Published on Tuesday 8 September, the editors of Britain Votes 2015, Professors Jon Tonge (Liverpool University) and Andrew Geddes (Sheffield University) criticise the emphasis placed upon incorrect headline polls that distorted the election campaign at the expense of proper analysis of those polls.
"The 2015 general election result will recast Britain’s relationship with the European Union and shape the future of the United—or disunited— Kingdom, but what seemed to matter most during the campaign was reporting of opinion polls about the distribution of seats in a hung parliament. Fascination about who might be shading an allegedly neck-and-neck race overshadowed policy debates", said Geddes.
Britain Votes 2015 – a special edition of the Hansard Society’s Parliamentary Affairs journal, published in partnership with Oxford University Press – includes thematic chapters from a range of leading political scientists including Professors Tim Bale, Sarah Childs, John Curtice, who led the exit poll team, and Matthew Goodwin all of whom will be speaking at
the launch event on Tuesday evening.
The book finds that the Conservative victory was due to a ‘black widow effect’: after mating with their (acquiescent) Liberal Democrat coalition partners, they ‘gobbled them up’, taking 27 of their seats. This was due to perhaps the least noticed aspect of the Conservative campaign: the decision taken, late in 2014, that rather than focusing solely on the constituencies they needed either to defend or snatch from Labour while going easy on their coalition partners, the Conservatives would throw a significant proportion of their considerable financial resources at trying to unseat the Liberal Democrats.
Furthermore the book argues that the Liberal Democrats’ support for equidistance was folly and its confidence in an incumbency strategy delusional given all the evidence available. The election result illustrates the weakness of the party’s social and partisan base. Building support in an area around a person is based on quicksand, given previous evidence that it ebbs away when the incumbent retires and fails as a safety net when the party is in trouble nationally.
Ed Miliband thrashed around, launching three-month wonder ideas: ‘pre-distribution’; ‘squeezed middle’; ‘one nation Britain’; ‘predators versus producers’ and short-term offers, such as a freeze on energy prizes’, but ‘The sum of the parts was never a coherent strategy’. Hiding behind a series of ‘retail offers’ did it no good. For many voters, its enemies had defined what they took to be the character of Miliband’s Labour; to others it remained just unclear. Even for its supporters Labour appeared to have no central theme, defining what it stood for. Just as Thatcher’s shadow hung over the Conservative Party, defeat in 2015 unleashed a battle to define Labour’s post-Blair identity and future.
Both the Conservatives and Labour failed to neuter immigration as an issue at the election. The Conservatives won the election in spite of, rather than because of, immigration. As a consequence, in the eyes of a significant number of voters, UKIP remains the preferred vehicle for expressing their often intensely felt concerns over this issue. Unless a mainstream party can convince voters that they are able and willing to reduce immigration, we can expect UKIP to remain in the game.
National campaign expenditure as we have traditionally understood it may well now effectively be dead, or at least in terminal decline. The vast majority of spending by the main parties was not on large scale nationally-focused campaigns, but on supporting constituency efforts through ever more precise micro-targeting of key voters in target seats.
However, voters in marginal seats appear to have tuned out not turned out. The closeness of the contest in a constituency in the previous election has been regularly associated with turnout levels for many years. There were frequent complaints that the parties were focusing more than ever on their target seats—and even on target voters within these seats. But on this occasion, differential campaigning did not pay off with better turnouts. Did voters in marginal seats became so fed up with the constant stream of leaflets, direct mail, and telephone calls during the campaign that they turned off from the election altogether?
Professor Jon Tonge said:
“Britain Votes 2015 is the first major analysis of how the 2015 election was won and lost. It brings together a team of experts to assess the strategies of all the main parties, analyse the results across the UK and draw firm conclusions about what really mattered. The book shows how, despite the obsessive short campaign focus, the election fates of political parties are often determined much earlier.”