British politics is now full of challengers

This blog has already been very clear about the struggles of the Big Two political parties in Great Britain. They are in a deep hole, and they show every sign of continuing their dig. Two challenger parties – one old, one young – in the shape of the Liberal Democrats and the Brexit Party seem to sit more naturally across the great divides in our politics today. And they’re full of verve and a sense of momentum, while the blue and red teams trudge glumly around in search of eye-catching and popular ideas.

But what about the insurgents fighting to get in from outside this new and unfamiliar four-party system? Because one of the things that was so noticeable about the recent local and European elections was the rise of the Greens and the Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru, the continued success of the Scottish National Party, and the success of Independents and localists everywhere – while another new grouping, Change UK, seems so far to have comprehensively failed to get off the ground?

Today, on day two of our week-long blogging marathon, we’re going to take a look at a political system that isn’t so much bifurcating between Leave and Remain as crumbling in all directions – with concerns about the environment, transport and housing apparently sitting across the traditional divide of Right and Left just as strongly as Brexit does. Because as the Big Two crumble, it’s not just the New Two that are pushing them around: it’s the little battalions and the sharpshooters too.

The Green surge. We’ve been here before, of course, since over the winter of 2014-15 and leading up to the 2015 General Election the Green Party seemed to be going places – only to disappoint as the date of the polls actually approached. They actually hit 10 or 11 per cent in two polls conducted in January 2015, conducted by YouGov and Lord Ashcroft respectively. But now there seems to be a more sustained upwards drift, reflecting a second and more voluminous inrush of the green tide. The Extinction Rebellion movement, and the publicity surrounding Swedish environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg, have become a cause celebre among voters who might once have been attracted to Cleggmania and Corbynism: increasing evidence of the warming planet is causing voters widespread unease.

Added to a great deal of local organising, on the model that the Liberal Democrats once used to come back from the brink of extinction in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the Greens have a great chance to establish themselves as a permanent player in a multi-party system. Don’t believe us? Well, they put on 194 councillors in early May, and they won 12.1 per cent of the vote (and seven MEPs) at the European elections – coming in just two percentage points behind Labour. The Britain Elects poll tracker now has them on average at 5.4 per cent for a Westminster election, only a little behind their placing during the party’s much-heralded ‘surge’ last time. It will be very, very hard for them to win any more Parliamentary seats, partly because Labour is standing in their way in areas that are demographically and ideologically fertile for the Greens: but it does not seem totally impossible in the medium term.

The nationalist challenge. Welsh and Scottish nationalist parties also had much to cheer. Given constraints of time and space, we’re going to treat their fortunes together here, though we do know that these two countries are very, very different. Plaid Cymru first, because their advance seems the most stunning. They beat Labour across Wales in the European elections for the first time ever, and they didn’t just squeeze out what was once thought of as Wales’ dominant party: they beat them by 19.6 per cent to 15.3 per cent, a swing of over nine per cent since the last such election. Recent opinion polling in Wales, which suggests that Plaid is indeed benefiting from increasing support, confirm the picture. As with the Greens, Plaid will struggle to win many more Westminster seats – maybe only two or three look remotely within reach – but these days, we wouldn’t rule it out.

The SNP’s remarkable run of success continued, with extraordinarily good results for a party which is now twelve years into government at Holyrood. The only real way to put this is to say that theyutterly crushed Scottish Labour in the European vote, since Labour’s vote share collapsed and who nearly came sixth in a country they used to govern without question – as they have done Wales up until very recently. Labour lost its last MEP in Scotland, while the Conservatives also went markedly backwards. Opinion polling (opens as PDF) continues to indicate that both the UK’s ‘main’ parties are going to get a beating in Scotland next time around, with Labour perhaps retreating back to the single seat it won in Edinburgh South in 2015 and the Tories ending up with only two to four Scots MPs. They’ve both played right into the SNP’s hands in so many ways. SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (above) probably cannot believe her luck.

The independent insurgency. One line of the local government results that really made many people sit up and notice was the one said ‘Others – Gains’. Because all round the country, particularist parties of local people who liked to style themselves ‘independent’ of any party won ward after ward after ward. In fact, they made 660 gains – nearly as many as the 705 net pickups that the Liberal Democrats managed. In three districts, for instance Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, the Independents now have overall control. Now, these groups are necessarily drawn from all sorts of people, and seem to represent almost all of the points on the ideological spectrum. Many of them seem to be civic-minded individuals who have taken up the baton of the 2011 Localism Act and run small parish councils, before (as now) trading up into the much bigger world of district elections.

Some Independent groups seemed to be angry about new housing schemes; others were committed to breaking the hold of long-serving councillors who seemed to have become complacent and presumptuous in a world of First Past the Post elections in which they always won their wards. But it’s not just disaffection with Westminster that we’re seeing: the phenomenon seems wider and deeper than that, and to reflect something of a wish to, shall we say, take back more control locally. In many parts of the country, information about for instance the use and survival of bus routes is very controversial, but not freely available; new housing plans are absolutely huge in scale and ambition, but very vague and not really presented in a useable manner; central government funding cuts have often asked local people to step in and fill the void.   

How should we expect this all to turn out when we next go to the polls? Not just some Brexit Party MPs (if that issue remains unresolved), and more – potentially many more – Liberal Democrats. But also ever-sharper challenges to the four parties who now seem to be rotating around the low 20s or high teens in the polls. A lower vote share for the Conservatives and Labour. More wins for the SNP. Probably an increased number of MPs from Plaid Cymru. And a higher vote share, if not any more MPs, for the Greens. And all the time, as the success of Independents and localists demonstrates, a burgeoning sense that this time, the centralised two-party system really is under the most existential threat it has ever faced. This chaotic Parliament may not be the last.

What is the meaning of the Peterborough by-election?

This week, to mark the end of the academic year and therefore Public Policy and the Past’s annual summer hibernation, we thought we’d do something different. So steel yourself for a full week of blogging – each at only half the length we normally attempt, running to only a thousand rather than two thousand words, but hopefully illuminating nonetheless.

It’s been an absolutely terrible year for British politics, which appears now to be in vertiginous decline. Its ranks are dissolving into nothing more than a chaotic rabble. That’s a paradox, because the nation as a whole really does not seem to be exhibiting the same deep amber or red warning signals. So it’s time to take stock. Why does the organised party system in the United Kingdom look to be under such threat? Is the threat real? What are the deeper roots of the crisis, if indeed there are any.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at how the traditionally ‘smaller’ British parties are doing, having cast our eye last month over what May’s local and European elections told us about the Conservatives, Labour and the apparently resurgent Liberal Democrats. Then on Wednesday, we’ll examine the likely balance of forces if there is a General Election this year – specifically, the very strange prospect of a Labour government being elected even as its popularity falls off a cliff.

On Thursday, this blog will examine Labour’s recent report on land policy, all the more pressing since they appear to be on the verge of power. We’ll round it all off on Friday with a survey of recent public policy successes, not just to end the year on a slightly more optimistic note, but to highlight again the odd sensation of watching politicians struggle so tragi-comically while the country at large keeps its act together. 

First, and today: what does the recent Peterborough by-election tell us about the parties’ relative standings? Labour’s narrow victory has launched all sorts of not-so-hot takes, usually from partisans whose utterly naked self-interest and boring tribalism make their one-eyed claims all the harder to take. One small part of the kingdom has been to the polls yet again – and with the voter recall of Chris Davies, the Conservative MP for Brecon and Radnorshire, another seat will be up soon too. Can a by-election tell us anything about national standings?

Peterborough might just tell us nothing at all. On one level, it’s important to note that all the hot takery in the world might mean… zilch. We once thought that the Conservatives’ February 2017 victory in Copeland showed that the Tories were on the march, likely to seize Labour seats deep into red territory. Well, it didn’t work out like that, did it?

Let’s go further back, too. Eastleigh in 2013 told the Liberal Democrats that they might be able to hang on to quite a few seats, despite the deep unpopularity of their coalition with the Conservatives among many of their voters. That turned out to be, well, optimistic. Labour’s narrow hold of Darlington in 1983 convinced the party to keep Michael Foot. He then led that party to electoral catastrophe just three months later. Keep in mind that single data points do not make for a conclusive equation.

The by-election told us that the polls are right. One intriguing and comforting point that leaps out from the Peterborough result is that it to some extent confirms the national polling picture. The Brexit Party have hit the low- to mid-20s in many of those surveys: here they got 29 per cent. That party just failed to grab the seat from Labour. It’s not listed as a Brexit Party gain on what is perhaps still the most famous seat predictor, Electoral Calculus – even though that site projects nearly 200 Brexit Party gains.

The polls are also telling us that support for the Conservatives and Labour alike is falling like a stone. That’s exactly what happened in Peterborough. Labour’s vote fell by 17.2 per cent (the fifth worst byelection vote fall for that party in forty years), while the Conservative vote went down by 25.5 per cent. So, very roughly speaking and in the real world where British political polling has a mediocre record, pollsters should be cheered: they don’t seem to be doing too badly.

This win told us that although Labour are suffering, the Conservatives are in an even deeper hole. Labour’s candidate Lisa Forbes (above) got returned to Parliament not because she was particularly popular, but because her party’s vote share fell less than did the Conservatives’. Put very crudely, Labour were more successful in staunching their bleeding to the Liberal Democrats than the Conservatives were to the Brexit Party. Had just a few more Labour voters decided to give the revived and Remain-focused Liberal Democrats a chance, Labour would have lost this seat. And that tells us exactly what the European elections did: Labour’s coalition is falling to bits, but the Conservatives’ alliance with the voters could be completely disintegrating.

The vote totals hinted that there is still life in the ‘old’ parties. Some voting surveys are suggesting that Labour and the Conservatives have shed half their vote since the last General Election. That isn’t quite what we saw here, since although the Tories’ vote did crater on that scale, Labour’s didn’t. Labour seems still to be holding on among minority communities and in diverse areas, a fact that caught our eye too in the European election results. That fact caused quite a lot of unpleasant racist dog whistling from the Brexit Party immediately after this byelection, and a not-so-whispered campaign against the legitimacy of this election focusing on the postal vote. Far be it for us to suggest that Nigel Farage and his supporters would do better to have a think about why non-white Britons loathe them so much.

Meanwhile, one of the main reasons the Brexit Party did not win this seat was that even though it clearly became a two-horse race, the Conservative vote actually held up better than expected against a classic protest vote ‘squeeze’. Mr Farage simply couldn’t persuade enough Conservatives to back his new upstart party – which ended up at about the same nearly-nearly threshold that United Kingdom Independence Party used to bang its head right up against. Close, but no cigar.

So Peterborough confirms lots of things that have been more and more obvious in recent months. It’s only one result, but it makes the polls look as if they are in the right ball park. It demonstrates that the Big Two of red and blue are astonishingly unpopular given that they are supposed to be the main and traditional homes for left- and right-leaning voters. But they are still just about able to block the advance of new entrants such as the Brexit Party. They have the data. They know where their voters are. They have money and machinery. But their dominance is creaking and cracking alarmingly, and they know it. For the rest of the week, we’ll try to suggest why that might be – and why it matters.

Britain's electoral upheaval might be just beginning

For the United Kingdom, May has been a month of not one but two elections – one in England and Northern Ireland for local councils, and two across the whole UK for the European Parliament. We’ve been leaping for joy here, of course, as the data has flooded in and each numerical lightning strike has lit up the landscape a little more plainly. But the tsunami of results may have left the (shall we say) less obsessive a bit… overfaced. As we come up for air after this month of numbers, what do the local and European elections tell us about the state of the parties? Enough of council by-elections, opinion polls and party rumour: here’s some real ballot boxes to break open. Do try to restrain yourselves. 

The Conservative Party is on a precipice. First and foremost, what these results tell us is that the governing Conservatives’ prospects are hanging by a thread. They are under attack from two sides. First, in the local elections, they got absolutely shredded in England – particularly Southern England – wherever there were wealthier ex-Tory Remainers. And then, in the Euro-elections, they got battered by absolutely everybody, including frustrated Brexiteers who defected en masse to Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party. To be fair, the Conservatives’ share of the vote in early May (at perhaps something between 28 and 31 per cent) was not too bad by historical standards. Many governments have done much worse than that. Labour fell below that national share of the vote in all the local elections held its entire third term in office, gaining only between 22 per cent and 26 per cent in local elections between 2006 and 2009 (opens as PDF). And the Tories at least managed to match Labour’s similarly poor performance (more of which later). So they weren’t exactly wiped off the map.

But the results were particularly bad for them geographically, helping to explain why they lost quite so many councillors (over 1,300) when if you’d asked us on polling day, we’d have said they would maybe lose 800 or a few more. Let’s take you to deep England, to the Vale of White Horse in South Oxfordshire, where the Tories got sand kicked in their faces by the resurgent Liberal Democrats; to East Cambridgeshire, where they also went backwards; to Mid Suffolk, where they lost overall control; to Chelmsford (where the Liberal Democrats got pretty close in 2010, before tumbling backwards at the end of the Coalition years), which saw the Tories wiped out in the city itself; and so on. Wherever there were commuters, graduates, people moving out of London, relatively high income strivers, the Tories got whacked. In a First Past the Post system that loses you a lot of councillors, just as it loses you lots of MPs once one particular slice of people turn on you. It’s for just this reason that the Tories should start to worry just a little about even apparently safe seats like Ed Vaizey’s Wantage (in Vale of White Horse) and even wealthy Guildford in Surrey.

Dazed by their misfortune in the face of their gold enemy in the shape of the Remainery Liberal Democrats, the Tories then got slammed in the back by the massed turquoise forces of Leavedom, in the shape of the Brexit Party. They managed to come fifth in the elections to the European Parliament, and to garner only nine per cent of the vote. The conventional thing to say here is that this is ‘the Conservative Party’s worst result since 1832’, but actually it’s much worse than that: this is their worst result by far since the dawn of universal suffrage and the emergence of the modern party system. They got beaten everywhere, and they failed to win a single council area, but their grip on Remain Britain (which the locals showed was at best tenuous) was completely broken. Their vote share was particularly pathetic in areas that voted more than 60% Remain. Take a look at London, which they ran under Boris Johnson’s Mayoralty until 2016 (and where Zac Goldsmith managed to get 35 per cent of the first round of voting even then). Last Thursday, they managed… 7.9 per cent. The Tories are in crisis in Brexitland, but they are struggling for bare survival in Remainia.

Labour are in deep trouble too. What, then, of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition? The last time the Conservatives posted local election results like these, Tony Blair was carrying all before him and Labour were getting vote shares in the 40s. Well, not so much this time. Via some unpleasant alchemy the chemistry of which is in part opaque, voters’ distaste for the Government seems to be rubbing off on the alternative government too. The Tories may have performed catastrophically, but Labour has performed appallingly. There is a mood of ‘plague on both your houses’ running in the country, and an angry undertow of frustration about politics-as-usual. Labour has been trying to ride that tiger, with Trumpian rhetoric and quicksilver misdirection: this time, they ended up inside the animal they sought to tame.

Labour’s local election performance was in many ways the mirror image of the Conservatives’, and indeed they attracted the same pretty low share of the vote. In what you once might have called their ‘heartlands’, particularly the North East of England, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour offer went down not so much like a lead balloon but an entire Zeppelin made of concrete. They lost and they lost and they lost, which since early results were clustered there shaped the early narrative on a night where they did not quite so badly in more urban, liberal, Remainery parts of the country (they held off a strong attempted Liberal Democrat challenge in Cambridge, for instance). Hartlepool, Darlington, Stockton-on-Tees, Redcar and Cleveland: Labour lost control of all of them. Since they too are plunging in the opinion polls, and their leader is probably the least popular Opposition chief ever, that ought perhaps to be not so surprising: but it’s still a little bit of a shock when we’re used to one of the Big Two being up when the other is down. There are historical precedents, as when both Ted Heath as Conservative Prime Minister and Harold Wilson as Labour leader were deeply unpopular in 1972-74, and when Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot were also phenomenally disliked in 1981; but it still seems strange to see both red and blue teams in the toilet at the same time.

If Labour’s fortresses seemed to crumble at the beginning of May, their remaining citadels got positively dynamited in the European elections at the end of the month. Very crudely, their traditional and perhaps more conservative voters turned their backs on the party in the local elections: then their new, younger, city-dwelling and cosmopolitan backers kicked them when they were down. Labour has been tip-toeing along a very fine line in recent years, trying to attract new supporters as they shed them in seats they’ve held for decades. For every Stoke-on-Trent South there must be a Canterbury, for every Mansfield a Kensington, and so on. This time, they fell off that tightrope. They got buried in North London, losing Islington, Camden and Haringey to the Liberal Democrats. They got annihilated in Bristol, where they managed to come fourth in a city where they hold all four Parliamentary seats. They somehow managed to come third in the City of Oxford, where there was a 23 per cent swing to the Liberal Democrats. That’s right: 23 per cent. Yes, it was a fairly low turnout compared to a General Election, and yes, perhaps lots of those voters were committed Euro-partisans on one side or the other. But Labour, like the Tories, did worse than it has ever, ever done before – without even including their risible fifth in Scotland, where Scottish Labour increasingly looks like an irrelevance.

The Liberal Democrats are back in the big time. The big winners on both nights? Step forward, the orange team led by Vince Cable (above), who are now firmly installed back in the mainstream of British politics. It’s an extraordinary turnaround. Just a few months ago, perhaps only a few weeks back, we were still scratching our heads, saying ‘why aren’t the Liberal Democrats doing better?’ Turns out they just needed the right circumstances, the right campaign theme, and the right electoral battleground. They’ve never done as well in terms of gaining councillors as they did in the local elections (though their actual projected share of the vote was a relatively modest 17 to 18 per cent). And they’ve never done as well as they did in the European elections, where they managed to attract 20 per cent of the vote. It’s also important to note that their opinion poll ratings are also beginning to shoot up now, into at least the mid-teens. In part, but only in part, this is explicable as the Revenge of the Remainers: high-income, highly-educated voters who are unused to not getting their own way, and are pretty angry about it, choosing to use the Lib Dems as their vehicle of discontent.

But there does seem to be more to the centre party’s success than that. There are Remainers everywhere, of course (something lost in the deeply stupid discourse of ‘Leave seats’ and ‘Remain seats’). But the Liberal Democrats’ success in England’s North East and North West in early May, as well as their frankly stunning march forward into deep blue areas in Southern England, shows that they’re doing something right in general rather than just in detail. It's true that most voters don't turn up at these contests: but the Liberal Democrats were able to attract 'their' voters to the polls even as others struggled to do so, which must be worth something. Take a look for instance at Hertfordshire, an area of commuter-heavy Metroland where the party has been strong in the past. There the Lib Dems managed to pick up 36 councillors across six councils, catapulting themselves for instance into first place in St Albans – a Westminster seat they have hopes of winning, and indeed should win if they are to make the kind of advances that the last month suggest (it’s the party’s eleventh target overall, and their seventh potential gain now held by the Conservatives). Above all, it seemed to us that the party looked professional, deploying good-looking branding, insurgent phrases, eye-catching podiums, excited-looking candidates. Perhaps that’s a little thing, and the actual shape of the playing field was the main element here. But it can’t have hurt.

In the European elections, the Liberal Democrats managed to push Labour back into third, and by quite some way (outstripping them by more than seven percentage points). They won London. They picked up 15 Members of the European Parliament to add to their solitary one last time. Their storming performance justified the confidence of pollsters who pushed them right up, mainly on the basis of their sampling techniques rather than turnout assumptions – which may be an optimistic sign for the yellow team as we move forward towards the General Election. They seem to have been comprehensively de-toxified, not via a slow, drip-by-drip purging, but in a single dose of principle. Other parties should take note: if you say what you mean and mean what you say, people listen. It’s not just in St Albans where the Lib Dems have target Parliamentary seats in which they did well. They succeeded in both the council and European elections in North Devon, overlapping with their seventh target seat. And Remainer-heavy Richmond Park and Cheltenham should be fairly easy gains for them in the next General Election, since they got more than half the vote in the former (opens as PDF) and easily topped the poll in the latter - pushing the Conservatives back into fourth. Basically, the Lib Dems are back. In terms of Westminster seats, they face an intimidating blue wall of huge Conservative majorities, but they must surely be hoping for at least a modest haul of new MPs next time.

The fixed points of reference have all gone. There’s so much more to say. Change UK did not manage to get off the ground, and they face an uncertain future in which they will probably seek to strike an electoral deal with the Liberal Democrats – which is probably what they should have done all along. The Scottish National Party and the Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru had fantastic nights, Plaid in particular exultant because they beat Labour in Wales for the first time ever. What about the Greens, who rode a wave of environmental concern across Europe to post really strong results in both the locals and the European elections? What about the huge numbers of Independents and Ratepayers elected in the local elections? What’s happening in Northern Ireland, where two out of three MEPs are now from parties in favour of both Remain and of the backstop that Tories hate so much? Analysis of these trends will have to wait until next month.

That brings us to our last point: the Big Two might be in crisis, but the new and not-so-improved Big Four when we include Brexit and the Lib Dems are also surrounded by insurgent forces – Nationalist, Green, Localist. The system is in unprecedented flux, and in a First Past the Post system (containing a large number of super-marginals) that means that a huge range of General Election outcomes are in play. Just a medium-sized leakage of left-wing voters out of Labour could cripple the party. Alternatively, just a 10-15 per cent vote share for the Brexit Party could put Mr Corbyn in Downing Street with something approaching a majority.

The public no longer want to be labelled Red or Blue – who can blame them? – but given Britain’s lop-sided electoral system it’s still very likely they’ll have to accept a Red or Blue government. Combined with the laughable and undeliverable pledges both teams now seem to issue on a daily basis, voters' sense of frustration and alienation as people are expected to live on as Little Labourites and Toryites is only going to grow – eventually, perhaps, blowing the lid off the system entirely. It’s not just the steps in front of us that are shrouded in fog, but the road ahead and the horizon too.

Newport West in historical perspective

It probably won’t have escaped your notice, amidst all of the UK’s political chaos right now, that there’s just been a Westminster by-election for a seat in South Wales. Or, at least, you won’t have missed that if you’re the sort of person who reads this blog – in which case, read on, because this month we’ve got an absolutely bumper load of data for you on exactly how to judge last week’s electoral contest in Newport West. It was a fairly easy Labour hold for Labour's Ruth Jones (above), with a majority of nearly 2,000, and although Labour’s vote fell quite a long way, so did that of the Conservatives in second place. So: a dull night, then? Not so fast. Actually – and you’d expect to say this, but bear with it – if we look at Newport West in historical context, it tells us quite a lot.

How to see it? Well, we’ve crunched all the numbers on equivalent contests in the modern era – since 1979. We’ve taken a look at every byelection while the Conservatives were in office (between 1979 and 1997, and then again since 2010), in which the Tories and Labour started the race in first and second place. Just an arbitrary sample in a way, perhaps, but necessary to look at Labour’s performance while out of power, and to screen out all those byelections where either of the two big national parties were so far behind that relative moves in their vote share didn’t mean very much. It turns out that there have been 69 of these, so not just a tiny number, and two variables in particular seem of interest. First, how far did Labour’s vote share rise or fall in relation to the seat’s result in the previous General Election? And what was the two-party ‘swing’ between Labour and the Conservatives – that is, how much did Labour’s vote share fall or rise in comparison to the increase or decrease of the Tories’ score? All this just to gain a proper sense of how well or badly the two parties did in Newport last Thursday. Which we hope is a useful public service.

Now, as election guru Matt Singh from Number Cruncher Politics has pointed out, you would expect the main Opposition party to do well on these occasions, and for the governing party to do badly. Sending Ministers a message – usually a rude one – never goes out of fashion. So when we’re looking at these 69 byelections, it’s no surprise that almost all of them (57, to be precise) saw Labour gain on the Conservatives. And just under half (33, since you ask) saw Labour’s vote share at least stand still or increase – no mean feat when voters often think they can have a free swing in these contests, and vote for smaller parties to make a point rather than to form a government or ‘keep the other lot out’. So, in a straight fight with the Conservatives, Labour has usually done well in Parliamentary byelections.

They have even been doing well when we look at their performance since the Conservatives returned to office in 2010. You can see that from the chart you can see just below, and also from House of Commons reports on both the 2010-15 and 2015-17 Parliaments. Despite Labour’s many internal arguments and their unpopular leaders, only three of the Labour-versus-Tories byelections held since David Cameron entered Downing Street have seen Labour fall back against the Conservatives. In one of these, they experienced one true disaster – the loss of Copeland in Cumbria, which at the time appeared to herald near-apocalypse for the party at the ballot box. The other two examples weren't nearly so bad. In the ultra-safe Conservative seat of Sleaford and North Hykeham in 2016, they started off miles behind and only just slipped behind UKIP and the Liberal Democrats; in Lewisham East in 2018, there was a Lib Dem surge from third in Remainery London that still gave Labour a huge majority of over 5,600. In every single one of the other contests, they won – and often handsomely, as at Corby in 2012. They took a classic marginal then on a good and chunky twelve per cent swing, and looked if not set fair for power then at least very competitive and credible.

What springs out immediately from the data is that no such positives were visible in Newport West. Take a look at the top twenty falls in the Labour vote visible in the table that follows. In all of our sample of 69 seats, Newport West saw the ninth biggest fall in the Labour vote. That’s, well, sub-optimal, and it’s an even worse finding when you look at some of the absolute drubbings in the list above the Newport contest. Bermondsey in 1983, when Labour’s candidate Peter Tatchell was subjected to a horrendous and very personal campaign of vilification in part based around his sexuality, and in the last stages of which Conservative voters defected en masse to the Liberal candidate, Simon Hughes, to defeat Mr Tatchell. The disaster of Mitcham and Morden in 1982, a byelection held at the height of the Falklands War which saw the Conservatives manage the very rare feat of taking a seat from the Opposition as a sitting government. Crosby in 1981, in the first flush of the Social Democratic Party’s first success and with one of its most popular leaders, Shirley Williams, seizing the seat from nowhere. Warrington that same year, where Roy Jenkins came within two thousand votes of unseating Labour. And so on. Byelection catastrophes to make any Labour person wake in the middle of the night – which are the only scores that are worse than the party’s vote share tumble last week.

The story is similar if we look at the two-party swing, as you can see from the next table: here we also have the ninth worst head-to-head performance. Some of the same candidates for ‘worst Labour byelection of the modern era’ beat Newport West to the tape, including the aforementioned Copeland in early 2017, held at a time when Labour looked about as popular as a stink bomb in a lift. And famous contests such as Glasgow Hillhead in 1982, when Jenkins as the SDP’s first leader finally made it back to a Parliament as he surged past both Labour and the Conservatives. Oh, and Beaconsfield, where a young Tony Blair was routed by both the Conservatives and pushed back into third by the Liberals – again, as at Mitcham and Morden, during the Falklands War. Quite a list of debacles, and Newport West only just lags behind them.

What about contests in Wales, if we take them as a separate and discrete list? Well among Welsh contests, as you can see from yet another table ranking their performance by share of the vote (below), this is the worst Labour have done in the modern era in terms of both the change in the Labour vote and two-party swing. There have been quite a lot of falls in the party’s vote share here, actually reflecting in part Labour’s dominant status in some of these seats (hello Neath, Islwyn and Pontypridd). When you basically have to weigh the Labour votes rather than count them, it’s easy to fall a bit from a high perch. But reflect also on some of the contests where Labour has done badly in the past: on the Gower in 1982, there was an SDP surge, while the Welsh Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, did exceptionally well at Neath and Pontypridd in 1991 and 1989 respectively. Never has Labour done anything nearly this badly when the Tory vote held up, and indeed closed in on them a little.

So there we have it: the historical context of Newport West. We can argue about what it all means until we’re blue (or red) in the face, but you can’t argue with the numbers. This was a very poor performance by Labour. If we look only at Labour-versus-Conservative byelections, out of 69 straight fights it was the party’s ninth most dismal performance of the modern era in terms of both vote share and Labour-to-Conservative swing. Not much to write home about if you’re on the Left, really – and quite encouraging if you support the Conservatives, who despite being in almost complete chaos at Westminster are doing sort-of-okay in local council byelections as well.  

What seems to have happened this time is that there’s been a fracturing of the Labour and Conservative votes towards almost every other point on the electoral spectrum, with more liberally-minded and pro-European Remainers moving away from Labour towards Plaid, the Liberal Democrats and even the new Renew Party. Remember: even when seats are supposed to be for ‘Leave’, like Newport West, most of the Labour voters there were Remain in 2016. Given the movements of public opinion in general, there are also likely to be even more Remain now. Rather unsurprisingly, they don’t seem well-disposed towards Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s endless equivocations on the subject (or, to be honest, in general).

And Newport’s ex-Conservatives? They seem a bit friendlier towards the United Kingdom Independence Party than they were in 2016-18, a period during which the Conservatives’ leader, Theresa May, could however implausibly pose as the leader and sponsor of Leave as a whole. Now she’s had to bend to reality and compromise with the other 27 countries in the EU, her more Eurosceptical supporters are peeling away. The two main parties also seem to be tarred with the brush of the darkly comic imbroglio of Meaningful and Indicative Votes unfolding at Westminster. Frankly, they look ridiculous, and lots of voters are pretty angry about it.

This isn’t new. As this month’s blog has indicated again and again, byelections have often seen the big two’s dominance challenged. The Liberals and SDP threatened to tear up the whole rulebook in the early 1980s, and battered both the Conservatives and Labour at Glasgow Hillhead and Bermondsey. MPs defecting from the Conservatives to UKIP easily beat both the Tories and Labour in the late autumn of 2014, winning both Clacton and Rochester and Strood at a canter. So we’ve been here before, and we can use this backdrop as a comparator and guide to scale at least.

It’s not so clear that Newport West can serve as a signpost for the next General Election. As we noted after the Barnsley by-election all the way back in 2011, the way people vote in safe seats and in localised conflicts doesn’t necessarily map onto who they want to be Prime Minister. Oldham West in late 2015 indicated to many sceptical observers that Labour’s vote under Mr Corbyn was likely to hold up rather better than many experts thought – but Uxbridge in 1997, and Ipswich in 2001, proved to be false dawns for the Conservatives in Opposition. 

So what we’re not saying here is that Labour is going to do particularly well or badly at the next General Election. The indicators are mixed. The two main parties are pretty much neck-and-neck in the latest polls. Given the potential for party splits over Brexit, almost anything could happen on the national stage over the next few months. But what we are saying is that Newport West was a bad, bad night for Labour when you look at the historical context. Not really catastrophic like Bermondsey, Mitcham and Morden or Copeland, but pretty bad. A nasty flu, rather than pneumonia. But as we all know, if you don’t pay attention when there’s something wrong, it can get worse pretty quickly. Behind the celebrations in Newport West, Labour people must know that it was a very weak performance in which victory hid more than it revealed.

Why are England's universities in trouble?

Under the radar, and away from the benighted question of Brexit, Britain’s public sphere is in a terrible state. Hospital waiting lists that miss targets for years on end. Schools that can’t open five days a week. Councils selling off whatever property they can – and closing libraries, public toilets and youth centres faster than ever before. Hence, of course, the appeal of a more Left-wing politics these days – a perfectly appropriate response to a crisis in our shared space and common ownership.

The situation in England’s universities is no different. Away from the headlines – dominated of course by Britain’s disastrous and chaotic retreat from the European Union – England’s Higher Education Institutions are now struggling for cash. Many of them are now laying off staff, usually in a voluntary manner, but at some institutions in a widespread and sometimes desperate cull designed to save institutions from bankruptcy. At least one institution has had to be bailed out already. Rumours abound about the numbers who will get seriously into trouble if the situation gets any worse. It won’t just be a little handful, that’s for sure.

All of this has got drowned out for lots of reasons, not least the easy answers that are often rolled out when you raise this issue. ‘Well’, people say, ‘Vice-Chancellors shouldn’t pay themselves so much’. ‘Okay’, bystanders shout, ‘don’t build so many new shiny buildings then’. But although there are examples of bad behaviour and bad practice in both those spheres, that isn’t the real reason England’s universities are now struggling. This month, ‘Public Policy and the Past’ is going to take a look at the true causes of the cash crisis – a quiet but poisonous policy disaster in the making. And as ever, the answers are more surprising and revealing than the knee-jerk responses so popular on social media.

Demographics. For all the expansion of postgraduate taught and research student numbers, universities’ core business is still undergraduate teaching. But there’s a problem here. This academic year and next, the number of eighteen-year olds will reach historic lows that are far below long-term trends. There simply are not enough young people to go around – and since this government and the last have done their best to destroy the part-time and second-degree provision that used to play such a positive role across the board, that is acting as a structural drag on HEIs’ income. This situation won’t last. If the share of each cohort going to university stays the same, the rising birth rate from 2001 onwards will mean that the numbers of eighteen-year olds will rise steadily (and by over twenty per cent) in the decade after 2019/20. But universities have somehow got to bridge the gap between here and there. At the moment, shedding staff and ambitions, they’re at risk of destroying teaching provision and knowledge that will be desperately needed in the 2030s – one of the problems of the largely unplanned system we have built ourselves.

The free-for-all. One problem English universities now have is that they can’t plan ahead with any degree of certainty. Back when George Osborne was Chancellor, which yes, does feel like about a thousand years ago, he decided to take the cap-in-detail off student numbers entirely. The idea being that a ‘market’ could emerge, in which students could choose exactly where they wanted to go. Universities can now sign up as many students as they can manage. The predictable outcome: some universities went on an expansion drive to end all expansion drives, delving ‘down’ the traditional hierarchy for students if needs be. So a kind of malign Mexican Wave developed. The Russell Group kicked the middle-ranking institutions. They kicked down. Newer universities kicked new universities. New universities kicked themselves. But as the absolute numbers of young people declined, a huge amount of instability was injected into the system. Some ‘research’ universities which could rely on prestige from the past basically became teaching factories. Some ‘teaching’ universities began to specialise in profitable research, consultancy and spin-offs. No-one knew exactly how many students to expect every September. And some institutions got really nasty shocks when far fewer students actually turned up. University life took on more and more of the characteristics of merry-go-round or tombola, rather than the hallmarks of education.

The rising tide. University income got a welcome jump-start back in 2011. Tuition fees set by the incoming Coalition administration were supposed to usually stop at £6,000 per annum, only rising to £9,000 in certain circumstances. Well, of course universities set themselves immediately to jump all the barriers to charging that higher figure, and almost all of them did immediately apply the top price tag. So far, so good. But there was a problem. The quid pro quo of a one-off funding boost – replacing more than the Government was withdrawing in teaching grants – was first a total freeze on incrases, and then an inflation-based formula that in an age of subdued prices held back universities from raising their prices more than one or two per cent every year. But in a sector like education, where most costs are staff costs (or which are in a few fields related to scientific and technological change), inflation at the sharp end is actually much higher than the background number. So universities’ costs slowly approached the £9,000 per student fee over the last decade, then overall matched it, and have now overtopped it. Put simply, there simply is not enough money in the system.

The ageing professoriat. One of the reasons those costs move up higher than any increase in fees is the structure of the academic profession. Once you’re on a scale as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor and the like, you get to move up one increment on the pay scale every year until you reach the top salary point for that role. And of course you then usually apply for promotion, and if you’ve been teaching, researching and publishing as you should, likely you’ll eventually get that promotion. What that means, and what that means especially in a world where there are fewer and fewer permanent entry level posts, is that the professoriat is expensive. Add to that the effects of vastly increased management surveillance and government pressure on performance indicators – meaning that staff increasingly meet the criteria for progression – and it’s an increasingly costly picture. You will probably have heard about last year’s university strike, caused by a complex mix of the pension scheme attempting to de-risk its investments and deeply questionable assumptions about yield and risk – but for now the upshot is that pensions, too, have become pricey. Add it all together, and universities basically now cost more to run than students are being asked to pay. The Government could easily make up that gap – for now – but the political drive is, shall we say, conspicuous by its absence.

The building boom. It won’t have escaped your notice that campuses look great these days – if you like a lot of glass and steel. Now this has mostly been a boon to Britain’s very competitive and very successful Higher Education sector. Vice Chancellors were usually right to rebuild. Campuses from the 1960s and 1970s were often, well, knackered: teaching needs and modes have changed; environmental standards have moved on, making energy-hungry teaching blocks seem like a throwback to the days of coal and lead; very low interest rates have meant that governing bodies can lock in cheap borrowing for capital. So far, so good. But the rush to build has also been rooted in the same helter-skelter hyper-competitive race for student numbers that is making finances so hard to plan. Prospective students and their parents are not the gullible consumers that many critics imagine: they are of course impressed, not so much by the buildings themselves, but by the care and investment in the future that they represent. Still, there’s little doubt that the sector has overshot. Very low interest rates won’t last forever; some institutions have borrowed too much, and not always on the most advantageous terms; some prestigious universities have imagined that their huge and rapid expansion can be maintained forever, in terms of the level if not of the increase. Basing their capital plans (and therefore their debt maintenance) on that model may turn out to be a huge error.

Bad policymaking. It will not have escaped your notice, on the top of all this, that the UK’s policymaking community has been making rather a hash of things of late. From Universal Credit to Chris Grayling’s train timetables, the capacity to react to Brexit and the need to update services, is just very low. It can’t be done at the same time as satisficing with a much smaller and less experienced state apparatus. Consider the situation from Vice Chancellors’ perspective. Will they be able to bid to the European Research Fund? Will they still have access to the Erasmus student programme that allows EU students to study across the continent? Will they still be able to attract the best and the brightest EU staff? Will the Government allow them to uncouple student visa numbers from their absurd overall immigration targets? The answer being: right now, who knows? So they will draw in their horns until the storm has passed – except, the way things are going, the storm may never pass. The Conservatives in government look ready to slash tuition fees and make universities absorb some of the cost – while preventing potential students from lower grades accessing the student loan system at all. Labour, for their part, want to abolish fees altogether. And if you think the Treasury will pay up for that, we’ve got a really nice bridge here we can sell you. On top of Britain’s longstanding research and development deficit, its ailing infrastructure, the anti-intellectualism that passes for much of our collective life, the path ahead looks more than steep and winding. It looks impassable.

Here, then, are the six real reasons why England’s universities are struggling. It’s not Vice-Chancellor’s pay and too many new buildings. It’s a matter of student numbers, impossible planning, rising costs and poor policymaking. All the signs are that things will continue to deteriorate – perhaps quite rapidly – before they get better. If they get better. The fantasymongers that pass for the two main parties are about to make it worse, just like they poison everything else they touch. The current rash of redundancies will assuredly snowball, and a small number of perhaps very high-profile universities which have expanded furthest and fastest will threaten to go completely belly-up. What will governments do then? In the case of redundancies, nothing, because those job losses will make the sector cheaper. In terms of actual threatened bankruptcies, though, things are trickier. Should central government bail the stragglers out, or let the unlucky victims fail before reconstructing them later? That will be the test for Whitehall and Westminster, who will yet again have set themselves a challenge that should never have arisen in the first place.

UK polling: what's going on beneath the surface?

So one thing Polling Club would tell you, if there were such a thing, would be to look beyond the headline Voting Intention numbers that the hard-of-thinking throw around all the time. They’d also tell you not to talk about Polling Club, so it might exist after all, but that’s another story. Anyway. Since we took a perhaps ill-advised look at those very topline figures last time, this month we thought ‘Public Policy and the Past’ would take a look below the surface – at the numbers that might really determined who commands the House of Commons after the next election. Hopefully, it’s imminent, and thousands of numbers will soon pour across screens that for now remain sad and empty. So this is not a – shall we say – completely academic question.

The don’t knows – where are they now?

As you’ll also know if you were with us in January, one key to any election is the Don’t Knows, the Won’t Says and the Refused. Say one in five survey respondents tells you that they’re not sure who they’re going to vote for – even though they’ve clicked on the invite. Now imagine that they are not a balanced or normal sample of voters – that they all actually favour one ‘side’ or the other. That means that your nice clean 50/50 split from the poll might actually blow up into a lead of twenty points on polling day. We’ve actually got a good recent example of this, because in the lead up to the 2017 General Election a huge slice of ex-Labour voters had gone over to Don’t Know. And hey presto, by polling day most of them were back, boosting Labour’s score higher than even its surge in the polls guessed at.

Where are we at with this lot now? Well, the most recent evidence shows that they are now more likely to be voters who chose the Conservatives in the recent past, not Labourites disillusioned with the Party’s recent, well, troubles. Take the most recent Ipsos-Mori Political Monitor. Only five per cent of 2017 Labour voters are now completely unsure how they would vote. Only three per cent of ex-Conservatives say the same – though the numbers of ‘won’t vote’ pretty much even up the score of those who’ve shed supporters to ‘unsure’ or ‘won’t turn up’. In the last Survation poll, which returned a slight Labour lead, Conservative ‘not sures’ were 10.5 per cent to nine per cent. ComRes’ last poll showed that Don’t Know and Won’t Vote were tied at five per cent of their past supporters. And so on. One of the causes of what polling fail there was in 2017 came from citizens who weren’t sure which way they’d jump – who turned up to be Labour voters in disguise. That doesn’t seem to be holding this time.

Leaders… and the lack of them

Leadership ratings are usually a good indication of voting intention. When Neil Kinnock and John Major fought it out in 1992, one indication of how well the Conservatives were actually going to do was the Prime Minister’s leader on ‘best Prime Minister’. When David Cameron was more popular than Ed Miliband, the suspicion stuck that there was something ‘wrong’ with the headline voting figures. And so on. So we need to look at these numbers too, to test visceral reactions to the parties’ main personalities as figureheads and lightning rods. And what we find here is very interesting – that Theresa May is unpopular in a normal way, at about the level one would expect for a Prime Minister who’s now nearly three years in power, while Jeremy Corbyn is very, very, very unpopular – indeed spectacularly so, and probably more unpopular than he has ever been.

Let’s take a look at this historically. After a long period of slowly deflating, recent rows over Brexit and antisemitism appear to have done further damage to Mr Corbyn’s already-tarnished brand. Ipsos-Mori’s Political Monitor for January has just given him the highest Unfavourable rating that any Leader of the Opposition since 1977 has ever recorded – bar none – and the second-worse net result (of -55) after Michael Foot in August 1982. Now in a world of increasingly fluid political loyalties, it might not be particularly surprising that these scores are less ‘sticky’ as it were, but that’s still an absolutely dreadful result. Theresa May, on the other hand, has a net score of-25 (with 33 per cent satisfied). This is obviously pretty bad too: for comparison, Donald Trump given some rather different questions has an overall rating of -15 (itself the second-worst in history). But Mrs May’s rating is about the same as Gordon Brown’s and David Cameron’s at this point in their Premierships, and better than John Major’s numbers at that point. So it’s not particularly remarkable. Mr Corbyn’s favourables do now on the other hand appear to be at an all-time low, since they have also reached the same trough with YouGov. Those statistics might recover – they did, after all, surge very rapidly during the 2017 General Election campaign – but for now what we can say here is the Prime Minister is unpopular, and the Leader of the Opposition is very, very, very unpopular.

The extraordinary longevity of the Scottish National Party

One of the main battlefields next time will be Scotland. Which is one of the reasons why the next General is so unpredictable. Labour must make progress here to govern with an overall majority. The Conservatives must try to hang on to their impressive 2017 gains if they are to get anywhere near an absolute advantage in the House of Commons. At the moment? They’re both falling back - Labour slightly more than the Conservatives - in the face of a small but noticeable bump in support for the Scottish National Party. Partly we suspect because they have that vital political quality of clarity when they talk about Brexit, and partly because the Conservatives’ main star Ruth Davidson has been absent on maternity leave, the SNP have been clocking up some pretty impressive poll leaders – which is extraordinary when you think they have been in power in Edinburgh for over a decade. An average of the last two Scottish polls puts them on 38.5 per cent, up from the 36.9 per cent they gained last time. Labour has fallen back rather, from 27.1 per cent to 23.5 per cent.

This matters a lot. Seven out of Labour’s top twenty targets are held by the SNP, and all of them have majorities under 1,000 voters which will fall on a swing of less than one per cent. Right now, polling says the SNP will hold them all. Yes, Labour can govern without making a single gain in Scotland. But the more they win there, the less they will have to rely on and listen to SNP leader Nichola Sturgeon, and the less in government will they risk English voters’ ire by appearing to rest on Scottish voters and Scottish MPs. Looking at the other side of the equation, the Conservatives have eight seats vulnerable to the SNP on a swing of less than five per cent. These are much less vulnerable on the whole than Labour’s vulnerable Scottish outposts, but the small size of Scottish seats (and a fall in turnout between 2015 and 2017) means that we’re not talking very many actual votes here – perhaps three or four thousand at most. Lose just a few of those, or worse face SNP voters who stayed home in 2017 coming back to the polls, and the Tories could lose a scattering of absolutely vital seats. At the moment, the SNP has advanced enough to put all but one of Labour’s seats in danger, but not far enough to expose more than the Tories’ Stirling seat. None of this changes the size of likely Commons coalitions. But if the SNP push forward any more, the balance might start to change again as Conservative seats come within their range.

The unbearable lightness of council by-elections

Last but very much not least, we really should take a look at local council by-elections – contests that go on round the country week in, week out – and for the most part with very little fanfare. Sure, these are low-turnout affairs, they often throw up eccentric results, and in various parts of the country they are contested by local or regional parties that have very little chance of winning a Parliamentary seat. Last Thursday night, a Tower Hamlets-only party won a ward off Labour, while an excellent and surprising Labour win in deepest Buckinghamshire was rather marred by the fact that their candidate had been suspended from the Party before the polls had even opened. So you can’t put a vast store by these results. You can, however, use them as a broad-brush overall guide to exactly where the parties are. If one of them was absolutely tanking or surging, you would expect to see it show up here.

Except that’s not what we see at all. In fact, the overall stasis that we observe from the national Voting Intention headlines is borne out here too. There has been a small swing from the Conservatives to Labour since the 2017 General Election, though one that seems to have become a little less powerful over time (for now disregarding the small number of results we’ve had in 2019). The swing is a modest 2.3 per cent since the last General Election, and since the 2018 local elections it has been running at just under the two per cent mark. It’s not exactly a King’s ransom for the Opposition, especially when we note exactly when these wards were last fought. They were last up for election in the 2015-18 cycle, four local elections in which Labour certainly did not do very well. They lost the National Equivalent Share of the Vote in three out of the four, and only in one of them (2016) did they squeak ahead, that time by a single point – 33 per cent to 32 per cent. So this two per cent swing means that Labour might overall be on average there or there about with the Tory score – exactly what we would expect from the opinion polls. It’s not much of an insight, but as with ever confirming what you think you already know isn’t nothing.

Inner mechanics and outward appearance

So there we have it. Below the big-ticket numbers, there are a number of very interesting things that we can say about any upcoming General Election. What we know about the Don’t Knows tells us that they are not so maldistributed as they were in 2016 and 2017. Labour is unlikely to be able to draw on such a ready-made pool of sympathetic voters again. Another surge might happen, but it will need a different source this time. Leadership ratings are a bit trickier, because Mrs May has made clear that she will not fight any election held in the medium- to long-term. If there’s an election soon, though, her numbers will matter. And they’re really bad – though not so bad as Mr Corbyn’s, who is about as popular as video rental. Again, that might change, just like it did in 2017, though to come back from these lows twice might be a harder ask again. For now, amazingly, the Prime Minister has the edge.

In Scotland, Labour face a greater challenge than do the Conservatives, not that it will matter in terms of who will sit in Downing Street – the SNP could not possibly do any sort of deal with the Conservatives. Even so, what really matters there will be whether the Conservatives lose more than one or two seats. If they don’t, so much the better are their prospects of retaining power. Local by-elections tell us that we are probably are reading this all aright – that the two major parties in England and Wales do seem to be locked together in a macabre political struggle to bestride the realm of the unpopular. This time, the inner mechanics of what we know seem to confirm the words up in lights. It might not always be so: we’ll keep tracking the detailed churning of the data, and get right back to you if things change.

Update, 12 February: YouGov tells us more

No sooner had the blog above been posted, but pollsters over at YouGov published an update of results from their famous Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification model (or MRP for short). Now although this got things pretty much spot on at the last election, we shouldn’t deify MRP as anything more than an interesting new piece in the puzzle. But it is pretty much the closest thing we have to the state of the art right now, and it’s where most polling is going. Take an absolutely massive sample, and map it onto all sorts of turnout and demographic data, and you can much more accurately project a seat-by-seat analysis. And lo and behold, what YouGov have found is pretty much in the ballpark as all the straws in the wind above told us. The Conservatives do indeed have their noses in front, as their continuing hold over their 2017 voters, their leadership ratings and council byelection results have been indicating they might. Labour are as we suggested going backwards in Scotland, with five of their seven seats there in deep danger, and none of the Conservatives’ Scottish seats looking likely to fall to the SNP. So – it all fits. We’ve got a good (if blurry) picture. Whether that scene withstands the Brexit hurricane or an actual election campaign is another matter.

What are the polls telling us about a snap election?

There is quite a lot of talk at the moment about the possibility of a snap election in the UK – of Prime Minister Theresa May trying to break the Parliamentary stalemate over Brexit by changing the composition of a Parliament that seems too confused about what it wants to make any decision at all. So this month, we thought we’d take a look at the polling and ask: what does it tell us about the standing of the parties right now?

First things first: overall Voting Intention numbers. If we take an average of each pollster in the field’s January report, we get vote totals that look rather like: Conservatives 38%, Labour 37.8%, Liberal Democrats 9.4%. So the Tories would be down 5.5% on their 2017 performance; Labour will have shed 3.2%; and the Liberal Democrats have advanced 1.8% since the last national contest: but the swing from Conservative to Labour over this Parliament would be only 1.15%: and that means the Government has actually made a very small amount of progress over the last twelve months. A year ago, those numbers actually reported a slender Labour advantage, rather than the tiny Conservative lead that we see now: Labour were on 41.5% as against the Conservatives 40.3% and the Liberal Democrats’ 7.3%.

So the ratings of both major parties have taken a hit over the last year, both drifting downwards a tad as the Liberal Democrats’ polling looks a couple of points healthier. But really, for a number of reasons, there’s even less to that change than meets the eye. You win seats under the First Past the Post, and how many votes you get regionally or nationally don’t come into it. Here, the picture has moved perhaps even more glacially than the overall numbers. So many seats are on a knife-edge that a really decisive break in one direction or the other would pile up the numbers in the Commons for whoever leads the charge; but at the moment, that just isn’t happening.

If we take those overall averages and also factor in sub-national polling from Scotland, Wales and London, in January 2018 we would have expected a House of Commons that looks rather like this: Conservatives, 293; Labour, 283; Scottish National Party, 37; Liberal Democrats, 14; Plaid Cymru, 4; Greens, 1. Right now, we’re looking at something more like Conservatives, 301; Labour, 268; Scottish National Party, 42; Liberal Democrats, 17; Plaid Cymru, 3; Greens, 1. So in a whole year of sound and fury, the Conservatives have moved forward by less than ten seats, while Labour have moved backwards a bit more, partly because of what looks like a deteriorating situation in Scotland: they’ve gone backwards in our virtual election by fifteen MPs, and forward on their unexpectedly good 2017 showing by just six seats.

That means even less when we look at what those numbers would mean in terms of forming a new government. In both situations, those seat totals add up to a Hung Parliament in which Labour would likely try to form a minority government relying on the support of the SNP and the Liberal Democrats. The only difference is the security and stability delivered by a deal between those two parties. Labour plus SNP in January 2018 looked like 325 seats; just about enough on their own to govern for quite a while, with vote-by-vote support from the minor parties. Now that picture looks slightly less rosy for those two parties: they only add up to 310, not enough without the Liberal Democrats (and probably Plaid and some liberal Tories) to do anything much at all.

This is a strange kind of stasis. We appear to be living in a period when the parties might fracture, or even break up. Their discipline in the House of Commons seems almost shot. Frontbenchers on the Opposition side are even allowed to rebel against a three-line whip and keep their jobs. There has been a chemical weapons attack on British soil, killing a British citizen. Brexit is casting a pall over everything. Public services look increasingly threadbare, and in some cases (for instance if we look at homelessness and rough sleeping) appear to be failing altogether.

But the public are just not moving. The vote totals are stuck. It is our contention that voters are so fed up – a fact that you can see in almost all the qualitative and quantitative evidence – that they’ve got into a 'plague on all your houses' mindset, promising to vote for one team or the other just because they hate the alternative. With both parties retiring into their own increasingly bizarre and fantastical comfort zones, these wide but thin coalitions might last for quite a long time.

Ah, Labour partisans say – but look at what happened in the last election, where we surged from the mid-20s to more than 40% in just a couple of months. Once reporting restrictions are introduced to give due balance to the Opposition, and once Labour gets out in sunny rallies and canvassing with its huge membership, then these numbers will be transformed. There’s probably something in that case, too: strategically, the Conservatives have very little to the public except ‘delivering Brexit’, which is likely to consolidate their base without reaching out to any new voters. And Labour’s domestic policies – nationalisation, higher taxes on the rich, more public spending – are undoubtedly pretty popular.

It is however possible to doubt that any Labour gains during the campaign will be on anything like the scale that they managed last time. For one thing, there is just much less of the vote to bite into. The Liberal Democrats were polling higher than they are now at the start of the 2017 race, and the United Kingdom Independence Party have gone from polling in the teens then to mid-single figures now. For another, the number of don’t knows that were once Labour is far smaller than when Mrs May made her ill-fated break for it in 2017. As the Bristol University academic Paula Surridge explains here on her blog (using YouGov figures) there were many more ex-Labour undecideds from 2015 at the start of the 2017 campaign than there were uncertain Conservatives. That allowed Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn to squeeze voters who preferred Labour, but who weren’t sure about him and his agenda, by urging to come home and ‘stop the Tories’. But that gap has now been reversed or closed altogether. There aren’t the don’t knows to make the same sort of progress.

Other pollsters confirm this picture. Take the first ComRes poll of the 2017 campaign: 11% of 2015 Labour voters said ‘don’t know’at that point, as against six per cent of Conservatives. The last ComRes poll we have in 2018 records 15% of Conservatives as uncertain, as against 13% of previous Labour supporters. Labour might indeed do quite well in a campaign. But they seem unlikely to jump upwards quite so vertiginously as they did in 2017.

What does this all mean in practice? Well, the exact polling numbers should be taken with a pinch of salt. For one thing, UK polling has a mediocre rather than a bullseye record of predicting General Election results even just before the poll, let alone months or even years before it happens. As US polling guru Nate Silver noted in 2017, the average error on UK polls fifty days out from a vote is exactly six points on the margin between either the two sides in a referendum or the first place and runner-up slots in a ‘normal’ election. That means that our tiny Conservative lead of 0.2% could actually end up meaning anything between a 6.2% lead and a 5.8% deficit on any polling day in March. Even poll numbers from the week before have a five-point error margin. The biggest miss from the week before is 9.5% (at the 1992 General Election). That means that it should not completely and utterly shock us if the Conservatives ended up either winning a snap election by 9.7% or losing by 9.5% - not much of a guide to anything, you might think.

Secondly, the whole country is entering the white-water phase of any political crisis, where the thrills and spills make you feel sick rather than excited: it’s perfectly possible that one or both main parties will splinter, with breakaway groups forming and recrimination spreading. There’s even potential for a really unplanned or disorderly Brexit, which will likely bring about more disruption and therefore political upheaval than any emergency since the miners’ strikes, the three-day week and the winter of discontent in the 1970s. It is likely that if we do crash out of the European Union, the Government will get much of the blame; but even that is unpredictable, were the Conservatives to be led into a snap election by a Eurosceptical leader who blamed everything on Eurocrats and foreigners.

Third and last, it’s important to note that everything we’ve written above is based on averages – the safest, but by no means foolproof, way of going about measuring any group of indicators churning so dynamically. And the polling differs. One pollster, YouGov, is showing a consistent Conservative lead – of five points at the last count. The others aren’t, and the last reports from pollsters Opinium and Kantar actually gave Labour three-point leads. Relying on YouGov alone would give us a House of Commons would look like: 331 Conservatives, 241 Labour, 37 SNP, 19 Liberal Democrat, 3 Plaid Cymru, 1 Green. The Tories would gain a small absolute majority that looked very much like David Cameron’s in 2015, though with a rather different geographical spread of where their seats actually were. But if we take YouGov out of the picture entirely, each party’s total of MPs would likely look much more like the average, with perhaps a handful of seats going over to Labour from Conservative.

Even so, the polling does tell us something, and that’s why it’s better than nothing – just as it told us a lot during the 2017 General Election campaign, during which both main campaigns whispered to anyone listening that they didn’t believe the surveys showing a Labour surge upwards. Well, the polls were right about that, and the canvassing data and human intelligence was wrong. So it might prove again. The polling tells us that the parties are running pretty much neck-and-neck, that the remarkable longevity of the SNP’s popularity in Scotland looks to be still holding up, and that Labour looks unlikely to make the same gains during the next campaign as it did during the last one. In short: any General Election would be a massive gamble for all concerned. Right in the middle of the bell curve of probability is a Hung Parliament that produces nothing very useful except the chaos that populists love so much: but at one end (with YouGov) the Conservatives win a majority, and at another (with Opinium or Kantar) Labour have enough MPs to govern, albeit without much comfort. That is the heat map of where we would land if there were a General Election tomorrow – which, of course, there won’t be.

Now, that level of precision (or lack of it) might be a poor return for all the work everyone is putting in. It isn’t a Rosetta Stone. But it isn’t nothing either. Such is the world of known knowns and known unknowns – and of statistical art and practice, rather than science. Experts, in this case pollsters, do know things: it’s just that they don’t know everything. They can map out the landing zone. The rest is up to you.