CONSERVATIVES NEED SWING OF 7 PER CENT AND LEAD OF 11 PER CENT TO WIN NEXT ELECTION.

EUROFACTS

28^th April -2006.

Vol 11 No 14

The Tories are the careless party.

Anthony Scholefield argues that the Tory leadership’s public distain for

UKIP

Is part of a political strategy that is deep ly flawed? Failure to secure its base and to find favourable electoral ground on which to fight means the party faces a near impossible task.

‘To lose one parent, Mr Worthington, may be regarded as a mistake, to lose both looks like carelessness.’ Lady Brackenbury in Oscar Wilde’s

‘The Importance of Being Earnest’

Since 1970 the Conservative Party has been careless about its core vote. It has allowed no fewer than four parties to take bites out of its core electoral strength.

These are the Ulster Unionists, the UKIP/Referendum Party, the BNP and Veritas.

Most of the damage was done in the Heath era, one that was characterised by the high tide of liberal managerial conservatism and distain for the core Conservative interests and ideals.

The breakaway new parties were grounded on formally traditional

Conservative

beliefs of democracy, patriotism and the protection of the interests of the British people, especially the working population.

Core Policies

Once a new party rises and establishes itself, it can prove remarkably resilient so long as its core policies are relevant and have a small but solid support.

It is quite clear that UKIP and the BNP plug into separate but vital core areas of politics and offer a distinctive policy from the three main parties. It is hard to see them going away.

Heath directly lost the 10/12 Unionist MP’s who were incorporated in the Conservative ranks up to 1970. Once a certain period of independence had passed, it was inconceivable that the Ulster Unionists would rejoin the Conservatives. The parties drifted further and further apart.

Heath’s enthusiasm for Europe did not do immediate damage to the Conservatives’ ability to win elections but the European issue eventually exploded in the 1990’s with the formation of the Referendum and UK Independence Parties.

Once again, what was a substantial opinion in the Conservative party was so estranged that it split off. Moreover, its policy stance was continually vindicated by the collapse of support for the EU by Conservative voters and the chronic evasiveness of Conservative politicians on the EU.

Finally, the ruling liberal conservative elite showed little interest in the impact of mass third-world immigration on British working class areas.

This enabled the BNP, despite the unsavoury past of some of its leadership, to gain a foothold. In fact, the impact of the BNP is probably underestimated since it presents a real obstacle to Conservative recovering in the metropolitan areas outside London where they now hold only

5 out of 124 seats

In most of the West Midlands and urban Yorkshire and Lancashire the Conservatives vote dropped in 2005 while the BNP saved deposits all over the regions.

In effect, the Tory working class vote cultivated by Conservative leaders in the nineteenth century has been ignored and has now collapsed in most of the Midlands and the North of England.

Electoral Bias

At the same time the Conservatives became careless about the state of the electoral system. The massive electoral bias in favour of Labour is, to a, large extent, the product of decisions about the electoral system taken when the Conservatives were in office.

In 1987, following a House of Commons’ Committee study of the electoral system, the decision was taken to retain the over-representation of Scotland and Wales.

The Tory leadership also failed to set principles for the Boundary Commission which would reduce bias in the electoral system, particularly to reduce the gap between the size of the average Labour seat and the average Conservative seat which in 1997 still amounted to 6,500 votes.

The more efficient distribution of the Conservative vote in the 1980’s masked the other biases in the system in Labour’s favour.

On the basis of the current bias in the Westminster electoral system the Conservatives would have only won one post –War election (1983), according to Kavanagh’s

‘The British General Election of 2001’.

In 2005 the result in England alone was 286 for Labour against 193 seats for the Conservatives despite the Conservatives being slightly ahead in the number of votes.

Anti-Democratic

Even now this staggeringly anti-democratic state of affairs is being treated as a second order issue by Conservative politicians who make no serious attempt to address it. It also has another effect. The poorest regions, which are massively over-represented, supply most of the governing party, which inevitably colours policy.

The next election

According to the Electoral Reform Society’s Report o the \General Election of 2005, the Conservative Party needs a swing of about 7 per cent and a lead of 11 per cent to win an absolute majority at the next election.

This allows for the Conservatives achieving a net gain of seven seats after the Boundary Commission Report. The changes are estimated to be

Tories +7, Labour –5

-and the Liberal Democrats +2.

In elections since 1945, such a swing was only attained once, by Tony Blair in 1997.

Given these self-inflicted handicaps, where are the Conservative votes to come from?

If we add up the votes for Labour, the Liberal democrats and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists we find that they totalled the following in the last nine elections.

1974-59.0% 1974-61.0% 1979-52.8%

1983-54.5% 1987-55.1% 1992-54.5%

1997-62.5% 2001-61.5% 2005-59.4%

The bedrock of this left Bloc is thus 55 per cent. In addition there is Northern Ireland, which is a further 2.5 per cent of the total electorate. So the Conservative ceiling would seem to be about 42.5 per cent of the vote.

The best Conservative performances were in 1979,1983, 1987 and 1992 when they won 42-43 per cent.

Their success in number of seats in 1979, 1983 and 1987 was due to the split in the left bloc with a great deal of the LibDem vote wasted. This is no longer the case.

But the crucial point is that up to 1992, the Conservatives did not face any political party attacking from the Right.

In the last three elections they did. In 1997 these parties attracted 2.9 per cent in 2001 1.7 per cent and in 2005

3 Per Cent

of the electorate.

Moreover, in England only, the parties of the Right attracted just under 4 per cent of the votes in 2005 –votes that, in the past, would normally have mainly gone to the Conservatives.

No wonder that the UKIP vote alone was in excess of the Labour’s winning margin of the vote in 25 constituencies and the BNP/UKIP vote combined exceeded that vote in a further 5 constituencies, despite the BNP concentrating on Labour heartlands and not standing in many marginals.

With the Cameron Policy of targeting left bloc parties, the Conservatives might cut back the vote for the Left bloc from about 60 per cent in the last three elections to, say, 55 per cent – the bedrock Left Bloc vote -and, from this process, they could gain 5 per cent of the national vote. Their possible electoral total might be:

Conservative vote 2005 32.4%

From left Bloc 5.0%

Total 37.4%

If we assume that 50 per cent of the votes came from Labour and 50 per cent from the LibDems, this would mean the labour vote would total 32.7 per cent, giving a Tory lead of 4.7 per cent.

This would produce a hung Parliament but the Tories would still have 25 seats behind Labour.

So, relying on taking votes only from the Left Bloc leaves the Conservatives with an inadequate result; a hung Parliament at best.

To actually win with this strategy the voting figure would have to look like this:

Conservative 42.6%

Labour 30.1%

LibDems 16.9%

Scots/Welsh 2.2%

This would give the Conservatives a lead over Labour of 12.5 per cent, just enough to form a government.

In this scenario the total of the Left Bloc is 49.2 per cent. In other words, the Tories would have to push the Left Bloc into a lower percentage of the vote than in 1979 when the Left Bloc totalled 52.8 per cent –lower than any election since the 1950s. Is this really a possibility?

To emphasise, there are two reasons for the scale of the challenge the Tories face.

The existence of the new Right parties compresses the total available vote for the Conservatives.

Second, the LibDem vote is more successful in turning votes into seats than it did in the 1980s.

Conservatives have ignored the two basic canons of electoral warfare.

They have failed to secure their base.

The left Bloc may shrink from 60 per cent to 55 per cent of the electorate if the Tories detach some of it with current strategy BUT, historically, it is unlikely to go lower.

Remember that Mrs Thatcher was neither handicapped by the bias in the electoral system nor by the existence of small but crucially important

Right Wing parties.

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[Font altered-bolding & underlining used-comments in brackets]

[Well! until there is a more aggressive stance against the EU by the Tory leadership which can be believed –and that is the greatest difficulty they have -there is also the present suspicion that the trend of that party is to follow New Labour and hope they will hold their members until they can become a government-if ever.

But assuming that the rank and file of the Tory party are being led along with the belief that there is a possibility of government while behind the scenes the leadership is merely interested in ensuring that the Pro-Europe faction from ALL main parties achieve their ambition of our entry into a

United States of Europe.

This is all speculation but when one looks at the reluctance of the Tory party to take a stronger stance on withdrawal from the EU or at the least a positive programme of clawing back our Sovereignty it leads many with the unmistakable impression that a vote for the Tories is a vote for New Labour or LibDem as their policy on Europe and in fact on many other major issues of concern crosses party lines.

As we have stated for some years now we believe that ONLY

PR-PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION

-can ensure that the voices of millions of voters who have no intention of being European citizens in a Collective Totalitarian State have the opportunity to protect their accustomed

Rights and Liberties.

The battle lines need to be drawn by the fringe parties in the following months of 2006 by making PR the most important issue for discussion as a first step to returning True Democracy to England.

If Scotland and Wales have their Devolution- why not England?

DO IT NOW –MAKE IT HAPPEN!

* * *

MAY/06

Q&A: The Lisbon Treaty-2008

Leaders of the European Union's 27 member states meet in Portugal this week to sign what will now become known as the Lisbon Treaty.

*

The abolition of Britain
by The Reform Treaty
- Second Reading-Passed by majority of 138

*

Veteran parliamentarian TONY BENN speaks of the absolute necessity of a

REFERENDUM

HEAR HIM ON

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=o0I-ZdvQz1o

www.noliberties.com

[Latest Addition - June07]

www.eutruth.org.uk

www.thewestminsternews.co.uk

www.speakout.co.uk

Daniel Hannan - Forming an OPPOSITION to the EU

www.telegraph.co.uk.blogs

VOTE

MAY -2007

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WITH THE ONLY PARTY WITH A MANDATE

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