I've just noticed a Fabian Society email that starts:
Like it or not (and a lot of Fabians definitely do not), most analysts predict a hung Parliament after the 2015 General Election.
Why, one has to ask? First, why did I read the mail (research, I promise you) and second, why do they want to promote this idea?
Let's look at the facts: just after two years after a general election they lost badly Labour is consistently 10% in the lead in polls. That's astonishing. It's a massive electoral recovery at a near record rate. And yes, it is a measure of how bad the Coalition is. And maybe it's helped by Labour saying not a lot: things may get worse when people realise Labour are still talking cuts more than anything else, which is absurd.
But nothing about such predictions makes much sense, at all. To put it another way, they just look wrong, right now.
But there's a long way to go. Unfortunately.
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Mid term slumps are not unusual. Plenty of evidence for that. Hopefully, come the next general election, people will remember the disaterous economic policy that New Labour persude, to say nothing of their big state and authoritarian tendancies.
All the best.
The sad thing is – Labour appears not to believe in the state
And that’s the problem
@Richard – Yes, such mid-term slumps are indeed common, but I cannot share your implicit hope that the tide will turn back towards the Tories, especially on the so-called grounds of “the disaterous economic policy that New Labour persude”. Up to 2007, I have to ask “What disaster”?, especially when seen in the perspective of the 2-year on-going road-accident of the Coalition’s handling of the economy: 10 years of growth and falling unemployment versus 2 years of double dip recession, with the wheels falling of the vehicle.
Equally, I am perfectly sure that Osborne would have drowned unded the deluge the Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling skilfully faced up to post 2007.
No, this is a weak argument to bring against New Labour, as Richard Murphy’s posts on the REAL working of the economy under New Labour, and in face of the credit crunch have clearly demonstrated. Up until then, satisfaction with New Labour was generally high, even in the business world.
I’ll give you your concerns about New Labour’s authoritarian tendencies – I was part of the No2ID movement against ID cards, but not on big government, of which there was not too much, but too little, especially over the matter of financial services.
So, what I hope the electorate DO see is New Labour’s REAL failure, which was to listen to the shysters in the City, and not to set up really effective regulation, bringing the card-sharps of the City under democratic control. There was Labour’s real failure – a failure we can expect only Labour to be willing to remedy, since the Tories will not, and the LibDems on their own cannot, rein in those bloodsuckers, who have drained the economy for their own comfort, and everyone else’s discomfort.
So I echo RIchard M’s concern about current Labour’s nervousness about the state, and its role as the expression of the democratic will.
Agreed Andrew
The only explanation for so many Labour MPs clinging to the neoliberal wreckage now is that they believe in it
That’s the worrying bit
It seems to me that this is more of a fundamental shift in voter affiliation than a midterm slump. The latest YouGov poll gives the Tories 35% – only 1% down from their 2010 total. The fundamental shift is that the Lib Dems are down from 23% to the election to 8% now, and Labour is up from 29% to 44%. So in other words a 15% swing from from Lib Dems to Labour with the Tories unchanged. I don’t see what the Lib Dems are going to be offering at the next election to tempt back into the fold all their left-leaning ex-voters who jumped ship after they became lobby fodder for the Tories. How is 5 more years of Nick Clegg going to convince any voter who’s abandoned the Lib Dems? So I think it’s going to be a Labour victory – possibly a landslide – simply due to that effect alone. Unless the Tories can secure millions of extra votes on top of what they had last time – and I just don’t see how it’s going to happen. And Osborne’s economic policy is a damn sight more disastrous than anything New Labour managed.
Agreed!
For there to be a hung parliament – there needs to be a strong third party who can take seats from both the two main parties.
Whatever happens, its not going to be the Lib Dems, so do they think the Greens will suddenly gain about 20-30 seats?
I have to admit I think that would be of enormous benefit to UK democracy
I can’t see the nationalists taking many more