Ideas@TheCentre
UK election report
Peter Saunders |
14 May 2010
The deal between Tories and Liberal Democrats has given Britain its first peacetime coalition government since Ramsay MacDonald in 1931. As well as a referendum on voting reform (to introduce an Australian-style Alternative Preferential Vote for the Lower House), there will be proposals for a reformed Upper Chamber elected on PR and a commitment to introduce fixed-term parliaments (the next election has been fixed for May 2015, with earlier dissolution possible only with 55% backing in the Commons).
The coalition partners know that if they don’t hang together, they will hang separately. Labour is eagerly anticipating a swift return to power on the back of the huge unpopularity that will be triggered by Tory/Lib Dem cuts. The new government will need all of its five years to get the budget under control and then rebuild voter support.
It will be a rocky ride, for many Lib Dem activists and supporters are to the left of Labour, and a major European controversy could test this uneasy alliance to destruction. But David Cameron is socially liberal and Nick Clegg is economically liberal, so this coalition could work.
After all the excitement of the last week, it’s important to remember that great swathes of the electorate don’t actually care who governs. Last week I predicted that the To-Hell-With-Them-All Party would win, and despite reports of angry queues at polling stations, I was right. Thirty-five percent of the electorate did not vote – about the same as supported the Tories and Lib Dems combined.
The fascist BNP fared much worse than I anticipated in my comments last week. So did UKIP and the anti-sleaze independent candidates (the backlash against greedy politicians never happened). I was right about the Greens winning their first ever seat, but like everyone else I misread the Liberal Democrat ‘surge.’ They lost seats, but still ended up in government.
The Blair landslide in 1997 briefly eclipsed the sharp geographical polarisation of British politics, but it’s back again. Labour lost every seat in the South-east of England while the Conservatives won just one in the whole of Scotland. This electoral geography will make it even harder to drive through the cuts that are needed, for the areas where the new government has its weakest mandate are the areas where public expenditure is highest.
In the last 13 years, UK government spending increased from 38% to 45% of GDP – a huge rise. The test of this new government will be whether it manages to reverse this profligacy without tearing itself – and the country – apart. Interesting times lie ahead.
Professor Peter Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. This article is last installment of his weekly piece on the UK election.
