Election 2017 – What’s going to happen?

Theresa May’s decision to call a snap General Election has taken everyone by surprise, not least because she had repeatedly said that under the 2011 Fixed Term Parliaments Act the next election would not be until 2020. She is not one to consult widely but plays her cards very close to her chest, which signally prevented even the tiniest of leaks in advance of her announcement of the 8 June poll.

For all the accusations of a U-turn, she has understandably sought to strengthen her hand both in negotiations with the EU and in the management of Parliament. She has pointed the finger at the other parties in both Houses of Parliament, but in reality she was in danger of having her freedom for manoeuvre seriously restricted by both Remainers and extreme Brexiteers in her own party. If Labour’s catastrophic leadership weakness and bitter divisions deliver the expected large Conservative majority, she will be able to negotiate a pragmatic Brexit which may in the end be neither hard nor soft according to current definitions. If Brexit negotiations had reached their conclusion in 2019 with the British Prime Minister rendered vulnerable by needing to ensure her    re-election a year later, negotiators on the EU side would have been tempted to strike a harder bargain. Now they will not enjoy that advantage.

But the key question is what sort of majority is Mrs May likely to be sitting on when the sun rises on 9 June? Opinion polls during April have shown Conservative leads over Labour of between 9 and 21%. However, only one poll has shown a lead of less than 17% and should be regarded as an outlier. The probable actual poll lead is about 19%. But how accurate is this likely to be? Polls in the UK have suffered recently from serial inaccuracy, typically underestimating the Conservative vote (and the Leave vote in the EU referendum). Even exit polling has not been as accurate as one would expect. It was not far off in 2015, certainly pinpointing the Liberal Democrat meltdown but failing to pick up the actual outcome of an overall Conservative majority. The polling companies have modified their methodology following 2015, but who is to say whether they have now got it right?

How likely is it that this lead of 19% or so will be repeated when the UK actually votes on 8 June? One’s sense of where the country stands in relation to Brexit and to the various parties suggests that this is a realistic lead at this moment for the Conservatives. The Labour Party looks highly unlikely to get its act together over the next seven weeks and convince much of the electorate of its fitness to govern. Actually, the reverse is quite likely to be true, with a further unravelling of leadership, of policy and of unity under the stern gaze of a largely sceptical, if not hostile, media. This will be underlined by a poor showing in local elections on 4 May, while the Liberal Democrats will probably benefit from positive coverage of a good performance. Election weariness will depress the turnout, as will the feeling that the result is a foregone conclusion, but there is no recent evidence that this affects any party in particular.

So if this sort of lead is translated into actual votes, what will it mean in terms of seats? If the swing to the Conservatives were uniformly applied across the country, the outcome would be a majority of about 100 seats (up from the present 17), with Labour losing about 50 MPs mainly to the Conservatives. Regional variations and the performance of the other parties are bound to come into play, so these need some preliminary analysis.

In England and Wales, the Liberal Democrats are showing signs of bouncing back somewhat from the hammering they took in 2015 as the price for their engagement in the 2010-15 coalition. This time, they could benefit strongly from a perception that they are the one party clearly committed to resisting a hard Brexit. While the recovery in their poll figures is fairly small, they have achieved spectacular successes in the Richmond Park by-election in SW London and in a range of local by-elections. Historically, they have benefited from pockets of support, and they may so benefit again, particularly in pro-Remain London where they are likely to reverse a number of losses in 2015, mainly to the Conservatives in prosperous boroughs south of the Thames. Their one region of traditional strength is SW England, the counties of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, which voted Leave in the referendum. However, it is believed that the Conservative Party’s Australian strategist, Sir Lynton Crosby (known as the Wizard of Oz), has found evidence in private polling of a significant Lib Dem revival in the South West, perhaps because there is resistance there to a hard Brexit and because the desire to punish the Lib Dems for going into coalition has simply worn off after two years. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect a modest Liberal Democrat revival, not enough to lift them to anywhere near the level of 2010 but enough maybe to take about 10 seats off the Conservatives across England and Wales.

So what about UKIP? Well, they have not exactly had a good few months, losing a leader or two, their main financial backer, their only MP, a fair proportion of their voter support and arguably their reason for existing. However, they will still attract a significant number of votes, but given the Brexit situation disproportionately taking support from Labour rather than the Conservatives. This is not likely to gain them any seats, but it could well gift some Labour seats in the Midlands and the North to the Conservatives. Expect some Conservative gains which 10 years ago would have looked more than unlikely. The farther north one goes, the harder they typically find it to gain seats, but 2017 could easily prove to be the exception to that rule.

In Wales, the nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, receives nothing like the support of their Scottish counterparts. They would hope to increase their representation this time from three to four MPs. Their main strength is in areas where the Welsh language is widely spoken.

The Green Party will expect to retain its first and so far only Westminster seat in Brighton. They have a good chance of doubling their representation.

The way Scotland votes will make very little electoral difference to the Conservatives, but it will of course have huge constitutional significance. The Scottish National Party won 56 of the 59 Scottish seats in 2015, leaving the other three parties on just one each, with nothing much therefore left to lose. At best, the Conservatives could hope to gain three seats. Remembering that the last time they held more than one seat in Scotland was in 1992, that would be a good result for them! There is sufficient disquiet in Scotland about the performance of the devolved SNP administration in Holyrood for some loss of seats to the Conservatives and Lib Dems to be very much on the cards, particularly if the unionist part of the electorate works out how to vote tactically. If it happens, this would be something of a setback for Nicola Sturgeon’s hopes of holding, never mind winning, a second referendum on Scottish independence.

The politics of Northern Ireland have been quite separate from the rest of the United Kingdom for over 40 years now. The Protestant parties (the Democratic Unionists and the Official Unionists) tend to align with the Conservatives, but their support comes with a price tag. If Mrs May gains a large majority, unionist leverage will be reduced or eliminated. The nationalist SDLP usually aligns with Labour. The more militantly nationalist Sinn Fein has 4 MPs at present, but they never take up their seats at Westminster, which obviously has a bearing on the parliamentary arithmetic. The only non-sectarian party, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, has previously been represented at Westminster, but currently is not. So the outcome in Northern Ireland is unlikely to affect the working of the House of Commons, but it will have a bearing on the long-running problem which Northern Ireland unfortunately is, also on the resolution of the thorny issue of the nature of the border-to-be between the UK and the EU, of which the Republic of Ireland is and will continue to be a member.

Regional variations are harder to predict in the absence of much real evidence. Some factors have already been addressed regarding the north and southwest of England, as well as the other three nations of the UK. London was the one English region which voted to remain in the EU. As has already been suggested, this should benefit the Liberal Democrats. One might also have thought that it should benefit Labour, but such polling evidence as there is implies that Labour’s decline is as bad in London as it is elsewhere. If that is correct, then at least 10 Labour seats in the capital are at risk. The rest of England and Wales did not show huge regional variations in the EU referendum, so perhaps the possibility of regional effects having much bearing on the result should be to a large extent discounted. There will of course be fluctuations at a much more local level, but they are likely more or less to cancel each other out.

So what is likely to be the outcome? If there were no Liberal Democrat revival, a Conservative overall majority of about 100 looks quite likely. But if a small Lib Dem recovery is factored in, Theresa May could be governing with a comfortable majority of around 80. If you offered her that today, I think she would take it. A majority of 80 would be enough of a cushion for her to keep the opposition on both sides of the House of Commons in check. She would hope to see off renewed Scottish demands for independence and negotiate departure from the EU on sensible terms, facing down whatever resistance arose domestically to the deals that she has struck. Then in 2022 (or in 2021 if the Fixed Term Parliaments Act is as dead a duck as it appears to be) she can take on a new Labour leader on a new and at this stage pretty well unknown political landscape.

That seems today to be the likely outcome, but you never know for sure. There could yet be a political cataclysm enveloping the Labour Party. Before anyone says that political cataclysms do not happen in Britain, let me say emphatically, “They do.” From being the party of government, the Liberal Party virtually disappeared between the two world wars. Much more recently, their successors, the Liberal Democrats lost 49 out of 57 seats in 2015. In Scotland in 2015, Labour went from 41 seats to one. It is not totally impossible that they could experience a disaster on a scale approaching this in England and Wales, something which ought to keep Labour’s leadership awake at night. On the other hand, Theresa May will know that one of her predecessors, Harold Macmillan, when asked what could blow governments off course, famously responded, “Events, dear boy, events.” Even in this apparently most favourable of situations, the calling of an early election is never entirely without risk.