European Elections Ahoy!

Yes, now just becoming visible on the horizon are the June European Elections, and an early poll by YouGov, commissioned by the Tax-Payers' Alliance and the Euro-sceptic pressure group Global Vision, has produced interesting results on voting intentions for the European Parliament. It was fairly large poll of over 2,000 people.

These headline "voting intention" results are presented here in order of decreasing poll share, with the actual vote percentages from last time (2004) in brackets:

• Conservatives 35% (26.7% in 2004)
• Labour 29% (22.6% in 2004)
• Liberal Democrats 15% (14.9% in 2004)
• UKIP 7% (16.1% in 2004)
• Greens 5% (6.3% in 2004)
• BNP 4% (4.9% in 2004)

(My thanks to ConservativeHome for providing these figures.)

One might have expected a better result for UKIP, whose leader — Nigel Farage — has done so much to make the party more visible and seemingly relevant. UKIP members and supporters at ConHome and on their own 'blogs are trying to spin this in their own way to suggest that (to quote one of them) "the sky's the limit" in anticipation of securing the support of untold numbers of disaffected anti-EU Conservative voters.

In reality this doesn't seem likely, as the poll should surely have this covered, at least approximately. It doesn't seem feasible that it would be a long way from the actuality; so unless UKIP find a way to attract those votes, they seem unlikely to do well at all. They won't just drop in their lap in most cases — some, yes; though most of those are probably already represented within the 7% UKIP poll result above.

In practice, there will be a very noticeable effect all round if Gordon Brown called a General Election for the same date; but that would tend to reduce the voting for the smaller parties, rather than increase their vote share. Informed thinking seems to indicate that UKIP would then lose most if not all of their seats in Europe. I think that would be unhelpful, so it would be better for Britain if the General Election were not to be held this coming June.

It is good to note from a Sunday Telegraph article on this result that almost two-thirds of those polled want Britain to either loosen its ties to the European Union (48%) or pull out altogether (16%). This is a healthy sign, telling us that the British public have by now largely woken up to at least some of the dangers that the EU represents to British interests and sovereignty. As with all entities with a lot of "mass", it takes a lot of effort and a fair amount of time to make course adjustments, as any captain of a large seagoing craft will readily acknowledge...

For the Conservatives there are still going to be concerns, though, especially the news that 10% of their votes could go to UKIP, which could affect the more marginal seats (not so critical in European elections, owing to the regional nature of the constituencies, but still of some importance) so Team cameron needs to do so work on this. First and foremost, the Conservatives must face up to this issue and keep hammering their key messages on EU membership, the Lisbon Treaty, and their own Group's affiliations within the Parliament.

They have been widely perceived at non-committal, fudging, and largely avoiding the whole issue. Although this is an unfair assessment, they could have done with being more up-front and persistent about these issues, and should certainly have achieved something concrete regarding the last of those three topics by now — the Group affiliation question. That seems to be taking forever, for some reason that is not exactly clear in the public's minds, and the only reason it isn't a bigger issue in the news is that most of those minds have no real understanding (or perhaps even awareness) of what it is all about and its significance.

Even so, the public perception is that the Conservatives are rarely in the news regarding any aspect of the European side of things, and that has to change very soon and consistently from then on. Then we can hope to get a sensible outcome from the June elections, with strengthened Conservative membership, a small but useful UKIP presence, and a reduced Labour, LibDem and Green presence. Hopefully there will remain no BNP membership.

That would be just about the best result for which anyone in Britain could hope.

UPDATE: Here is UK Polling Report's take on this poll and what it would mean in practice.