The Tribune

The Conservatives have new energy and impetus but are unsure how to respond to the UKIP threat while Labour’s weak, left-leaning leader is an electoral liability. As the starting gun fires on the race to next year’s General Election in Britain Peter Young forsees the end of voting on traditional two-party lines amid the political uncertainties.

The end of summer and the beginning of autumn is traditionally marked in Britain by the annual conferences of the political parties - particularly significant this time as the main players set out their stalls in the lead-up to next year’s General Election.

With some 200 days before voters go to the polls in the Westminster five-yearly cycle, the scene has changed radically from the usual two-party system of Conservative and Labour governments.

Since the Second World War, these two have been in power for 35 and 30 years respectively, until the anomaly of a Conservative and Liberal Democrats coalition following the 2010 General Election. But the recent emergence of UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) as a political force with its possible appeal to both Tory and Labour voters, has brought this to an end.

UKIP’s rise, following its successes earlier this year in the local elections in England and Northern Ireland - and in the European elections when it topped the British national poll - has been nothing short of spectacular.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, currently in the middle of their conference gathering, seem to have lost their way after sharing power in the coalition within which tensions have arisen. They can no longer lay claim to the protest vote and support for the party has dwindled so that its political prospects appear bleak.

For some months, the opinion polls have showed Labour ahead on 36 per cent with the Tories on 31 and UKIP 15, while the Liberal Democrats have trailed with six per cent alongside the Green Party. However, following Prime Minister David Cameron’s rousing speech to round off the Conservatives’ conference last week the latest polls show the Tories narrowly in the lead.

Even though the policies of each party, as a precursor to their forthcoming manifestos, were the main themes of their conferences, the personality and performance of each leader have increasingly come under the spotlight in recent years – and this is despite the Westminster concept of ‘primus inter pares’ or first amongst equals.

This drift towards a presidential emphasis on the leaders themselves is important for the 2015 election because of the perceived shortcomings of the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, whose personal ratings are low and whom many cannot imagine in the role of prime minister. Derided by the UK press, at its most cruel, as a ‘socially awkward nerd’ and ‘weird Ed’, he is seen by many as an electoral liability rather than an asset and as someone not to be trusted to run the nation’s economy. Others (less critical) blame the Tories for wanting to attack the messenger rather than the message.

By contrast, Cameron is seen as a polished speaker and performer and an experienced leader with a good grasp of the wide range of issues, though he is also accused of reneging on promises. The UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, is regarded as an articulate, down-to-earth and adroit politician with an appealing personality.

A

lthough the Labour conference in Manchester last month was judged to have had a rather flat atmosphere with lacklustre speakers, there were a number of major policy announcements about National Health Service (NHS) reform, the so-called mansion tax, building new houses and a reaffirmed commitment to an energy price freeze. It now looks as though Labour’s election campaign will stick to traditional issues with promises, for example, to put more money into the NHS by taxing wealthy homeowners and tobacco firms.

However, Miliband’s keynote conference address to the faithful, delivered without notes, was deemed to have been a flop, not least because he failed to mention two important issues of immediate concern - immigration and the sizeable public deficit.

More generally, Miliband, who is critical of bankers and big business and wants to be regarded as the champion of low-wage employees and the socially vulnerable, is seen as having moved the Labour Party to the left politically – away from the centre-left party which was in power from 1997 to 2010 under its then leader Tony Blair followed by Gordon Brown.

At UKIP’s well-attended conference in Doncaster in the north of England last month, Farage, who also largely ad-libbed his speech, stated that his party was not about right or left but rather right or wrong, and not about nationalism but inclusion and tolerance. It supported the free market and libertarianism. It loved Europe but hated the European Union (EU) and wanted to withdraw from it.

The party was not against immigration but wanted to control its quantity and quality. It aimed to protect welfare benefits and increase social spending and planned to cut taxes for minimum wage and middle earners. It also wanted to cut foreign aid and cancel the proposed hugely expensive high-speed rail link in central England.

UKIP, which is seeking support from both Labour and Conservative voters, is clearly a threat to the entire British political class, though probably more so to the Conservatives than Labour. Already, two Tory Members of Parliament have resigned and joined UKIP, as has a former deputy mayor of London and a top Tory financial donor. The two MPs will stand as UKIP candidates in forthcoming by-elections which both are tipped to win.

If further defections follow, as predicted, it is possible that some sort of limited accommodation with the Tories will result, though not with Labour. So far, the general view is that it is too late for a formal full-scale Conservative/UKIP alliance, but there is a case for local arrangements in key marginal seats.

The Tory grassroots consider that their and UKIP’s values and stances may not be so different: patriotism, freedom, family, enterprise and wealth creation to protect the poor and needy, opportunity as an answer to inequality, support for the armed services, dislike of the European Court of Human Rights and resentment of interference by the EU as well as a wish to return to a trade-only relationship with it.

The Tories seem to be unsure at present how to respond to the UKIP threat, which may deny them an outright victory in 2015. Farage is quoted as saying that it is “not inconceivable that UKIP could hold the balance of power if the result of the General Election is inconclusive”.

Nonetheless, after a successful conference in an atmosphere of optimism and hope for the future, the Conservative Party seems to have found a new energy and impetus. It has also drawn strength from the outcome (keeping the Union together) of last month’s Scottish independence referendum.

This year’s gathering in Birmingham – geographically in the heart of England - started under a cloud with negative headlines about the defections to UKIP. But it ended in triumph, with Cameron’s passionate and convincing speech described by some commentators as the speech of his life and inspirational compared to Miliband’s ‘cringeworthy’ performance at Labour’s conference which offered hard-left class warfare.

Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, set the scene with a reminder that Britain’s economy was the fastest growing in Europe. He focused on the need for tough decisions and responsible governance in order to balance the nation’s books and reduce the deficit by cutting public expenditure further with a view to putting the overall budget in surplus by 2018.

As the sitting Prime Minister, Cameron laid out his party’s prospectus with plans for serious tax cuts – mainly an increase of the tax-free personal allowance and of the threshold for the higher tax rate and abolition of tax on transfer of retirement savings after death – affecting some 30 million people. He also undertook to reduce corporate taxes, abolish youth unemployment, cut benefits for under 25-year-olds, help young people to buy house and protect the NHS from spending cuts.

On the broader front, Cameron pledged to take the battle to ISIL in Iraq and Syria (“these people are evil, pure and simple”), to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU leading to an in/out referendum by 2017, to strengthen counter-terrorism laws and to scrap the Human Rights Act while drawing up a Bill of Rights.

What will happen next? It is certain that there will be no let-up in political activity. In particular, the by-elections this month will be watched carefully for pointers to the likely outcome of the General Election.

With Labour now marginally behind in the polls and under attack for ‘reverting to the 1970s’, voters will still question whether Cameron and his colleagues can deliver on their promises about easing the tax burden and about EU renegotiation (especially on immigration in face of insistence by Brussels that open borders and free movement of people are not negotiable).

Whatever the results of the by-elections, the continuing battle between the statist left and the free market right will be the basis of the political calculation, with the key issues of the economy, the NHS, the EU and immigration of prime concern.

The coming months will surely provide a source of endless fascination for the political commentator and psephologist alike – not to mention an increasingly knowledgeable, sceptical and demanding electorate.

• Peter Young is a retired British diplomat living in Nassau. From 1996 to 2000 he was British High Commissioner to The Bahamas.