How parties compete (1)

This is the first of three chapters that considers how modern parties compete for votes and office. Since most formal models of party competition are based on the strategic use of ideological appeals to electors, it concentrates on describing the ideological stances of the parties in Britain: the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Labour, Greens, UKIP, and the Brexit Party/Reform UK are all covered. (The SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the major parties of Northern Ireland are covered in the course of Chapter 1’s discussion of devolved party systems.) This chapter concludes with a two-dimensional map summarizing the main ideological traditions found in British party politics today.

Party Strength of Regionalist Parties of United Kingdom: Conceptualisation and Measuring

The article conceptualizes the concept of party strength and the measurement of its two quantitative elements (electoral and institutional) by example of four United Kingdom regionalist parties: Scottish National Party, Democratic Unionist Party, Sinn Fein and Plaid Cymru. Based on the analysis of the main theoretical approaches to party strength, the article proposes a method for its measurement, which can be used to measure and evaluate regionalism through the strength of regionalist parties in different political and institutional contexts. Comparing the levels of electoral and institutional party strength allows to highlight several tendencies: growth in electoral strength of UK regionalist parties during 2010s is noted, with stabilization of the institutional party strength; and the gap in the levels of institutional strength of the regionalist parties does not reflect the difference in the level of electoral strength. At the same time, the article mentions the challenges to assessing the strength of regionalist parties, namely, the need for detailed conceptualization of the qualitative characteristics of the party strength and the lack of analysis of the communicative and organizational elements of party strength.

Politics and Devolution in Scotland and Wales, 1999–2007

This chapter analyses Scotland and Wales, addressing developments in Scottish politics, the move to further reform of the devolution settlement in Wales in 2006 and the significance of the 2007 elections in both countries. It reconsiders the nature of the territorial strains in Scotland and Wales, the power politics of seeking to gain power and guide devolution in each country. It addresses the approaches of the devolved governments and the UK Labour government in each case to ensure they achieved what they wanted. The chapter explores the extent to which the neo-Bulpittian propositions hold in the practice of devolution. In Wales, there was an opportunity to ensure the constitutional process behind the 2006 Act was more successful in achieving support across the political class than had been the case with the Government of Wales Act 1998. In the second set of elections in 2007, the Scottish National Party (SNP) emerged to form a minority government in Scotland; in Wales, Labour's hold slipped and Plaid Cymru became a coalition partner. The chapter readdresses the sources of the 2007 emergence to power of those who Bulpitt would have called the genuine peripheral dissidents more in terms of an analysis of the effectiveness or not of political management after 1999. It also reassesses the significance of the 2007 election results in practice to local elite assimilation.

‘The Fair Claims of Wales’

Nationalist unionism was not confined to Scotland. This chapter extends the book’s analysis to Wales, where the three unionist parties – Liberal, Labour and Conservative – had also deployed nationalist arguments and language in order to maintain Wales as part of the United Kingdom. As in Scotland, the originators of this approach were the Liberals, although one wing of the Labour Party in Wales was also nationalist in mindset as was, to a more modest degree, the Conservative Party, particularly in the 1950s and 2010s, when calculated appeals were made to Welsh traditions such as its distinct language. In contrast to Scotland after power was devolved in 1999, the Welsh Labour Party managed to maintain control of this ‘nationalist unionism’ while Plaid Cymru (which advocated greater autonomy) languished.

A miner cause?

If twentieth century politics in Wales has largely been defined by class, and therefore along the typical cleavage of Labour versus Conservative; it is nevertheless true that for a significant proportion of Welsh activists and voters, the cleavage is between nation and union (identifiable with the British state). Closely identified with Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, a political manifestation of the Welsh nation was a direct inheritance from nineteenth-century liberalism and its persistence for much of the postwar period was a result of the persistence of that form of politics. But there was an alternative form of left nationalism that emerged through the Communist Party of Great Britain, which this chapter focuses its attention on. Beginning in the 1930s, and spanning almost the entire life of the party thereafter, communists engaged with and developed ideas about nationalism, nationhood and national liberation. This chapter considers the development of these ideas and argues that rather than Plaid Cymru, it was the Communist Party of Great Britain that enabled the persistence of left-nationalist thought and action after 1945 and that it was, to a large extent, communist activists who were the most consistently nationalist in that period.