Glenrothes was a triumph for Labour. But to call a general election now would be folly Labour’s win in Glenrothes is astonishing, all the more so for being so unexpected. The Scottish National Party were confident and Labour nervous even as the polls closed. There are several ways in which this election was extremely good for Labour. The party not only increased its share of the vote, a rare enough feat for a party in government, particularly in a seat it already holds. Labour’s share of the vote increased by 3.2 percentage points. But it actually polled a few hundred more votes in absolute terms than it did in 2005, because there was only a small fall in turnout. There is simply no way of spinning that into anything other than a triumph. The swing to the SNP was kept down to 5% in Glenrothes, even though in campaigning terms the party had thrown the kitchen sink at the constituency. A 5% swing might sound a reasonable result for the SNP until one looks at the party’s record in byelections. While the 22.6% swing in Glasgow East earlier this year was very high, 10% is usual. In contests between Labour and the SNP, there is a double-digit swing more or less whatever the political circumstances. This happened in Livingston in 2005, Paisley South in 1997, the two Paisley elections in 1990 and Falkirk West in 2000. The only previous occasion in recent years that the SNP has fallen short of a 10% swing in a two-party contest for a Labour seat was in Glasgow Anniesland, following the death of Donald Dewar in 2000. There are some similarities between that contest and this – it took place at almost exactly the same point in the parliament, during a Labour recovery from a low point (although 2000’s nadir around the fuel crisis was shallow and very short in comparison to the recent trough), and was prompted by the death of a well-respected local MP. Another historical parallel reaches back a little further. The SNP dominated Scottish politics in the mid-1970s, surging in the two 1974 elections and scoring some impressive results in the 1977 district council elections, although the supply of byelections had dried up. When two Labour seats fell vacant in 1978, at Glasgow Garscadden and then at Hamilton, the SNP contested them vigorously but Labour easily fought off the competition, electing Donald Dewar and George Robertson to parliament. While Glenrothes was an extremely good result for Labour, and for Gordon Brown, Labour should not be tempted by a quick general election. The campaign focused on the shortcomings of the SNP-run Fife council, which effectively put the SNP candidate and...

Labour could win Glenrothes. Even defeat won’t see a nail in Brown’s political coffin Anyone with a retentive political memory will recall that the Glenrothes byelection is supposed to be the killing blow to Gordon Brown’s ailing premiership, following Labour’s humiliation at the hands of the SNP in Glasgow East and the leadership speculation in July. The financial crisis and the conference season have removed this possibility from the agenda. Even another defeat, in this more serious and less frothy political climate, will not lead to Brown’s departure, and in reality it is doubtful that anything short of a truly awful result like a five-figure SNP majority, or third place, would have done so. The constituency is peculiarly unsuitable for a role as a national barometer. The Glenrothes constituency is on the edge of one of the sharpest social and political divides of any rural area in Britain. Just to the east lies the soft agricultural, almost southern English-looking countryside of North East Fife, and towns such as academic St Andrews and the attractive fishing harbour of Anstruther. Glenrothes is where the rough, scarred landscape of the ex-coalfield of Central/West Fife begins. In East Fife, Menzies Campbell’s constituency, the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives are the main parties, with the SNP and Labour hardly relevant to the outcome and weak even at local government level. In Glenrothes the positions are reversed, with Labour and SNP dominant and the Lib Dems and Conservatives irrelevant (although they are fighting their own Lilliputian battle for third place). The tough mining towns and villages of Fife have a fierce collective, class-conscious tradition, typified by the Communist MP for West Fife from 1935 to 1950, Willie Gallacher. This area is now divided between the Westminster seats of Glenrothes and the Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath seat of the prime minister. Glenrothes itself is a new town, designed around a short-lived coal mine but reinvented as a centre for communities that would otherwise have died with the exhaustion of the Fife coal seams, a replacement source of employment (in manufacturing and the council’s headquarters) and better housing. In recent years some of the pit villages and new housing around Markinch have attracted Edinburgh commuters, rather as the English new towns have grown into new upmarket suburbs. New town politics can be volatile and peculiar. Places like Basildon, Stevenage and Harlow started off as Labour, swung wildly to the Tories in Thatcher’s elections (home ownership and tax cuts were a potent appeal for predominantly skilled white working class communities) and then to Blair in 1997. Since then they have drifted back to the Tories, thanks in part to the new commuter estates, and in part to the long term...

Forensic accountancy is a difficult business but the Electoral Commission takes its investigative duties seriously David Hencke and his investigative colleagues at the Guardian have a fine record of unearthing dubious and corrupt practices in British politics. The Conservative party has a longer but not so fine record of being less than transparent and clean in its finances. From the share it took from the sale of honours in the 1920s to the secretive “river companies” set up in the 1940s to channel funds to the massive donations from wealthy foreigners it accepted in the 1990s, it is not surprising that the arrangements over Constituency Campaigning Services (CCS) have attracted suspicion. But sometimes, as Freud observed, a cigar is just a cigar, and even with political finance sometimes a company is just a company. Forensic accountancy is a difficult business, as I found out when I tried to unravel the business dealings of Reginald Maudling and John Poulson, but the Electoral Commission takes its investigative duties seriously. If the commission’s conclusion is that CCS charged commercial rates for its services, and therefore did not effectively donate to the Conservative party, it is incumbent on its critics to find solid evidence to the contrary. It is hard to see how paying the going rate amounts to an abuse of the spending limits, or a donation to the party. Whatever the party pays has to be within the spending limits, and any free or discounted services must also be accounted for. Nor is CCS entirely exempt from transparency rules. As with other organisations made up mostly of party members, it must report donations to the commission, which publishes them on its website. In recent years, the Conservative party has tried to be punctilious about following the letter of the rules, in something of the spirit of a reformed alcoholic making long detours to avoid his former favourite pub. While it is not ideal that CCS does not have to publish its accounts, it is not the commission’s fault that the law fails to require it to do so. The government has the opportunity to tighten this up in its party funding bill. Given the high profile of the Midlands Industrial Council (MIC) as CCS’s funder, it is easy to see why some think the money has been funnelled into the party, but the commission’s conclusion means that there could be other, potentially more entertaining possibilities. There would, after all, be a gentle irony if the prominent businessmen behind MIC had wasted so much money on keeping an unprofitable business afloat for the sake of party pride. It is also unfair to blame the commission for the fact that the “cash for...

Labour’s plan to rewrite the Act of Succession is very small beer, but few Conservatives dare to entertain radical constitutional reform either Electoral reform is a difficult sell at the Conservative party conference; promoting it sometimes seems like trying to sell Chelsea tractors at the Greens’ annual gathering. But there are some stirrings, and some new arguments about the constitution and elections are being heard at Birmingham. Tories who support proportional representation have in the past tended to be liberal in their general approach, but reform is finding some adherents among hard-edged right wingers such as Douglas Carswell, MP for Harwich since 2005 and one of the more interesting thinkers within the Tory party – one of the few MPs who can refer to Weber and Gramsci and sound as if he knows what he is talking about. Representation in parliament is one of the last monopoly public services left. Carswell asked at an Electoral Reform Society fringe meeting in Birmingham why it was that in a world where people are used to shopping around, telephones and electricity had been made competitive, there was still a single supplier of representative services that you had to like or lump. In an environment where consumer choice is the dominant force, and people increasingly look at politics as consumers, why not have multi-member constituencies? Competition and choice improve standards. Lazy MPs, or those who did not represent the views of their constituents properly, would face internal competition, and there would be fewer barriers to new talent and new ideas coming forward. While Carswell is vague on which electoral system he favours with his multi-member seats, his vision is perfectly compatible with the long-term electoral reform goal of the Single Transferable Vote (STV). It is also part of Conservative history – after all, Disraeli introduced the three-member boroughs and the “limited vote” in 1867. Carswell is very much a maverick Conservative, and he was joined on the ERS panel by more familiar Tory voices. Eleanor Laing represented the pleasant, moderate face of Tory partisanship and constitutional immobilism, and Bruce Anderson adopted his familiar role as the voice of candid reaction who frankly acknowledged the benefits of elective dictatorship – as long as it was the Conservative party doing the dictating. I doubt that many opponents of the Conservatives would be unduly worried by the arguments of Laing or Anderson, but Carswell’s case would be unsettling. He uses reforming language to argue for quite radical Conservative projects – a more securely founded Conservative government would have the hegemony necessary to deal with the alleged progressive bias of the broadcast media, the civil service and the education system. Carswell also favours direct democracy and the...

The Tories’ basic ideology is, if not bankrupt, trading under Chapter 11. Cameron may be safe, but his policies look vulnerable The Conservatives have had a wonderful year since their last conference, when they deterred Gordon Brown from calling an election in November. Apart from the wobble of the past week – which is probably attributable to Labour’s usual post-conference bounce – the Tory vote has been hitting a stable and high level in the mid-40s since spring 2008. That’s well ahead of anything they’ve managed since 1988, and an election-winning position. David Cameron’s personal approval ratings are more variable, but on this measure as well there is no cause for complaint. Their local and London elections in May demonstrated real electoral progress. The party has also recorded its first byelection gain since 1982 in Crewe and Nantwich and seen off a Liberal Democrat challenge in Henley. So what could possibly go wrong at Birmingham? Now the prospect of a Tory government is being taken so seriously, the Conservatives can expect a greater degree of scrutiny from the broadsheets. Another risk will be bandwagon-jumping from interest groups and lobbyists who wish to become on better terms with the potential next government. Conference will have a busier, more glossy and hectic feel than in the past, which will fuel the feeling that the Conservatives are on their way. The risk is of premature hubris. Winning is a considerable benefit in the struggle for party unity. The 2006 conference, which was at the softest and most listening phase of Cameronism, saw some subtle displays of different priorities: tote bags bearing tax-cutting and anti-EU slogans were carried around conference. Last year’s conference became a festival of unity, despite sub-surface misgivings within the party, because of the pressure generated by the mishandling of the election announcement by Number 10. An imminent election concentrates minds. In 2008, the sense that they are on the way and the Cameron strategy is working will mean that there will not be much by way of public dissent. The party’s self-presentation has also shifted a bit to the right, with recent pronouncements on obesity and other issues rooted in a traditional Conservative emphasis on personal responsibility. The party has also rowed back from some previous proposals for reform or consensus, such as the composition of a revised Lords. This suggests confidence in their ability before long to implement an undiluted Conservative agenda. However, there are still a few tensions. One is quite how far it is permissible to go in painting a negative picture of the state of Britain. Oppositions always have to judge whether they will be hurt by the allegation that they are “running down Britain”....

The mayoral defeat was painful for Labour, but urban voting patterns mean the Tories shouldn’t assume it means more success At a Progress fringe meeting this week, Labour delegates in Manchester examined the London elections last May with a mixture of pain and pleasure. The pain was of course in the loss of the mayoralty, and the resulting self-criticism of the language, tactics and apparent deafness to the concerns of many white and outer London voters. The pleasure was in the gain of an assembly seat, and in what was generally acclaimed as a professionally organised campaign that had got activists enthusiastic in a way that is unusual in Labour politics (and contrasted with the paralysis of the will that prevails this week in Manchester). As well as the surface politics of the London elections, there were some intriguing fragments of information in which deeper currents could be glimpsed, provided by Ben Page of the polling organisation Ipsos-Mori. These left me thinking as much about the Conservatives as Labour. Ipsos-Mori’s research on local government suggest that levels of “unhappiness” – fear of crime, dissatisfaction with local services and the council’s record, and a perception of dirt and squalor – are highest in the outer London boroughs, with Croydon and Harrow leading the way. People in inner London seem by contrast relatively happy with their lot. As early as 2002, the Conservatives under Iain Duncan Smith did relatively well in some outer London boroughs, regaining Barnet, Redbridge and Enfield. Their campaign in these boroughs tapped into a sense that the areas were in decline, becoming more inner city and chaotic. It would be inaccurate to see this merely as a coded appeal to racism, although no doubt susceptible voters did hear a dog-whistle. The main aim was more about tapping into a sense of a lost dream among London suburban voters of a clean, green place with families living in large houses, good public services and a sense of (perhaps stifling) social order. In voting Conservative in local elections in 2002 and 2006, and in such numbers for Boris Johnson in 2008, suburbanites (including the working class suburbanites of Dagenham, and other outer London council-built areas) are saying that they do not like the current state of their suburbs very much, and haven’t felt that Labour cares very much about it. While many suburban voters feel that they are losing what they initially found attractive in their communities, inner Londoners have often made a conscious choice to come to a place that fits their aspirations. This applies to the people who have come from all over the world to live and work in London, and for instance to the affluent...