Blue Is Turning, But Not To Purple

Another UKIP-free Question Time panel tonight.

I have never suggested that it ought not to be on at all. Merely that it ought not to be on anything like as often as it has been. And that it would not be, now that this Parliament was more than halfway through. Such has turned out to be the case.

The Conservative coalition that delivered that party's unexpected 1992 General Election victory, and that with what is still the largest vote ever received by a British political party, is certainly a thing of the past. But the beneficiary has not been, and will not be, UKIP.

Where UKIP has no MPs, and has never succeeded in electing one, parties to the left of Labour hold seats in Scotland, Wales, the North of England, and the South of England.

In Scotland, the Labour vote is as large as ever, while the SNP has taken over most of what was historically the unassailable Tory majority there, with the SNP heartland exactly where the Unionist, as a party name, heartland used to be; it has never been Labour.

In Wales, Plaid Cymru's strength is in rural areas that not very long ago were either Labour-Conservative marginals or safely Conservative.

No one could accuse its voters of being immigrants. Speaking the oldest cultural language in Europe also to be in more pedestrian day-to-day use, since no whole town or village shops in Latin, they are the oldest population group on this Island and its islands. Compared to them, everyone else here is an immigrant; even the speakers of Gaelic are Irish.

Labour is in second place in two of Plaid Cymru's three seats. It is not the Labour vote that has transferred to Plaid Cymru. That vote has not transferred to anywhere.

Bradford West was a Conservative target seat in 2010, and it is the kind of place without which that party cannot win an overall majority. Nor has it ever done so without Brighton Pavilion, which, say it until it sinks in, is in Sussex.

In both, the Labour votes remain solid enough to provide realistic bases for recapture in 2015. The main party that has lost ground is demonstrably the other one.

The Greens' target seats in several parts of the South are in a similar position, with neither the aim nor even the aspiration being the replacement of Labour, but rather the uniting of the anti-Labour vote. It is obvious who that means, at least primarily.

How can this possibly be? It ought not to come as any surprise. 70 per cent of people favour the public ownership of the utilities, the railways (that figure now seems to be more like a breathtaking 75 per cent) and, even before it has been privatised, the Royal Mail.

The second and third of those were the policy, not by default but as the positively stated policy, of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher. John Major abandoned both in principle, and the railways in practice. He never won another General Election.

Support for a 60 per cent top rate of income tax is support for the policy of Nigel Lawson when he served under Thatcher, and the threshold at which today's respondents would wish to set it is well above that at which he administered it with her authority.

One could go on.

The Conservative Party has always been economically to the right of the Labour Party at the given time. But the Conservative Party of the 1980s was economically far to the left of the Labour Party of the Blair years.

Enough previous Conservative voters duly leapfrogged Labour to put parties to its left into Parliament from, it is worth repeating, all four of Scotland, Wales, the North of England, and the South of England.

They put those parties into government in Scotland, and periodically in Wales. They nearly managed to do so in England as well in 2010.

When, even with as good as a clear run and massive newspaper support at Buckingham against John Bercow, UKIP still failed to win so much as one seat.

UKIP is an interesting phenomenon. It will be the subject of fascinating doctoral theses. But the day when it becomes of purely academic interest is rapidly approaching, and it has never been of very much else.

That is now so obvious that even what has previously been the extremely indulgent BBC has noticed, while the Head of Sky News has publicly stated it as a fact.