14 November 2019

Chatham House: Boris Johnson could emulate Donald Trump’s election victory

With four weeks to go, the UK is experiencing not only its most important election in living memory, but its most unpredictable—and one in which a minority of voters could impose Brexit on the majority, says Peter Kellner.

[...]Three parties want Brexit to happen on or before the new deadline of January 31, 2020: the Conservatives, the Brexit Party, and the now tiny UK Independence Party (UKIP). An average of the latest polls puts their combined support at 47 percent. Five parties oppose this policy and want to reopen the decision to leave the European Union: Labour, the Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems), the Scottish National Party, the Green Party, and Wales’s Plaid Cymru. Their combined support averages 52 percent, a majority for the anti-Brexit parties.

However, the Conservatives could well overcome this and win a clear majority in the new Parliament. This is essentially because the Conservatives, led by Johnson, are likely to win up to 90 percent of the pro-Brexit vote, whereas Labour, the main opposition party, currently enjoys the backing of little over half the anti-Brexit vote. [...]

On both sides, modest attempts are being made to prevent perverse results. The Brexit Party has decided not to field candidates against incumbent Conservative MPs. In May 2019, the party came top in the UK election to the European Parliament with 31 percent of the vote, although the latest polls show that its support has fallen below 10 percent. Its decision to give incumbent Conservatives a free run will probably make little difference.

However, the Brexit Party’s greatest support tends to be in Labour-held areas that voted to leave the EU in 2016 and that the Conservatives are targeting. By still standing in these seats, the Brexit Party will siphon off some pro-Brexit votes, mainly from the Conservatives. If the Brexit Party wins only 5 or 10 percent in these areas, it could help Labour retain seats it would otherwise lose to the Conservatives.

On the anti-Brexit side of the scales, the Lib Dems have agreed an election pact with the Greens and Plaid Cymru in sixty seats (out of the total 650 seats in the House of Commons) where only one of the three parties will field a candidate. As with the Brexit Party’s decision, this pact is likely to affect the outcome in very few of these seats.

This means that in virtually every constituency there will be at least two anti-Brexit parties—Labour and either the Lib Dems, Greens, or Plaid Cymru. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party, another anti-Brexit Party, will also stand, giving anti-Brexit voters there a choice of three candidates.

The upshot is that through the United Kingdom, in its first-past-the-post system, the anti-Brexit vote will be more divided than the pro-Brexit vote.

One factor could prevent a clear Conservative majority in the new Parliament: tactical voting. If all anti-Brexit voters back their preferred party, Johnson can look forward to a comfortable victory next month. However, there are non-party campaigns to prevent this by trying to persuade millions of anti-Brexit voters not to vote for their preferred party, but for the local candidate with the best chance of defeating the Conservatives. If these campaigns succeed, they could deprive the Conservatives of twenty to forty seats. [...]

Full analysis on Chatham House

© Chatham House