Canada and the UK: Lessons From Britain

What we know, heading into 2011, regarding the Canadian political scene is this: there might be an election, but there might not. And if there is an election, it might change a lot, but it might not. Not much to go on, really.

The interesting thing, though, is that those among us who sense that the stasis that has set in regarding our political landscape might be shaken up (might need to be shaken up) have by-and-large ignored the Westminster System just across the Atlantic that has a half-year leg up on the changes we might well be seeing in Canada in 2011.

If we really do enter an era of coalitions, we shouldn't be looking at countries like Germany or Italy that know them well: we should be looking at the UK as it stumbles through its first proper coalition. The other way the UK presents a model for us is in the existence of Caroline Lucas, the UK's first-ever elected Green MP. This matters because (for now, anyway) the UK has the same problematic FPTP system that we do. So if Nick Clegg's reform referendum fails, sticking the UK with its current dysfunctional system, Caroline Lucas's successes and failures will tell us a lot about the feasability of having a Green Party in a Westminster FPTP system.

The comparison is not entirely valid. For instance, the three-party system that the UK has right now might seem to match ours quite closely (with the same colours, even), but since the mid-nineties, the non-right of the political spectrum in the UK has been really confused. The Liberal Democrats, whose participation in the current coalition has been disastrous for their popular support, appeared to be an option more progressive than the Labour party - an appearance not borne out of the histories of the two parties but on recent trends in parliament, current platforms, and to a large degree on the personages of Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown. Nick Clegg was the story of the 2010 election, and his party seemed like a vital alternative to the two stagnant main parties.

Things are different here. Setting aside the Greens and the BQ (who, of course, correspond to the SNP and the PC), we're quite clear on who our left, our centre and our right are - to the extent that the actual beliefs and policies of the NDP, the Liberals and the Conservatives respectively would do little to change that popular perception. A Conservative/NDP coalition seems even less plausible than a Conservative/LibDem one, which means that Nick Clegg's noble aspiration, as the third party, to negotiate with the first party before talking ot the second party might be dead on arrival domestically. It's a pity, because it's a mature and intelligent working system in a 'coalition era' of politics. But the concept of coalition has coalesced so firmly around the Liberals and the NDP that nothing else is even considered. Realistic in the short-term, I realise, but dangerous in the long.

Dangerous, perhaps, for the NDP. Whatever the rank-and-file might think, I think the NDP as a party has grown comfortable with its role as kingmaker: in Ontario it has been kingmaker a few times before and in 2011 there is a decent chance it will be again. Federally it was kingmaker in the 1970s, and was more comfortable in the role under Martin than it has been under Harper. If the scales tipped just enough this year to give the Liberals more seats than the Conservatives, I think the NDP would be happy to 'prop up' a minority - if they could introduce some key legislation during that time (say, regarding Afghanistan), then it might even help them. If the Conservatives still lead in total seat count (which seems likely), then the NDP are stuck where they were before - either discussing the so-called 'coalition of losers' that so inflamed popular opinion in 2008 or carrying on as they have been for five years now.

A genuine Liberal-NDP coalition presents an interesting challenge for the NDP: as we saw in the 1970s, failures would taint the NDP brand while successes would not necessarily vindicate them. It's tough for a junior partner to take much credit in a coalition, and it's here also that we need to look at the LibDems.

The numbers in the UK are horrifying: scant months ago at the polls, the LibDems took 23.0% of the vote to Labour's 29.0 and the Conservatives' 36.1. This happened after a heady post-televised-debate bubble that had all three parties polling equal numbers; there were even four polls that put the LibDems out front - on 24 April, YouGov posted the LibDems at an unbelievable 34%.

It was unbelievable. Unrealistic and unsustainable. YouGov today posts the following numbers: Labour 43%, Conservatives 37% and the LibDems 9%. The cost of coalition has been astonishing for the LibDems, though you could argue (quite rightly) that the LibDems' numbers were artificially inflated by wavering Labour supporters who have since returned home. Why they have returned home is important, and I don't think it's merely a distaste for the government side of Commons (though there's that). Yet think this way: of any five people who voted LibDem just a few months ago, only two remain faithful. More than half have wandered away. Obviously the tuition fiasco is of great importance. But it reflects the strange situation the LibDems, historically a centrist party, find themselves in: are they responsible to their party loyalists or to their most recent electors? If their intentions have been misunderstood by a large number of the people who cast votes for them (though the tuition fiasco is a bit different - it does seem to be a genuine turnaround), is that really their fault? And how grateful should they be for the votes they managed to secure last time around, if many of those votes were cast against the other two parties as opposed to genuinely for them?

For the moment at least, the LibDems and Labour are tied to each other: one party's success is the other party's failure. One wonders how well a Labour/LibDem government would have performed - and one wonders how well the LibDems would be polling were Nick Clegg Ed Miliband's junior partner. One also wonders where the UK Greens - a more soundly left-wing party than the Green Party of Canada - fit into all of this (quite well in the short-term, at least - were an election to be held tomorrow, Caroline Lucas's seat would seemingly be secure and perhaps joined by a few others). All this matters over here because whatever fluidity can be squeezed from the stone of Canadian politics falls clearly on the left side of the Conservatives-vs.-everyone-else axis. Coalition, merger, collapse, whatever: it's only a shakeup in the relative positions of the four non-Tory parties that can really change the composition of parliament. The signals from the UK are mixed at best. But we need to be reading them much more carefully than we currently are.

UK: Three losers

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The ballots in the UK general election have been closed for slightly less than an hour now. All the BBC can talk about, all they have in their hands, is their exit poll. An exit poll is, after all, a poll, not an election result. So it fits in well with our blog's stated purpose. Here it is:

• Conservatives: 307
• Labour: 255
• Lib Dems: 59
• Others: 29

At the risk of falling into cliché, if we take a minute to presume that the exit polls are close enough to take as an 'approximate' view of reality, the fact is that this remains an election with no winners but with plenty of losers.

There's no getting round the fact that Labour have lost: even if they can cobble together a coalition with the Lib Dems, they have certianly lost their mandate: they've lost any real claim to 'represent' the British people in any real way. There's no surprise there. Given that David Cameron looked like cakewalking to a majority just a month ago, it's tough to see a hung parliament as anything but a loss for the Conservatives as well - polls all long have shown very little enthusiasm for the Tories this time round: merely less antipathy than exists towards Labour. The biggest loss, though, has to be the Lib Dems, really: this exit poll shows them, amazingly, losing seats since 2005. While the Lib Dems can spin that scenario into a plea for electoral change, and while a hung parliament is very obviously exactly what they've been salivating for, 2010 was meant to be the real electoral breakthrough for the Lib Dems. Losing seats is a queer way to have a breakthrough...

No winners at all. No breakthroughs for nationalists, for Green, for UKIP either... one hopes, then, that the way forward here is humility. One hopes that all three parties will come forth and talk about their inability to have engaged the public's imagination or hopes this time round. Obviously co-operation is essential between the parties: not just for the for-the-love-of-God-stop-talking-about-them 'markets', but most importantly to stop the British public as a whole from falling either into a profound apathy or into the trap they appear to have avoided this time out of voting for far-right fringe parties.

Will that happen? Well, the optimist in me hopes so. The pessimist in me? He sees dark times ahead...

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UK: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

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Well, the current polls are showing the Lib Dems back in the basement - or at least far away from the lead (The Mirror has them down by 5%, the Telegraph by 4%, News of the World unbelievably 13% below the Conservatives).

They talked about a 'Lib Dem bubble' and about whether or not it would burst. Well, if these polls are to be believed, it certainly has. The question then is, 'why?' I've seen a few places online suggest that it has to do with Lib Dem foreign policies, as revealed during the second debate. Maybe. But then again, there's that same old bugaboo, what you might call 'electability'.

The poll that really matters, then, is the one released by YouGov, showing that 49% of voters would vote Lib Dem if they thought they had a reasonable chance of forming the government.

That's an amazing stat, one that bears consideration. 49% - half the electorate. You have to go back to the 1950s to see a single party capturing shares of the electorate that high. And furthermore, the 49% comes from all across the political map: not just undecideds and decided Lib Dems, but decided Labour supporters and decided Tory supporters too.

What does this mean? Well, though it's not quite worded as one, it's the closest you'll get to a true 'self-fulfilling prophecy'. A 'self-fulfilling prophecy' is what happens when belief in a certain outcome causes that outcome to happen. A classic example is the collapse of a smaller bank: if a rumour can be started that a certain bank is having economic problems, a worried populace will withdraw their savings from that bank, in effect causing the economic probilems, and ultimate failure, that they had feared would happen (and that would not have happened had they not done so). In effect, the rumour itself causes the effects it describes to happen.

Online vote predictors are, of course, far from 100% accurate. But putting the numbers from the YouGov poll (in full: Lib Dem: 49%, Tories 25%, Labour 19%) into any of them produces a solid, in fact ridiculously so, majority for the Lib Dems. http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/swing-calculator gives the following result: 548 seats for the Lib Dems, compared to 41 for Labour and 28 for the Conservatives. 15 for other parties and 18 Northern Irish seats fail to make this potential scenario anything but a landslide.

So here's the crux: if everyone who would vote Lib Dem if they had a chance of forming the government did vote Lib Dem, they would have a chance of forming the government. More than a chance, in fact, a virtual certainty.

So why isn't Nick Clegg riding a tsunami into Number 10, then? Why do his current polls differ from this theoretical-situation poll so drastically?

Well, on the one hand it's an obvious referendum on the people's faith in the current British electoral system: it shows a good deal of people making voting decisions based on the concept of a skewed outcome. But additionally it's another example of the politics of animosity in the UK political scene: that essentially you don't have people voting for Labour or the Tories so much as against them. One main reason why the historically centrist Lib Dems have so much theoretical support is that anti-Tories prefer them to the Tories, and anti-Labour voters prefer them to Labour. When people vote either to keep Brown out of office or to keep Cameron out, Clegg is appealing to either side, at least in part.

What this fails to see, however, is that there is genuine respect and admiration for Nick Clegg and his party - large amounts of it. Even people with no intention of voting for him still see Clegg as more honest and having more vision than the two 'main' candidates. While some Lib Dem policies regarding immigration, defence and Europe might genuinely raise eyebrows, the fact is that much of the Lib Dem platform is appealing to the British voter.

And if everyone in the UK woke up on the morning of 6 May saying, 'this is a genuine three-way race; I'm voting with my conscience', who knows what would come to pass?

But that would never happen.

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UK: Shy Tories and Bold LibDems

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Apparently, there exists a phenomenon called the 'Shy Tory Factor', wherein, in the UK, pre-election polls tended at one time to downplay Conservative support. The result is that, on election day, you suddenly find the Conservatives garnering significantly more support than the polls had previously suggested - in the 1992 election, to the extent of an 8.5% difference. Why is this? Well, the theory posits that Conservative voters tended to hide their actual voting intentions while talking to pollsters, either by calling themselves 'undecided' or by listing another party as its preference.

I get this info from the Wikipedia page on the topic, so I'm certainly no expert. The logic behind it kind of suggests that perhaps there's a stigma against voting Tory that people sought to overcome, or rather that people shrunk from while talking to surveyors. I think there might be an aspect of truth to that, and the more paranoid of Conservative supporters might have felt that there was a large aspect of truth to it (perhaps moreso in 1997, seemingly less so today). I do wonder, though, if it's not a variation on a trend that pollsters have certainly observed in Canada, and perhaps in other countries too: that people tend to be more 'experimental' when talking theoretically before the day than they are when actually ticking boxes on the day. In Canada, this manifests itself in the tendency for polling companies to overstate voting intentions for the New Democratic Party - and more recently the Green Party.

In Canada, it works like this: there is a certain percentage of the populace who, before election day, will claim an intent to vote NDP but who, on the day itself, suddenly 'choke' and vote Liberal (it could be other parties, but primarily Liberal) for two different reasons: (1) a gut feeling that the untested NDP would be too inexperienced to runn a good government in comparison to the extrememly-experienced Liberal Party, and (2) the old yarn that the NDP have no chance of forming a government anyway, so voting for them is a waste of a vote. This is made explicit when you consider tactical voting, which in Canada is generally used against Conservatives as opposed to against any other party. So it's the opposite of the Shy Tory Factor. Call it a Bold NDP Factor.

Which brings us to the current Liberal Democrat 'bubble' that is making such headlines in the UK - the fact that, in the week since the first televised debate, pollsters are consistently showing the LibDems well ahead of Labour and neck-in-neck with the Conservatives. Leaving aside for the moment the huge gap between expected voter intention and the expected parliament balance it will return, it raises a question: if we head into election day with comparable polling numbers, will we find either of these phenomena arising? To word it differently:

• Could the current Conservative numbers (that show the party vying for first place as opposed to the comfortable first-place they've been enjoying for years now) actually be lower than reality, and on election day will we find an unexpected surge in Tory numbers?
• Alternately, given the fact that the Wikipedia article discusses ways that pollsters have attempted to account for the Shy Tory Factor, is it possible now that the Shy Tory Factor no longer exists (the anger against the Labour government has caused Tory voters to set their qualms aside), leaving us with artificially inflated Tory numbers at the moment?
• Could there be a 'bold LibDem' factor? Namely, could a certain percentage of the electorate presently claiming an intention to vote LibDem suddenly get cold feet on election day, concerned about their ability to govern or their ability to form a government, and transfer their vote to the Conservatives or Labour (both of which seem like possibilities)?

The first and the third of these concerns would both wind up being good news for the Tories, were they to come to pass. If nothing else, though, the existence of these concerns, and others, underlines what I think is a major trend this election cycle: the honest truth that we have no real idea what's going to happen on 6 May.

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