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May. 26th, 2014 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
toyahara_kTom Clark
theguardian.com, Monday 26 May 2014 16.00 BST
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A brass band plays outside Rotherham town hall
A brass band at Rotherham town hall. According to Matthew Goodwin, Ukip appeals to 'struggling, blue-collar and left-behind voters', who are heavily concentrated in towns such as Rotherham. Photograph: Don Mcphee for the Guardian
The function of experts on big news days is very often to calm journalists down, by drawing on long memories to put things in a bit of perspective.
But after the Euro-elections, even the most hardened number-crunchers are disinclined to dismiss the Ukip insurgency as a flash in the pan which will be forgotten by next year's general election. Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde, who has been at the pinnacle of British psephology for a third of a century, says that the old parties can "whistle in the wind if they want to", but the reality is that they are now up against "a completely different phenomenon" from protest votes of the past.
Outside of the distinctive ecology of Scotland (where Ukip climbed by just five percentage points on 2009), and Britain's "other country" in London (Ukip up five percentage points), the surge that took Nigel Farage to the top of the poll was fairly uniform across the regions, in low-to-mid double digits everywhere. The range of the Ukip rise varied from 10 points in the West Midlands up to a maximum of 16 points in the neighbouring East Midlands region, with everywhere else in the north and the south somewhere between the two. This increase took the party's total share of the poll to a winning 27%.
If you want to play fantasy politics with the results, imagine Scotland leaving the union after a yes vote and you would be left with Farage measuring the curtains for No 10. This won't happen, of course, because European contests for a parliament of anonymous legislators tasked with obscure work are a very different matter from a general election to settle who runs the country. In repeated electoral cycles, Ukip – like other protest parties before it – has done far better in the European vote than in the subsequent general election. That will happen again this time, too. The big question is to what extent; fortunately, there is quite a bit of evidence with which to answer.
First, there are the local elections which took place on the same day, which reveal the current disposition of English voters when faced with a choice concerning not some far-away assembly in Brussels and Strasbourg but their own town hall. These elections did not take place everywhere, but if they had – the BBC's projection says – Ukip would have been on 17%, compared with the 27% notched up in the Euros.
Second, there are the regular opinion polls, very many of which (and not the most excitable of the surveys either) have now been registering Ukip in a 10-15 point range in the Westminster stakes for more than a year.
Add in a third piece of evidence, Lord Ashcroft's weekend survey of people who had just voted Ukip in the Euros, which found that almost exactly half (51%) say they plan to stick with Farage next year, and these polls look increasingly solid. The British Election Study's analysis of likely Ukip voters had previously suggested a somewhat higher figure.
The evidence points to around half of those who have plumped for Ukip last week intending to stick by them for 2015, implying a vote share of 13%-14%, 10-11 points up on the 3% Farage achieved in 2010. This is a big enough increase to profoundly alter the electoral arithmetic across the country, and tip the balance in all sorts of marginal seats.
The defence secretary, Philip Hammond, claimed this week that Ukip was "lent" Tory votes, that the different rules of a first-past-the-post election would jolt voters into returning to past habits.
Curtice expects that the vote share will actually come in somewhat lower than this, particularly because Ukip voters were disproportionately inclined to turn out this week, but dismisses any suggestion that it is about to sink all the way back to where it stood last time Westminster faced the people. He scoffs at Hammond's suggestion. "The hold of Labour and the Conservatives on the system has never been weaker," he says. "The idea that voters will all 'go home' is dubious. After all, the 2010 general election was already a record low for the combined share of the big parties."
What looks increasingly like being an intensely close general election between David Cameron and Ed Miliband could very well be settled by which of the two proves more adept at winning back Ukip voters in the next 12 months.
But despite Ukip being poised to alter the outcome in many parliamentary seats and perhaps nationwide, this does not mean that it will win any itself. With a vote share of, say, 10% the corollary of that relatively equal spread of strength across the regions would be a failure to concentrate enough strength anywhere to come out ahead. Drilling down within the big and mixed regions, however, suggests some real pockets where Ukip could be in contention, if it can organise on the ground.
For if Farage's geographical appeal spreads far and wide over most of England and Wales, his demographic appeal is now "more socially differentiated", Curtice says, than any of the other parties in Britain's traditionally class-based politics.
Matthew Goodwin, co-author of a new book on Ukip with Robert Ford, wrote in the Guardian on Monday that Ukip appeals to older, white, "struggling, blue-collar and 'left behind' voters". And although such people are numerous in every region, they are very heavily concentrated in particular towns, including Rotherham, Wakefield and Stockton-on-Tees, all of them places where the party has just done well.
Those towns are in the traditionally Labour north, but there is even more of a concentration in pockets of England's east – Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, Thanet in Kent and tracts of Lincolnshire, including Newark where there will be a Westminster byelection next week. In Newark, England's appetite for Ukip will be put to the test imminently. On the basis of the results thus far, it would be brave to bet against them.
theguardian.com, Monday 26 May 2014 16.00 BST
Jump to comments (57)
A brass band plays outside Rotherham town hall
A brass band at Rotherham town hall. According to Matthew Goodwin, Ukip appeals to 'struggling, blue-collar and left-behind voters', who are heavily concentrated in towns such as Rotherham. Photograph: Don Mcphee for the Guardian
The function of experts on big news days is very often to calm journalists down, by drawing on long memories to put things in a bit of perspective.
But after the Euro-elections, even the most hardened number-crunchers are disinclined to dismiss the Ukip insurgency as a flash in the pan which will be forgotten by next year's general election. Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde, who has been at the pinnacle of British psephology for a third of a century, says that the old parties can "whistle in the wind if they want to", but the reality is that they are now up against "a completely different phenomenon" from protest votes of the past.
Outside of the distinctive ecology of Scotland (where Ukip climbed by just five percentage points on 2009), and Britain's "other country" in London (Ukip up five percentage points), the surge that took Nigel Farage to the top of the poll was fairly uniform across the regions, in low-to-mid double digits everywhere. The range of the Ukip rise varied from 10 points in the West Midlands up to a maximum of 16 points in the neighbouring East Midlands region, with everywhere else in the north and the south somewhere between the two. This increase took the party's total share of the poll to a winning 27%.
If you want to play fantasy politics with the results, imagine Scotland leaving the union after a yes vote and you would be left with Farage measuring the curtains for No 10. This won't happen, of course, because European contests for a parliament of anonymous legislators tasked with obscure work are a very different matter from a general election to settle who runs the country. In repeated electoral cycles, Ukip – like other protest parties before it – has done far better in the European vote than in the subsequent general election. That will happen again this time, too. The big question is to what extent; fortunately, there is quite a bit of evidence with which to answer.
First, there are the local elections which took place on the same day, which reveal the current disposition of English voters when faced with a choice concerning not some far-away assembly in Brussels and Strasbourg but their own town hall. These elections did not take place everywhere, but if they had – the BBC's projection says – Ukip would have been on 17%, compared with the 27% notched up in the Euros.
Second, there are the regular opinion polls, very many of which (and not the most excitable of the surveys either) have now been registering Ukip in a 10-15 point range in the Westminster stakes for more than a year.
Add in a third piece of evidence, Lord Ashcroft's weekend survey of people who had just voted Ukip in the Euros, which found that almost exactly half (51%) say they plan to stick with Farage next year, and these polls look increasingly solid. The British Election Study's analysis of likely Ukip voters had previously suggested a somewhat higher figure.
The evidence points to around half of those who have plumped for Ukip last week intending to stick by them for 2015, implying a vote share of 13%-14%, 10-11 points up on the 3% Farage achieved in 2010. This is a big enough increase to profoundly alter the electoral arithmetic across the country, and tip the balance in all sorts of marginal seats.
The defence secretary, Philip Hammond, claimed this week that Ukip was "lent" Tory votes, that the different rules of a first-past-the-post election would jolt voters into returning to past habits.
Curtice expects that the vote share will actually come in somewhat lower than this, particularly because Ukip voters were disproportionately inclined to turn out this week, but dismisses any suggestion that it is about to sink all the way back to where it stood last time Westminster faced the people. He scoffs at Hammond's suggestion. "The hold of Labour and the Conservatives on the system has never been weaker," he says. "The idea that voters will all 'go home' is dubious. After all, the 2010 general election was already a record low for the combined share of the big parties."
What looks increasingly like being an intensely close general election between David Cameron and Ed Miliband could very well be settled by which of the two proves more adept at winning back Ukip voters in the next 12 months.
But despite Ukip being poised to alter the outcome in many parliamentary seats and perhaps nationwide, this does not mean that it will win any itself. With a vote share of, say, 10% the corollary of that relatively equal spread of strength across the regions would be a failure to concentrate enough strength anywhere to come out ahead. Drilling down within the big and mixed regions, however, suggests some real pockets where Ukip could be in contention, if it can organise on the ground.
For if Farage's geographical appeal spreads far and wide over most of England and Wales, his demographic appeal is now "more socially differentiated", Curtice says, than any of the other parties in Britain's traditionally class-based politics.
Matthew Goodwin, co-author of a new book on Ukip with Robert Ford, wrote in the Guardian on Monday that Ukip appeals to older, white, "struggling, blue-collar and 'left behind' voters". And although such people are numerous in every region, they are very heavily concentrated in particular towns, including Rotherham, Wakefield and Stockton-on-Tees, all of them places where the party has just done well.
Those towns are in the traditionally Labour north, but there is even more of a concentration in pockets of England's east – Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, Thanet in Kent and tracts of Lincolnshire, including Newark where there will be a Westminster byelection next week. In Newark, England's appetite for Ukip will be put to the test imminently. On the basis of the results thus far, it would be brave to bet against them.
