Keep an eye on the small, local parties in this General Election - they may be portents of the future
As the UK General Election thunders above us, we’re looking for political perspectives that hint of different futures than those laid out by the traditional parties (and their ideologies). This Guardian piece from Alan Finlayson makes a very interesting point about the phenomenon of smaller parties - and how they might be portents of a future.
Finlayson looks at the 1992 election, and see the Anti-Federalist League get around 4000 votes - before it turned into UKIP. Caroline Lucas of the Greens was then just a speaker for the party. SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon lost to Labour in Shettleston by 14,000 votes. The RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party) stood in a few seats, with candidates Claire Fox (now Brexit Party MEP) and Muniza Mirza (who co-wrote the current Tory election manifesto).
So are there any glimpses of the future in the 344 parties registered in Great Britain with the Electoral Commission, 64 standing candidates in this General Election? Finlayson makes a familiar conclusion (at least to this blog):
Beneath the surface turbulence of daily events, change happens slowly within the body politic. The formation of small parties, and the votes they receive, might be the last residue of a dying part of our political culture.
But they might also be early intimations of resentments, fears and hopes that mainstream politics has yet to articulate. Ahead of the curve, by luck or instinct, tenacious activists (and some incredible self-publicists) have found and made their moment. They weren’t relics. They were portents.
What, then, of the great winter election of 2019? Beyond Brexit, are there portents of the future? Some parties certainly do look like relics of a lost era. The Workers Revolutionary party will stand five candidates and the Liberal party, formed from opposition to the 1988 merger with the SDP that created the Liberal Democrats, 19.
They will get few votes but perhaps one of their candidates is a future panellist on The Moral Maze. The Young People’s party, a group of Georgists (followers of 19th-century economist Henry George) who want to rebalance taxation towards tax on land and introduce a universal basic income, will run in three seats.
But my guess is that hints of our political future are to be found in local and regional parties. The class and cultural divisions of the UK now have a markedly geographic dimension to them. And a number of councils are run by local parties.
The Residents Associations of Epsom and Ewell have controlled the borough council since 1937. In Nottinghamshire, the Ashfield Independents won 30 of 35 seats at this year’s local elections and their leader will stand in the constituency.
There are also regional parties with a Westminster focus: the North-East party, the Lincolnshire Independents. In Yorkshire, the Yorkshire party got more votes than Change UK in the European election and in December will have 28 candidates on the ballot.
It’s not a great comparison, but who would have thought at its formation in 1991 that a federation of Italian regional parties, Lega Nord, would one day come third in a general election and that its leader would be deputy prime minister?
What will dominate our politics in two decades is likely to be quite visible already. We just don’t know that we are looking at it. When you vote, take a moment to scan that longer-than-you-expected list of candidates. You might get a glimpse of the future – of a time when Brexit really is done and the debacle of December 2019 a distant memory.