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Chronicle - 1 May 2007
There’s nothing like a really good election for making the blood pump through the body. So it is good news that they are having one in France! They are also having a passably good one in Scotland what with the unlovable but gleeful populism of Scot-Nat Alex Salmond wreaking panic amongst the Labour establishment (a bit like a patient going berserk in Dr Findlay’s surgery!) and the introduction of PR for Scottish local elections.
In England everyone is busy lowering expectations. To be honest this is not proving a difficult challenge for Labour: the electorate seems inclined to shut the door on the Blair years with as big a bang as local elections can muster. The Tories, having (wisely) admitted that they see little chance of advancing into the no-go zones of inner city Northern Mets are really looking to inflict serious damage on the Liberal Democrats who have a high proportion of their seats in play. The Lib-Dems, in turn, look to demonstrate that they are the only alternative to Labour in urban Britain.
The key figure for the Conservatives will not be the number of seats won but the overall share of the vote: 40 per cent makes a general election victory that bit more plausible even if the party’s vote is very unevenly distributed around the country and the big northern cities remain stubbornly “Scotlandised.”
I suspect the results the parties will really pore over (even if they don’t let it show) will be those of the BNP, and not just in “traditional” BNP battlegrounds like South and West Yorkshire, industrial Lancashire and urban Essex. Migration from Eastern Europe has given it a whole new political feedstock to set alongside its traditional anti-immigration appeal. Whilst Labour is likely to be the most alarmed because of the BNP’s appeal to working class Labour voters (though I suspect it may also mobilise disaffected non-voters) all the parties face the same dilemma: how to reconcile the need to fight in the centre ground of politics with the necessity to avoid handing over parts of the electorate to extremists.
With the BNP fielding some 650 odd seats it is good to know that there will be at least a little light relief: UKIP appears to have decided to embrace precisely the Tory policies which bombed at the last general election. Both the BNP and UKIP live on fantasy politics but whereas UKIP’s fantasies are relatively harmless I believe that the BNP’s threaten our society.
Which brings us back to Scotland and France. We do not know whether the Scottish electorate thinks that independence is a fantasy – though the Scot-Nat invocation of the “Celtic tiger” of Ireland as the basis for the Scottish economy certainly is. It can vote for the Nationalists without voting for independence- that vote would come in a later referendum. A coalition of defeated parties ganging together to keep the party with the biggest number of seats out of power could have the effect of radicalising Scottish politics and give Alex Salmond the dream slogan: Cheated!
It would be a poisonous potion to usher in Gordon Brown’s premiership. It could also, of course, alert the English to the possibility of a coalition of beaten parties to keep out the Tories if they (as they did at the last general election) come well ahead in the English popular vote. In any event Scotland is set to become a very troublesome neighbour and we may have to live with the politics of dislocation.
The local elections fall slap-bang in the middle of the two rounds of voting in the French Presidential elections. Five years ago the National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen humiliated the lumbering and divided Socialist Party to make it into the play off, giving the assorted Left no choice but to vote for Jacques Chirac. Well into his Seventies Le Pen is running again, though neo-Gaullist candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, who, as Interior Minister, revelled in his “take no hostages” response to riots in the heavily immigrant-populated Paris suburban ghettoes 18 months ago, is trying to leave no ground to the law-and-order right unoccupied.
I suspect that John Reid understands that dilemma. Come May 4 we may all have to face it a little more squarely.
© Local Government Chronicle
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