The outcome of the general elections in the United Kingdom shows that the U.K. is no exception to the general problems that have afflicted Western-style democracies - poor voter turnout, a trend of voting for individuals rather than political parties and the growth of the extreme Right.
IT was a stunning night for Labour. If 1997 was a landslide, June 7, 2001, saw the earth move. British political geography has been permanently transformed.
Yet learning the lessons of defeat is comparatively easy. British Conser-vatives have already started learning them. William Hague resigned, having failed, as the Tories' former chairman and current European Commissioner Chris Patten graphically put it, to distinguish a bandwagon from a hearse. Europe and the single currency may not be popular among the English electorate, but these issues are so far down the voters' lists of priorities in a national election that they have almost no electoral leverage. People choose the party to vote based on their views on health or education, the economy or public services, rather than on the single currency. Nothing illustrated this as well as the derisory 2.5 per cent vote share of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). More people vote over the real political divide of whether they should allow groups of individuals to entertain themselves by having packs of dogs tear foxes apart than over Europe.
The Tories need the soothing passage of time for the voters to forget the John Major years and for a political re-positioning that would connect them back to the centre of the political debate where the real people, rather than readers of The Daily Telegraph, live their lives. Michael Portillo seems to have got the message. The question is whether the Tory 'selectorate' has, as well. There are no preservation laws on political parties; they can disappear or, more sadly, like the British Liberals, languish on the geographical and political margins for at least three-quarters of a century.
Yet Labour must not be complacent. Hidden in the results for those who want to look are the signs of future difficulties and defeats. These are threefold: 1. Collapsing voter turnout; 2. Increased voting for individuals inside and outside parties; and 3. The growth of the extreme Right. None of these is a problem unique to Britain; rather, they are common problems found in 'Western-style' democracies, from the United States to Japan and across the whole of the European Union.
This general election in Britain saw the lowest turnout since 1918, when the country was severely disrupted by the consequences of the First World War. In a number of 'safe' Labour seats less than half the electorate bothered to vote, and the figures were almost unimaginable even a decade or so ago. Voter interest was not sparked even in key marginals where Tories and Labour or Tories and Liberals were running neck and neck. Here, the 'stay at home party' still had the biggest swing. In Japan there have been similar problems with a falling voter turnout. As a result, the government has sponsored a number of studies on changing the mechanics of voting to encourage increased participation. Electronic voting in supermarkets, railway stations and even at bank cash machines has been envisaged - a technical fix that may alleviate the problem but not solve it. It is not the difficulty to vote that has been the problem. It is the new nature of politics.
The traditional view is that the candidate is rarely worth more than a few hundred votes in a general election. This time around it was not true. In South West England, the answer to the question "Will you be voting Labour?" was often, "No, I'll be voting for Diana Organ, Ben Bradshaw or Valerie Davey," Labour's victorious Members of Parliament in 1997 in the Forest of Dean, Exeter and Bristol West constituencies respectively. A vote for hard-working new blood. In contrast, there was deep electoral resentment at the parachuting into St. Helen's South of Shaun Woodward, the former Tory MP who switched to Labour during the term of the last Parliament; there was a 14.3 per cent swing against Labour. Interestingly, while Prime Minister Tony Blair himself had a 5 per cent swing against him, Peter Mandelson, Blair's former Cabinet colleague, did rather well with only a 1.5 per cent swing against him.
Outside the party fold there was a spectacular result in Wyre Forest with the junior Minister and sitting Labour MP David Lock being ousted by Dr. Richard Taylor with a swing of 27 per cent on the single issue of the closure of a local hospital. In Brentwood, Martin Bell, despite standing in a constituency where he had no local support base, came within 3,000 votes of winning as an independent. Again, echoing the U.S., where Jesse Ventura was elected Governor of Minnesota and Japan where, in a Tokyo byelection, government and opposition candidates were rejected in favour of Etsuko Kawada, an independent who shot to prominence campaigning against a government cover-up of the sale of blood products contaminated with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the mid-1990s.
The extreme right had a good night. The British National Party (BNP) got 16.4 per cent of the votes in Oldham West, Environment Minister Michael Meacher's seat, and over 11 per cent in Oldham East and Saddleworth. Most commentators attribute this to the recent riots and disturbances among the local Asian community that were provoked by the BNP. That fails to explain the BNP's vote share in Burnley, also 11 per cent, and in the East End of London. After the last general elections in 1997, the BNP said that its strategy was to replace the Conservatives as the party of the Opposition in Britain's inner-city areas. In Oldham and Burnley and elsewhere, there is the danger of it doing exactly that. If the party is allowed to maintain the current levels of racial tension in Oldham through to next May, it may well win seats on the local council. Again, merely a late reflection of the successes of Le Pen's Front National in France, Joerg Haider's Freedom Party in Austria and the Vlaams Blok in Belgium.
The message is simple. The electorate is increasingly alienated from the politics of today - this is not to argue that the people want the politics of yesterday back, which is certainly not the case as the leader of Old Labour Arthur Scargill's derisory 912 votes in Hartlepool demonstrated. When they do vote, they increasingly vote less by class than by fashion, and they are willing to demonstrate their frustration with loud protest votes for parties outside the electoral pale.
Labour's next national electoral test in the warm-up phase before the third term will be the European elections in June 2004. Last time around the new electoral system and contextual voting, as the psephologists say, produced three Members of European Parliament from the UKIP and two from the Green Party and caused a Labour defeat. In 2004, if the turnout across the country falls into the teen figures - and it could, if the current trends continue - and if Labour fields the party rather than its candidates, with the third and fourth parties running effective personalised campaigns, it would fall back even further from its disappointing result of 1999, leaving Britain being represented in the European Parliament by a ragtag and bobtail army of protest. In France, in the European elections of 1999, the Communists, the Trotskyists and the Fascists as well as the Greens and the equivalent of the Countryside Alliance were elected. It should not happen in the United Kingdom. The year 2001 must not be the high-water mark of a fast-ebbing tide.
Glyn Ford is a Member of the European Parliament from the United Kingdom.
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