Dennis Kavanagh

British Political Science in the Inter-War Years: The Emergence of the Founding Fathers

In the inter-war years a number of scholars studied and wrote about British politics in a way that marks them out as founding fathers of the discipline. The writers were academics, confined to a few universities, and did not regard themselves as political scientists. The article analyses two outlooks—collectivism and pluralism—which emerged to challenge the Westminster model. Many present features of a ‘British approach’ are evident in the work and the long-term impact on the discipline is assessed.

Speaking truth to power? Pollsters as campaign advisers

Looks at the role of the pollster in the UK and the USA and suggests that the UK pollster’s influence is modest, particularly when compared to his counterpart in the USA. Tries to explain why a more enduring relationship between pollsters and parties has not emerged. Concludes by suggesting that the political role of communications professionals may be about to change, with the advent of a new generation of politicians, apparently more at ease with the political uses of market research and public relations.

Prime Ministers, Ministers and Civil Servants in Britain

This paper examines a variety of recent challenges to the British political system and assesses the impact on the two key political elites in Britain - ministers and civil servants. It analyses their response to these challenges and argues that both ministers and civil servants have been adept at pursuing a public strategy of greater openness, inclusivity and flexibility, while privately remaining a homogenous elite with a tight hold on power. This appears to have continued, despite the 1997 change in government. The British political elites have been successful at ensuring the continuation of plurality without pluralism in the political system.

From Stockbroker’s Son to Vicar’s Daughter: The Conservatives

When the general election results came through in May 2015, David Cameron and his team were both elated and taken aback. He had been prepared for various outcomes, including defeat, but now found himself leading the first majority Conservative government since John Major in 1992. He was the first Conservative Prime Minister since 1955 to increase the party’s vote share in successive general elections, albeit by less than 1%.

Not Going According to Plan

There was not supposed to be a general election in 2017. In May 2015, David Cameron had formed the first Conservative majority government for 23 years, having won what he called ‘the sweetest victory of all’. Committed to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, his plan was to negotiate a reformed relationship with the EU, which he would then put before the country, where a campaign focusing heavily on the economic risks of leaving the EU would secure a relatively easy victory. The Conservatives would then govern for the rest of the Parliament, before he handed over to his successor, widely assumed to be the Chancellor, George Osborne. Instead, at 7 am on 24 June 2016 and with Britain having voted by 52% to 48% to leave the EU, Cameron remarked dryly to his advisors: ‘Well, that didn’t go according to plan.’ In his first party conference speech as leader back in 2006, he had said he wanted the Conservatives to stop ‘banging on’ about Europe, ‘while parents worried about childcare, getting the kids to school, balancing work and family life’. There was therefore an irony in a referendum over Europe resulting in him announcing his resignation as Prime Minister at 8.23 am, when many parents were getting their kids to school. The third successive Conservative Prime Minister to have been fatally damaged by his party’s European divide, he had been Prime Minister of a majority Conservative administration for just over a year.

From Miliband to Corbyn: Labour

There was no shortage of election inquests, both official and unofficial, into Labour’s defeat in the 2015 general election. They included the Fabian Society’s The Mountain to Climb, the party’s official Beckett report in January 2016, an independent inquiry, Labour’s Future, chaired by Labour MP Jon Cruddas, and an internal and private report, ‘2015: What Happened?’ All acknowledged the need for the party to reach out to former Labour voters, but also to win over some Conservative and UKIP voters if it was to have any chance of gaining the seats it needed to win a majority next time.

Horrors and Hopes

The bombing in Manchester on 22 May 2017 was the worst terrorist attack in the UK since 2005. The country woke the next morning to shocking pictures of bloodied concert-goers being helped out of the Manchester Arena by members of the emergency services. The Prime Minister chaired an early morning meeting of COBR, the government’s emergency response committee. She then gave a statement outside Number 10, in which she described the attack as ‘among the worst terrorist incidents we have ever experienced in the United Kingdom’. She announced that she would be travelling to Manchester to meet with the Chief Constable and the newly elected Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, as well as the emergency services.

The Liberal Democrats and Others

Once considered a hallmark of the British political system, the concept of two-party politics was thought to have been consigned to history. The share of the popular vote captured by the two main parties had been in almost constant decline since the 1970s, falling as low at 65% in 2010. The 2015 contest had seen a very small reversal, with both the main parties seeing their vote share rising, but only very slightly, and with record-breaking performances from UKIP (especially in England and Wales), the SNP and the Greens, the 2015 contest provided plenty of evidence of a highly fragmented party system. It was the first election since 1832 in which different parties had topped the poll in all four parts of the UK. Yet the following two years proved difficult for the ‘other’ parties. In Scotland, as discussed below in Chapter 6, the SNP found it hard to maintain the dominance they had achieved just two years before, while elsewhere the smaller parties found themselves struggling to respond to a rapidly changing political environment.

Wrong-Footed Again: The Polls

Having been spectacularly wrong about the 2015 general election—when they had predicted that Labour and the Conservatives were too close to call in terms of vote share, only for the latter to end up 7% ahead—the opinion pollsters knew they were on trial in 2017. Since the 2015 debacle, they had enjoyed some success with predictions for Corbyn’s leadership election in 2015 and 2016, Sadiq Khan’s victory in the London mayoralty race, and in the devolved elections in Wales and Scotland. Their performance in the 2016 referendum, however, was more mixed. In the last month of the campaign, marginally more polls predicted a Leave outcome than Remain, although most of the final polls predicted a win for Remain.

Election Night and Its Aftermath

For most voters, election day was warm (the warmest since 1997), if wet (with some of the heaviest rain since the election of February 1974, especially in Scotland). The usual reporting restrictions limited discussion of the election on conventional media to stilted accounts of polling stations opening and politicians casting their votes, although on social media—here as elsewhere driving a coach and horses through much of existing electoral law—there were claims of unusually long queues at some polling stations, along with a larger than normal presence of younger voters, especially in some university towns and cities. In Newcastle-under-Lyme, there were reports of newly registered students being turned away at Keele University despite having polling cards, until council staff were forced to produce up-to-date registers. However, claims of high turnout had frequently been made in the past, only to turn out to be exaggerated, and rumours about the high participation of young voters and students failed to dent private predictions in all the political parties that the election would result in a comfortable Conservative majority.