Professor Tim Bale: The balance of advantage for the Conservatives has shifted. They would now be better off with PR.

On Saturday morning, the Today Programme brought together the Sun’s Tom Newton Dunn and the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee - a couple of journalists who don’t normally see eye-to-eye, to put UKIP’s stunning result in Thursday’s local elections into some kind of perspective.

One hare set running by presenter Evan Davis was a comparison with the SDP, which in the 1980s seemed to present as big a threat to Labour as some are now suggesting that UKIP presents to the Tories.  At first glance, the similarities seem spooky.  But it’s actually the differences that are most striking.

True, what Polly Toynbee called the ‘crushing effect’ of our first-past-the-post electoral system will likely see to it that UKIP burns bright but burns briefly, flaring then flickering, and finally flattering to deceive – in other words, exactly what happened to the Social Democrats.

True, too, that UKIP may end up helping to change the Conservative Party, just as the SDP helped change Labour.  But there’s the rub.

Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and David Owen (who also appeared earlier on the Today Programme) were serious, heavyweight politicians who knew what it was to govern.  Having tried and failed to drag their old party to its senses, they founded a new formation – not on its flank, but in the centre of the political spectrum. Nigel Farage (and this is of course part of his appeal as a populist outsider) has never been elected to parliament, let alone served in government.  And the party he leads, rather than helping to drag the Tories into the ideological space occupied by most voters, risks stranding them some way from where they need to be in order to win an overall majority in a plurality system.

As the discussion went on, Davis and Newton Dunn drew a second parallel between the SDP and UKIP, this time by recalling one of British electoral folklore’s classic canards, namely that Labour lost election after election in the 1980s because the left’s vote was split between it and its Social Democratic splinter.

This common wisdom relies on the assumption that all those voting for the SDP would otherwise have voted Labour had the Gang of Four never made their move.  In fact, many of those who plumped for the Social Democrats were people who may well have voted Tory but were put off by Margaret Thatcher and her policies.  Had it not been for Jenkins and co setting up shop in the centre, and given that Labour had put itself beyond the pale for all but its diehard core voters, they would either have voted for the Liberals – the other half of ‘the Alliance’ and the traditional repository for dissatisfied Tory voters – or would held their nose and voted Tory despite their misgivings about Maggie.  In short, had the SDP never existed, not only might Labour have taken even longer to get its act together but the Thatcher governments would have commanded even bigger Commons majorities than they did anyway.

When it comes to UKIP, however, Davis and Newton Dunn were on to something.  There really is a serious risk that Nigel Farage might split the right-wing vote in this country and therefore let Labour in on just over a third of the vote.  Davis was on to something, too, when he asked whether UKIP’s success should be seen as part of a wider populist phenomenon affecting many countries in Europe.  Put those two points together. and it soon becomes apparent that the Tories do indeed have a serious problem.

In Austria, in Denmark, in Italy and in the Netherlands, to name the obvious examples, centre-right parties have all found themselves leaking votes to their right.  However, because they operate in PR systems, those votes are translated into seats for radical right-wing populist parties (like the FPÖ and the BZÖ, the Danish People’s Party, the Northern League, the LPF and Geert Wilders’ PVV) which may then prove willing to help mainstream conservatives and Christian Democrats govern, either by joining them in coalition or supporting them as minority administrations.  In the UK, this can’t happen because the vast majority of votes that go to UKIP at the next general election probably won’t be converted into parliamentary seats, meaning they are, to all intents and purposes, wasted.

The only way that this can be avoided – the only way in other words that it makes sense to do what Tom Newton Dunn did on Saturday morning when he put the Conservative and UKIP votes together and made 48 per cent – is if we do away with first past the post and replace it with a fully proportional system.

If UKIP retains even a modicum of its momentum until the next general election, then even more British voters than usual will end up casting a ballot for a party that won’t be able to boast many or even any MPs.  That will only inflict further damage to a political system which is having enough trouble already convincing citizens that it is working on their behalf rather than on behalf of a privileged elite – a failure which has helped give rise to the populist critique that, in this country at least, UKIP has made its own.

We need to fix that system to take account of the fact that, for whatever reason, British voters are no longer content to stick with the two parties that first-past-the-post inherently favours.  The only way we can do that is to plump for PR – not the miserable little (and non-proportional) compromise that was AV, but a fully proportional system like the Mixed Member Proportional variant chosen by New Zealand in the 1990s and which was recently re-endorsed by them in a referendum.

One of today’s grandest political paradoxes, however, is that those most determined not to fix Britain’s broken electoral system are those who would most obviously benefit from that chance – a Conservative Party that hasn’t won an overall majority for a full twenty years and (unless Labour implodes) doesn’t look set to do so again any time soon.

Admitting this, however, is tantamount to admitting defeat.  Moreover, the Party has principled objections to change and knows from the AV referendum that the great British public seems to prefer the status quo.  As a result, first-past-the-post, rather like the Union with Scotland, looks set to remain a sacred cow that, even though it’s in their self-interest to do so, the Tories (in many ways admirably) simply won’t countenance slaughtering. 

Prof Tim Bale: Rachel Sylvester is wrong about Cameron's strategy in opposition and the reasons why he failed to win an outright victory in 2010

Tim Bale is Professor of Politics at Sussex University and is the author of The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron, an updated version of which was recently published in paperback.

Normally I'm more than happy to sneak a peek over the paywall to read Rachel Sylvester, but today I think she's got it wrong.

In her Times (£) column she suggests that the 'red-top grit' that Andy Coulson put into the 'red-Tory oyster...also muddied the water.  By persuading the Conservative leader to focus more on crime, immigration and Europe, Mr Coulson undermined the careful rebranding operation on which Mr Cameron had embarked. He kept traditionalists on side with ideas such as 'prison ships', he wooed the tabloids with policies on knife crime but he also frightened off swing voters - who are the key to electoral success - by playing the old Tory tunes.'

Leaving aside the idea that Philip Blond's ideas achieved quite as much traction with the Tory leadership as some seem to think, Ms Sylvester's take on things misreads both Cameron's strategy in opposition and the reasons why he was unable to win an outright victory in 2010.

When Andy Coulson was brought in to run the Conservative media operation in 2007, Cameron looked like he was in deep trouble.  Brown was bouncing and the Tories had been hit by 'grammarsgate', by an excruciatingly embarrassing by-election defeat, and by widespread criticism of Cameron's decision to fly off to Rwanda instead of staying in his flood-hit constituency.  As a result, there was a serious possibility that Labour might call - and win - a snap election. 

Cameron responded by using a number of high-profile violent crimes to talk tougher than he had done in his so-called 'hug-a-hoodie' phase about law and order.  He also entered the immigration debate for practically the first time, empathising with those who felt the public services their families relied on were coming under strain as a result of the numbers arriving in the country.  George Osborne responded by distancing the leadership from what he called 'uber-modernising' and by his Conference promise to cut inheritance tax.

Prof Tim Bale: Even Churchill considered an electoral pact with the Liberals in the 1950s

Tim Bale is Professor of Politics at Sussex University and is the author of The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron, an updated version of which is published in paperback this week.

It should come as no surprise that one of the Conservative Ministers most comfortable with seeing the Party’s relationship with the Lib Dems extended is Francis Maude.  It’s not simply because he can fairly claim to have been a Cameroon before Cameron.  It’s also because he was one of the first Tories in recent years fully to appreciate the fact that Britain’s third party has long been one of the biggest obstacles to the Conservatives winning or retaining power.  A brief look back through the Party’s post-war history suggests he was in good (indeed the best) company: anyone worried that David Cameron might yet do some sort of deal with the Lib Dems at the next election should read on.

In an article for the Telegraph, jointly authored with Stephen Dorrell, which appeared just days after the 2005 general election, Maude claimed that at the heart of the Party’s inability to overhaul the Blair government was ‘our failure to compete effectively with the Liberal Democrats for the anti-Labour vote.’  Instead of operating under the ‘self-serving delusion’ that the Lib Dems were nothing more than ‘a wish list in a woolly jumper, and that this view is widely shared by the voters’, the Conservative Party had to realise that ‘they have been more successful at expressing the aspirations of modern [and especially urban] Britain.’  Unless the Tories changed their tune and their tone it would be ‘impossible for us to substantiate our claim to be to be a national party’ and ‘impossible for the Conservatives to achieve a majority in the House of Commons.’

As it turned out, David Cameron’s campaign to effect that change of tune and tone, much of which – at least in its early stages – was presaged on the idea of ‘love bombing the Lib Dems’, failed to convince sufficient voters and the Conservatives fell short once again.  Unable to convert enough Lib Dem voters before the election, Cameron did the logical thing and effectively mopped them up after it by bringing his erstwhile opponents into coalition.  Whether the long term intention was finally to bring about the supposedly ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ Conservatism that Cameron had long talked about, or (in more Machiavellian style) to lure the Lib Dems into a fatal embrace that would see them so hopelessly compromised that they would lose support and eventually split, is a moot point.  What surely matters most is that, at last, something has been done to resolve a problem that has arguably, on several occasions in the post-war period, cost the Conservative Party Ten Downing Street.

Tim Bale: How the Conservative Party has made the journey from the political wilderness of the 1990s to being on the cusp of power once again

Dr Tim Bale is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sussex University and is the author of The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron, published this week by Polity Press.  He will be launching the book this Wednesday, 3rd February, at a public lecture and Q&A at the LSE which will be chaired by ConservativeHome’s Jonathan Isaby.

Devoted denizens of ConservativeHome could hardly be blamed if they preferred to file and forget a fair few of the twenty years that have elapsed since Margaret Thatcher’s departure from office, especially now that the Tories look set for a return to power.  But remembering what happened over the last two decades is important – if only, once they take office, to avoid repeating the mistakes which tipped the Conservative Party into opposition in the first place, as well to learn from the errors that trapped it there for so long.  After all, the seeds of the serial defeats inflicted by Tony Blair were sown several years before 1997, and the Party was to a very great extent the author of its own misfortunes in the years that followed.

Part of the problem under both Thatcher and Major was that the Tories began to believe their own propaganda.  Rather than realising that their electoral victories in 1983, 1987 and 1992 were contingent affairs – achieved through a combination of astute timing and a Labour opposition widely seen as incompetent and out of touch – Conservatives too eagerly bought into the myth that they had ‘won the battle of ideas’ and thereby won over a stodgily centrist country to the advantages of small-state neo-liberalism.  As a result, instead of offering a change of direction, the Party believed it could, under John Major, get away with offering a change of tone. 

In fact, by the early 1990s, polls were showing that public had got pretty much all they wanted from the Conservatives and were looking for a government that was going to invest more in health and education, not close coalmines, privatise the railways and the post office, and clamp down on spending.  Yet, rather than making for the politically more profitable centre before Labour finally got its act together, the Party – consumed by its own internal rows over Europe – seemed instead to head for the hills.

Tim Bale: The Scottish Tories are getting their act together

Tim Bale is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sussex University and his book, The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron, is due for publication early next year.

Judging from the discussions at a round table on the Scottish Conservatives held recently at the University of Strathclyde there seems to be widespread agreement that, after a difficult few years following the advent of the Scottish Parliament, the Tories are getting their act together.  The event that featured contributions from Jackson Carlaw MSP; Andrew Fulton, Chairman of the Scottish Conservative Party; David Torrance, author of We In Scotland – Thatcherism In A Cold Climate; and the academic, Professor James Mitchell.  The audience, brought together under the auspices of the UK Political Studies Association’s Conservatives and Conservatism specialist group also made it a lively affair.

There were all sorts of opinions expressed in a wide-ranging discussion, which means that absolutely none of the following should be seen as the product of some kind of consensus.  That said, most observers seem to think Annabel Goldie is providing good-humoured, sensible leadership and has brought a degree of stability to a party that, a few years ago anyway, was seen, rightly or wrongly, as a bit of a rabble.  She is relatively well-thought-of by the general public and events like the debates over the Scottish Government’s Budget suggest that there are a number of strong performers among the party’s MSPs.

The overall aim, though, has to be for the Scottish Conservatives to be respected as well as liked and to be seen to do well not simply because the party has exceeded low expectations.  This applies not only to voters, but to the UK leadership, which according to some reports, still fails to take the party north of the border sufficiently seriously.

Changing all that will also mean the Scottish Conservative Party being seen as an outfit with policies and ideas of its own, rather than one that reacts to the proposals of its more powerful opponents, even if those proposals do sometimes actually borrow from, or at least coincide with, policies which the Tories themselves have suggested or support.

Tim Bale is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sussex University and his book, The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron, is due for publication early next year.

Judging from the discussions at a round table on the Scottish Conservatives held recently at the University of Strathclyde there seems to be widespread agreement that, after a difficult few years following the advent of the Scottish Parliament, the Tories are getting their act together.  The event that featured contributions from Jackson Carlaw MSP; Andrew Fulton, Chairman of the Scottish Conservative Party; David Torrance, author of We In Scotland – Thatcherism In A Cold Climate; and the academic, Professor James Mitchell.  The audience, brought together under the auspices of the UK Political Studies Association’s Conservatives and Conservatism specialist group also made it a lively affair.

There were all sorts of opinions expressed in a wide-ranging discussion, which means that absolutely none of the following should be seen as the product of some kind of consensus.  That said, most observers seem to think Annabel Goldie is providing good-humoured, sensible leadership and has brought a degree of stability to a party that, a few years ago anyway, was seen, rightly or wrongly, as a bit of a rabble.  She is relatively well-thought-of by the general public and events like the debates over the Scottish Government’s Budget suggest that there are a number of strong performers among the party’s MSPs.

The overall aim, though, has to be for the Scottish Conservatives to be respected as well as liked and to be seen to do well not simply because the party has exceeded low expectations.  This applies not only to voters, but to the UK leadership, which according to some reports, still fails to take the party north of the border sufficiently seriously.

Changing all that will also mean the Scottish Conservative Party being seen as an outfit with policies and ideas of its own, rather than one that reacts to the proposals of its more powerful opponents, even if those proposals do sometimes actually borrow from, or at least coincide with, policies which the Tories themselves have suggested or support.

Tim Bale: Passing the Wednesday-Friday Test

Tim Bale teaches politics at Sussex University and is writing a book on the Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron. Here he looks at the tension between the "politics of power" and the "politics of support" for the Conservatives.

David Cameron must already rank as one of the most skillful leaders of the opposition this country has ever seen. In this respect at least, he truly is the heir to Blair.  But government, as Blair himself soon discovered, is a little more difficult.  The politics of support is one thing; the politics of power is another. The essence of statecraft is to reconcile and, ideally, to integrate them.   

As far as the electorate are concerned, ‘position politics’, structured by disagreements about ends, is giving way to ‘valence politics’ where the disputes revolve mainly around means.  Because of this shift from the politics of either-or to the politics of more-or-less, policies need more than ever to pass the ‘Wednesday-Friday test’.  They have to be eye-catching enough to attract attention right up to the day before an election yet feasible enough to begin being implemented the day after.

Meeting this need by creating a radical, comprehensive blueprint for government, however, can mean you end up over-prepared and under-prioritised, just as Heath was in 1970.  In any case, if one of your themes is to trust the professionals, leaving a little leeway for civil servants to interpret your ideas isn’t a bad way to get them on-side.

Tim Bale: Do the Tories have a 'Plan B' if Labour do oust Gordon?

Tim Bale teaches politics at Sussex University and is writing a book on the Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron.

I'm not alone in thinking Eastbourne by-election did for Margaret Thatcher, though I may of course be biased.  Having grown up there, it's nice to think my home town might be a footnote in history, not just the butt of jokes about God's Waiting Room.  Who knows?  Perhaps there's a budding political scientist in Crewe and Nantwich ecstatic that it's finally on the map for something other than, 'well, alright, I confess, I'm not sure what those twin-towns are famous for.'

The question is, will Eastbourne and Crewe have anything else in common after this morning?  Looking back on it, losing the jewel of the Costa Geriatrica turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the Conservative Party, at least in so far as it was spurred on to ditch its leader in time to save its bacon at the next election.

Whether it might in hindsight have been better to stick with Mrs Thatcher and thus go down to a glorious defeat which would have handed Neil Kinnock the poisoned chalice that became Black Wednesday is another argument entirely.  The fact is that, at the time, the Government was saved by the swift removal of a Prime Minister who by then was plumbing hitherto uncharted depths of unpopularity.

Tim Bale: The problem of party change

Tim Bale teaches politics at Sussex University and is writing a book on the Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron.  Here he analyses David Cameron's challenges in changing the party, a topic he will be speaking on at this weekend's Political Studies Association conference.

So it looks like the polls, and therefore the party, are back on track after something of an anxious summer.  The ‘Brown bounce’ may well be over, its demise apparently hastened by David Cameron’s end of summer ‘fightback’ – a much-welcomed move back on to traditional Tory territory like crime, immigration and Europe, albeit with enough mentions of the ‘broken society’ and ‘three-dimensional approaches’ to keep advocates of the ‘And Theory’ happy.

Conservatives should be able to go back to school with a spring in their steps, the alarming prospect of an autumn election a distant, even an amusing memory.  Roll on the government’s mounting inner turmoil over Europe, the impact of a global credit crunch feeding into the real economy, and whole host of as yet unforeseen but surely inevitable calamities which will make it clearer than ever that, at last, it really is time for a change.  After a bit of a wobble, we might, it seems, be talking not about if the party takes office, but when.

But hang on.  Can it – will it – really be that easy?  Probably not.

Dr Tim Bale: Lessons from Sweden

Tim Bale returned to the UK in 2003 after five years working in New Zealand in order to teach politics at Sussex University.  He specialises in British and comparative party politics.

Because of the linguistic, cultural and media ties we share with the US, and with countries like Australia, Canada and New Zealand, people in British politics tend to take their shining examples - or their dire warnings - from those countries rather than places closer to home.  Conservatives, for obvious reasons, are arguably particularly prone to learn their lessons from that small Anglo-Saxon sample rather than from fellow European countries.

That’s a pity because the continentals, even those that labour under the PR systems that are obviously anathema to most Tories, can sometimes teach us a thing or two.

For instance, how can an ailing centre-right make it back into power even against a centre-left that appears to doing most things right as far as voters are (or are supposed to be) concerned, namely running a reasonable economy and demonstrating general (if not total) competence in other areas of government?

Sweden is clearly a case in point in this respect.  Notwithstanding the fact that unemployment in the country is probably higher than official figures suggest, the Social Democratic government that lost power at the weekend was hardly a disaster: multiculturalism and migration issues may have been bubbling under, but growth was good, the welfare system nowhere near meltdown and there were no great signs of a tax revolt among a population whose middle classes pay a lot but also get a lot in return.

Tim Bale: PR Man? Why David Cameron might want to think about electoral reform

Tim Bale returned to the UK in 2003 after five years working in New Zealand in order to teach politics at Sussex University.  He specialises in British and comparative party politics.

David Cameron’s first few months at the helm suggest he is far from being ‘all spin and no substance’.  Distracting policies have been ditched, fresh faces introduced, commissions set up - all in order to demonstrate a new determination to fight Labour on the so-called centre ground.

It’s funny to think that before Blackpool some were suggesting the Tories not only needed a new leader but also some kind of ‘Clause Four moment’ in order to truly signal change.  Surely Dave is doing fine without one, right?  In fact, if the post May 5 hyperbole is to be believed, Tony (or should that be Gordon?) may as well hand him the keys to Downing Street right now and save us all the bother.

But perhaps we all need to calm down a little.  Sure, there are signs that Cameron could be the kind of Conservative leader that voters finally feel able to trust.  But the polling still suggests that he has some way to go to emulate Blair in 1994 and convince them that the party he leads has really changed.

And then there are the electoral technicalities.  Put bluntly, the Tories’ problem may not be simply what they’re trying to sell, but also the rigged market they are trying to sell it into. Their current edge would give them plenty of votes but not enough seats.

How much longer, then, will they go on supporting an electoral system that risks becoming, in effect, a self-denying ordinance?  While few Conservatives would relish the prospect of joining the high-minded moaning of the centre-left chattering classes, the time may have come to think seriously about electoral reform.

A more proportional system, after all, would increase the chance of converting Conservative votes into Conservative seats, as well as meaning that the party - like its continental counterparts - could form governments with around a third of the votes if necessary.   This may be distasteful - especially to those already preparing to trot out the tired ‘Italy and Israel’ critique.  But we may arrive at such a necessity sooner than we think.

The next election may well take us into hung parliament territory with the Conservatives as the biggest party.  Unless a semi-victorious Mr Cameron is prepared to test voters’ patience and precipitate fresh elections, he may have to do a deal with the LibDems, the price of which would presumably include PR.  Better perhaps to go into an election which may very well result in such a scenario having thought through the options in advance and pledged oneself - in apparently principled fashion -  to the one that seems to make the most sense, rather than appear to be dragged kicking and screaming into a cynical stitch-up. 

Just as importantly, pushing PR may not provide David Cameron with a fully-fledged ‘Clause Four moment’ but, given the Tories’ lack of similarly sacred cows, what better, bolder - and smarter - way to show that the party really has changed its tune?  Electoral reform may not be an argument many Conservatives want to have, but it may be worth having - and sooner rather than later.

This is an edited version of ‘PR Man? Cameron’s Conservatives and the symbolic politics of Electoral Reform’, published recently in the Political Quarterly.  Email Tim Bale if you would like a full copy of the PQ piece.