No PR for EU Elections

[LDCaerdydd]

Imagine the 1999 EU elections were still held under FPTP. Nigel Farage Jeffery Titford and Michael Holmes certainly wouldn’t have been elected.

The HoC Library estimated that if the 1999 election was conducted under FPTP the following would have been the result:

Con – 49 seats
Lab – 30
SNP – 3
PC – 2

LD, UKIP and Greens all on zero.

If the 2004 elections were fought under FPTP where UKIP won 12 (up 9) seats under PR – would any of the old FPTP constituencies have retuned a UKIP member in 2004, ditto in 2009?

UKIP undoubtedly were boosted in 2004 by the proposed Lisbon Treaty but would they have had the coverage and exposure during the campaign if they didn’t have sitting MEPs?

If UKIP were still a tiny fringe party on the edge of nowhere (scoring similar vote shares and representation to the Greens) Cameron wouldn’t have pledged to hold a referendum.

Discuss.

[Pete Whitehead]

Cornwall & Plymouth and Derbyshire in 2004 (assuming votes cast the same way - Derbyshire is down to the Kilroy-Silk vote in the East Midlands

[Pete Whitehead]

But yes what you say is true. It's ironic because the PR system was imposed on us by the EU, but without it UKIP would not have flourished

[Deleted]

Cameron was certainly worried by the pressure from UKIP (though note that their major breakthrough in local elections came in 2013, after the referendum pledge).

But he would still have had substantial internal pressure from the Conservative Party. Indeed it would likely have been more acute as there would have been no UKIP "safety valve" and more anti-Europeans would have stayed and fought for their cause in the Tories, with ramifications for parliamentary selections etc.

Alternatively, UKIP adopts different tactics from the outset - in reality they were highly dependent on national media coverage for any success they had and notably only made a local breakthrough very late in their (influential) life - in an alternative scenario they take the more traditional fringe party approach of targeting specific local areas (I guess in their case the likes of southern Essex, Lincolnshire etc), build up a local base and use that as their springboard. It would of course require a membership which was particularly engaged in local campaigning which afaict (perhaps with the partial exception of the 2013-16 period) they never were.

So I think the likeliest counterfactual is (i) UKIP still grows, but more sporadically and in more geographically concentrated areas, never attaining the kind of totemic influence they secured in reality, but getting a national profile on a par with say the Greens; (ii) internal pressure from within the Conservative party for a referendum is even more intense and effectively replaces the "UKIP effect" as an influencer on Cameron, and he ends up committing to a referendum anyway. Or perhaps option (iii) - the cumulative increased internal Eurosceptic pressure means Cameron feels obliged to commit to an in-out referendum much earlier - perhaps even during his leadership campaign.

[lennon]

Jun 12, 2018 13:00:30 GMT @strinity said:

Cameron was certainly worried by the pressure from UKIP (though note that their major breakthrough in local elections came in 2013, after the referendum pledge).

But he would still have had substantial internal pressure from the Conservative Party. Indeed it would likely have been more acute as there would have been no UKIP "safety valve" and more anti-Europeans would have stayed and fought for their cause in the Tories, with ramifications for parliamentary selections etc.

Alternatively, UKIP adopts different tactics from the outset - in reality they were highly dependent on national media coverage for any success they had and notably only made a local breakthrough very late in their (influential) life - in an alternative scenario they take the more traditional fringe party approach of targeting specific local areas (I guess in their case the likes of southern Essex, Lincolnshire etc), build up a local base and use that as their springboard. It would of course require a membership which was particularly engaged in local campaigning which afaict (perhaps with the partial exception of the 2013-16 period) they never were.

So I think the likeliest counterfactual is (i) UKIP still grows, but more sporadically and in more geographically concentrated areas, never attaining the kind of totemic influence they secured in reality, but getting a national profile on a par with say the Greens; (ii) internal pressure from within the Conservative party for a referendum is even more intense and effectively replaces the "UKIP effect" as an influencer on Cameron, and he ends up committing to a referendum anyway. Or perhaps option (iii) - the cumulative increased internal Eurosceptic pressure means Cameron feels obliged to commit to an in-out referendum much earlier - perhaps even during his leadership campaign.

Or potentially - given the "UKIP effect" within the Tory party - Cameron loses to David Davis.

[catking]

Jun 12, 2018 13:47:35 GMT lennon said:

Jun 12, 2018 13:00:30 GMT @strinity said:

Cameron was certainly worried by the pressure from UKIP (though note that their major breakthrough in local elections came in 2013, after the referendum pledge).

But he would still have had substantial internal pressure from the Conservative Party. Indeed it would likely have been more acute as there would have been no UKIP "safety valve" and more anti-Europeans would have stayed and fought for their cause in the Tories, with ramifications for parliamentary selections etc.

Alternatively, UKIP adopts different tactics from the outset - in reality they were highly dependent on national media coverage for any success they had and notably only made a local breakthrough very late in their (influential) life - in an alternative scenario they take the more traditional fringe party approach of targeting specific local areas (I guess in their case the likes of southern Essex, Lincolnshire etc), build up a local base and use that as their springboard. It would of course require a membership which was particularly engaged in local campaigning which afaict (perhaps with the partial exception of the 2013-16 period) they never were.

So I think the likeliest counterfactual is (i) UKIP still grows, but more sporadically and in more geographically concentrated areas, never attaining the kind of totemic influence they secured in reality, but getting a national profile on a par with say the Greens; (ii) internal pressure from within the Conservative party for a referendum is even more intense and effectively replaces the "UKIP effect" as an influencer on Cameron, and he ends up committing to a referendum anyway. Or perhaps option (iii) - the cumulative increased internal Eurosceptic pressure means Cameron feels obliged to commit to an in-out referendum much earlier - perhaps even during his leadership campaign.

Or potentially - given the "UKIP effect" within the Tory party - Cameron loses to David Davis.

Unlikely. It is worth remembering that Cameron ran on the more Eurosceptic platform in 2005, copying Fox's pledge to withdraw from the EPP. A pledge Davis never made.

I think the reality is that if UKIP hadn't have broken through thanks to PR, the pressure would still have been strong enough in the Tory Party to still force a referendum. Maybe earlier. Maybe later. But we didn't stumble into an EU Referendum by the fluke of PR European Parliament elections.

[greenchristian]

Without MEPs UKIP doesn't get treated seriously by the media and Farage doesn't gain celebrity status. Leading to various consequences discussed above.

Without MEPs, the Greens also get less media exposure, but the impact on our fortunes isn't as bad, due to the fact that this was the point where we started learning how to effectively target at council level, and we would still have won seats in the Scottish Parliament and London Assembly. This means that we fairly easily take and retain the status of being England's fourth party from the early 2000s onwards. Caroline Lucas would have been significantly less prominent within the party, as she remains an Oxford councillor, and never gets the experience she did in Brussels. It's not quite as certain that we'd win Brighton Pavilion in 2010 without the benefit of her increased media profile (and our candidate there might have been local boy Keith Taylor, as it had been in the previous two elections). But it's certainly not impossible, given the base we'd built up there.