Pity centrists, beware nationalists and praise our friend David Cameron

The surprise re-election of David Cameron in Britain, with the Conservatives winning a majority in their own right for the first time since John Major in 1992, is the best news Tony Abbott has had for a long time. It offers him a ­template and a raft of lessons.

It also ensures the continued presence of a good friend in a key capital.

Cameron gets on well with Abbott and appreciates the effort the Abbott government makes on strategic issues and what might generally be described as global governance.

Cameron, unlike Barack Obama, also goes to some trouble to help, or at least not to hinder, his friends and allies. Cameron understands Australian policy on climate change better than Obama does and understands that Australia’s effort is perfectly respectable. More important, though constrained by tough politics at home, Cameron does have some sense of alliances and the values implicit in alliances.

So there was no way he was ever going to be as graceless, ill-mannered and destructive as Obama was at the G20 summit. But more than that, Cameron’s government shares a broad strategic outlook with Abbott’s and gives this some real political value.

Cameron’s victory helps Abbott in several other ways. In terms of morale, it is marvellous. Cameron was behind in the polls, often substantially behind, for much of his first term. His efforts to consolidate the British budget were as unpopular as Abbott’s. And while Cameron’s standing as Prime Minister grew the longer he was in the job, as with Abbott, he was, also like Abbott, never popular and was thoroughly demonised by the Left.

Cameron’s opponent, British Labour’s Ed Miliband, lacked credibility and appeal. His association with the Scottish National Party underlined the sense of threat British voters felt when confronted with the idea of a Miliband prime ministership. But this sense of threat came primarily from Miliband’s left-of-centre, pro-union, populist, big-spending economic policies. Any echoes there?

Right up to election eve, the Conservatives and Labour were neck and neck in the polls. Yet in the end the Conservatives scored 37 per cent and Labour 30 per cent, the Conservatives 331 seats and Labour 232. Even if you add the SNP’s 56 seats, which is a reasonable thing to do as on economic policy the SNP is to the left even of Labour, it still puts the combined Left tally a long way behind the Conservatives. When confronted with the stark choice of putting back into power an unreconstructed Labour Party which, far from learning the lessons of its last failure, had doubled down on the worst of its former policies, enough people switched votes to end Miliband’s career.

These figures substantially underestimate conservative support in Britain. The United Kingdom Independence Party won 13 per cent of the vote. UKIP favours controlled immigration, withdrawal from the EU and a strong defence. It is fair to put UKIP to the right of the Conservatives. So UKIP and the Conservatives together were directly supported by a majority of voters.

However, two elements of the election are very concerning. They represent trends in almost all Western democracies and they are very dangerous. The first is the annihilation of the centre. Western democracies have been systemat­ically cleansing themselves of intelligent centrist parties acting as a vote alternative to the major blocs of Left and Right. They are being replaced by lunatic Green parties on the Left and equally nutty fringe groups on the Right. The British Liberal Democrats went from 57 seats to eight and lost more than two-thirds of their vote. This is sadly similar to the decline at the last German election of the Free Democrats. They were a bit different from the Lib Dems. The Free Democrats were economically conservative and socially liberal. The Lib Dems were a fraction to the left of that but were born of the historically free trade Liberal Party and the breakaway right- wing Labour figures who formed the Social Democratic Party in Britain in the 1980s. They were governing responsibly types.

The German Free Democrats too were a very intelligent, pro-business, sensible middle party. At the last German election they fell below the threshold for parliamentary representation and the Christian Democrats’ Angela Merkel, despite securing a historically large vote, could not form a coherent centre-right coalition. She had no natural coalition partner. All the fringe groups were mad so she was forced into an incoherent grand coalition with the Social Democrats, massively reducing her ability to govern well.

In Australia we have replaced the often frustrating but perfectly sensible Australian Democrats with the truly nutty and extreme Greens. The Australian Democrats were themselves much given to populism but they began life as a centrist party and had legislative compromise written into their DNA. The Greens, on the other hand, are a party of nihilist extremism. They are against everything except wild flights of utopian fantasy and for anything that involves extra costs to business and massive government expenditure.

They have become so extreme and destructive that they would not support even petrol tax indexation, the very core of Greens policy, because to do so would be to give Abbott a small victory. This is populism of the most profoundly irresponsible kind. It is parties like this, never seeking majority support but pursuing only that 10 to 15 per cent of protest, anti-everything voters, which are flourishing all over Western electorates.

The final dynamic in the British election that really is worrying is the triumph of identity politics. Fifty-six out of 59 Scottish electorates voted for the SNP. This included otherwise conservative parts of Edinburgh and radical parts of Glasgow.

This was a negative vote of identity. The SNP’s economic policies are ridiculous, barely a standard deviation or two more sensible than the Greens. But they turned Scottishness into a grievance all its own. Every problem is the fault of the English and the answer to every problem is a nationalistic assertion of Scottishness. In its vulgarity and foolishness, this is a million miles from the honest, decent patriotism that leads citizens to love their country but intelligently debate its policies.

Similarly the rise of UKIP is all about English nationalism, in reaction against EU supranationalism, and the special deal, special status, special money for Scotland.

The sort of destructive identity politics sweeping much of the West is one of the reasons I remain dogmatically opposed to Western nations, certainly our nation, making any constitutional or civic distinction between classes of citizens. Labour under Tony Blair thought it had solved the problem of Scottish nationalist separatism by federalist devolution. Instead it has paved the way to the likely ­destruction of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Cameron’s win was good for Britain and incidentally good for Abbott. But the increasingly unmanageable elements of contemporary Western politics are nonetheless there for all to see.