Last month the BBC broadcast a Newsnight election debate with a young, long-shot candidate from the Scottish Nationalist Party. Mhairi Black, a 20-year-old student from Glasgow University had no doubts about why the public had lost faith in its political representatives. “The problem with Westminster has been that it’s been a boys’ club,” she said, “it’s been a boys’ club for too long with too many similar, middle-aged, middle class guys.” Pressed on her lack of experience she pushed back: “I can’t help my age, any more than I can help my gender or other people can help their sexuality, or whatever it is . . . what we look for is dignity, integrity, honesty.” Then, responding to an earlier question about the difficulty of knowing which politicians could be counted on, Black said “that’s not your job, it’s our job to earn your trust.”
Two nights ago, having wrested the Paisley and Renfrewshire South seat away from shadow foreign secretary and Labour’s UK campaign coordinator Douglas Alexander — a strong favourite who had secured his seat with a 16,000 vote majority — Ms. Black became the United Kingdom’s youngest member of parliament in three and a half centuries. The result was one of several shocks on an election night that confounded all the pundits, who had predicted a close race, and handed the Conservative party an outright majority — a stunning victory for the very epitome of the boys club Black had denounced.
The scale of the Conservative victory owed a great deal to a wave of SNP support that swept the party to its comprehensive rout of the north, mostly at the expense of Labour. If nothing else the result underscored the strangeness of the first-past-the-post seat allocation. With five per cent of the vote concentrated in the right places the SNP won more than 50 seats; by contrast, the far-right anti-immigrant party UKip won just two seats, despite quadrupling its base in five years to almost 3 million votes, or 10 per cent of the national total.
The results indicate deep divisions within the United Kingdom: Conservatives comfortably won within England, the SNP overran Scotland, Labour prevailed in Wales. The Liberal Democrats were wiped out, losing 47 of their 57 seats — an unforgiving rebuke for having worked with the Conservatives in a coalition that forced them into “existentially disastrous” choices, in the apt phrase of a professor from the London School of Economics. The scale of this defeat should serve as a warning to any coalition that believes disenchantment with a previous government is enough to shore up support through a recession and the difficult policies it entails.
The Conservatives’ victory will likely reshape the agenda of British politics for a generation, giving them an opportunity to decisively settle questions such as the future of the National Health Service and funding for university education, but larger issues too, such as Scottish independence and Britain’s membership in the European Union. Freed from the constraints of a coalition there is little reason for Mr. Cameron to revisit his enthusiasm for free markets and the dismantling of the welfare state. Well aware that that his slender majority will soon face pressure on several fronts, however, Mr. Cameron quickly struck a diplomatic note in his acceptance speech, promising to ensure that he would “govern with respect” and continue to devolve power to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
It is hard to watch British election coverage without noticing the absence of pettiness, a quality that mars so much of American politics. After losing, by the smallest of margins, to a Tory candidate, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls conceded with exemplary grace, noting that “Any personal disappointment I have at this result is as nothing compared to the sense of sorrow I have at the result that Labour has achieved across the United Kingdom … and the sense of concern I have about the future.” Given the political stakes, not least the referenda on Scotland and Europe, Balls’ civility will be remembered long after this particular defeat has been forgotten.
The British election shows that polls and pundits can be utterly wrong (despite sifting through reams of data) because politics often turns out to be more like a sport, with unpredictable passages of play in which individuals achieve surprising victories, than a science. It shows that long-term political compromises — such as those made by the Liberal Democrats — are perilous gambles that require a great deal of principled determination, and luck, to succeed. It also serves as a reminder that the quirks of an outmoded electoral system can, in the right circumstances, magnify the appeal of one nationalist party, undermine the surprisingly broad appeal of another, and exact a heavy toll on mainstream parties that fail to earn the public’s trust by presenting themselves as credible opposition.
