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British Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party shocked political observers last Thursday when they captured a governing majority in the House of Commons. Pre-election polls predicted that the Conservatives and Labour parties would end up deadlocked, resulting in a hung parliament for the second consecutive election. This could have triggered a constitutional crisis as the party that won the most votes could have ended up as the opposition. However, when the votes were tallied the Conservatives gained twenty-four seats, enabling them the govern without their prior coalition partner, the centrist Liberal Democratic Party, and this made Cameron the first Conservative prime minister to win a governing majority since John Major did so in 1992. Cameron’s second term may give him more room to impose austerity on Britain’s public finances, but he will also face resurgent nationalism in Scotland and growing suspicion of the European Union. Handling these political and economic crises will come to define Cameron’s legacy as he has pledged not to seek a third term in 2020.
This topic brief will provide a summary of the British political system and the 2015 campaign, discuss the outcome of the vote, and then analyze the challenges that Cameron will face as he governs Britain for the next five years.
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The 2015 British Election Campaign
It is important to discuss how the British electoral system works before explaining how this year’s campaign unfolded. Most of the power of the British government is found within the House of Commons, the lower chamber of the British Parliament. The Commons has 650 seats and the governing party is the one that commands a majority of the chamber. Traditionally, a party has been able to govern the House on its own, but there have been several occasions in the early twentieth century and in 2010 when parties had to coalition with each other to command a parliamentary majority. The leader of the party that is in command of the House of Commons is named prime minister, while the leader of the largest opposition party becomes the leader of the opposition. The British political system is very adversarial and each week the Prime Minister takes questions from other members of the House and the leaders of the opposition. This would be akin to President Obama going to Congress each week and taking questions from John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. It is important to note that British voters also do not directly elect the prime minister. USA Today explains on May 8 that elections for the House of Commons see members of parliament (MPs) run in local constituencies (the British refer to them as constituencies and not districts) throughout Great Britain that have an average of 60,000 voters each. Although some of these contests can turn on local issues, much like some U.S. House of Representatives races, voters also take into account who a potential prime minister might be when voting for a candidate of that party. If voters dislike a potential prime minister candidate, they are less likely to vote for members of his or her party to ensure that that individual never takes control of the country. It must also be said that all races in Britain are “first-past-the-post” races, which mean that the candidate that wins the most number of votes in a constituency wins the race and goes to the House of Commons. In constituencies that are contested among multiple parties a candidate does not have to win a majority, just a plurality as there are no provisions for runoffs. Most importantly, Britain has no system of proportional representation for the House of Commons so it is possible that a party that achieved a sizeable number of votes would not have representatives that reflect that. For example, a party might win 10% of the national vote, but if that party only won one constituency then it would only get one seat in the House of Commons.
In the 2010 elections, a hung parliament resulted where no party could govern on its own. The Conservative Party, which is centre-right, was expected to defeat the Labour government of Gordon Brown (Labour is a centre-left party) and it did so. However, the Conservatives only won 306 seats. To ensure that the Conservatives could govern with a majority, Conservative Party leader David Cameron reached an agreement to coalition with the centrist Liberal Democratic Party that was headed by Nick Clegg. The Liberal Democrats won fifty-seven seats in the 2010 election so this gave Cameron enough room to govern without having to worry about defections from his party on some controversial votes. The coalition also moderated some of Cameron’s policies, especially in terms of desired cuts to the British welfare state, and it changed the power of the Prime Minister to call new elections. The Washington Post writes on May 7 that the coalition passed the Fixed-Term Parliament Act of 2011 that only allows new elections to be held if there a vote of no confidence in the sitting government or if two-thirds of MPs vote for them. This was meant to provide more stability for British governments, make the calling of new elections more democratic, and the coalition also agreed not to hold new elections before their five year term expired.
Some of the same concerns that have bedeviled the European electorate have also become prominent in Great Britain. Nationalism is on the rise in Europe driven partly by growing immigration flows from conflict zones that are near the continent and a sense that the European Union (EU) has become too powerful relative to national governments. Continent-wide economic problems have also made far-right, nationalist parties more attractive to voters, especially working class voters that have seen their jobs sent away due to globalization or that have seen their neighborhoods transformed by immigrants from the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a far-right party, has benefitted from these concerns in Great Britain. Founded in 1993, the UKIP opposes British involvement in the European Union (EU) and it favors tougher immigration restrictions. The UKIP became the first minor party in more than a century to win a British election last year when it triumphed in the European parliamentary elections. British political analysts wondered whether the UKIP would significantly cut into the Conservative vote, thereby depriving Cameron of the seats necessary to retain office. To keep some voters from moving into the UKIP camp, Cameron promised in 2013 to hold a referendum on British EU membership if the Conservatives were re-elected. His rhetoric against “welfare tourism” in the EU was also deemed as a way to woo UKIP-leaning voters.
Nationalism also threatens British territorial integrity. Scottish voters rejected independence last year, but the fortunes of the separatist Scottish National Party (SNP) have not diminished. Cameron’s government thwarted the independence referendum by promising to devolve more economic powers to Scotland, especially taxing powers, but the SNP argues that Scottish interests are best served by becoming independent. Scottish voters are hostile to Cameron’s austerity agenda and prior to the recent election they had typically cast their ballots for the Labour Party. Heading into this year’s election, though, Labour found itself defending its decision to align with Cameron and the Liberal Democrats in arguing against Scottish independence as part of the “Better Together” campaign. A separate article from The Washington Post on May 7 argues that some Scottish voters considered Labour traitors and thought casting ballots for the SNP was a better alternative. During the election campaign, Cameron warned voters that the only way that Labour could theoretically form a government was with SNP votes, thereby allowing a separatist party to potentially influence the British government.
Most of the British campaign focused on two issues: the economy and fitness for leadership. In terms of the economy, the Conservative Party made the argument that it had helped Britain survive the worst of the 2008 financial crisis, which they inherited when they took power in 2010. The Economist writes on May 9 that economic growth accelerated after the worst of the euro zone debt crisis passed in 2013 and that the British economy grew 2.8% in 2014. Unemployment has also fallen from a peak of 8.5% in 2011 to 5.6%. In fact, The Wall Street Journal reports on May 8 that British economic growth was the fastest among the Group of Seven advanced economies, but growth did show signs of stumbling during the first quarter. The Conservative argument was that Cameron was a good steward of the economy and austerity policies, despite being painful, had succeeded in improving the state of British public finances and created a better economic situation. The argument advanced by Labour leader Ed Miliband was that economic data was masking the fact that growth was not helping all Britons. He made income inequality a major part of his campaign, showing a greater willingness to move away from the centrist policies of former Labour leader Tony Blair who governed the country from 1997 to 2007. Miliband advocated for a higher minimum wage and promised to expand public services by closing tax loopholes for the wealthy. Labour also warned that if a Conservative government was elected it would begin dismantling important parts of the British welfare state such as the National Health Service (NHS). Cameron made the argument that Labour could not be trusted with public finances, noting that their Scottish allies favored the elimination of austerity policies, wished to expand welfare programs, and the tax increases they were supporting would do damage to British economic growth. The Washington Post noted that the SNP had promised to push Miliband to spend more on the NHS and look into shifting the Trident nuclear program away from Scotland. Miliband’s admission that he might use the SNP to govern the country if Labour failed to win a majority on its own thereby helped to strengthen the Conservative argument that a Labour government would spend too much and deliver too little to the British electorate. The Washington Post on May 8 writes that voters agreed that the Conservatives improved the British economy, although they also agreed that the gains were not equal across different socioeconomic classes. This gave the Conservatives a small advantage heading into last Thursday’s vote.
Another small advantage that Cameron enjoyed and one that Conservatives thought was their greatest asset is that voters preferred Cameron over Miliband for prime minister. Prior to taking over Labour in 2010, Miliband, according to The UK Telegraph on May 9, had served an intern for Blair and then served as a lecturer at Harvard University in the United States. Miliband also served as Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change between 2008 and 2010. Reuters writes on May 8 that it was clear before the campaign began that Miliband had a problem connecting with working class voters, who have been a strong Labour constituency in the past. Some Labour politicians found Miliband too much of a policy wonk and someone who spent so much time in academia and in the halls of government that he could not relate to “regular” British voters. When a politician is trying to oust an incumbent they have to make the case that they are up to the challenge and polls showed that British voters never thought Miliband would make a better prime minister than Cameron. The Economist writes on May 9 that in a pre-election survey 71% of voters said that they preferred Cameron’s leadership and this is startling because some voters who cast their ballots for other parties preferred Cameron over their own leaders.
The Outcome of the Election
Prior to the election, pollsters estimated that the race would be very close, with no party obtaining enough seats for a governing majority. Most polls in the British media projected that the Conservatives and Labour would win 35% of the vote each and this created the possibility of a constitutional crisis since the party that won the most seats or the most votes might be left out of the new government. However, as CNN writes on May 9 the polls got the British election wrong just as pollsters made incorrect projections about the 2014 U.S. midterm elections, the Scottish referendum, and the recent Israeli parliamentary elections. Instead of ending up with a hung parliament, Conservatives won 36.9% of the national vote to Labour’s 30.5%. This margin enabled the Conservatives to capture twenty-five more seats than they did in 2010, most of which came at the expense of the Liberal Democrats. The projected tally for seats leaves the Conservatives with 331 (five more seats than necessary to have a sole governing majority), Labour with 232, the SNP with 56, the Liberal Democrats with eight, and the UKIP with one. The other big winner aside from the Conservatives was the SNP, which took all but three of the constituencies in Scotland and enlarged its presence in the House of Commons from six seats to fifty-six. These gains came at the expense of Labour, which lost twenty-four seats relative to the 2010 parliamentary elections.
One of the reasons polls may have been incorrect is because pollsters did not account for so-called “shy Tories.” CNN explains that these voters are those who ended up casting ballots for Conservative candidates but were reluctant to tell pollsters that they were going to do so. The Economist writes on May 8 that these voters are reminiscent of U.S. President Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” that helped him win two presidential elections in 1968 and 1972. “Shy Tories” do not attend political meetings, make their views known in local publications or on the Internet, and sometimes refuse to answer polls. They may also be reluctant to say that they are voting Conservative because they may not deem it “politically correct” to do so. For whatever reason, pollsters have found it hard to incorporate these Conservative voters into their prognostications for decades. As The Economist writes in a separate article on May 8, John Major’s surprise 1992 win over Labour was due to these same voters who at the time were referred to as “Shy Conservatives.” The Economist argues that pollsters in the future might want to give Conservatives a few extra points in surveys because they seem to have more support than conventional polls say that they do.
Aside from the polls question, the election was notable for the devastation that it wrought on the leadership of several major parties. According to The New York Times on May 8 this was a sign that British voters, much like their fellow European voters on the continent, are turning against mainstream politicians. The Economist writes on May 8 that if politicians were “big beasts” then the 2015 British election could be referred to as a “mass extinction.” The Labour Party saw notable figures such as Ed Balls, one of its strong voices on economic issues, Jim Murphy, its leader in Scotland, and shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander go down in defeat. Alexander’s defeat was historic as he lost to Mhairi Black, a twenty-year-old Scottish nationalist, making her the youngest politician to be elected to the House of Commons since 1667. The Economist writes on May 8 that the Liberal Democrats also lost some of their major figures such as Vince Cable, a former business secretary, Ed Davey, the coalition government’s energy secretary, and Lynn Featherstone, the equalities minister. It also lost long-time legislators such as Simon Hughes and the party’s leader Nick Clegg barely won his race. UKIP leader Nigel Farage failed to win a seat in Thanet South and Mark Reckless, who defected from the Conservative Party, lost re-election. All of this might benefit Cameron’s government because it leaves opposition parties with less senior leadership than they had before last Thursday’s election.
The party that imploded the most was the Liberal Democrats as they went from being the kingmaker the last election to becoming largely irrelevant. Since Cameron is a moderate he may have wished for a better Liberal Democratic performance so that a “coalition 2.0” could be created. Observers wondered if the Liberal Democrats would hold enough seats to allow the Conservatives to keep power if they fell short of a majority, but after the votes were tallied and the Conservatives found that they could govern alone the Liberal Democrats served little use. The Economist in a separate article on May 8 notes that the Conservatives and Labour banked on an implosion of the Liberal Democrats as the party’s voters bolted the party after it chose to compromise some of its principles by joining Cameron in a coalition government. For example, Clegg voted to raise tuition fees for universities after saying during the 2010 campaign that he would not do so. One of the problems for smaller parties in a coalition government is that since they do not have the prime minister it is tough for them to establish a unique identity for the next election. This happened in Germany as Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) completely overshadowed their coalition partner the Free Democrats and the Free Democrats collapsed in the 2013 German federal elections. The Economist also speculates that by entering into a government with Cameron that the Liberal Democrats lost their identity as they had typically attracted Conservative and Labour voters that were dissatisfied with their options. Thus, instead of becoming a stronger party of protest the Liberal Democrats became part of the existing system and its voters abandoned it.
The performances and the SNP and UKIP are likely to produce calls for electoral reform. The SNP benefitted from voter dissatisfaction with Labour’s participation in opposing Scottish independence, but they also benefitted, according to The Washington Post, from Labour’s inattention to the area. Labour’s organizations are atrophying in Scotland and some speculated that Gordon Brown’s leadership of Labour in 2010 masked deficiencies since Scottish voters still embraced the party due Brown’s Scottish identity. The SNP also has a new leader in Nicola Sturgeon, who replaced Alex Salmond as Scottish First Minister in November. Sturgeon did a very good job arguing the SNP’s case in televised debates and some British publications such as The UK Daily Mail have referred to her as the “Most Dangerous Woman in Britain.” As previously stated in this brief, the SNP took fifty-six of the fifty-nine constituencies contested in Scotland, with the Conservatives, Labour, and Liberal Democrats each taking one seat. The regional power of the SNP helped it in the election as it only contested constituencies in Scotland, so 4.7% of the overall vote translated into a sizable chunk of the new House of Commons. For the UKIP, though, they contested constituencies throughout Britain, and The Economist on May 8 writes that it won 12% of the overall vote, tripling its performance from 2010. However, although the UKIP chalked up many second-place finishes in Northern England, a traditional bastion of the Labour Party, and threatened Conservative constituencies, they only managed to win one race. As a result, the UKIP will only have one seat in the House of Commons despite winning 12% of the national vote, while the SNP will have fifty-six seats after winning less than 5% of the national vote. After the election, Paul Nuttall, the UKIP’s deputy leader said that the allocation of seats in the House is an “affront to democracy,” and The New York Times writes on May 8 that it is clear that the UKIP will probably make a push before the 2020 elections for a proportional representation system to be installed.
The election will also force several parties to seek new leadership. The UK Independent writes on May 8 that Miliband, Clegg, and Farage all resigned within fifty-two minutes of each other once the results of the election became apparent. Miliband and Clegg stepped down in order to take responsibility for their party’s losses while Farage kept to his pledge to resign from the UKIP leadership if he failed to win a seat in the House of Commons. For the next several months all three parties – Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the UKIP – will be engaged in fierce leadership battles and all of them will be forced to plot new strategies to improve their performance by 2020. For the UKIP there is much less soul searching to do as they can legitimately claim to be an opposition party despite only having one House seat based on the share of the national vote that they won. The Liberal Democrats and Labour, though, will have to reassess how they have presented their platforms to voters. The Liberal Democrats will question whether they drifted too far from the center during the coalition government and Blairites within the Labour Party will try to shift that party away from the progressive direction that Miliband thought was appropriate. Fox News points out on May 8 that the election shows that Britain is not becoming a more progressive country as the Conservatives and UKIP won 49.4% of the vote. More important, right-wing candidates dominated the voting in England where spending, immigration, and secession issues topped voter concerns. If opposition parties do not conform to these sentiments they may find it difficult to win in 2020, but for now they need to find new leaders to chart them out of the political wilderness.
Cameron’s Upcoming Challenges
It would be easy for Cameron to bask in the glow of his recent triumph, but there are several issues that could give him some problems with the British electorate and his own party. The Economist speculates on May 9 that Cameron may soon wish that he was in charge of another coalition government as the thin margin the Conservatives enjoy in the House of Commons will force him to satisfy the demands of less moderate Conservatives who may try to bolt. Tony Blair encountered some of these problems when he led Labour to power in three elections as some members of the party were more loyal to Gordon Brown and kept trying to push Blair out of power. The Economist notes that the coalition government saw the most backbench rebellions since the Second World War, so Cameron is going to be walking a tight rope as he tries to acquire votes for welfare, immigration, and spending reforms.
The Economist explains that the first challenge that Cameron faces is to lay out a plan for reducing the British budget deficit. One of the Conservatives campaign pledges was reducing public expenditures. The British public debt is more than 80% of its GDP and in February 2013 the British government saw Moody’s downgrade the country’s credit rating from AAA to Aa1. The total British debt after the first quarter of 2015 has been estimated at £1.56 trillion. During the election Labour and the Conservatives pledged to eliminate budget deficits and work toward debt reduction by 2020 although both sides disagreed on how to get there. Cameron will have to find a way to deliver spending cuts and some tax reductions that appeal to hardline Conservative MPs, while also finding ways to improve British productivity via infrastructure investments and education reform. Opposition parties are already warning that Cameron will use his majority to push through draconian cuts to the British welfare state and Cameron will need to work to show that these beliefs are false. Perceptions that the Conservative Party was “mean” undermined John Major’s government in the 1990s and made Conservatives unelectable for more than a decade. Cameron has to work to not make this mistake so that he can pass power off to another Conservative leader and help the party’s chances in the next election cycle. Still, The Washington Post on May 8 does argue that Cameron now has a mandate for enacting some austerity, which he did not have during the coalition. It should also be noted, as USA Today does on May 8, that the drive for British austerity may create tensions with the United States as it means the British will be cutting their defense budget in the hopes that American military commitments to Europe will remain sizable.
Another challenge that confronts Cameron is Britain’s relationship with the EU. Time explains on May 8 that the UKIP may have only gained one seat in the House of Commons, but they succeeded in their aim of dragging Cameron more to the political right. This was shown in Cameron’s promise to hold a referendum on British membership in the EU by the end of 2017. This has scared the British financial community that has benefitted from Britain ties to the Europe and Time notes that 72% of British companies think a “Brexit” would damage business. It is also estimated that a “Brexit” could result in London losing $330b, which is the equivalent of 14% of its GDP. Following Cameron’s victory, French President Francois Hollande invited him to Paris to discuss British concerns and The UK Telegraph explains on May 8 that Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission President, said that the EU looks forward to constructive discussions with Cameron, although he emphasized that EU treaty obligations could not be renegotiated. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, has also said that Britain is better off within the EU than outside of it. Cameron’s best bet will be to renegotiate some of Britain’s relationship with the EU to create what some have called a “more flexible union.” Some of these changes might affect the reach of EU decisions on British law, the power of the British government to curb the welfare benefits given to migrant workers, and placing some limits on the number of immigrants Great Britain will accept from other parts of the continent. Extempers should realize that although Cameron has promised to hold a referendum on EU membership that this is not the same as backing the idea. In other words, Cameron can hold the referendum but then encourage voters to say “no.” Doing so, though, risks sparking the ire of more right-wing members of his party that dislike the EU and that could produce an internal challenge to his leadership. There is also the fear that holding the referendum in 2016 or 2017 may attract low turnout, possibly severing Britain’s relationship with the EU in a haphazard manner.
The problem of Scottish independence will also be one that Cameron must handle. The SNP will likely argue in the coming months and years that the power of its political organization in Scotland, as well as the fact that it is shut out of Cameron’s government, shows that Scotland needs to govern itself. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that the Conservatives only have one MP in Scotland, so the legitimacy of Cameron’s government there is in question. Extempers should be careful not to conflate support of the SNP with a new independence referendum, though, as The Los Angeles Times reveals on May 8 that 1.45 million voters in Scotland cast ballots for the SNP, but that was fewer than the 1.61 million that cast ballots for independence last year. Cameron has already promised to give Scotland more powers over welfare spending, taxation, and energy policy creating what he has called the “strongest devolved government anywhere in the world,” but it is uncertain whether this will be enough to quell the SNP’s angst at Conservative policymaking. The SNP is already against austerity and reforms to the NHS, so that could create a divide between Cameron and Scotland. What might provoke a second independence referendum the most is the EU referendum. Scotland is more in favor of the EU than their counterparts in England and Wales and CNN writes on May 8 that if British voters decide to leave the EU then Scottish leaders could schedule another independence referendum and if that works, join the EU. However, the first Scottish independence referendum had the backing of the British government. It is unclear whether Cameron would even allow a second independence referendum and if he refused, it is not certain that a Scottish “yes” vote in a non-authorized referendum would be recognized by other parts of the world. It is the same situation Spain faces in Catalonia where Catalan leaders want independence, but Spanish authorities refuse to authorize or recognize a vote in the territory. Since other European countries such as Belgium and Spain face their own independence movements, Scotland would likely need the backing of London to hold another independence vote.
Therefore, Cameron will have to wrestle with keeping Great Britain inside of the EU, keeping Scotland inside of Britain, and rectify the British fiscal situation without imposing unwarranted harm on the poor and working class. It will be a tough juggling act, one that will pit Cameron against members of his own party more than members of the opposition. He will benefit from the absence of senior leadership from other parties, but Cameron must avoid overreaching on domestic and foreign policy options as those could imperil the future of British conservatism and Britain’s place in Europe.