Miliband's electoral strategy unravelling fast

You could feel sorry for the Labour leader Ed Miliband these days. As his party should be riding high in the polls, the numbers show that barely a simple majority of people would cast their vote for Labour in May. On top of that, pretty much no one, friends and foes alike, thinks that he is prime ministerial material, which begs the question, why vote for the party in the first place. The shadow cabinet appears to have taken leave of absence for the last couple of months, seemingly hoping not to be associated with the car crash at the next general election.

If that was not enough, the Scottish Labour party leader Johann Lamont has just resigned. As a parting shot, she did not neglect to put the knife into Ed Miliband's flagging authority and twist it, for good measure. In her statement she said that the London Labour Party was treating her Scottish Labour Party like a branch office (anybody heard this before? Alun Michael and Wales perhaps?). This is more significant as it may seem at first. Scotland is important to Miliband's chances to form a government next May for several reasons.

Bacon batties are the least of Miliband's problems now

First, his circle has long put all the money on what's called the 35% strategy. In effect, it is the hope that, due to the electoral maths, Labour would get into office without winning over a broad majority of voters. It's of course a strategy borne out of the realisation, that Miliband's appeal to centre ground voters is so vanishingly small, that there is no hope in hell he gets more than 35% in the first place. All other things being equal, this strategy might still work.

This is where Scotland comes in. The second part of the strategy is that Scottish Labour MPs will provide the Westminster majority to heave Miliband into office. Enter devolution and the SNP, the Scottish Nationalists. As part of the deal to win over Scots to vote NO to outright secession, all party leaders offered devolution max to the Scots. Which in effect means that Scottish MSPs (parliamentarians in the Edinburgh parliament) will decide a whole raft of things without interference from London. This however means that Scottish MPs in Westminster should also not vote on English matters (the MPs of the Scottish Nationalist who sit at Westminster have long had a tradition of voluntarily abstaining from votes on English matter). Yet, without Scottish votes in Westminster, Miliband will have no majority to form a government. So, if he grants more autonomy to the Scottish Labour Party, he effectively makes the argument that has been put forward by the Conservative Party for a long time, that is no English government should have a majority solely by virtue of Scottish MPs.

That's where the 35% strategy reveals its fatal flaw. Without the support of Scottish MPs, Miliband wont have a majority, hence no government. So he has to deny Scottish MPs of Labour any independence. Which does not look good for a party that kicked off devolution in the first place.

As this perfect storm is gathering strength, Miliband is doing what his political master, Gordon Brown, used to do: disappear from view. The Labour leader has not been seen or heard since Friday, which may just give an extraordinary insight into his (in)ability to deal with problems once he gets into Number 10. If Miliband does not address this Scottish issue head-on, his electoral chances are fading fast, bacon batty or not.

What drives Douglas Carswell?

The Conservative Party is enjoying some good polling results this week and its members left Birmingham with smiles all around. Buoyed by a powerful speech from David Cameron and some tax cutting promises, the faithful departed to their constituencies with a spring in their step.

Things looked quite different only a few weeks ago when the newspapers were full of doom and gloom for the main governing party. The main reason were two high profile defections of Conservative MPs to UKIP, the party that flourishes on the margins of the political spectrum. The case of Mark Reckless, the copy-cat defector, is less controversial, mainly because Reckless's constituency is probably within reach of the Tories to retain. Douglas Carswell's defection however is a painful loss to the Conservatives, not least because Carswell is an articulate politician and a sharp mind, which makes you wonder whether or not he could be the canary in the mine.

However, here are some reasons why Carswell's defection will come to nought. First, UKIP's chances to gain a seat at the next general elections are thought to be approximating zero, if the bookies and election observers are to be believed. Whilst UKIP attracts plenty of disenchanted Tories (and some Labour voters), the electoral system is such that even a 15 percent swing to UKIP wont deliver sufficient votes in any single constituency to sweep them onto the green seats in Westminster. Things would be very different with proportional representation but first past the post will reliably swallow up any widely distributed yet shallow support for the party.

The other reason why Carswell's defection will remain an aberration however lies in his own motives. The BBC recently ran a town hall style debate with all candidates in the Clacton-on-Sea by-election and some voters. The question that hit home most of all came from a young woman. Why, she asked, if Carswell is so fed up with party politics, he would not run as an independent? Carswell's response was surprisingly weak, given that he built the argument for his defection on displeasure with party politics. He replied that Britain needs change and only UKIP can deliver that change. That's a tall order indeed. How a party can deliver change that has next to no chance to get its politicians elected next May  remains unclear.

Carswell's real motive may in fact not have much to do with party politics but with a simple calculation about his own political future as an MP. He could easily have waited until next May and sought a seat to represent UKIP somewhere in the UK at the next general election. However, this way he would very unlikely be selected for Clacton-on-Sea, a seat in which he has a solid 12,000 vote majority. Chances are that he would have to fight in a constituency with minimal chances to be returned to Westminster.

That is not the case of course if he defects and forces a by-election early, as he in fact did. He was automatically selected for the constituency for UKIP, standing as the incumbent MP.

Whilst his chances to be elected as the first UKIP MP are therefore quite good, the long term prospects to be an effective MP for Claton-on-Sea are dire. He is likely to be the only UKIP MP for the foreseeable future, so all bets are on that, sooner or later, he will return into the Tory fold.

The impressive Nigel Farage

As the mainstream parties are licking their wounds after bruising local election results in England, the leader of UKIP, the ubiquitous Nigel Farage is enjoying the limelight of the media. And this is even before the results of the European elections are made public on Sunday, a set of results that are bound to make Labour, Conservatives and LibDems look like medium sized parties.

Enjoying the media frenzy - Nigel Farage

So, what is the appeal of Farage? Although disentangling the motivations of voters at elections can be a tricky business, Farage has already offered a clue. It's the language. And I think he is largely correct.

Let's first of all look at his policies (and yes, they are 'his policies' since the party is more or less a one man show). These policies range from the hard right (shut the doors to all immigrants) to the hard left (milk and honey for everyone, whilst cutting public expenditure). The fascinating thing about Farage's policies is however that there are very few indeed. Farage has been immensely talented at selling soundbites as policies.

Take immigration. Well, governments of all colour have tried to reduce immigration with little effect. Even if Farage would be residing in Number 10 tomorrow, he would still need to go through a referendum on exiting Europe, since it is Britain's membership of Europe that produces most of Britain's immigrants. He may or may not win such a referendum. The fact is, he wont be in Number 10 any time soon. So he has no way of delivering this 'policy'.

But there is also light at the end of the tunnel for the established political parties. I have argued before that it is exactly the insignificance of local and European elections that allow voters to vote UKIP without any consequences. Europe and immigration are important themes, yet neither of them are high up on the list of priorities for decision making of voters in national elections, as Michael Howard and William Hague discovered when they ran 'anti-immigration' campaigns in 2005 and 2001 respectively. Immigration and Europe are the sort of topics that make for heated debates, but not for solid votes at general elections.

So, Labour and Conservatives can take comfort from the fact that the local and European elections this week probably marked the high point for UKIP. Farage may be able to translate his newly gained council representation into one or two seats at Westminster, yet the most damage UKIP will do at the general elections in 2015 is to split the small c conservative vote in some areas. And this is provided the newly elected councillors across England are not falling over each other (as the Greens for example did in Brighton). In essence, UKIP is a movement, rather than a political party, so the loyalty of party members to their party is fairly weak.

So, what about language? This is where the real challenge lies for the mainstream parties. Farage is famous for his straight talk and it is nothing less than painful to listen to Miliband, Clegg and others to try to downplay the UKIP challenge. It is exactly this waffle that gets voters angry. So why do Miliband and others do not speak their mind?

The real reason is that there is nothing they can say about many of the topics that UKIP has broached. Mainstream politicians are very wary of discussing something in public for which they potentially have no answers. The hard truth is that there is no answer for European immigration. Geographical mobility is a cornerstone of the edifice of European Union and there is nothing any politician can do about it, short of leaving Europe.

So, instead of acknowledging this fact and talking openly about it, they waffle their way through and hope no one notices. This Thursday, about a quarter of all voters have just called their bluff.