Posted on 05/09/2005 2:41:06 PM PDT by Pokey78
On election day, I happened to be motoring through the leafy lanes of Warwickshire, and thinking, as I do every couple of years or so, well, maybe I ought to get out the car and pick up some local colour and so forth. And, just as the thought occurred, I passed a Porsche dealership and a riding club and I realised, oh, no, I'm in Solihull. Nothing against Solihull, I hasten to add, but let's face it, it's not exactly the liveliest posting on anybody's election battleground map. "Conservative since the dawn of time," as the chap on the BBC's Midlands Today put it.
Except that time has re-dawned. It's Year Zero. True, as I drove through, all seemed quiet on the West Midlands front, but underneath a political earthquake was happening. Last Thursday, for the first time in the constituency's history, Solihull voted other than Conservative. They are now represented by a Liberal Democrat. If it were three in the morning on an election night special, I'd say sternly: "Until they can win seats like Solihull, the Conservatives will never be in government again", and leave it at that. Then I'd cross over to the returning officer in Hawick or Blaenau Gwent, and never give the place another thought.
Instead, I find myself brooding over the result: what is its broader significance? Or, even more alarming, does its broader significance lie paradoxically in its lack of broader significance? On election night, the Tories took five seats from the Lib Dems and the Lib Dems took three seats from the Tories. Is it possible that even the very modest gains the Conservatives made, rocketing them up to Michael Foot levels of unelectability, were nothing at all to do with the party? That the Tories were merely occasional beneficiaries of factors unrelated to their own performance or policies?
Take what follows with a kilo-pinch of salt. As Irving Caesar, lyricist of Tea For Two, used to caution me about Broadway: "Remember, kid, no-one knows nuthin'." That certainly applies to analysis of the 2005 election, where the facts on the ground seem magnificently resistant to the lame tropes of commentators. Still, one has to make a living, so here goes. Did you see those dreary Tory posters of Tony Blair? "Let him know what you think" - on Iraq, stealth taxes, immigration. Of those three issues, I would say two had no discernible resonance and Iraq benefited the Conservatives only insofar as it sent enough anti-war Labour voters stampeding to the Liberals to split the Leftie vote and thereby occasionally return a Tory member. In Solihull, on the other hand, so many voters took the Tories' advice to send Labour a message on Iraq that the stampede to the Liberals defeated the Tory, which may not have been quite the message they meant to send.
In this election, both the Left and the Right were split - on the Left, between the pro-war Blair and the anti-war Liberals; on the right, between Europhobic UKIP and Euroequivocating Tories. In Solihull, the Lib Dems won by 279 votes; the UKIP candidate got 990. Down the road in Warwick and Leamington, Labour won by 306 votes; the UKIP bloke got 921. By some analyses, the UKIP vote cost the Tories 25 seats. Without them, the Lib Dems would have won merely an extra seven seats and the Labour majority would have been down to 34.
Which split - the Left's or the Right's - is likely to be patched up by the next election? In 2009, Iraq will be a long way in the past and Gordon Brown's Labour Party will win back a lot of those anti-war votes. But Europe, like the poor, is always with us - and, whatever befalls the constitution and the euro, there's no reason to believe, after 15 years of failing to do so, that the Tories will suddenly find a form of words both the Clarkeite and sceptic wings of the party will support convincingly. And, if they go into another national election determined to avoid the subject, those 900 UKIP votes up and down the map will do their work yet again. Not to mention the BNP vote, which is a further complicating factor.
Here's another observation: economic conservatism isn't enough for a conservative party. It may have been in the late Seventies when nothing worked and everyone was on strike. But, though it pains a low-tax nut like me, my sense of modern Britain is that it doesn't think of itself as over-taxed. Besides, many tax rates - VAT, for example - are beyond the jurisdiction of Westminster to reduce: the issue is not stealth taxes so much as stealth Euro-centralism. It's true that many Britons seem to have less ready cash than other folks, but again that's not primarily a tax issue: the British spend more on accommodation and mortgages than their equivalents in other lands because the principal economic activity in the United Kingdom is selling undistinguished terraced houses back and forth to each other for ever more absurd six-figure sums. A ha'penny off income tax isn't going to change that.
Let's go back to newly non-Tory Solihull. Here's the front page of the Solihull & Warwickshire Guardian for May 5, election day: "Alert After Girl, 13, Raped In Town Park"; "Robbed Going Home From Baths" (and not just robbed but slashed with a chisel); "Residents' Relief As Travellers Abandon Park"; "Dead In Toilet" (a 36-year-old woman expired in the ladies' room at Solihull Hospital and lay there for 48 hours before her body was discovered). In Henley-in-Arden, north of Stratford, I parked near the surgery and made my way to the high street via a footpath lined with houses and offices. All had bars on the windows and signs warning that CCTV was in operation. Henley's a pretty town with a charming medieval high street - if you take your tourist snaps in long shot. The close-ups tell a different story.
That's post-socialist Britain: materially prosperous, but civically impoverished; wealthy villages and upscale suburbs full of frustrated and impotent citizens. Mrs Thatcher liberated the economic energies of the people; today's Tories need to complete the revolution by liberating the people's other energies. Stealth taxes is never going to cut it.
I've never heard of UKIP before. Steyn is so wonderfully informed on multiple countries.
That's a good analysis of the situation, not much I'd disagree with there.
UKIP got a big vote in the last European elections with lots of protest votes but are widely seen as a one issue party and so not really a factor on the national level.
It's an oversimplified analysis to say that UKIP cost the Conservatives x number of seats. People who vote UKIP are by definition rejecting the Conservative policy on Europe to such an extent that they would rather register a protest vote for a candidate with no chance of winning and risk allowing a more left-wing candidate in than vote Tory. It's a stretch to imagine that all of those people vote Tory if UKIP isn't there.
Ah, much like our Buchananite crowd, or whomever they choose to vote for in our Presidential elections. The permanently disaffected third party crowd.
This propensity for property speculation on the part of the Cousins has escaped just the Home Islands: the Japanese business newspaper the Nikkei recently had an article about the British Invasion of Orlando, Florida.
I did a search with "Orlando British mortgage", and here are some of the companies who specialize in lending to Brits using British mortgages on Orlando property:
http://www.orlandoholidayvillas.co.uk/mortgage/info.htm
Thanks.
I lived in England for a year in the early 90's. One day on BBC I saw a "youth program" presided over by a West Indian lad with dirty fingernails and bad grammar punctuated by glottal stops. I thought then, "It's all over for Old Blighty."
thanks for the ping
Thanks for the ping, Pokey! Another brilliant Steyn gem!
BTTT
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