An assessment of UK General Elections 2010 and performance of the British Left by Pragoti editorial member, Maidul Islam.

Vital Statistics

The British General Election 2010 witnessed the defeat of 13 years old Labour Government and the formation of a coalition government with a pact between Conservative Party (erstwhile Tory Party) and Liberal Democratic Party. In this election, the Conservatives have won 307 seats with a net increase of 97 seats in the 650 member House of Commons, when compared with 2005 election results. In a first-past-the-post electoral system, the Tories were 19 seats short of the 326 seat majority mark. In effect, it won 100 new seats and lost only 3 previously held Tory seats. In terms of vote share, it got 36.1%, an increase of 3.8% votes than the 2005 figures. On the other hand, the Labour party managed to get 258 seats with a net loss of 91 seats from its previous tally in 2005. In fact, it lost as many as 94 Labour seats and gained only 3 new seats from other parties. This time only 29% of UK electorate decided to vote the Labour party, a loss of 6.2% votes than the 2005 figures. Electoral pundits say that there is a clear 5% swing from Labour to Conservatives. The Liberal Democratic Party however, became the third largest party in the House of Commons with 57 seats, a loss of 5 seats but with 23% votes, a gain of 1% vote from its previous performance in 2005. It lost 13 Lib-Dem seats and snatched away only 8 seats from other parties. There are a few smaller parties like Democratic Unionist Party with 8 seats, Scottish National Party with 6 seats, Sinn Fein with 5 seats, Plaid Cymru with 3 seats, Social Democratic & Labour Party with 3 seats, and Alliance party with 1 seat. In this election, the Green Party for the first time was represented with a sole MP in the lower House from Brighton constituency. These smaller parties become less significant because of a Tory-Lib-Dem coalition arrangement. In this election, there was an increase of voter-turn out by 3.7% from 2005 (all the above data has been accessed from BBC website). In fact, the turn-out in UK from 1918-1997 was always over 70% with a couple of elections in 1950-51 registering over 80% (Source: House of Commons Library Data). Then in 2001, it suddenly had a sharp fall to 59.2% from 71.4% in 1997 and only increased to 61.4% in 2005. The political apathy of the British electorate that was noticed throughout 1990s with a sharp fall of turn-outs after 1992 elections that witnessed 77.7% polling was slightly reversed in the 2010 election with trends of increasing participation of new and young electorates in this election.    

Dismal Performance of the British Left

A significant feature of this election was an extremely poor show by the British Left comprising of many socialist, workers and communist parties. Wherever the British Left contested in this election, it could not manage to win even a decent vote share, leave alone winning a seat (See Table 1). If we closely follow the election data of 2010, then the national picture is clearly a swing from the Left back to Labour: of only three Labour gains, two were from the Left. Only four Left candidates saved their deposits—the three Respect target seats of Birmingham Hall Green, Bethnal Green, Poplar & Limehouse and the Blaenau Gwent seat by People’s Voice. In the case of Birmingham Hall Green and Poplar & Limehouse, the Labour in fact retained their seats, denying the Respect Party to win whereas Bethnal Green and Blaenau Gwent constituencies were gained by Labour from Respect and People’s Voice respectively.

Table 1: Performance of British Left Parties in 2010 General Elections

Source: Oxford Communist Corresponding Society

KEY

KEY

AGS — Alliance for Green Socialism; Anticap WP — Anticapitalists / Workers’ Power; AWL — Alliance for Workers’ Liberty

CL — Communist League; CPB — Communist Party of Britain; DD(C)P — Direct Democracy (Communist) Party

FfaAWG — Fight for an Anti-War Government; P Voice — People’s Voice; Resp — Respect Party;

S Alt — Socialist Alternative; SEP — Socialist Equality Party; SLP — Socialist Labour Party;

SPGB — Socialist Party of Great Britain; SSP — Scottish Socialist Party; TUSC — Trade Union and Socialist Coalition

UPS — Unity for Peace and Socialism; WRP — Workers’ Revolutionary Party

The Left has been significantly losing its vote share from the last two elections in 2005 and 2010, when compared with 2001 figures (See Table 2). The candidate in Coventry North East has been Dave Nellist in all three elections. His vote has steadily declined, presumably because fewer people now remember him as the local MP in ‘Militant Tendency’ days. In this election, the Left’s vote declined almost everywhere; exceptions are Poplar and Limehouse contested by Respect leader George Galloway, Camberwell and Peckham contested by WRP and others, and Leicester East contested by UPS candidate Avtar Sadiq, although these latter two still fell well short of the 2001 Left result. A number of Left groups contested this election with the name of a frontal organisation or associated with some leftwing publication house. For example, Fight for an Anti-War Government (South Shields seat) is an electoral arm of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) while the Communist League is the political wing of Pathfinder Books. The lowest vote for any Left candidate was 48 (0.11%) for the Communist League in Edinburgh South-West whereas a major Left party, Respect’s lowest vote was 174 (0.39%) in Enfield Southgate.

Table 2: Comparing Left Performance over the Last Decade

Source: Oxford Communist Corresponding Society. Note: Figures in square brackets show percentage of votes for each party whereas figures without bracket shows the total votes polled by the party in a particular constituency.

The lowest vote for any Left candidate who had a clear run in a constituency i.e., who were contesting as the sole Left candidate in a particular constituency was either 75 (0.18%) in Luton South or 78 (0.16%) in Feltham and Heston, both for the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. The best vote for anything with ‘socialist’ in the name was 1,592 (3.67%) for Socialist Alternative in Coventry North-East. The best vote for anything with ‘communist’ in the name was 202 (0.47%) for the Direct Democracy (Communist) Party and 110 (0.26%) for the Communist League in Hackney South and Shoreditch. The best vote for anything with ‘revolutionary’ in the name was 211 (0.45%) for the Workers’ Revolutionary Party in Camberwell and Peckham. A major Left party, Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUCS) polled 931 votes (2.93%) in Glasgow South-West, which is their best performance in this election. Another major Left party, Socialist Labour Party’s (SLP) best vote was 601 (1.57%) in Barnsley East. The best vote for any of the smaller Left slates (i.e. not Respect, SLP, or TUSC) was 596 (1.25%) for the Alliance for Green Socialism (AGS) in Leeds North-East. The Communist Party of Britain’s (CPB) best vote was either 196 (0.44%) in Cardiff South and Penarth or 179 (0.50%) in Glasgow North.

Political Assessment of Election 2010

The results in 2010 UK general elections clearly indicate that the very limited electoral gains that the Left has made over the New Labour period have basically been wiped out. This is because voters who have come over to the Left have remained ‘disgruntled Labour voters’, rather than socialist militants, as far as their fundamental outlook is concerned—and, like disgruntled Labour voters, they have grudgingly returned to Labour when there seemed to be a chance that in a polarised election, the Conservatives might get into power. This was evident in the erosion of Labour support base in 2005 election among many Afro-Asian communities with their disillusionment in the wake of Afghan and Iraq war and cashed by Respect Party in some cases. Secondly, the poor performance of the British Left reflected in this election was because of its inability to campaign among the people to vote the Left as a militant opposition rather than arguing what the Left would do if it gets elected to form a government. It was absolutely non-judgmental and imprudent to talk about a Left government’s policies when it did not even contest more than 100 seats in a 650 seats parliament! Thirdly, the fragmented British Left with its equally weak organisational strength could not take the political advantage in the midst of an economic recession. It was unable to launch massive political campaign among the people against the capitalist disorder of economic crisis coupled with pay-cuts, job losses and increasing unemployment. Before the financial crisis started in September 2008, there were also inflation in the food prices but the British Left could not seriously dealt the matter by politically convincing the electorate about the negative impacts of the capitalist system and the limits and failures of the major bourgeois political parties in U.K. in dealing the crisis. Finally, the Left could not highlight the major failures of the government and existing MPs from bourgeois parties to resolve many local constituency specific problems. To sum up, the Left was unable to raise major economic issues of everyday livelihoods and then transform those economistic demands into political ones of challenging the system with a Leftwing opposition. In such a political situation where people have limited choice with the incumbent Labour government being completely discredited and with an absence of a genuine Left opposition, it was no surprise that the Conservative party could easily emerge as a single largest party with a slogan of ‘radical conservatism’.

This election also surprised many psephologists, who predicted good fortunes for Lib-Dems but the results showed just 1% increase in its vote share and a loss of 5 seats from the previous election in 2005. The Lib-Dems argued hard that the electorate must give a fair chance to a new party than the traditional two old parties of Tories and Labour. However, the Lib-Dems are not as new as they claim since it has its origins in the old Whig party in early 18^th century and later in the Liberal party of mid-19^th century! The contradiction of British politics in this election was however represented in its mimicry of American style television debates with prospective heads of a future government but unlike a presidential system, Britain has a parliamentary democratic model with constituency specific dynamics. It was due to the specific constituency dynamics and a liberal/lenient approach to immigration by the Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg in the last of the three television debates that it lost out in the race. However, with no party touching the magic figure of 326 seats in a hung parliament, the Oxonian David Cameron as a Tory leader and Cantabrigian Nick Clegg as a Lib-Dem leader sealed a deal between two parties to form the first coalition government after Second World War with Cameron as Prime Minister and Clegg as his deputy. However, with Thatcherite revolution in late 1970s and throughout 1980s, British politics seems to be now run by the neoliberal consensus. In 1997, although the Labour party promised a social-democratic agenda, it soon got exposed with its imperialist bandwagon with the US in its joint offensives in post-9/11 Afghan war in 2001 and 2003 Iraq war. The New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was discredited over the last decade with its inability to fulfil the democratic demands of the people, where even its social-democratic agenda of giving relief to the people was lost under a neoliberal hegemony. Even if the Labour was voted back to power, it would also have cut government expenditure like the current Tory-Lib-Dem government with its ‘austerity drive’.

The massive cuts in government expenditure is in line with neoliberal economics of fiscal management whereas in times of recession, such cuts in government expenditure is going to further squeeze out an already demand constraint economy. On the contrary, increasing government expenditure would have facilitated the common people with an increase in its purchasing power capacity and thus would have generated demand in the economy. The current policies of the newly elected government is going to massively hurt the common man and thus we can notice the Tory formulation of a spiritual value aka ‘austerity’ to balm the wounds of common populace. These neoliberal economic policies of the current British government would further worsen the economic situation in UK. Thus we are listening Cameron talking about prolonged effects of recession, which the Tories are blaming the previous Labour government to avoid its own responsibility to give immediate relief to the people. In this election, the big capital overwhelmingly supported the Tories, and Cameron himself took pride of Britain’s big corporates in the television debates by spontaneously naming Sainsburys and Marks & Spencer. The political arrangement between the Tories and Lib-Dems are justified in the name of ‘national interest’ since apparently there seems to be some key ideological differences on electoral reforms, immigration and European Union between the two parties. Now, in the period of recession the big capital certainly wants a stable government with a Conservative leader as its head and for the time being, the coalition between Tories and Lib-Dems can ignore such ideological differences while serving the interests of big capital than the ‘national interest’. In such circumstances, the economic policies of the current government would only create conditions of possibilities for a militant Left movement if the British Left could only show such a political will to unitedly fight the economic menace ushered by global economic recession. It would be rather unfortunate if a new Labour in the long run reaps the political benefits of such anti-people policies of the current government and keeps on the same cycle of neoliberalism with some social-democratic rhetoric. If the British Left does not rectify the politico-ideological and organisational problems with careful self-introspection and forcefully challenge the neoliberal consensus with an alternative vision of working class politics complemented with equally important questions of race, gender, environment and war, there is no respite from the oppressive and exploitative clutches of neoliberal dispensation in Britain.

Note: In writing this article, the author would like to acknowledge Com. Ed Griffiths and Com. Zaid Yaqoob of Oxford Communist Corresponding Society for extensive discussions and inputs on UK General Election 2010.