British elections may never be the same again

And so the beast was slain, the News of the World, dead.

The Labour Party is rejoicing, and rightly so, in many ways this is their best week since the election last year. Ed Miliband killed at PMQs this week, their MPs Chris Bryant and Tom Watson have led on this since the start, and Cameron is reeling. A Survation poll in association with Channel 4 News shows that only 9% think David Cameron is handling the controversy ‘well’, and the Liberal Democrats, despite the party’s general hatred for News Corp have been largely absent from the debate due to being tied into the coalition. Labour have an opportunity to lead, and they have taken it.

This is good for Labour. For the first time in years they are able to paint themselves out as the champions of morality against a corrupt elite, they can launch a moral crusade, what’s more it is one that binds the whole party together and which reaches right across the political spectrum. Almost no one, of any political persuasion, would disagree that the allegations surrounding News of the World activities are horrifying. New Labour made it clear it was comfortable with elites and they proliferated around the party and its leadership, but Ed Miliband has nothing to lose, only the Mirror backed Labour in the last election and the media environment has got barely friendlier since then. He has nothing to lose by attacking them. I do not believe that the Labour Party can win an election on this but it has, temporarily at least, given them a sense of unity and purpose, a mission all of their own, and something to whack the government with.

What’s more this story has the potential to run and run. The News of the World may be deceased but Rebekah Brooks, who has achieved almost pantomime level of villainy in all this, remains at News International, and in any case, these revelations from the News of the World may be just the tip of the iceberg. Other newspapers are noticeably quiet, which suggests that they may have something to hide, and the timing is also bad for the News of the World. It is summer, Parliament will soon be on recess, and there will be almost no news. Here there are parallels to the expenses crisis, as an apparently corrupt elite has its crimes drawn out before the general public. That happened over a summer too, and one of the reasons it lasted so long as there were always new revelations to reveal, the full scale only became apparent in drips and drabs.

If this indeed proves to be the case it will be a deeply uncomfortable summer for David Cameron, who has worked hard to establish close links with News International. To be fair, he is not alone. Every Prime Minister since Margaret Thatcher has made it a priority to woo Rupert Murdoch. You can see why; he owns a massive amount of the news media and his tabloids, at least, are not newspapers which mess around when they want something. He has the appearance of power, and his newspapers have always gloried in that appearance. The headline from the day after the 1992 election is the famous cliché: ‘It was the Sun wot won it’.

Such claims of media power are overblown. Academic research does not support the claim that newspapers define political preferences; rather they are more closely affected by things like the views of your friends. Newspapers, it seems, do tend to affect what political issues you think are most important, but not your actual view on them. Now there are those who read papers and believe everything they say, but those are mostly a sort of feedback situation. People who already believe something, may read a choice of newspaper which simply backs up their own views. Nor do readers necessarily appreciate the political slant of the newspapers they read. Chris Patten, former Tory party Chair, reveals in his book Not Quite the Diplomat that research by the Conservative Research Department after the 1992 election showed that most Sun readers thought it was a left-leaning paper.

Rupert Murdoch does not define who wins elections. Rather he uses his deft political nous to predict who will win elections and then back them. In conjunction with this he uses the myth of his own power and standing to strike deals with politicians who either believe the myth is true or don’t want to test the theory that it is false. What does Murdoch want in return?

Murdoch is very right-wing, no one denies this, but he is, first and foremost, a businessman before all else. I would highly recommend Nick Davies revealing book Flat Earth News to anyone interested in these issues. It is an investigation by Davies which has been throwing up these revelations and Flat Earth News covered phone hacking and other ‘dark arts’ years before they entered mainstream consciousness. It is not a perfect book, I think it sells journalists too short, Davies’ left-wing biases are made quite clear and it can get ranty but it is well worth a read, especially now.

One thing Davies covers is the business practices of Murdoch, and a clear pattern emerges. Over and over again Murdoch has made deals with politicians in exchange for changes in laws and rules to benefit his businesses. There is an excerpt from the book here.

We can see this behaviour now. Murdoch was reticent to back Cameron for a long time, despite lobbying from Cameron’s friend Brooks. He eventually relented in late 2009, and News International began to back the Conservatives strongly. When the debates happened and the Clegg bounce occurred his papers visibly panicked. On the one hand there was a risk of a government including Lib Dem figures who owed him no favours, but perhaps even more dangerously the myth would have been blown. In short, Murdoch’s power would have gone and he would not have been able to secure the political favours he wants to expand his business, first and foremost is to take total control of BSkyB.

Fortunately for Murdoch the Conservatives came close enough to a majority that they could have said to have won.

Yet what politician will cosy up to Murdoch now? The dangers of the historic closeness between media and political elites have now been exposed in a visceral and extremely visible way. Ultimately this could be a true shift in the way elections are fought in this country. No politician will want to get as close to someone like Rebekah Brooks every again for fear of getting burned as a result.

If there is an early election this year I will eat my hat

Now, the twittersphere has been somewhat abuzz over the last few weeks with suggestions that Cameron might call an early election in May. The origin of these rumours is an article by Labour MP Tom Watson on the Labour Uncut website. Watson declares that a ‘Conservative insider’ told him this would happen, and he’s gained some credibility as the same insider told him Coulson would be gone on the 25^th of January (Coulson left slightly earlier – on the 21^st).

Now the argument for Watson’s point is fairly simple: the Lib Dems are an unreliable coalition partner, the coalition will break at some point, an early election gives Cameron a chance to gain a majority, and that an election would be relatively easy to win with neither Labour, nor the Lib Dems prepared and both in a far worse financial situation than the Tories.

As simple as it is, the whole argument is ridiculous. Firstly it cannot have escaped Cameron’s notice that currently Labour are leading in the polls. Now polls are one thing and election campaigns are another, but one should remember that in order to be guaranteed a majority the Tories need to lead by about eleven points over Labour. Election campaigns are unpredictable things, and there is no guarantee Cameron would win at all. There have been two years in which Britain has gone to the polls twice: 1910 and 1974, in both those elections the general public returned a result that was broadly the same. In calling an early election Cameron would also risk handing his opponents a gigantic weapon. The Liberal Democrats, for example, would be able to declare that the Conservatives had betrayed them, by rescinding on their coalition deal for no reason. The question would then go out: how can you trust the Conservative Party and David Cameron considering their betrayal of their coalition partners. No doubt there will be readers who question how trustworthy the Liberal Democrats are, but even if the effect is simply to make Conservative-leaning voters stay at home it will have worth. Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats would also be able to argue that the Conservatives were risking the economy on a frivolous early election, for the markets are unlikely to react well to such unpredictability. We should remember the lessons of European coalition governments: breaking a coalition is a very difficult thing. If a party is seen to have done it for frivolous reasons they are generally punished. Parties are only rewarded for such things when it is seen that their coalition partner has broken a promise to them.

At the same time whereas both Labour and the Liberal Democrats are financially weak both demonstrate excellent capabilities at ‘ground war’. They have sizeable activist bases, a superb capability to target key seats and an electoral system which is to the Conservative disadvantage. The Lib Dems may be polling badly but as a party they have historically demonstrated an impressive capability to hold seats in the face of large vote losses. This runs the risk of yet another hung parliament, and given the hypothetical events we have outlined it is worth asking why the Liberal Democrats would think about another deal with the Conservative Party. Having demonstrated their untrustworthiness, the Conservative opportunity to govern in such a situation is greatly diminished.

The coalition is also currently in the middle of governing. The Coalition has produced a raft of huge reforms to public services, which will have only been put into place by 2015. An early election means tearing ministers away from those reforms and giving the Conservatives little in the way of evidence for how they have changed Britain. The current Coalition strategy is actually rather simple: implement vast reforms to public services and cuts, endure mass unpopularity and go to the polls in 2015 just as the economy should be bouncing back and the reforms should be kicking in. An early election tears up this whole strategy.

I would also question how unreliable a partner Cameron thinks the Lib Dems are. So far not a single piece of government legislation has been defeated through Lib Dem votes. Nor are there many tales of problems with Lib Dem ministers to speak off. The Lib Dems are polling poorly, clearly, but if anything this makes them less likely to break the coalition, as the hope of bouncing back exists, in combination with continuing in government (indeed, recent polls have shown a small, but discernable, movement in the polls back in the Lib Dems favour of late).

Finally, I believe Cameron enjoys Coalition. Coalition has allowed him to counterbalance the Conservative Party right, jettisoning some of the party’s more right-wing policies in the process and frankly the question can be asked: why would he bother? Watson seems to think he will simply do it for the ‘glory’. This strikes me as a foolish reading of Cameron’s personality and overzealousness on Watson’s part.

Quite frankly, there is simply no reason to call an election. Now of course every party will have a folder stowed away somewhere marked ‘In case of early election...’ but this will be purely an emergency measure. The coalition will stay, because for both Cameron and Clegg, it must.

A couple of things…

I have noticed a couple of interesting articles over the past couple of days that are worth a look at. Not matter what you political views on Lord Ashcroft, from an impartial point of view the polling he commissions is extremely useful. It provides evidence on topical subjects which seemed destined to be consigned to endless anecdotal debate. His latest gem is a call back poll from last week's Oldham East & Saddleworth by-election. In his commentary Ashcroft argues something we here at Britain-Votes.co.uk had felt all along – the Conservatives could not win.

Although there was strong evidence that the Tory voters from last May propped up the Liberal Democrat vote share it wasn't because of the alleged lack of campaigning on the blues part. 65% of CON>LD switchers said their decision was because of the 2010 General Election result. The fact Elwyn Watkins came just 103 votes shy of winning the seat last time framed the election as a straight Labour/Liberal Democrat fight. In my opinion, the 'low-key' campaign from the Tories was as much about saving pennies than saving the Lib Dems. Just because the Tories have more money than the other parties doesn't mean they should be wasting it on fruitless endeavours.

The other article that caught my eye was Nick Sparrow's Political Betting debut. If you're not familiar with the name, Sparrow is a former head of political polling at ICM as has been at the forefront of psephology for the past two decades. I could offer a more detailed introduction but it would look a lot like Mike Smithson's! The article offers hope to Liberal Democrats as he argues the Voting Intention question doesn't fit the current political climate. As the next General Election is over four years away, and we have no idea how the two coalition partners will present themselves, asking respondents how they would vote tomorrow is a bit academic.

"The question thus assumes that, at a stroke, the coalition has been formally wound up, or breaks down, that all the main parties have already gone their separate ways and have campaigned on different manifestos for votes in an election campaign ending tomorrow."

Sparrow argues a question along the lines of 'Do you think the Government is moving voters in the right or wrong direction' would be far better to track over time. Of course, the state of the economy in four years will play a huge part in how the three main parties will perform at the next general election, and I dare anyone to predict that right now!

My reading of both these is that although the Liberal Democrats' drop in support is very real, it is not quite as bad as VI polling is showing and may not produce the apocalyptic demise predicted by some of their political opponents. Right now it seems certain that they will lose votes in 2015 how this translates into seats is far trickier to predict. The Ashcroft poll indicates that the Lib Dems held on to just over half their vote from 2010, and there was clearly an appetite to support the best placed non-Labour candidate. Furthermore, this bye took place soon after the huge furore surrounding the Tuition fee rise, which will surely have dampened by the next General Election. Essentially, the fate of the Lib Dems rests in whether the Coalition is deemed a success in 2015, and how much credit they can take if it is. If the future looks bright in four years then even if they are sitting around 15% in the polls I'd fancy a fair few incumbent Lib Dem MPs to hang on against any UNS projections. As for UNS projections based on today's polls? I wonder why anyone bothers producing them!

The Lib Dems and the Opinion Polls

Earlier today I got into a discussion on twitter about the Lib Dems and the opinion polls. Certainly there is little to be cheerful about for the Liberal Democrats, with polling invariably hanging around the 12-14% mark, after a continual downwards slide. Yet there is some comfort in some of the council by-elections as covered by Tom on this very site. The by-elections have been mixed for the Lib Dems, but there have been a few impressive results on the Lib Dem side, even a couple of gains.

The reality is that opinion polls are somewhat abused these days. The advent of organisations like YouGov has meant that news organisations can purchase a continual onslaught of polls to report upon. News organisations like polls because you can produce a short article about one tied to your desk in a short space of time. Yet it is questionable how much polls at this time tell us. For one thing the Lib Dems usually do badly in post-election opinion polls. The media reporting becomes about the new PM, or in the case of re-election, the old PM will often have a new bout of policies, and there is often a lot going on in the opposition as it tries to figure out why it lost. The poor old Lib Dems get squeezed out. This is even more the case with the coalition because when Lib Dems do speak they often sound like Tories, wedded as they are, now, to the Tory line. As the public is less familiar with Lib Dem policy it is often not noticed when Conservatives argue Lib Dem talking points – William Hague has taken an uncharacteristically moderate line on Europe for instance, whereas Ken Clarke is talking about rehabilitation in prisons.

The public is also inevitably somewhat switched off from politics. They have just had an election to deal with and they are suffering from politics fatigue, and so they are not necessarily paying much attention to what is going on. Many people only really switch onto politics during election campaigns, and so the Lib Dems are even more ignored. This is why the Lib Dems have performed well in some local by-elections. The Lib Dems are impressive campaigners, especially at a local level.

It is worth remembering too, that the next election is a full five years away. A very large number of things can happen in five years. From 2005 to 2010 the Lib Dems plunged to 13% under Ming, to their lofty pre-election heights. Similarly I remember seeing polls a few years ago where the Conservatives had around 50% of the vote, and being assured by Labour and Conservative activists and supporters alike that the Tories would win the next election in landslide style, against my own continued insistence that a hung parliament was the most likely outcome. In 1988 the Lib Dems sank to just 4% in many opinion polls, and predictions of their demise were widespread, but by 1992 they had survived intact, losing two seats, but surviving on 17.8% of the vote. The next five years is bound to be difficult for the Lib Dems, but predicting their demise now is relentlessly short-sighted. It is worth recalling that even if the Lib Dems do lose a large portion of their vote; once a Lib Dem MP is in they are unusually difficult to get rid of, as they are often highly skilled constituency MPs who are overwhelmingly popular locally. If they fall to, say, 15% of the vote that will be troubling for them, but if the vast majority of that loss is in the hundreds of seats where they are in second place it will not necessarily effect their number of MPs that much. This has often been the pattern in 'bad' elections for the Lib Dems. A slightly unusual example is the 1997 election where the Lib Dems fell from 17.8% to 16.8% of the vote, but gained twenty seats. The British electoral system, like God, can often work in quite mysterious ways.

It is impossible to tell what the future will bring for the Liberal Democrats, but I assure you that one thing is certain – you are not going to work it out by analysing this week's opinion polls at face value.