If Cleggmania didn’t turn into actual votes for the Liberal Democrats, it did serve another function during this General Election: It froze out UKIP, the Greens and the BNP from the coverage. Caroline Lucas did win a seat for the Greens, thanks to ferocious local campaigning, but Brighton Pavilion was the only tiny piece of good news for any of the 2nd tier parties.
Even now, in the varied and diverse postmortem of this General Election, the disaster that’s befallen these parties isn’t getting mentioned at all. So, lacking anything else to write about I thought I’d mention it now.
Revealing for me was a fairly local result. In the BNP stronghold of Mixenden Illingworth in West Yorkshire, the Nazis came third. Third! It’s mostly housing association territory, so of course Labour won, but the Conservatives came second, much to my astonishment. There was a time when they polled only hundreds of votes there. In fact, this was the first council seat the BNP claimed in West Yorkshire, after enjoying visits from the full weight of the BNP campaigning machine.
A friend of mine had a run in with Nick Griffin at the time during what was a very dirty and aggressive bi-election. “You’re a Lib Dem?” Griffin is supposed to have said. “Your logo is yellow, the colour of piss.” My friend claims he replied, “No, it’s the colour of the sun.”
This personal presence from Griffin did win the area over, much to my dismay (because, it has to be said, I lived there at the time). Eventually the party machine moved on, leaving it to the local supporters and activists to continue the work, and, inevitably, the BNP support drifted away as the glamour and naughtiness of voting BNP faded, the reality of the same small number of names appearing on ballot sheets over and over again and the track record of the goons who do actually make it has sunk in.
This experience of wild, enthusiastic support for the BNP evaporating over time appears to be repeating itself across the country. In Barking, where Nick Griffin got the best result of any BNP politician with 6k votes, they lost all their councillors.
How much of this was due to the freeze out in the media? And how much did the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats benefit from a very welcome absence of hysterical, “YOU MUST VOTE LABOUR TO KEEP OUT THE BNP!” messages?
UKIP, too, seemed to have had a very disappointing election judging from the stream of very glum looking faces on Election Night coverage.
Perhaps Alix Mortimer is right to suggest that Cleggmania was the reason the Lib Dems still have at least 57 seats, instead of being crushed into oblivion by the biggest squeeze on non-Tory, non-Labour votes for years?
There’s no doubt that without the debates, if this had been a normal election, the media would have focused on the threat to Tories from UKIP, the threat to Labour from the BNP and, in doing so, have given both parties the publicity they crave. The story could so easily have been “voters to punish the big three for expenses scandal” but as it happened it was those individual MPs that chose to stand for re-election with a blemished record that got a very specific, targeted booting.
If the predictions about the future of the Lib Dems in a post-coalition world hold true, we could be returning to an era of real two party politics. What next for these minor parties, struggling not just to make some sort of breakthrough but now, it seems, find themselves in a fight for their survival?
UPDATE: What’s the price of failure? For UKIP, it was £237k in lost deposits. The Greens threw away £151k and the BNP pissed £133k of hard earned fascist pounds up the wall. H/T, Matt Wardman via Twitter
