Britain’s destiny becoming a captive to minority voices

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron, right, and Mayor of London Boris Johnson take part in a hand painting session.

The British election on May 7 is the most important since 1979, when Britain decisively changed direction, embracing economic modernity and social dynamism, by electing Margaret Thatcher. It is the most unpredictable since 1992, when the Conservatives’ John Major sneaked back against all the odds.

It is important not only for Britain but for the world. Good-naturedly baiting and mocking the Poms is an old Australian sport. But this shouldn’t blind us to the sober reality that a disproportionate amount of global governance, such as it is, rests on British efforts.

As the single most important ally of the US, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, as an independent nuclear military power, and given the vast soft power Britain has in a world still mostly made in English, the UK remains seriously important to the world.

Yet foreign and strategic policy have never played a smaller role in any modern British election.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat government of David Cameron stands on the brink of defeat. This in itself is amazing and shows how all the rules of modern politics have been upended. Cameron has overseen a remarkable economic recovery after the devastation of the global financial crisis. British household incomes are back to pre-crisis levels. The deficit has been halved and two million jobs created. Britain is the fastest growing big, developed economy. Inflation is tamed.

Cameron is no folk hero but neither is he obnoxious, disagreeable, arrogant, corrupt or aloof. He is certainly no national embarrassment. He is much more popular than Opposition Leader Ed Miliband. He is not particularly right-wing. He doesn’t come from the right of the Conservative Party and his government has hewed rigidly to the centre under the effective veto of its coalition partners, the centre-left Liberal Democrats.

So why might he lose?

There are some special British characteristics but there are also broad trends at work that seem to be evident in all Western democracies.

One special British feature is the anti-Tory gerrymander in electoral boundaries. England makes up 85 per cent of the population of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to give the country its correct name, but gets fewer than 85 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons

There is a pro-city electoral bias whereas Conservatives score more heavily in the countryside and in outer suburbs.

Then there is the special question of Scotland.

British politics demonstrates three of the great destructive electoral dynamics at work all over the West right now. These are: the triumph of identity politics, the rise of Left populism, the increasing disconnect of public debate from hard reality and the fracturing of the electorate.

Britain’s political structures were designed to reinforce two- party politics. Between 1945 and 1970, the two main parties, Conservatives and Labour, never won less than 88 per cent between them and sometimes went as high as 98 per cent. This time they may get as little as 65 per cent.

Even the British electoral system will now produce an Israeli-style electoral result. This is the consequence of the electorate’s fracturing and the triumph of identity politics.

At least 10 parties will be represented in the next House of Commons. From England there will be Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem, United Kingdom Independence Party and Green. Scotland will provide the Scottish Nationalist Party, and Wales Plaid Cymru. Northern Ireland will provide the Democratic Unionist Party, Sinn Fein and the Social Democratic and Labour Party.

The polls strongly indicate no party will get a majority. The latest YouGov poll has Labour just ahead by one point, but a Survation poll has the Tories ahead by four. The Tories will need a lead like that to have any real chance of winning the biggest number of seats and having a chance at cobbling together a governing coalition. Most polls have the Conservatives and Labour roughly equal on 33 per cent. The eccentricities of Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system can produce extremely undemocratic results.

There are 650 seats in the Commons. To govern, a party or coalition needs 326. Last time, with 37 per cent of the vote, the Tories won only 307 seats. Tony Blair often won government comfortably with that kind of vote.

Cameron was able to form a government with the Lib-Dems, who won 23 per cent of the vote and got 57 seats, giving the coalition a comfortable parliamentary majority.

This time the Scottish Nationalists will win something like 4 or 5 per cent of the vote overall, but could win 50 or more of Scotland’s 59 seats. Last year’s Scottish independence referendum was lost 55 to 45. This was a slightly rigged vote that overstated support for independence because the voting age for the referendum was lowered to 16. If it had been 18, as it is for elections, the margin would have been closer to 58-42.

In any event, the Scottish Nationalists have been able to mobilise the essence of modern identity politics — imaginary grievance — to paint this democratic outcome as a conspiracy against Scottishness. The SNP is the most loopy far-left party in modern Britain outside the Greens. Yet it has managed to get the idea across that any criticism of the SNP is an English criticism of Scottishness. Most Scottish voters now believe independence is inevitable and a strong plurality think the way the election has gone has increased the chance of Scotland breaking from the UK.

Miliband’s Labour cannot win a majority in its own right. If it governs it will be with the support of the SNP. But the SNP is far too canny to enter a formal coalition, having seen the way the responsibilities and hard choices of government have cut the Lib Dems’ support in half. So the SNP will guarantee supply for a minority Labour government, giving it maximum scope to cause havoc.

All these results will be undemocratic in several ways. UKIP, according to the polls, will get 15 per cent or so of the vote and be lucky to return four or five members to parliament. The SNP may get a third or a quarter of that vote yet have more than 10 times as many MPs.

The SNP will be to a Miliband government what the Greens were to Julia Gillard, only a hundred times worse. They will seek extravagant payments to Scotland and will also demand left-wing policies for matters, such as education, within England, while being free under devolution to resist any English influence on education policies within Scotland.

It demands the abolition of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent and has threatened to vote against any funding for it. It may demand from Miliband another quick referendum on Scottish independence while preventing a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.

But no result is reliably predictable. If the SNP takes the right number of votes from Labour in some Scottish electorates, the Tories could fluke a half-dozen seats in Scotland, whereas now they have only one. The Northern Ireland Unionists could win 10 seats, which, in alliance perhaps with the Lib Dems’ remaining couple of dozen seats, could possibly provide a governing coalition for Cameron. This election, with all its fateful consequences, is more than a little bizarre.

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