The recurring theme of election coverage in Britain this year has been that no one cares about the campaign. The satirical magazine Private Eye’s cover this week shows a sleeping David Cameron, with the caption “Passionate Cameron catches national mood.” Funny stuff, but wrong: The campaign has failed to move voters not because it’s been dull, but because Britain is balanced on an ideological knife edge, caught between a fading belief in a limited state and a pudgy love affair with banning, restricting, taxing, and spending. That knife-edge balance will find its reflection in today’s results.
First, a reminder: For practical purposes, 323 MPs gives you a majority in the Commons. Unless the polls are wildly wrong, no party can win an overall majority. It’s almost impossible — though not quite — that the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition will win a majority, because the Lib Dems are going to do badly. How badly is an open question, as they tend win more seats than their standing in the polls implies. But they’ll do very well to keep 30 of their 57 seats.
The crucial number for the Tories is 290: If they don’t get there, it’s basically inconceivable that they will be able to form a coalition government of any variety that has a majority in the Commons. One small upside is that it’s theoretically possible for both the Lib Dems and the Tories not to do as badly as everyone expects, because the Lib Dems will likely take no Tory seats and the Tories look like taking only 10 Lib Dem ones.
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Britain is balanced on an ideological knife edge, caught between a fading belief in a limited state and a pudgy love affair with banning, restricting, taxing, and spending.
But feet on the ground: No forecast shows the Tories reaching 290. The average prediction is about 280, though overnight polling is even less optimistic than that. And 280 isn’t quite enough, both because the other parties that might coalesce behind the Tories aren’t likely to have enough MPs, and because several members of this potential new coalition (UKIP and the Lib Dems) can’t abide each other.
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One thing we can say for sure: There is going to be a political earthquake in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party (the SNP) are going to come close to rubbing out Labour. It’s hard to come up with a meaningful U.S. comparison to explain what a revolution this is. It would be, perhaps, like the Democratic Party in 1870 taking every congressional seat in the American North on a wave of public revulsion with the Republicans. But even that doesn’t do it justice. If Labour were to merely hold its current seats in Scotland, it would be the largest party, and would be a nearly irresistible coalition partner for the Lib Dems.
#related#That won’t happen, which leaves two possibilities. Both are bad news. The first, and to my mind most likely, is that after the election it will not be possible to form a stable coalition government. In other words, a disaster. If the Tories are on 280, Labour on 270, the SNP on 50, and the Lib Dems on 25 (which is where the averages put them), then Labour + SNP is 320, Tories + Lib Dem is 305, and both groups would have to look to the 25 remaining MPs — the Northern Irish parties, the Welsh nationalists, a couple of UKIP MPs, and (shudder) one Green and George Galloway. Yes: Britain’s political fate might just be decided by George Galloway.
There’s certainly no Tory-led coalition in that lot, and while Labour would find it easier to get to a majority, the most it could get to would be 330. Labour might be able to limp along for a while in that scenario, but it would be a nightmare, and in practice Labour would have to rely on both the Welsh and the Scottish nationalists to oppose Tory no-confidence measures.
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The second possibility, not far removed from the first, is that Labour does a bit better and the Lib Dems do a bit worse, and there’s a clear blocking majority against a Tory-led coalition — say, Labour + SNP on 325. This would be a mess rather than a disaster, for two reasons. First, Labour and the SNP are bitter enemies in Scotland. If they cooperate, that tells Scottish voters they can vote SNP and get Labour, which is bad for Labour. If they don’t cooperate, the SNP can pin the “Red Tory” label on Labour in Scotland, which is probably even worse for Labour, though it saves Ed Miliband’s party from being tagged as a Scottish tool in England, which is where most of its seats will be.
Neither Labour nor the SNP wants a new election right away, which is the traditional solution to the problem of a hung Parliament.
Moreover, neither Labour nor the SNP wants a new election right away, which is the traditional solution to the problem of a hung Parliament. Labour can’t afford one, and the SNP wants a government in office in Westminster until May 2016, when there are elections in Scotland, so that in the interim it can both extort more money from the English and complain about how terrible they are. Moreover, since Britain unwisely adopted fixed-term Parliaments in 2011, even the process of getting to an early election is more complicated than it used to be.
Thus the factor that will decide how the disaster is resolved, or whether or not there’s a blocking majority against the Tories, will be Labour’s decision about where it wants to take its lumps, and whether it still believes in the Anglo-Scottish Union. If it gives up on Scotland politically but keeps faith with the Union, Labour could decline to take power, or could decline to vote the Tories out of power. There would then be a Tory-led minority government, including the Lib Dems, until Labour felt it could afford another election, which would perhaps be in 2017.
By that time, Labour would be demolished in Scotland, but as a result it might be more competitive in England. One of the costs of that approach would likely be the end, not long postponed, of the United Kingdom, because, with few if any Tory or Labour MPs, Scotland would effectively be politically lost to the Union. Or Britain could get there the other way round: Labour could do a deal with the SNP now based on a decision to give up on the Union — Labour would give Scotland independence and then seek a new mandate in England, again around 2017, on the grounds that it was now a purely English (and Welsh) party. The only real barrier to this is Labour Unionism, and after tomorrow, that may be a perishable commodity.
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If it decides to take its lumps in England, to stick with the Union, and to do all it can to recover its position in Scotland, Labour will still have to do some sort of deal with the SNP. In this case, there will be a minority Labour government that will endure until the moment the SNP finds the deal inconvenient or believes it can do better elsewhere. The collapse of the deal will be followed by an election and, likely, a massive Conservative victory driven by English revulsion at being governed, de facto, by the Scots. In this case, the fate of the Union will be up for grabs.
#related#My gut sense is that, unless Labour is willing to break up the Union, it will decide it has more to lose from cooperation with the SNP than it has to gain. But when the prospect of Number 10 is dangled in front of Labour’s Ed Miliband, he may well find he thinks differently. So cruel is the dilemma, though, that Labour might actually be better off in the long run if Britain follows the narrow path to a renewed Tory/Lib Dem coalition. That would give it time to regain its footing in Scotland somewhat, which would in turn give it a hope of actually winning an election. Doing this would also avoid labeling it forever as the party that broke up the United Kingdom.
And then there is the question of how Britain got to this pass, and the equally vital questions of what these hypothetical governments might do, how long they will last, and precisely how Britain will get to the early election that is surely in the cards (unless, unthinkably, the Tories and Labour do a real deal). Right now, that feels like a million years away. But don’t kid yourself: This is the end of the two- (or two-and-a-half-) party political system that everyone in Britain has known all their lives, and of a good deal more besides. If this election’s been boring, there’s no need to worry: Britain will get its excitement on the back end.
— Ted R. Bromund is the senior research fellow in Anglo-American relations in The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.