Parties Just Don’t Get It

PublicService.co.uk is carrying an article entitled “Political parties simply don’t get the public on Europe”. Needless to say, if ever there was a title to grab my attention that is it.

The article is written by Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, and so unsurprisingly makes some extremely good points and is not the usual drivel often written about the subject.

It is telling, for example, that the voters who abandoned the main parties did not swing uniformly to smaller parties across the political spectrum. UKIP are the most prominent example of a party that did well, but if this was purely an expenses-driven swing then they would have struggled due to their own well-publicised financial scandals. By contrast, the entirely fresh but “pro-European” Libertas struggled at the ballot box, as did the Jury Team of independents standing on an anti-politician platform.

For that matter, if voters were looking for a pro-EU party that was relatively untainted by the expenses scandal, they could have chosen the Liberal Democrats. But they didn’t and the Lib Dems crashed with 13.7 per cent of the vote, failing to hold up their vote even against the background of a Labour car crash. The Yes 2 Europe Party, untainted thanks to never having had anyone elected and in favour of unlimited EU integration, flopped on 0.2 per cent of the vote in the regions where they stood.

Indeed. A pro-EU party has never received any scale of support anywhere close to that of Eurosceptics.

When asked by ICM, an outright majority of the public agreed that “none of the main political parties adequately represent my views on Britain’s future relationship with the EU”, by a margin of 67 per cent to 28 per cent. What should have the Conservatives, the Lib Dems and Labour particularly worried is that that majority exists amongst each of their support bases. Tory supporters will be most dissatisfied at 71 per cent, but Labour and the Lib Dems both have almost as big a problem, with 65 per cent of their supporters expressing dissatisfaction with the parties’ line on Europe.

Nor is there any possibility that this result represents people who would like their parties to be more supportive of closer union with Brussels. Across all the core EU issues –referenda, the Lisbon Treaty and membership of the Euro – the public are as opposed as they have ever been, and again that scepticism is reflected among the supporters of all main political parties.

And here is a key point. There is no home for Eurosceptics in any of the Conservate, Labour or Lib-Dem parties, who are each more pro-EU than their supporters. Those of us who are UKIP supporters have long come to the conclusion that the only party that genuinely represents these voters is indeed UKIP.

However, UKIP’s success at the ballot box has been restricted to European Elections, with a break-through in domestic politics being far harder. But why? Certainly the Proportional Representation at Euro elections eliminates the “wasted vote” issue, but why have we not had more success in devolved assemblies domestically? Is it simply that voters do not see MEPs as having any influence whatsoever, unlike their MPs, councillors and assembly members, and so are happy to signal a protest?

The mistake the main parties have made is to behave as though the EU is purely an issue of the political class, restricted to technical constitutional debates and complex foreign policy negotiations. In reality, it has a serious impact at the supermarket checkout, at the post office and even on your doorstep, through the EU’s regulation of waste disposal.

All three main parties must abandon their assumption that the public do not care about the EU, and recognise that while they have been working within a cosy Westminster consensus that the current relationship with the EU is a good thing, the public’s experience has been very different.

People simply do not accept that the transfer of so many powers to a regulation-loving, interfering European Union has been good for them. In a ComRes poll carried out for the TaxPayers’ Alliance before the European elections, 49 per cent of the public said that they felt the EU was not a good thing for ordinary people, compared to 81 per cent of MEPs who though it was good for people.

The difference in opinion is hardly surprising, but extremely telling. Politicians, especially MEPs in their isolated bubble in Brussels and Strasbourg, are so removed from public opinion, and seem to see voters as an annoying inconvenience who ‘don’t understand the complexities’ and who must ‘come around to their reasoning’. Perhaps this is why politicians don’t argue points of substance, and instead seek simply to win support in other ways, allowing them to get on with the business without having to worry about voter opinion?

Just a thought. But Mark Wallace is definitely correct. The political landscape is shifting and the Lib/Lab/Con are failing to understand where public opinion is moving.