The Floating Masses

You may think William Rees-Mogg is an old duffer. But he's still pretty good at sums.

"Non-party voters are now by far the largest group. Voters without a party commitment amount to 40 per cent, another 10 per cent support small parties, including Nationalists, the Greens and UKIP. Those who have loyalties to the three main parties split 24 per cent Labour, 17 per cent Conservative and only 9 per cent Lib Dem. The old politics, which was decided by the solid blocks of party loyalists, belongs to the past.

Again one can see the importance of the Cameron factor. Just as he is the leader who is the most attractive to women, he is also the most attractive to independents. Whereas Labour currently converts the 24 per cent of voters who are Labour loyalists into 21 per cent of current support, Cameron converts the 17 per cent who are Conservative loyalists into ICM’s estimate of 40 per cent current support. That suggests that Cameron is beating Labour among independent voters by an exceptionally wide margin, and is also beating the Lib Dems."

This is extrapolated from yesterday's ICM poll (published in the Sunday Times). Rees-Mogg's purpose is to show both the power of the "Cameron effect" so far and how big a problem Blair has become for Labour. His number-crunching also tells us that the size and volatility of the floating vote is now enormous; which is, of course, why both the two big parties court it so relentlessly. Where, though, does that leave everyone else? In need of proportional representation, maybe? If so, their chances of getting it seem to be declining as rapidly as the vigour of our democracy.

Comments

[Political Umpire]

Cameron is turning out to be the worst kind of populist, as I've blogged this morning.

I don't think PR is the answer. They have PR in New Zealand, a country with which I am rather familiar. There are two really invidious consequences: (i) the horse-trading that goes on between parties after the election, particularly between those who campaigned on the basis that the others were Satan or Hitler, but suddenly found them better to deal with after the election; and (ii) the presence of MPs with no constituency and therefore no-one to answer to save their party masters. If you thought Blunkett and Mandleson were hard to get rid of after their transgressions, consider what would have happened under PR - they could never be disposed of so long as they had Tony's ear.