Why There Isn't Going To Be An Early Election

There isn't going to be an early Election, precisely because the Tories would be wiped off the map if there were. Not only would that create the space for a patriotic, morally and socially conservative party to emerge instead, but it would also remove the Tory bogeyman, the one thing that keeps anyone at all voting Labour, never mind turning out to deliver Labour leaflets and what have you. That, in turn, would create the space for a social democratic party to emerge instead.

Indeed, these two movements might very well be one and the same, and would in that case sweep the board electorally, not least because traditional Labour voters are among the most patriotic, and the most morally and socially conservative, people in Britain, while traditional Tory voters are the biggest Keynsians and Beveridgites of the lot, provided that they get their own slice of the cake; this is, after all, a country where even the farmers and the private schools only exist because of gigantic public subsidies.

An economically neoliberal, socially libertarian, and therefore geopolitically neoconservative (including Eurofederalist) party might also try its luck at the polls, but it certainly wouldn't win a General Election, and under First Past The Post it might well win no seats at all.

So the Tories must be saved. Like Labour and the Lib Dems, the Conservative Party contains certain sections of the electorate in such a way as to prevent the emergence of an economically Keynsian and Beveridgite, morally and socially conservative, patriotic political movement, and instead secure the current neoliberal, libertarian, neoconservative (including Eurofederalist) one party state.

So no Leader of either party would ever kill off the other one. And an October Election would do just that: it would reduce the Tories to a rump of fewer than a hundred seats in the most solidly agrarian parts of the South East, East Anglia and possibly (though probably not) the Midlands. Heaven knows why people like that would vote for Cameron, but there we are.

We have been here before, several times. Most notably, after the 1987 Election, Margaret Thatcher failed to deliver on her promise to ban party-political contributions by trade unions, a move which would have killed off Labour on the spot. But by then, Labour and the Tories had re-converged on nuclear weapons, and had converged on Europe, never having been as far apart on anything else as is widely imagined on both sides by people who believe that, just because they wanted something to be the case, then somehow it was.

And, of course, the alternative to Labour already existed. Thatcher was a lot happier facing Neil Kinnock than she would have been facing David Owen, who, with Labour out of the way, would have ditched the Liberals and, mostly thanks to the Poll Tax, would easily have won a General Election which would probably have been held in 1991.

So Thatcher reneged on a Manifesto commitment and saved the Labour Party. It will now return the favour to the Tories, for similar reasons.