A divided Kingdom

After days of discussions around a possible hung parliament and various coalition equations, who could have expected such a poll outcome in the United Kingdom? Certainly, not David Cameron. Or else, his party wouldn’t surely have campaigned so vigorously against a possible pact between the Labour Party and the Scottish National Party (SNP), vehemently ruled out by Ed Miliband.

Ironically, in a year that marks the octocentenary of Magna Carta — the Great Charter — signed by King John at Runnymede on June 19, UK’s major political parties planned their campaign strategies around fear. Magna Carta was the first formal document making it imperative for the monarch to follow the law of the land, and ensure individual rights against the wishes of the ruler. It was a charter of liberty and hope. But in its 800th anniversary year, we witnessed an election campaign tied to fear. Can anyone deny that exercising the franchise without fear or favour also constitutes an important individual freedom?

The Tories scared the English voters into believing that a minority Labour government would be captive to the SNP, which clearly wants to break away from the United Kingdom. The Labour, on its part, pressed the panic button based on their assumption that another five years of Tory austerity will cut the public services, including the much valued National Health Service, to size.

The campaign of fear, it seems, is going to haunt David Cameron in the weeks and months to come, as he heads to form a single-party government backed by a slim majority. Armed with the over 50 seats in Westminster, the SNP will make every possible effort to irritate David Cameron and undermine the authority of his government over Scotland.

Nicola Sturgeon, the charismatic leader of the Scottish party, had vouched to enhance the influence of Scotland in Westminster. She led her party to win 56 out of the 59 seats in Scotland. But, given the outright majority of the Tories, the election outcome didn’t necessarily enhance SNP’s power in Westminster. Sturgeon will, therefore, try her best to enforce that power by questioning Cameron’s authority, and, thereby, fuelling Scottish ambition of independence from Britain in the form of a referendum.

The rise of the SNP meant bloodbath for the Labour and the Liberal Democratic Party in Scotland. Jim Murphy, the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, and Douglas Alexander, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, have lost their seats to the SNP. Alexander lost his seat to a 20-year-old student, Mhairi Black.

Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and a key figure in the Tory-Lib Dem coalition and Charles Kennedy a former Lib Dem leader too, suffered the same fate. So did Vince Cable the Business Secretary and Lib Dem leader from Twickenham, a constituency he held for nearly two decades. What is surprising is that the coalition partners may have projected their record in government during the campaign, but it is the Lib Dem candidates who were punished as the Tories returned as winners.

As the election results stated coming in on Friday morning, I met a girl from a religious minority community. She told me, she voted for the Conservative candidate overlooking Cable, who represented the middle ground and sanity in British politics. And she is not alone in holding that view. While the voters were polarised as a fall out of a vitriolic election campaign, it is equally true that the electorate can’t be stereotyped by their religious and ethnic backgrounds any longer. Across the country, young voters from the religious and ethnic minority groups stood by the Tories, generally considered tough on immigrants and religious and ethnic minorities. For years and generations, these groups have constituted the core support base of the Labour Party.

The performance of the Labour Party isn’t that dismal in London. They have increased their tally from 2010, probably a message for the city’s Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson, the darling of the party’s right-wingers. Rumours that Johnson would be propped up as a leader of the Conservative Party if Cameron failed to deliver an outright majority, were circulating. The electoral outcome in London also underlines a consolidation of working class votes in favour of Labour after the Tory onslaught on a possible Miliband government in a tacit agreement with the SNP.

The electoral outcome across the United Kingdom is a complex equation, definitely much more than what caught the eyes of the poll stars, a majority of whom were proved wrong.

The equation is even more complex in England. The United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP), which wants the UK to quit the European Union (EU) and blames the migrants — especially those from the East European countries — for all the ills that have befallen Britain, have made significant inroads in England, not necessarily in terms of seats won, but in the share of votes garnered by the party.

The rise of the UKIP comes not necessarily at the cost of the Conservatives, which incidentally is its parent party. But, also at the cost of Labour. The Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls lost his seat because of the number of votes secured by the UKIP in his constituency of Normanton in West Yorkshire, up in North England. The polarising party led by Nigel Farage is making its presence felt beyond the South of England which sees the maximum immigration from the continent.

Despite the resounding success of the SNP in Scotland, Plaid Cymru, another nationalist party in Wales, has managed only a handful of the 40 seats. But there is apprehension that the trend set by the Scots will inspire the Welsh to speak out more vigorously for independence.

With a large number of leaders not returning to parliament, the Labour Party faces a generational crisis. The burden of the skeletons of the New Labour, left by the Blair-Brown years, seemed to have been too heavy for Miliband to bear. The infighting between the Blairites and the Brownites, which later resurfaced in the form of a family war between the Miliband brothers — Ed and David — the latter leaving the Labour Party to take up a plum job in the US, split the organisation too wide for Ed Miliband to stage a comeback.

An outright majority is not all comfort for Cameron. Now that there is no coalition, he will face enhanced pressure from his backbenchers to deliver more for the Tory core voters.  Europe and immigration are causes for concern for the prime minister so is the difficult task of balancing the books and yet deliver a reasonable public service.

Divisive politics awaits a divided nation.

A version of this write up was first published in the DNA on May 9, 2015

Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant. 
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com 
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