The United Kingdom general election of 2015, held last Thursday, 7 May, saw David Cameron and the Conservative Party elected to form a majority government. Winning 331 seats in the House of Commons, an increase on the 306 they took in 2010, the Conservatives will be able to govern alone, beyond the confines of the coalition partnership they have led for the last five years alongside the Liberal Democrats. Labour managed 232 seats, seeing minor gains in England, but far fewer than expected and grossly insufficient especially with the Scottish National Party driving them out of Scotland. There, the SNP won 56 of a possible 59 seats: enjoying swings in their favour routinely in excess of 30%, with their number of seats rising by a remarkable 50. The hegemony Labour have long enjoyed in Scotland – never attaining fewer than 40 seats since 1964 (though just over 70 seats were on offer north of the border until the general election of 2005), and between the late 1980s and early 2000s routinely achieving in excess of 50 – has been shattered.
In England the Conservatives’ share of the seats rose as they effectively wiped out the Liberal Democrats, whose seats fell from 57 to 8. Labour also picked up several seats at the expense of the Lib Dems, but failed to adequately challenge the Tories. Perhaps this explains some of the discrepancy with the pre-election opinion polls – which until Wednesday unanimously predicted an even race: Labour were indeed up on their showing in 2010, but not in the areas which would matter, while the Conservatives more than retained their support in the face of a collapse in the Liberal Democrat following. Yet it seems clear also that many voters were reluctant to admit their right-wing preferences.
Many of UK politics’ biggest names have departed the Commons. For Labour, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls and Shadow Foreign Secretary – and Ed Miliband’s Chair of Election Strategy – Douglas Alexander lost their seats. Alexander fell in his constituency of Paisley and Renfrewshire South, a seat he had held since 1997, to the SNP candidate Mhairi Black, at twenty years old the youngest MP since the seventeenth century. The decimation of the Liberal Democrats saw Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, Secretary of State for Business Vince Cable, and Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Davey ousted; along with Simon Hughes, who had held Bermondsey and Old Southwark for a remarkable thirty-two years, and respected figures including Jo Swinson, Lynne Featherstone, David Laws, and former party leader Charles Kennedy.
In the aftermath of the election, Labour and the Liberal Democrats find themselves looking for new leaders. Despite holding their respective seats, both Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg resigned from their posts. Nigel Farage effectively reneged on his pre-election promise to depart were he to fail to become an MP: initially opting to stand down over the summer before contemplating a return come the autumn, his ‘resignation’ has been rejected by UKIP party members, meaning he will remain in place as their leader. Farage, after what was widely considered a dismal campaign, lost out in South Thanet to Conservative Craig Mackinlay. Jim Murphy meanwhile has vowed to remain as Leader of the Scottish Labour Party, but there are already calls for his resignation, notably from the trade union Unite.
The figures from the popular vote show millions failing to receive adequate representation. The Conservatives achieved their 331 seats with a total of 11,334,520 votes, giving them a 41% share of the vote in England, and a 36.9% share throughout the UK. Labour took 232 seats courtesy of 9,347,326 votes overall, with a 31.6% share in England and a 30.4% share across the UK. The SNP attained their 56 seats via just 1,454,436 votes in more sparsely populated Scotland: enough for only a 4.7% share of the vote in the context of the whole of the UK, but the party did earn 50% of the vote where they stood within Scotland. However UKIP won 3,881,129 votes and 12.6% of the voting share throughout the UK for just 1 seat, giving the party by far the poorest record when it comes to votes per MP. Less extreme but in the same vein, the Greens took 1,157,613 votes for 1 seat; and the Liberal Democrats 2,415,888 votes for 8 seats, the same number as the Democratic Unionist Party won in Northern Ireland on the back of 184,260 votes.
This will once again spur a debate on the merits of a more representative voting system as an alternative to first past the post. The Conservatives will be hugely reluctant to implement electoral reform, and they of course hold power and will point to the failed alternative vote referendum of 2011. But now there is a strong impetus for all other England-based parties to demand change. Typically a cause of the left, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party have long favoured some form of proportional representation; while UKIP may now prove its biggest advocates. And given their demise in Scotland, where they lost 40 seats and finished with only 1, Labour too may now seek to benefit from an alteration in method. Determining which of the many variants of proportional or preferential voting best suit will be a difficult task. Some systems would not seem, for instance, to justly uphold the the extent of the swing towards the SNP in Scotland.
Electoral reform would clearly influence politics beyond the confines of election day. If David Cameron and the Conservatives had faced the prospect of growing UKIP support turning into seats, perhaps they would have focused less over the past five years on immigration and the EU. Though Cameron has pledged a referendum on EU membership by the end of 2017, he and many other leading Tories do not want an exit; and with Scotland and devolution elsewhere in the UK a more immediate concern, plus the expected pressure towards electoral reform, it is hard to see where there will be time and space for an EU referendum to properly go ahead. Perhaps not coincidentally, the latter half of 2017 is scheduled to see Britain take the rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union. This and his attempts to renegotiate the terms of EU membership could see Cameron twist a way out of his pledge. Meanwhile for their own sake the Conservatives may look to change constituency boundaries ahead of 2020.
The about-turn seemingly orchestrated by Farage and UKIP, allowing him to remain as the leader of what is now arguably England’s third party, may seem duplicitous. Farage has done similar before, briefly stepping down ahead of the 2010 general election to contest the seat of Buckingham, before returning as leader after finishing third. But beyond selfish motives there are good reasons for Farage to stay in place: despite frequent controversies and an ever-changeable set of policies beyond their core focus on immigration and the EU, the profile of the party has grown markedly over the last few years, resulting in almost three million more votes versus 2010. And notwithstanding the high-profile defections from the Conservatives of Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless – with Carswell remaining as MP for Clacton after his by-election success last October, the only UKIP politician now with a seat – the public perception of the party is so bound in Farage’s person that it is unclear how they would fare without him. Attitudes within UKIP are deferential wherever they are not reverential.
It is to be seen whether Farage has the imagination and the inclination to strengthen UKIP’s presence in the north of England. The growth in UKIP’s support has occurred throughout the country: in Yorkshire, for example, their share of the vote increased by 13.8%, but Yorkshire, the Midlands, and the North West too are important for both the Conservatives and Labour, sites where small swings in the voting share can make all the difference. By contrast in much of the North East, UKIP have a relatively unfettered pathway towards challenging Labour dominance. On Thursday UKIP finished in second place in 120 constituencies overall, many in the broadly defined ‘north’; and Carswell has suggested that they are capable of replacing Labour as the north’s first party with a brand of ‘radical popular capitalism’.
This phrase scarcely conceals the fact that, scaremongering aside, UKIP’s economic policies pander primarily to the wealthy, offering a string of tax cuts that benefit only the well-off. In accordance with Farage’s background, the party’s support flourished initially in the South East and along areas of the east coast, extending then to the South West. As is the case with Cornwall, the Durham and Tees Valley is one of the poorest regions in the whole of northern Europe; but to roundly win over the north and the North East in particular, and to make the most of their current standing, UKIP will have to fundamentally shift their outlook when it comes to the economy, education, and the NHS. In this regard Farage’s initial suggestion – that he would take the summer off before deciding whether to mount a return – made a degree of sense despite the uncertainty it would have wrought. It could have afforded the party a useful change of perspective, and the chance for a temporary leader to showcase their credentials.
A cynical view is that the Conservatives, for whom the North East is never a priority, will hardly be inclined to spur development when a struggling region will stretch Labour and potentially play into UKIP’s hands. Analysts have routinely argued that UKIP will pose a long-term challenge to Labour more than the Tories; a view that Farage seemed to uphold when, on election night, he mocked The Sun and the Daily Mail for arguing that UKIP would split the Tory vote. More than divided into three or four by virtue of country, the UK as it exists today is politically divided into at least five or six distinct regions, with the North East sharing ideologically more with Scotland than the south.
The concept of the rise of the SNP as a product of nationalism, expounded by Labour politicians in the midst of their resounding defeat, wilfully misses the point. Support for the SNP is not based on Scottish exceptionalism, a vain sense that the country has some unique value or import: rather it is based on a set of principles which were once British and remain European, in so far as they persist most prominently in Scandinavia and France. It is a left-wing, socialist, anti-austerity movement, nationalist only in so far as it is a rejection of the present state of another nation, England and its political class at Westminster. Culturally too Scotland has a long and rich identification as part of Europe, and the country would not want to find itself forced from the EU. Labour’s failure in Scotland owes partly to the independence referendum, which – especially given the lack of meaningful action since its conclusion – crystallised anti-Westminster sentiment; but more to its own vacillating between barely enunciated left-of-centre policies on taxation, housing, and devolution, and the towing of a resolutely right-wing agenda on welfare, immigration, and the EU.
So we look towards a Conservative government intent on damaging spending cuts and without the restraining influence of the Liberal Democrats. Again, it is confounding to consider where the proposed £12 billion of further welfare cuts will come from, at least without significantly affecting disabled people, lower-income families, and youngsters forced to attempt to begin life on housing benefit. And again, beyond the perception of the Lib Dems as power-grabbing and promise-breaking, the party had a positive impact as part of the coalition: fundamental in raising the personal allowance, securing same-sex marriage, and fighting on behalf of civil liberties. With the results on Thursday still coming in, Theresa May sought to relaunch her ‘Snooper’s Charter’, the Draft Communications Data Bill which would authorise the bulk collection of data and which has been roundly condemned as an invasion of individuals’ rights.
On Monday, with the Liberal Democrats already a fading memory, David Cameron finalised the cabinet that will commence his second term. George Osborne, Theresa May, Philip Hammond, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Fallon, Jeremy Hunt, and Nicky Morgan remain in their posts; Chris Grayling replaces William Hague as Leader of the House of Commons; Michael Gove moves to become Justice Secretary; Sajid Javid switches from Culture, Media and Sport to Business, Innovation and Skills, with John Whittingdale taking up his old position; Amber Rudd becomes Secretary for Energy and Climate Change; Greg Hands becomes Chief Secretary to the Treasury; and Robert Halfon will be the new Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party as well as Minister without Portfolio.
Cameron is set to address his newly-formed cabinet with more talk about ‘getting on’, without regard for the security of jobs, the quality of jobs on offer, and stagnant wages: under this government, the ‘chance to make the most of life’, the ‘dignity of a job’, and the ‘pride of a paycheck’ amount to no more than crude mythologising, while the promise of a home of one’s own is rendered increasingly unattainable by a housing policy equally crass and defunct. Labour on the other hand begin the quest for a new leader vowing much soul searching – with Chuka Umunna, Yvette Cooper, Tristram Hunt, Andy Burnham, and Liz Kendall among the early contenders – but a restoration of fortunes will not be achieved via a complacent return to a reshaped middle-ground.
