It’s been a strange week in British politics. The EU referendum has driven every other kind of political question to the margins. The only question is IN or OUT of the European Union.
It is an open secret as to why we are having a referendum at all. It is because the Prime Minister, David Comeron, feared a takeover by an alliance of the far right of his own Conservative Party and United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).
He was accused at the time of putting party politics above the health of the nation.
When he went to Brussels to negotiate changes, he said that by holding a referendum the Euro partners would know that he wasn’t just posturing when he set out his demands.
And then he came back and pulled out of his hat a small or non-existent rabbit, or a big rabbit – depending on who is telling the story.
Then the campaigning got under way and his message was that we would risk falling off a cliff if we voted to leave.
Well if that was true when he said it, it was true before he went to Brussels and he should never have risked the decision to a vote that was out of his control. Not if he believed in the principle rather than the desire to hold onto power.
How Real Is UKIP
So how real is the threat from UKIP? If there are only a few UKIP supporters, then they aren’t much of a threat.
After the national election, Lord Leach of Fairford, Chairman of Open Europe, wrote to the Times saying what would have happened had the German form of PR applied in the general election.
Under that system, any party getting less than five percent of the vote is not allocated seats. The reason for that is to prevent a huge number of parties with one or two votes each swamping the actual business of government.
And what would have happened is that we would have had the Conservatives with 275 seats, labour 229, UKIP 92, Lib Dems 54 and no seats for any of the other parties. That is, the SNP would not have got any seats at all.
The Scottish National Party swept the board in Scotland – but only because it has 56 constituencies in a country that is only five-million people out of a total UK population of sixty-four million.
In other words, our first-past-the-post system and the constituency boundaries that apply in elections hide the fact that UKIP has a large base of support.
Here are the numbers for the seats, the number gained and lost in the election, the actual number of the popular vote and the percentage of the vote that the number represents.
Conservatives 330 (+37, -10) 11,334,726 36.9%
Labour 232 (+23, -48) 9,347,324 30.4%
SNP 56 (+50, -0) 1,454,436 4.7%
Green 1 (+0, -0) 1,156,149 3.8%
Lib Dems 8 (+0, -48) 2,415,862 7.9%
UKIP 1 (+0, -1) 3,881,099 12.6%
Nearly four-million people voted for UKIP. But they only got one seat in Parliament.
So the threat was real and Cameron has played it well – well that is if the Remain camp wins.
But what a risk to take.
My Prediction Is…
I think the vote will go with David Cameron and the Remain camp.
And if it does, then he will be saved again. And for some stupid reason, people will think he was the better option and we will all love the moderate Tories. Ha!