The UK election campaign – no fireworks yet

As the UK general election campaign continues, it has yet to come fully to life, with no party able to make a decisive breakthrough so far, and public interest remaining surprisingly muted.  Partly this is due to the fact that by far the most likely outcome is that no single party will be able to form a majority government – as we explained in our last article (see “Analysing the UK general election”, 6.04.15), this has changed the nature of the campaign statements and commitments the various parties are making.  The politicians announce a succession of statements and policies, ranging from the platitudinous to the frankly unbelievable, but the electorate seem to have already decided that no single party will be in a position to implement their promises entirely unaltered and therefore pay limited attention.

Partly, too, it is because there is actually much less between the main parties than they admit or want the electorate to realise.  Indeed, the striking feature of the political debate is not the differences of views but the degree of common ground – all parties wish to be seen as supporting the NHS, concerned about the deficit, keen to help “hard-working families”, responsible about defence and so on.  The parties do, it is true, differ slightly on the details of how to fund the growing financial needs of the NHS or how fast to tackle the fiscal position, but these are second order political issues.  And in any event, the room for manoeuvre for any incoming government will be fairly small – as president Hollande of France has found, whatever you promise in an election campaign, in government your freedoms are very limited and your actions are much more likely to be dictated by events.

As a result, the main parties are having to manufacture differences, and what are in reality fairly minor issues – such as the exact form of tax to levy on property, or the taxation of people with non-UK residential status (a tiny sector of society which really should only merit the smallest of footnotes in the campaign) – are turned into causes célèbres on which the parties can strut their disagreement and outrage at their opponents’ proposals.

But in this essay we wish to highlight two further features of this election.  The first is a further look at the dearth of real debate in the wider society.  As we noted, the politicians announce their policies and deliver their carefully constructed sound-bites, but by and large society is not engaging with them or joining in the discussion.   One senses that much of the electorate is not really listening, with the campaign still at the “noises off” stage, and it might well be that, with a widespread expectation that all the important decisions will be taken in the coalition negotiations after the election is over, this low level of involvement from the general population continues all the way to polling day.

More significantly, corporate Britain, which is hardly a disinterested party given the different stances of the parties on economic policy, on immigration and on UK membership of the EU, has been almost entirely silent – the intervention by Tesco chairman John Allan this weekend being mainly notable for its rarity.  Indeed, there is a palpable fear of intervening in any debate that is “political”, and there is certainly a line of thought that says that companies and organisations should not have (and certainly should not voice) political opinions, the justification being that as collective organisations, they should not presume to speak for their members/stakeholders without consulting them first.

There is something in this, and one remembers the furore when the Scottish CBI offered an opinion in the Scottish Independence referendum last year, with its member firms falling over themselves to distance themselves from it.  I think though the analysis is deeper than that, and is a combination of two things.

First, no matter how anodyne or reasoned a view, there will be a group of people who disagree with you; and second, with the advent of social media those that disagree with you and your reasoned argument can and do comment back, and increasingly they do not do so in a spirit of open debate but hostile anger – the Twittersphere, with its 140 character limit on each tweet, does not lend itself to rational debate and long reasoned arguments.  One wonders how the great politicians of the past, such as Gladstone and Disraeli or even Churchill, would have handled a modern election.

Indeed, we have moved a very long way from Voltaire’s classic dictum of “I disagree with your view, but I defend your right to hold it”.  Via two intermediate stages of first “I disagree with your view and therefore you are wrong” and then “I disagree with your view, you are wrong, and therefore you are offensive (or even evil)” we now seem rather to have reached the stage of “I disagree with your view, and I will attack your right to hold it”.  And certainly attack your right to make it in public.  Voltaire must be in deep despair in his grave!

And so for anyone for whom politics and political discourse is merely one of many factors in their life not the single driving force, discretion becomes the better part of valour, and people who might once have contributed to the political debate consider the power of social media, and many will think better of it and stay silent.  Companies who depend on the UK’s membership of the EU for their prosperity feel unable to join the debate on whether the country should leave or stay in, industries who turn to immigrants for their workforce to fill gaps they cannot otherwise fill feel unable to offer a comment on the immigration debate, and so on.

But how can a democratic society discuss important issues with those whose opinions it disagrees if large numbers of members of that society feel unable or unwilling to join the debate?

The other feature of the campaign we would remark upon is the challenge the election result is likely to pose to the UK’s “first past the post” system.  On current voting trends, it is likely that after the two main parties, the next three, in order of popularity, will be the UK Independence Party with possibly around 12-15% of the total vote, the Liberal Democrats with perhaps 8-10%, though they will be hoping that a late surge increases this number, and the Scottish Nationalist Party, who although polling heavily in Scotland will have maybe 4% of the UK‑wide vote at most.  And yet their reward in seats is likely to be in completely the reverse order, with the SNP hoping for between 40 and 50 seats, the Liberal Democrats likely to win either side of 30, and UKIP ending up with no more than a small handful.

You do not need to be a UKIP supporter to feel that this would be a somewhat illogical and inequitable outcome, a frustration of the will of the people, and if the SNP – the fifth most popular party in the UK as a whole – ended up in effect deciding who was prime minister, it might call into question the legitimacy of the electoral process itself.

And with the next government likely to face some difficult and far-reaching issues in the coming parliament, a question-mark over the process that elected that government in the first place would be most unfortunate.