The Tribune

By LARRY SMITH

After spending the last several weeks in Norwich, a United Kingdom provincial capital of 200,000 people, I have been able to gain some insight into the upcoming British general election set for May 7 - and consider parallels with the Bahamian political situation.

Straddling the tranquil River Wensum, Norwich is one of England’s most historic towns. Sections of its medieval wall still enclose an impressive Norman cathedral and a castle built by William the Conqueror. And Norwich City is a hugely popular football team recently demoted from the premier league.

This is also a city where the once obscure Green Party hopes to score a historic goal in the next general election, helped along by rising popularity among young people - recent polls put the party at 29 per cent among 18 to 24 year-olds. The Norwich constituency is a marginal seat now held by a Liberal Democrat.

The Greens are one of three small parties competing against the traditional two-and-a-half mainstream parties (Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat) for a fragmenting British electorate. The others are the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Scottish Nationalists (SNP).

Since the recent failed referendum on independence for Scotland, the SNP has ironically become the UK’s third largest political party, with 93,000 members. At the same time, the Greens have surged to over 51,000 members while UKIP has signed up 39,000. This compares to 190,000 for Labour, 135,000 for the Conservatives, and 44,000 for the sagging Liberal Democrats.

The social democratic SNP wants to take Scotland out of the United Kingdom altogether. It won its first seat at Westminster in 1945 and is expected to sweep Scottish seats in the upcoming election - mostly at the expense of Labour.

In England, the recent Green Party surge is also noteworthy. With roots that go back to the environmental movement of the 1970s, two Green candidates were elected to the European parliament in 1999, and its first (and only) Westminster MP was elected in 2010 - at Brighton.

While the SNP and the Greens outflank the Labour Party on the left, UKIP is a problem for the Conservatives on the right. Founded in 1993 mainly to push for Britain’s exit from the European Union, UKIP offers “a simplistic right-wing vision, expressed in anti-immigration, plain-speaking populism”, according to the Financial Times.

In 2010, UKIP took three per cent of the vote while the Greens got one per cent and the SNP 20 per cent. The Liberal Democrats (at 23 per cent) joined with the Conservatives to form Britain’s first coalition government since the war, and polls suggest that another hung parliament is the most likely outcome for the May 7 election. This means that the smaller parties will again hold the balance of power in the 650-seat parliament.

None of these smaller parties quite matches our experience with the Democratic National Alliance (DNA), which was formed in 2011, ran a full slate of candidates and managed to take 8.5 per cent of the popular vote in the 2012 general election - a respectable result. But despite widespread disillusionment with the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) and the Free National Movement (FNM), and winning more than 13,000 votes, the party failed to gain a single seat.

Most analyses since the election have focused on the lack of any real ideological difference between the DNA and the two main parties, coupled with the fact that DNA support was thinly spread over many constituencies. Under our winner-takes-all system, a party which comes third in every district will not gain any seats, even if it receives a good proportion of the overall vote.

The British Greens, in contrast, have a distinct philosophy based on linking social, economic and environmental issues. They want a new constitutional settlement for Britain, to include proportional representation. They also want to re-nationalise the railways, scrap the British nuclear deterrent and implement new wealth and financial sector taxes.

The DNA’s platform does not differ significantly from those offered by either the PLP or the FNM. Personality trumps ideology in Bahamian politics, and many feel that much of the intensity in the 2012 general election was based solely on dislike of the former prime minister, Hubert Ingraham, who was perceived as being heartless and insensitive during bad times.

Bran McCartney, the DNA’s only MP in 2012 (after he left the FNM with the encouragement of significant financial backing), lost his Bamboo Town seat in the election, and only a handful of DNA candidates won more than 10 per cent of their constituency vote.

According to one political insider, “third parties in the Bahamas have the shelf life of a hibiscus. If lucky, they can at best act as a spoiler - as the DNA did in 2012”.

Like the Greens and UKIP in Britain, the appeal of the DNA in The Bahamas lies not in what it is, but in what it is not. In other words, the DNA is neither the PLP nor the FNM - and McCartney is a relative newcomer with a limited political track record.

In Britain, polls confirm that support for the main parties is falling. In the 2010 general election, some 12 per cent of voters did not support the Conservative/Labour/Lib Dem parties. A survey of 18 opinion polls published in December showed that figure had more than doubled to an average of 26 per cent.

One can also sense huge dissatisfaction with the status quo in The Bahamas, where longstanding problems of crime, immigration, education and the economy are not being effectively addressed. But it is unlikely that the DNA will ever have the human resources to form a government of its own. And its prescriptions for dealing with these intractable issues are distinguished mostly by semantics.

Although the Greens expect to field 500 candidates in the upcoming British election (compared to 300 last time), they plan to concentrate their efforts on 12 key seats held by the centre-left - including the Norwich constituency now held by the Lib Dems.

Similarly, UKIP’s strategy is to disrupt the Conservative Party’s dominance of the right wing vote by focusing resources on key marginal seats. The hope is that this will give them enough leverage to cut a power-sharing deal with the Tories in advance of the 2020 general election.

In The Bahamas, the DNA seriously wounded the FNM last time around - sending one of the country’s pre-eminent leaders into what seems to be permanent retirement and affecting the electoral outcome in several constituencies.

Together, the DNA and FNM won more than 50 per cent of the vote in 2012. It remains to be seen whether they can agree on a common approach in the 2017 election. And whether that approach will be seen by younger voters as an effective blueprint for national development.

What do you think?

• Send comments to lsmith@tribunemedia.net or visit www.bahamapundit.com.