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Old Saturday, May 09, 2015
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Default Post-Election Britain: A Disunited Kingdom

LONDON — One of the most anodyne election campaigns in living memory has left Britain with a result that few expected — and one that could transform Britain both internally and externally. This was an election that recast the political geography of Britain. It may redraw the boundaries of the nation. And it raises questions about the future shape of the European Union.

It is conceivable, given the astonishing success of the Scottish National Party, that this may be one of the last elections of a United Kingdom. It is also conceivable, given the Conservative Party’s pledge to hold a referendum on European Union membership, that it may be the last general election in which Britain is a member of the union.

Pollsters and pundits had for weeks been predicting a tight result, with no party receiving a majority, Labour and Conservatives neck and neck, and the nation facing days, perhaps weeks, of political negotiations to stitch together a new coalition government. Instead, the Conservatives have gained an absolute majority in Parliament. The junior coalition party in the previous government, the Liberal Democrats, was effectively wiped off the electoral map, retaining just eight of its 57 seats.

The Labour Party suffered, if anything, an even greater catastrophe. Labour had expected to be the largest party; its leaders had been talking bullishly in the past few days of forming the next government at the head of a grand anti-Tory coalition. Instead, Labour has 26 seats fewer today — its worst result in nearly 30 years.

The biggest winner was the Scottish National Party. Last September, it decisively lost the referendum for Scottish independence. On Thursday, it took 56 of Scotland’s 59 parliamentary seats, a political tidal wave that washed away Labour north of the border. How the new Conservative government deals with the Scottish question will be one of the dominant issues in the coming months.

Before the election, with most commentators expecting an indecisive result, there was widespread discussion about the issue of legitimacy: Would a minority government, or a coalition of disparate parties, have a genuine mandate to govern? Thursday’s result may have prevented the feared constitutional wrangling, but it has raised deeper questions of legitimacy.


“I want to reclaim the mantle that we should never have lost,” Prime Minister David Cameron told fellow Conservatives Thursday night, “the mantle of one nation, one United Kingdom.” But no party can any longer claim that mantle. Over recent decades, support for all the major parties has geographically fragmented.

Whatever Mr. Cameron’s desire, the Conservatives no longer constitute a “one nation” party. It is effectively the party of England, and more especially of southern England. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the Conservatives were the dominant force in Scotland, winning more than half the votes in some elections. As late as 1992, the party took more than a quarter of the votes and held 11 seats there. In this Parliament, as in the last, there is just one Scottish Conservative member.

The Labour Party possesses even less of a national presence. From being the prevailing political force in Scotland, it has been all but wiped out, retaining, like the Conservatives, just one seat. And in England, it has been forced back into its heartlands in London, the Midlands and the North. Even here, it now faces a new threat. The populist anti-immigration, anti-European U.K. Independence Party polled strongly in many traditional Labour areas in the north of England and even in Wales. Come the next election, it may well challenge Labour in these constituencies.

The legitimacy of Britain’s electoral system is also now under scrutiny. The first-past-the-post system worked relatively well while British politics revolved around two main parties. There was never a perfect fit between the proportion of votes that the Labour or Conservative Party received and the number of parliamentary seats they gained, yet the relationship was close enough in a rough-and-ready way to give the system legitimacy.

Britain, however, is growing more fragmented in its political outlook. As the two-party system has mutated into a multiparty democracy, the electoral arrangements are producing highly skewed results. The Scottish National Party, for instance, won a little less than 1.5 million votes last night and 56 seats. UKIP won more than twice as many votes but has just one member of Parliament.

The problem of legitimacy runs deeper, though, than simply the technicalities of the electoral system. The election highlighted the parties that voters rejected more than it revealed the ones they supported.

The anomaly of the Conservative victory is that the policies of the last coalition government were deeply unpopular. Many voters, however, feared Labour more than they loathed the Tories. One of the reasons all the opinion polls were so wrong in their predictions is the phenomenon of the “shy Tory” — voters who do not wish to publicly proclaim their support for the Conservative Party but who, in the privacy of the voting booth, find they prefer it to any of the alternatives.

A highlight of the election campaign was a televised debate in which the three main party leaders were quizzed by an audience of voters. The highly articulate audience was very critical of Mr. Cameron. But it gave the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, an even harder time. Voters did the same on Thursday. Nevertheless, while the Conservatives won last night, they took barely a third of the popular vote — and their share was just 0.8 of a percentage point higher than in the 2010 election.

Even in Scotland, voters’ sentiment was shaped as much by the party they despised as by the policies they liked. It is unlikely that in the space of eight months, all those who voted “No” in September’s independence referendum have suddenly become enthusiastic nationalists. What seems to have created the S.N.P. swing was a deep disillusionment with the Labour Party that has been growing over many years, and finally engulfed it on Thursday.

All this will shape postelection British politics. The question of Scotland’s position within Britain and Britain’s relationship to the European Union will dominate. But both reflect a deeper issue: a nation that has become both more politically fragmented and more disenchanted with mainstream political institutions. That is the paradox of an election that has seemingly produced a more decisive result than almost anyone predicted.

Kenan Malik, a writer, lecturer and broadcaster, is the author, most recently, of “The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics.”

The New York Times Published on 8th of May,2015
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