Ukip has seized its second seat at Westminster in as many months, defeating the Conservatives by 2,920 votes in the closely fought Rochester and Strood byelection.
The insurgent party’s victory amounts to a humiliating defeat for David Cameron. The prime minister promised to throw everything at winning the contest, visiting the seat five times and ordering his MPs to each make at least three trips. Mark Reckless, a former Tory MP whose defection to Ukip triggered the byelection, received 16,867 votes, or 42.1% of the poll. His Conservative opponent, Kelly Tolhurst, took 13,947 votes (34.8%). The Tory vote fell by 14.4%. Labour’s Naushabah Khan came third with 6,713 (16.8%, down 11.7%) and the Liberal Democrats just 349 (0.9%, down 15.4%).
This was not a (particularly) ‘natural’ seat for UKIP to win, and there are stronger candidates out there than Reckless. Even if we allow for the by-election [special election] effect (turnout is lower, and voters are more willing to vote for outsider candidates) this is a bad result for Cameron (and not so hot for his Liberal Democrat partners: 0.9%!). The mathematics of a Tory win in next year’s general election look ever more unlikely.
Over at the Spectator, Fraser Nelson comments:
‘All bets are off,’ said Nigel Farage after Mark Reckless prevailed in yesterday’s by-election. But that’s not quite right: bets are being made, and the balance of money points to ‘no overall control’. That is to say: a Prime Minister too unpopular to win a majority, and too toxic to be able to form a coalition. A minority government that can’t call an early election thanks to the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act and will have to implement cuts far deeper and more painful than any implemented so far (remember, we’re not even halfway through the fiscal consolidation, due to the lamentably slow progress of spending reform).
The Fixed-Term Parliaments Act was a characteristically anti-democratic measure brought in by the incoming Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition. It provides that, except under fairly limited circumstances, parliaments have to run their full five-year term (previously a government had the option of calling an early election).
Back to Nelson:
There is a precedent. In the recent Swedish election, Cameron’s ally Fredrik Reinfeldt lost power. He adopted a safety-first approach before the election, seeking to minimise the difference with his rival and bet that the left’s uselessness would save him (ie, the same strategy being adopted by Cameron now). The result was as you’d expect: voters couldn’t quite work out what the conservatives would do with another term in office, but they didn’t turn to the opposition either. Instead the populist Sweden Democrats prospered, as did the feminists, but no mainstream parties did. No one won the Swedish election but someone had to form a government, so the Social Democrats (fresh from their second-worst election in history) cobbled together a coalition which lacks purpose or direction. Sweden is now governed by a coalition of losers.
Nelson is too sanguine. If I had to guess, the most likely election result at present is a minority Labour government, propped up (and dragged even further to the left) by the Scottish National Party, which is currently crushing Labour in Scottish opinion polls. The SNP will demand a steep price for its support, and Labour will pay it. The resulting government is likely to prove more durable than Nelson imagines.
So far as the Swedish precedent is confirmed, that is indeed instructive, but perhaps not quite in the way that Nelson suggests. On the whole Reinfeldt’s center-right government did a far better job than the unpromising landscape of Swedish politics might suggest, but Reinfeldt had a blind spot when it came to immigration. Sweden has seen an extraordinary surge in immigration in recent years, something that Reinfeldt has welcomed. That’s been a serious mistake in my view, but not a particularly surprising one. What, however, ought to be unacceptable in a properly functioning democracy is the way that Reinfeldt took a leading role in turning any serious discussion of the rights and wrongs of mass immigration into a political taboo. The result was to persuade a large number of Swedish voters to turn to the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, a (very) far from attractive party that was on the fringe of Swedish politics just a few years ago. Reinfeldt’s mule-headedness over immigration created an opening on the right (to use an inadequate shorthand for who these voters are) and the Sweden Democrats took it. In 2010 they entered parliament with 5.7% of the vote (from more or less nowhere). This year they secured 12.9%, and Reinfeldt was finished. That tend to happen to politicians who don’t listen.
So it is with David Cameron. UKIP existed long before he became Tory leader, but he opened up a far larger space on the right (again, that doesn’t do full justice to what UKIP stands from or where it gets its votes) than his predecessors, and UKIP took it. Like Reinfeldt (who was busy hymning the wisdom of his immigration policy in the run-up to the Swedish election) Cameron has shown himself remarkably tone-deaf to the concerns that have driven voters to UKIP, something typified by his decision—just days ahead of the Rochester vote— to force through Britain’s resubmission to the European Arrest Warrant (a foully repressive mechanism described by Dan Hannan here) and to earmark over $1bn of Britain’s (hugely expanded-another sore point) aid budget for the global “green climate fund”, two gestures that showed his contempt for potential UKIP supporters.
They have now returned the insult. Punch a group of voters in the face for long enough and they will, sometimes, punch back.
How Britain’s right should vote next year will be a complicated question—letting ‘Red Ed’ Milliband slip into power would be a disaster—but last night the Conservatives richly deserved their defeat.