Photo Credits: BBC
Despite the volume of their disagreements reaching levels commonly considered disruptive to family-friendly neighbourhoods, the representatives of Labour and the Conservatives were outshone by their small-party rivals.
As Part 1 of the Series, this article focuses on the first 7-Party election debate.
Commentary on the 2024 Election:
An analysis of the small parties in the first 7-party debate
In recent years, we have seen the rise of the SNP in Scotland, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition (from 2010-2015), and the consequential Eurosceptic campaigning of Nigel Farage in his various party-political guises. Plaid Cymru and the Green Party have also gained more visibility. Political capital has been distributed more equitably. While the two-horse race between the two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives (also known as the Tories), is proceeding at the typical gallop (thanks to the current electoral system), there is increased interference from the smaller parties.
During the first 7-party debate, the Liberal Democrats heavily criticised the Conservative's record in government. However, they lack credibility as critics due to their broken promises on tuition fees during the coalition period.
Some of the debate's most outspoken figures represented the Welsh and Scottish nationalist parties, Plaid Cymru and the SNP. Positioning themselves to the Left of Labour, and deploring both Labour and the Conservative's rhetoric around immigration, among other things (such as austerity), they presented a clear ideological rift between the nationalist parties (and in Scotland's case, the governing party) in the devolved assemblies and consensus-ridden Westminster. This channelling of separate values serves the interests of their independence movements and speaks directly to their left-of-centre audience.
Speaking of buzzwords such as independence, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, has taken his megaphone oratory to high-decibel debate once again. Now taking the helm of the right-wing populist Reform UK Party, his bombastic attacks on the governing Conservatives' immigration record garnered little response from Penny Mourdant, who was representing the party in question. The Conservatives directed their attacks at Labour. Indeed, it appeared that the two main parties were locked into their own debate, apart from the others. The Tories, battered by their 14 years of widely criticised governance, mostly ignored the vulturous swoops at them from the Farage-led Right, putting a stern face on a reported existential crisis amongst their ranks.
While the "capital R" right-wingers in Reform are eyeing up the parliamentary spoils of the disaster likely to befall electoral Tory-ism, the Green Party is aiming for the left-of-centre vote. Labour is gunning for a "broad-church" electoral coalition comprising socially conservative voters from the party's post-industrial heartlands (many of whom swung to the right in the last general election) alongside centrist and progressive demographic groups. Labour's diplomatically presented "small c" conservatism, on immigration and economic policy, was exposed to emphatic critique by the smaller left-of-centre parties in this debate. Carla Denyer, representing the Green Party, went as far as presenting the Conservatives and Starmer's Labour as identical. Awake to the ideological divisions within Starmer's target electoral bloc, and general dissatisfaction with the Conservatives, the Greens are contesting specific constituencies in a bid to gain influence from a stronger platform.
Only time will tell whether the influence of small parties will swell to a greater size. Various figures, varying from members of the (progressive, cross-party) compass group to Nigel Farage, have suggested electoral reform. A surge in small-party influence would at least bring up the topic of a more proportional voting system in the UK, raising it from the realm of the unthinkable and the unmentioned.
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