.8% of the total vote.

The share of votes only counts as a measure of opinion. It does not lead to a seat in the House of Commons, which is determined by a first-past-the-post ballot in each constituency. So, for example, a winner with 20,000 votes gets the seat. If the runner up has 19,999 votes, then these votes go nowhere. A strictly proportional representation of votes in the 650 seats in the UK Parliament would mirror public opinion (assuming that voters fully agree with a party’s political programme). Comparing the seats implied by a PR ‘opinion’ with the actual seats gained, these are the results:

	Share of vote	PR-implied seats	Actual seats
Conservative	36.9%	240	331
Labour	30.4%	198	232
UKIP	12.6%	82	1
Liberal Democrat	7.9%	51	8
SNP	4.7%	31	56
Green	3.8%	25	1
Others	3.7%	23	21

One can assign different scores on a spectrum of progressive to reactionary for each of these parties. But the overall picture remains depressing, although it is not surprising. In political terms, I consider half the UK electorate to be on a different planet, and the other half to be in a different solar system.

Tony Norfield, 10 May 2015

Immigration and the Imperial Mentality

In the previous post about the UK Labour Party's attachment to British imperialism's nuclear weapons, I forgot to mention another aspect of their policy: on immigration. Especially in the wake of the crisis, there has been a growing shift of UK public opinion to blame immigration for all manner of social ills, from a lack of jobs for Brits, to poor availability of decent housing, to putting a strain on the health and welfare services. British political parties have adapted to this shift in opinion, rather than prompting it, something that is also true of UKIP, the most overtly anti-immigrant party that has gained significant support. Views on immigration are interesting because they reveal a lot about politics in the UK, if not also in other rich countries.

People who vote in elections choose the candidate they think will best represent their interests. Electoral turnouts may decline, as even the dumbest voter realises that nothing much will change and, in any case, the major parties have very similar policies. But this also means that the major political parties will respond, at least rhetorically, to how those interests are expressed. In Britain's case, the clear expression now is that immigration is a problem.

This is not racism, since the immigrants being opposed are mainly white Europeans, rather than black or Asian immigrants as in earlier decades. It is nationalism, the nationalism of an imperialist power that has an implicit deal with the local population to keep their privileges intact.

In the 1980s, the Conservative Party's attacks on trade unions undermined much of the institutional support for racial discrimination in Britain that was given by those unions. A capitalist policy of hiring whoever the boss wanted meant that colour did not enter the calculation as it did before: the boss did not now have to worry about the union objecting on behalf of the existing white workforce. It was this that led the UK to be probably the least racist European country, although that is not saying very much.

This development also meant that those from ethnic minorities could join in the national consensus to defend domestic privileges against outsiders. So even UKIP has non-white members and candidates. Also, despite the Labour Party traditionally getting most ethnic minority votes in the UK, it has had no hesitation in backing an anti-immigration policy, something that dates back more recently to Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown's infamous 'British jobs for British workers' statement in 2007.[1]

It will not come as a surprise to readers that I will not be voting in the forthcoming UK election on 7 May. Still less, if that were possible, for a party that has issued the following special election mug:

The word 'scum' doesn't seem to be strong enough to describe these people, but it is apt for the ideological dirt or froth bubbling above a reactionary political development.

Tony Norfield, 11 April 2015

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[1] Notes on the background to this statement are set out in 'Gordon Brown's 'British jobs' pledge has caused controversy before', The Guardian, 30 January 2009.