David Cameron’s next challenge: How to keep the kingdom united

David Cameron defied anti-incumbency, winning a slender majority of 330 seats, and followed in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher by increasing his party’s tally in the second term.

By: Vijay Rana

To be or not to be, that’s the question the UK must be facing now.

Voters in Scotland have brutally discarded mainstream British political parties. They never liked the Conservatives in the past, but on a dramatic night they have almost wiped out Labour and Liberal Democrats from Scotland. The triumphant Scottish Nationalist Party, which has never hidden its intention to leave the UK, has swept all but three of the 59 seats in Scotland — indeed a massive earthquake in British politics.

Now it is for the winning Conservative PM to bridge the chasm and rebuild a damaged UK. And he set upon the task immediately, assuring his northern neighbours that he will work for “One United Kingdom”.

No political pundit could predict that Cameron would be able to form a majority government. Cameron defied anti-incumbency, winning a slender majority of 330 seats, and followed in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher by increasing his party’s tally in the second term.

The Liberal Democrats became the biggest casualty of the hazy coalition politics of the past five years — they won only eight seats. Their leader Nick Clegg admitted that his party was going through “a dark hour”. As the “cruel and crushing” night proceeded, senior Lib Dem leaders fell like dominoes and a “heartbroken” Clegg finally resigned.

Electoral politics is a brutal game. No one would know it better than Labour leader Ed Miliband. Until Thursday night, many poll pundits were predicting that he might be heading to 10 Downing Street as the leader of a new coalition government.

But, Labour could only win 232 seats, a loss of 26. Within 12 hours, Miliband’s dream lay shattered. In his resignation speech, he said, “I am truly sorry that I did not succeed. I have done my best for five years.”

The middle-classes were not prepared to hand over to Miliband the reins of the fragile British economy, which has been struggling to recover from one of the biggest recessions in history. His passionate advocacy of the old welfare state and his insistence on hiking the minimum wage and abolishing the exploitative zero-hour employment contracts were opposed by small and big employers.

Also arrayed against him was the overwhelmingly influential media machine of Rupert Murdoch and many other right-wing newspapers which persistently ridiculed his policies as well as his personality.
Then he made the tactical blunder of distancing himself from the centre-right policies of Labour’s most successful PM Tony Blair. The country has changed, but the party has not. There were few buyers of good, old soft-socialism in Cameron’s Britain.

But the road ahead will not be easy for Cameron. He first priority will be to pacify, as the SNP leader Alex Salmond put it, the “roaring Scottish lion”. In his victory speech, Cameron assured quick implementation of the agreed devolution plans. He said, “In Scotland, our plans are to create the strongest devolved government anywhere in the world with important powers over taxation.”

Scotland aside, Cameron’s accommodative spirit may not last long. He is committed to a tough austerity programme, shrinking the welfare state and slashing housing, unemployment and child benefits. Opposition parties have accused him of a hidden programme of 12bn euros worth of financial cuts that will harm the poor and virtually devastate the welfare state.

As for the Indian angle, 10 Indian-origin MPs have been elected. Familiar names like Kieth Vaz (Leicester East), his sister Vallerie Vaz (Wallsall South), Virendra Sharma (Southall), Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston), Preeti Patel (Whittam), Alok Sharma (Reading West), Sailesh Vara (Cambridgeshire North West) won comfortably. Paul Uppal (Woolverhampton South) lost.

Source:: Indian Express