Since 2010 the Government has been more popular than Labour

In 2010 something quite remarkable happened.

Two parties came together, they claimed in the national interest (although some would of course dispute that motive) to form a coalition in order to govern the country for the next 5 years.

It has been difficult for the Conservatives and Lib Dems. They haven't always agreed and there have been at time bitter arguments between them. However they have managed to remain in government together and nobody now seriously thinks that they will not last another year until polling day on May 7th 2015.

In the meantime, the Labour opposition have tried to find different ways to position themselves against the government. They have been quite inventive in this. They have referred to it as a "Tory led government" as they clearly think this is a good attack line. They have at times accused the Lib Dems of "betraying" their voters and also implied that this government has no mandate as nobody specifically elected the coalition. They have questioned the motives of ministers of both parties in the way they have implemented the cuts, claiming they are "ideological". They have berated the government for being heartless, out of touch, in the pocket of millionaires and many, many, many other such attacks.

This has been rather effective. Look:

Labour climbed ahead of the Tories in the polls a few months after the 2010 general election and apart from a slight blip a year or so later when the Tories briefly overtook them they have basically stayed ahead. The Lib Dems slid down to around 10% and have bumped around at that level ever since.

Surely based on this Labour is winning the argument and the public would prefer Labour then?

Well not quite actually. Look:

If we combine the totals of both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, (i.e. the two parties of government) then that combined total has largely been ahead of Labour. There's a bit of crossover around the time and for a while after the "Omnishambles" budget of 2012. But for the majority of the time and certainly quite recently the "government" total has been ahead.

Of course the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are two separate parties. They won't be merging or standing on joint tickets, or even going for some sort of "coupon" agreement next year. They will stand separately. But Labour consistently attacks and berated the entire government. The pejorative term "ConDem" government is used to great effect in their campaigning. So if they are going to attack the entire government it is only fair to look at the figures in that context. And that shows us that despite the fact that for 4 years the government has had to make swingeing cuts and has launched unpopular reforms in all sorts of areas, they are still more popular than the Labour opposition.

If I was a Labour politician or activist I'd be very worried about this.

The real lessons from the 2010 coalition negotiations

I've just finished reading Andrew Adonis’s 5 Days in May: The Coalition and Beyond and it has given me food for thought both about how the 2010 coalition negotiations proceeded and what lessons we might learn for any potential future coalition discussions.

Having already read David Laws’s 22 Days in May and Rob Wilson’s 5 Days to Power and having watched various radio and TV programmes about the 2010 negotiations, I already had a reasonable idea about how they went. But it was interesting to get a Labour perspective on the talks.

The fairly settled view from Lib Dems is that Labour were unprepared for discussions and some members of their negotiating team and parliamentary party seemed to be mentally ready for opposition, rather than seriously trying to make the necessary compromises to stay in power.

One figure, however, in all the accounts that I have seen, heard and read, who clearly did want to try and make the negotiations work was Gordon Brown. There is no doubt in my mind that he really did want to see a Lab-Lib coalition. Unfortunately, because he had not properly prepared the ground for any such discussions, having been so used both as Chancellor and PM to working majorities, he was destined to fail. The passion with which Brown tried to make the discussions with the Lib Dems work comes across in Adonis’s book as almost tragic, but given how much we already know about what a tribalist was, he cuts a contradictory figure, desperately trying to convince Nick Clegg of how a radical Labour-Lib Dem coalition could deliver.

A telling vignette from 5 Days in May is how Peter Mandelson, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls all discussed with Adonis how they had never come across Andrew Stunell before and did not know who he was. He had been Lib Dem MP for Hazel Grove since 1997 and a frontbench spokesperson for almost all of that time. This demonstrates a shocking level of engagement by Labour with the party that they were supposedly attempting, in good faith, to form a government with.

An important theme from the Adonis book is that of how the question of 'the numbers' seemed to be eminently solvable in the view of Brown and some other senior Labour people. Despite the fact that Labour only had 258 seats and the Lib Dems 57 (so a total of 315 vs the Tories' 306, with a majority requiring 326) Brown was convinced that most of the minor parties would fall into line. I’m not sure if I would describe this as wishful thinking or self-delusion but the idea that a 'rainbow coalition' or even a minority coalition that took the votes of the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Caroline Lucas, the SDLP and the DUP all pretty much for granted would have been plain sailing, and was somehow an obvious and equal choice to the stability of a solid working majority with the Conservatives, is optimistic in the extreme.

It also suggested to me a level of arrogance, perhaps fostered by 13 years in government, within senior Labour ranks that the minor parties would come to heel. The Lib Dems were doing the responsible thing in not assuming that all these smaller parties would stay in line and instead considering that any deal with Labour would be on the basis of a minority government which would have been very difficult to control. This was not least because a number of Labour MPs spent the five days of the coalition negotiations making it clear that there were things they would not agree to or vote for. So far from Brown being sure of being able to deliver his 258 MPs, it was far more likely that the total would regularly fall short of that depending on which issue the vote was on.

A good example of this is how during the first formal discussion with the Labour team, Adonis highlighted how Labour was open to a proportional representation option being on the AV ballot paper. But I know from my own personal discussions at the time that Labour MP Tom Harris would never have voted for a bill that included a PR option in the referendum. He told me categorically. It was also clear to me that he was not alone in this respect and there were a number of Labour MPs who would also have defied party whips to defeat this. Labour was negotiating on something it would never have been able to deliver on.

So what lessons can we draw from the various accounts of the 2010 coalition negotiations? I would say the most important thing is preparation. Both the Lib Dems and the Conservatives wargamed a number of scenarios before the 2010 election. They approached coalition negotiations professionally and with the clear purpose of forming a stable government that could last for a whole parliament. Contrast this with Labour, which didn't even start seriously planning for coalition until after the result was announced. And it made a big difference. The Lib Dems did not take Labour as seriously as the Conservatives as potential partners, not for ideological reasons (as Adonis seems convinced of), but primarily because the reds had not done the basic groundwork. So the key lesson from 2010 for Labour is to be open to the possibility that there will be a hung parliament in 2015, long before it actually happens, and to plan, war-game and prepare in advance for this outcome. Even just making sure the basics, such as having enough backchannel communication between key players. Happily, there are signs that Ed Miliband gets this now and is preparing the ground for just such an eventuality.

Another important factor is to be realistic about what can be achieved. Brown's offer of PR on the AV referendum ballot simply could not have been delivered by him in the circumstances he found himself in. Indeed the numbers made any alliance at all very tricky. If the maths makes things difficult, parties should be open about this. That is the only way that good faith can be maintained.

The final lesson to draw for now is more related to how the current coalition has played out. The Lib Dems have been reasonably disciplined in keeping their troops in line and ensuring that most items from the coalition agreement have gone through, even when, as in the case of tuition fees, they have gone directly against what the party wanted. Whatever you may think of the individual policies, this has been done in the name of coalition cohesion. By contrast, the Conservative backbenches have been much more restive and have forced defeats on measures such as Lords reform in defiance of their party leadership.

The various processes that the Lib Dems had (and have) in place to facilitate buy-in from the parliamentary and wider membership were seen by both Labour and Conservatives in 2010 as somewhat eccentric. Indeed, one of the reasons Brown found it so hard to get hold of Clegg on several occasions during the five days is because the Lib Dem leader was in one meeting or another keeping colleagues closely informed of what was happening and consulting them. But it is hard to argue that the legitimacy those processes conferred on the coalition from a Lib Dem perspective is anything other than a very good thing. I was one of the party members who voted in the special conference convened towards the end of May 2010 and it certainly gave me a feeling of ownership which has been sorely tested over the last three years. It is not a panacea and we enter a grey area when measures that were never in the coalition agreement are legislated on, sometimes to the chagrin of myself and my fellow party members. But a complete lack of any such process within the Conservative Party has led to a widespread feeling amongs its members, both in parliament and more widely, of a lack of legitimacy in the current coalition.

There was no modern precedent on which the parties could draw three years ago and they were, to an extent, flying blind. But in 2015, should such discussions become necessary, that will not be the case. All parties should learn the lessons from those five heady days in May 2010.


This piece was first published online in The New Statesman.


We discussed the Adonis book and the lessons for future negotiations on this week's House of Comments Podcast which guest starred Hopi Sen.

After Eastleigh UKIP are a serious threat

It's typical of the mainstream press as they have done since Mike Thornton's victory in Eastleigh on Thursday to focus on the fact that UKIP came second and the Conservatives came third. You'd hardly know that the Lib Dem candidate had won judging from the front page coverage since then.

It goes without saying that I am very pleased Mike won. He fought a good campaign and I was one of the thousands of activists who poured into the constituency to help him. It is a deserved victory.

However we should not get over excited. Mike got 32% of the vote which in some elections would not be enough to win. One of the main reasons this was sufficient to claim victory this time is because of the large vote that UKIP got: 28%. With the Conservatives getting 25% this made it a three way marginal.

After Eastleigh the political establishment and activists need to start taking UKIP much more seriously. I have seen some comment about how there are no prizes for second place and highlighting that the fact that they have few councillors and have never had an MP.

I think there is a real risk of complacency here. The party was only founded less than 20 years ago and already it has 11 MEPs. In our first past the post electoral system for Westminster it is almost impossible for an upstart party to break through. That's how it is designed, to make the barrier to entry so high that the status quo is maintained. And yet UKIP came within 4 percentage points of having just one of those breakthroughs.

The consequences of this will reverberate through our body politic for a long time. Most importantly UKIP are now no longer a fringe party. To come so close in a key by-election (perhaps the most important one for a decade or more) will linger in the memory. The next time UKIP are fighting somewhere and the other parties try to squeeze their vote by saying they "cannot win" it will not gain as much traction. They very nearly did win in Eastleigh and people know it.

It is also very interesting to note that one of the key aspects of how they fought this by-election was to focus on local issues. For a long time they have only really been associated with EU withdrawal, reducing immigration and one or two other key national policies. But as Lib Dems we know that it is local that can often win the day. UKIP are learning that lesson focusing on things like plans for an incinerator. It is a sign that they are maturing as a political party. As Lib Dems we cannot complain about this, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It also means that if they continue with this pattern they are likely to be much more competitive at a council level where they are currently very weak. They could now quite quickly start to build up a more substantial local elected base perhaps starting with the May elections this year.

My final point to note is that they managed to achieve their close run second place with a candidate that nobody had heard of. When Nigel Farage announced his intention not to stand, in the back of my mind I thought that UKIP were not taking the election very seriously. After all Farage had stood in the by-election there in 1994 and he seemed like an obvious choice. But instead they went for Diane James who was from outside the constituency and had no national profile at all. It turned out that she is an excellent campaigner who impressed a number of Lib Dems I have spoken to (not about her policies of course but about her campaigning techniques). This is important because for UKIP to be a credible party they cannot be a one man band. Too often in the past it has seemed like Farage is really their only visible member. Having good candidates like Diane who now does have a national profile is vital if they are going to achieve their long awaited breakthrough.

I have confidence that the Lib Dems can take on UKIP and win the argument where they are challenging us. But we need to stop seeing them as a fringe also-ran party in domestic elections. Eastleigh has put paid to that notion.

UKIP are a serious threat. We need to treat that threat with the respect it deserves.

Tory MP admits Lords commitment was a fudge

I was listening to the podcast of last week's Radio 4's Week in Westminster the other day and I was somewhat taken aback by the candour of Conservative backbencher Andrew Turner when he was questioned by Fraser Nelson about Lords reform:

Fraser Nelson: Andrew, as far as you're concerned the House of Lords thing was intended as a fudge. To bring forward proposals and then to drop them. So it was intended as a fig leaf to the Lib Dems but not to do any more and that is as far as your understanding what David Cameron intended all along?
Andrew Turner: I'm sure it isn't what David Cameron intended but I would certainly read it that way and I can understand why many others can read it that way.

This is pretty shameless stuff. He is saying that he and a substantial proportion of his colleagues viewed their manifesto commitment on Lords reform as a sop to Lib Dems in case of a hung parliment but that they never actually intended to do anything about it. What is the point of manifestos if they are simply going to be used as a political tool like this?*


It was also very telling that at the start of the interview, Turner also said that he didn't consider himself and his colleagues who are planning to vote against the reform bill rebels. When pressed on this in the end he did concede the point but he clearly thinks that he is representing the "true view" of the Tories on this.


I have to ask, if Andrew Turner feels so strongly about this, why did he stand as a Conservative candidate at the last election at all? There was nothing stopping him joining another party or even standing as an independent "Tories for unelected privilege" candidate.




*I am well aware that there will be some thinking it's a bit rich for me to be talking about sticking to manifesto commitments when the Lib Dems have gone back on a number of theirs but they had to compromise to form a coalition. Lords reform was in both manifestos. No compromise on this was needed!

The government thrashed the opposition on Thursday

What a strange title for a blog post you are thinking (yes, I am arrogant enough to assume I know your thoughts by the way). Surely it was a triumphant day for the Labour opposition in the local elections last Thursday and the Conservative and Lib Dem parties are licking their wounds?

Well that depends how you look at it. Yes, the Conservative party's share of the vote was only 31%. And the Lib Dems did as poorly as last year during the local elections and only ended up with 16% of the vote. Labour got 38% and are very pleased with their performance.

But let's take a couple of steps back here. For the last 2 years, Labour have done all they can to paint "the government" as being regressive and ideologically driven to implement the cuts agenda. They have berated "the government" as unfair to the poor and out of touch with ordinary people's lives.

That's right I hear you say (I'm doing it again), Labour have done that and they've done a good job hence your extremely poor showing last week you Lib Dem loser (I'm still doing you talking to me in case you're losing track).

But it strikes me that two different yardsticks are being used here. When Labour want to attack the government they attack it collectively. No quarter is given. No dispensation for the possibility for example that the Lib Dems might have to compromise in any way. No, they are fully complicit in every decision and hence fully culpable. And yet when it comes to the elections, Labour suddenly separate out the Tory and Lib Dem vote. But if we apply the same criteria as Labour normally do, lumping the governing parties together then suddenly the story is very different. In the middle of a parliament, with the government implementing the biggest cuts in several generations and having just tipped back into a recession the governing parties between them got 47% of the vote. The Labour opposition got just 38% of the vote.

Now just hang on a minute you say sharply (a bit too sharply for my liking to be honest), the Lib Dems are always going on about how they are a separate party. Yes indeed we are always going on about that and we are a separate party. But Labour never seem to make that distinction themselves. They are claiming that these local elections are a terrible verdict on the government*. If that was truly the case and the public agreed and enthusiastically wanted the alternative on offer from Labour wouldn't we have expected to see their share of the vote dwarf the combined share for the governing parties?

That didn't happen. Therefore it is hugely stretching credulity to claim that the elections last week prove that the coalition is on the ropes. It might be and there are doubtless lots of problems but the narrative that is being spun is just that, spin.

The reality is that using the criteria Labour usually use when it suits them, the government thrashed the opposition last week.


*I am well aware by the way that they were local elections and I get as annoyed as anyone that the results are automatically extrapolated into a picture of national reflection but hey ho, that's how everyone else interprets them and it would be like urinating into a hurricane to attempt to counter this.

Moving the centre of political gravity

My friend Emma from off of Scarlet Standard wrote a blogpost the other day entitled: "What is the Cause of Labour’s Cuts Problem?". I'm not going to try and answer that in detail here, but something Emma mentioned in her post regarding how a majority of the public still appear to blame Labour for the cuts got me thinking:

The problem I have, is that we don’t know why they blame us.

Do they blame us because the Tory narrative that we overspent on public services has caught on? It’s a populist narrative that probably does have a lot of traction despite both a lack of serious veracity and the fact that until the crash the Tories were planning to match us for spending.

It is (sort of) true that until the crash the Conservatives were planning to match Labour for spending. I say sort of because they were talking about "sharing the proceeds of growth" which I always took as a tacit signal they would be looking to alter the balance of spending and taxation even if only marginally (at first!).

But what the comments above fail to take into account is how the political centre ground gets moved by a government once in office. Labour in government were very adept at doing this not least in the language they used. They always characterised spending as investment and any opposition from the Conservatives to any individual spending commitments was always characterised as mean spirited and often described with labels such as "same old Tories". Almost irrespective of whether there may have have been good arguments against some of the spending such as it might have been cost ineffective etc.

I am not casting value judgements on any of this by the way, just observing that is what happened.

So Labour managed to move the centre ground of politics onto their investment territory leaving the opposition with little choice in the end (after 3 election defeats) to talk the same language and eventually even promise very similar policies to them.

The Conservatives had managed a similar trick in the mid-90s. After 4 bruising election defeats for Labour, when Tony Blair took over in 1994 he set about trying to neutralise the Tory charge of Labour hiking up taxes (the centre ground was in a different place then) by promising to match Tory economic plans for the first two years of a Labour government.

But over the course of the 13 years following Labour's 1997 victory despite a tentative start they did eventually succeed in increasing public spending overall by quite large amounts in the end. Just because the initial signals they sent in opposition implied they would not do this, I think most people recognised that if you get a Labour government they will try and shift the balance towards more public spending.

I think the same situation happened in reverse in the last few years. Cameron (as is his wont) very closely followed the Blair play book by trying to hitch himself and his party to Labour's spending commitments. Not because he had any deep convictions that it was the right thing to do but for politically expedient reasons. It was only the economic crisis that interrupted this plan and caused him and his government to reduce spending as dramatically as they have done. And to be fair, Labour would have reduced spending quite dramatically too, just not as much. That of course would have been them keeping the centre ground positioned more in their direction.

So to unpack Emma's comments a little bit further, the problem I have is that I do not understand why she does not understand why people still blame Labour. It was Labour who had been in power for over a decade when the crisis hit. They had been in control of where the political centre ground was. Blair (and to be fair Brown) were past masters as it. Cameron was only promising to match Labour spending because that is where that centre of political gravity was.

If you don't believe me, try a little thought experiment. Would public spending have been at the same level as it was in 2007/2008 if Michael Howard had won the 2005 election? Or if William Hague had won the 2001 election?

It is only fair that Labour take their share of the blame for the cuts that are needed now given that it was their government that was presiding when the crisis hit and their levels of spending facilitated by their political acumen.

If Labour are looking for some comfort from the current situation though it is that the electorate tend to have fairly short memories. I confidently predict that as the cuts really start to bite it will be the current government that moves into blame pole position and that will continue to get worse over the next 2 or 3 years.

William Hague will not address #ldconf - but maybe he should

The Daily Mail today has a story that William Hague is to address the Lib Dem conference next month:

The Foreign Secretary, widely seen as one of the best orators in the Commons, is expected to lead a Conservative charm offensive at the gathering in Liverpool in the hope of winning over disaffected LibDem activists.

Tory sources suggest Mr Hague will give a 'witty' address, rather than focusing heavily on policy.

However according to a Cowley Street source that has got in touch it aint true:

William Hague is not part of the conference agenda and I can confirm that he has not been asked to speak at the Liberal Democrat conference. No Conservative ministers have ever been approached to speak at our conference.

Fringe events are still being finalised, and it is of course possible that an independent group may have invited Mr Hague to speak at their Fringe event. But this is no different to any other year and it is common for MPs of all parties to attend these events.

But maybe Hague should be invited to address the main conference. It would not be as high profile as getting David Cameron to address it which may be a good thing and if anyone can leaven the situation with genuine humour (rather than what often passes for politician's humour) whilst still making a good speech it would be Hague. He is by common consensus one of the best communicators of his political generation.

I guess after the rebuttal it is unlikely that any Conservative will address the main conference and that any blue presence will be confined to the fringes.

Are the Conservatives becoming media shy?

There have been some occasions recently when the Tories seem to have gone a bit media shy. Michael Gove recently refused to debate directly with Ed Balls on TV about schools policy and insisted on being questioned separately. I must say I found this very odd. It is exactly the sort of thing that if Balls had done to Gove, the Tory bloggers and tweeters would have been up in arms about and insisting it would have been because Gove would have wiped the floor with him.

Then today on the "World At One" on Radio 4, the Conservatives declined to put anybody up to talk about the Lord Ashcroft situation. I am afraid I don't buy the "no-one was available" line. I am certain that if Labour were under the cosh about something they would have been straight on there as they always are in that sort of situation. I am pretty sure there have been other examples of Tory media shyness of this nature previously too.

The government has been rightly pilloried in the past for bottling out of media opportunities to defend itself (usually as I said by the Conservatives) but it does seem quite odd that there are growing examples of the opposition doing it too.

Is this a sign that we can expect this sort of disdain for public accountability to continue if they win the election?

The rest of us might as well pack up and go home then

The blogging Labour MP Tom Harris had a rather uncomplimentary piece about the Lib Dems yesterday entitled: "LibDems to retain meaningless promise". In it he claimed that the pledge to abolish tuition fees is meaningless:

“LibDems keep tuition fees pledge”? Now, technically, the headline is correct. The Liberals have decided to keep their tuition fees pledge in their party’s programme.

But away from the Liberals, back in the real world, the phrase about “keeping” a pledge would normally mean “honoured”. In other words, parties can “keep” their promises by enacting in government whatever promises they made before polling day.

Given that the Liberals will not win the 2010 general election, the headline would have been more accurate had it read: “LibDems to retain meaningless promise to scrap tuition fees”.

I hear/read this line of reasoning from members of the two main parties frequently. That any pledge from the Lib Dems is pointless because they are very unlikely to have enough seats to form a majority government after the next election.

Of course Tom is technically correct about the last point. We currently have 63 seats and we would need 326 after the next election to form a government on our own. Barring a political earthquake it is not going to happen. However he is being extremely dismissive and in fact contemptuous of our political system in this country.

Just a few months ago, the government reversed its decision on allowing the Gurkhas to remain resident in this country. It is unlikely that would have happened without the Lib Dems championing their cause both inside and outside parliament. Is it really very far fetched to think that if the tuition fees policy proved very popular and starting moving serious numbers of voters towards the Lib Dems that one (or perhaps both) of the two main parties would modify their own policies to counter that trend? It's not like it hasn't happened before.

Perhaps even more importantly though given some of the recent polls it is also not beyond the realms of possibility that there could be a minority (or even coalition) government after the next election. In that situation the Lib Dems could have even more influence and perhaps even some of the party's policies could find their way into a Queen's Speech. That possibility surely calls into question Tom's "meaningless" charge.

Of course if Tom is so dismissive of the Lib Dems as they are unlikely to form a government on their own any time soon then that must equally apply to all other political parties except Labour and the Tories. So by that reasoning, the Greens, UKIP and all the other UK-wide parties having policies is even more pointless.

Tom's message is clear. No matter how poorly the two main parties represent your views you should just pick the least worst one and vote for them. Never mind if you find yourself ideologically much closer to one of the other parties.

They are meaningless.

How low can we go?

General elections in the UK used to be about two parties. Labour and the Conservatives. They used to get most of the votes between them. A few percent would go to the third party and "others" but the vast majority voted red or blue.

In this sort of situation, where you effectively have a two party system, the First Past the Post electoral system was perceived as working quite well. It often ensured that one of the parties had a majority (even though this was often on a minority of the vote) but it was often only a few percent difference and usually the party that won the election in terms of seats, got the most votes (although not always - February 1974 being a good example of this).

In 1951, 93.1% of voters plumped for red or blue. In 1955 it was 96.1%. The problem is that since the 1950s, the proportion of people who vote for one of the two main parties has declined. Here is a table showing the shares each party got for each election from 1951 - 2005 and the combined total (source - collated from Wikipedia pages on general election results):

As you can see, we have gone from 90 odd percent voting for Labour or Conservative in the 1950s to only around two thirds voting for both of thoise parties in 2005. Here is the data in graph form which makes the decline a bit clearer:

Now, before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy, I am well aware that I have complained before about graphs that don't start from 0 but there is a reason I have done it like this. Frankly, if support for the two main parties combined at a general election ever dropped below 50% then it would be game over for First Past the Post irrespective of whether (or probably even because) one of the two parties could form a majority government. This is a psychological floor to my argument which is why I have made it the bottom of the graph.

As can be seen from this graph, there is a bumpy but steady decline. You could draw a line of best fit through this which if continued would suggest that in another 20 years or so we could well hit that 50% mark.

As if to prove my point, looking at the latest "General Election Prediction" from Electoral Calculus which analyses opinion polls and electoral geography to come up with their best bet of how the votes will go at the next election their current prediction (from 7th July 2009) is:

So a combined predicted total of 62.34%. This would follow the line of best fit from the above graph perfectly showing a continuation of this trend of decline in support for the two major parties.

So what conclusions can we draw from this? I would say that we are becoming increasingly pluralistic as an electorate. We have got used to voting for smaller parties and those often described as "others". I think the vote share of the two main parties will continue to decline and it will get harder and harder for them to justify the present system.

At the moment, those in favour of First Past the Post have the power of incumbency with it being the existing system and inertia will generally militate against a change. However recent opinion polls have shown that people are generally in favour of a more proportional system and as that line of best fit comes down and down over the next few years I think things will flip. Proponents of FPTP will be pressured to justify why such a manifestly unfair system that disproportionately benefits Labour and the Conservatives should be allowed to continue.

UPDATE: Tom Freeman has done an excellent follow-up to my post here where he hypothesises what could happen if the vote shares for Tory and Labour gradually came down and the others gradually went up. He's got pie-charts and everything!