�A Disunited Kingdom?�
Jeff Ramsay | Monday May 18, 2015 15:23
At least for those following the polls, the extent of the Conservative (Tory) party of Prime Minister David Cameron’s victory in the UK election was surprising. In the context of the First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system Cameron’s party managed to capture 51% of the seats with 37% of the national vote. The lion’s share of the Tory vote, along with 319 of the seats, came from England.
At the beginning of this year, many believed that Labour had a modest edge thanks in part to what were seen as favourable constituency boundaries in England, while on the eve of Thursday’s vote the opinion polling consensus was that the Tories were running neck to neck with Labour across the country, with both likely to fall short of a majority.
While the polls more accurately predicted the surge of the Scottish National Party (SNP), the extent of its unprecedented landside, taking 56 out of Scotland’s 59 seats in Westminster, still came as a shock to many.
Behind the respective success of the Conservatives and SNP lies a deeper tale of political divergence in Britain, whose parameters become apparent when one factors in the votes for the other parties.
The SNP victory in Scotland can to a greater extent be attributed to its supplanting Labour as the country’s principal centre left party. The SNP gained some 50% of the vote in Scotland, followed by 24% for Labour and another 2% for the Greens and smaller socialist parties.
If one includes the centrist Liberal Democrats, who in Scotland are traditionally left leaning, the centre-left total climbs from 76% to 83%. By contrast, the main parties on the right in Scotland, the Conservatives and United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) together accounted for only 16.5% of the vote.
Turning to England a dramatically different narrative emerges. There Cameron’s Tories captured 60% of the seats with 41% of the vote, with UKIP attracted another 14% of the vote, while gaining but one seat. The combined vote for the parties on the English right was thus 55%, climbing to 63% for the centre right if one throws in the Liberal Democrats.
In the heat of the election it is easy to cite issues of personality and tactics to explain outcomes. Labour’s failure has been attributed to the perceived weakness of its now former leader, Edward Miliband, combined with the Conservatives’ success in stoking English voter fears that he would be at the mercy of the SNP in a hung Parliament.
To this author at least the 83% vote for the centre left in Scotland versus 63% vote for the centre right in England suggests the consolidation of a more fundamental, long term, political realignment between the two countries that make up the north and south of Britain.
The results in the two smaller UK jurisdictions, Northern Ireland and Wales, reinforce the picture of regional drift. In Wales alone Labour remained predominant, taking 25 out of 40 seats, albeit based on 37% of the vote. Along with the nationalist Plaid Cymru’s 12% of the vote, but only 3 seats, and another 3% of the vote, but no seats, for the Greens and smaller socialist parties, the left of centre in Wales accounts for 51% of the vote, a decline from the past, while the combined Conservative/UKIP vote was 41%.
Northern Ireland’s five main local parties (none of the major UK parties field candidates in the region), have once more between them maintained the roughly 60% versus 40% division between the “Unionists” favouring continued bonds with Britain, and “Republicans” in favour of the integration with the rest of Ireland. While the latter are generally more inclined to leftist rhetoric, the still bitter division between the two tendencies is more rooted in tribal than ideological sentiment.
Getting back to England and Scotland there is a tendency among casual observers to assume today’s political divergences are a reflection of divisions of identity rooted in historical conflicts running back from the time of the 18th century Jacobites and the earlier wars of independence.
But, tracing today’s tale of two nations to Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Highland rebels, much less to the Middle Age resistance of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and, dare I say, the subsequent exploits “Black Agnes” and her valiant knight protector Alexander Ramsay, is frankly problematic.
Until recently election results in both England and Scotland to a greater extent displayed a convergence of political vision reflective of their post 1707 shared British identity. In the mid-1950’s the now “Toxic Tories” were actually predominant in Scotland as well as England. Their marginalisation north of the border can be traced to the 1980s disenchantment with the policies of the Thatcher administration, which also polarised English opinion along regional as well as class lines.
Notwithstanding the histrionics of the English tabloid media, a second independence referendum for Scotland seems unlikely anytime too soon. But, finding a shared framework for reconciling the now radically divergent politics of all four of the countries that make up the UK will certainly be a major challenge for the Rt. Honourable Cameron.