Current
polling trends: the Conservatives will lose the next general election, perhaps
with another Labour landslide, unless they decide to advocate withdrawal from
the EU.
The obliteration of
the Conservative and LibDems in yesterday’s by-elections, and the slide in its
vote share in Corby, has an obvious message. At the next general election Labour
will keep its strongholds and rebound in the rest of the country, as left-wing
LibDem voters return to it. The LibDems – who depended on their protest vote
status for much of their support – will be massacred. My guess is that the
middle-class anti-Labour vote will go largely to the Conservatives, whose vote
share will be surprisingly resilient. UKIP will take votes from all three of the
other parties and could poll 10%, perhaps more. In the 2010 general election the
Conservatives took 36.1% of the vote, Labour 29.0%, Liberal Democrats 23.0%,
UKIP 3.1% and the rest 8.8%. The rest included meaningful vote shares for the
BNP (1.9%) and the Scottish National Party (1.7%), and the SNP in fact took six
seats because of the concentration of its vote. Who knows what will happen in
2015? But I don’t think I am claiming great powers of foresight in suggesting
that Labour will take virtually all of the seats now held by the LibDems, except
in the South-West. In the South-West the LibDem seats will either revert to the
Conservatives or possibly give us in UKIP our first parliamentary
representation. If the Labour vote share were 40%, the Conservatives 34%, UKIP
11%, the LibDems 8% and the rest 7%, Labour would have a large majority, perhaps
even a landslide.
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