United Kingdom?

S P SETH

There was a time when the sun never set on the British Empire, as they said. Those times are long gone but memories of the Raj, as the British rule over India was called, are recounted in books, through films and in myriad other ways. While this might tickle the pride and glory of the island country but the painful prospect of its further shrinking, with many Scots keen on independence, must be terribly galling for Britain which still, as a result of the post-WW11 settlement, happens to be a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

The recent elections in the United Kingdom highlighted how far even its internal governance and cohesion has come under serious strain. Of course, the unexpected victory of the Conservative Party to govern in its own right, without the need for a coalition partner that was the case before elections, would be very flattering and sweet for Prime Minister David Cameron. But as often happens in such cases, this surface victory conceals more than it reveals. What it highlights is that the first-past-the-post system of electing a party to power with a minority vote is seriously in need of an overhaul to better reflect the popular opinion. For instance, the Conservative Party has been returned to power by polling only 37 per cent (36.9 per cent, to be precise) of the vote. In other words, nearly two-third of the British electorate voted against the ruling party, though fragmenting their disapproval by voting for an array of multiple parties. Not surprisingly, there were rowdy protests outside the official residence of Prime Minister David Cameron, as people fear a continuation, and even further tightening, of the country’s economic austerity regime. In other words, the poor and those teetering on the poverty line are in for even harder times.

The Labour Party, which hoped to defeat the Conservatives to become the country’s new government, had a nasty surprise of even managing to lose seats. And the Liberal Democrats, the junior coalition partner in the David Cameron-led government, received electoral drubbing ending up as a parliamentary rump with eight seats. The worst, though, were the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) that got only one seat in the country’s first-past-the-post-system. But this doesn’t truly reflect their electoral position, having polled 12.6 per cent of the votes. Which suggests that, contrary to UKIP’s one seat, the anti-immigrant and anti-European Union (EU) constituency in UK is steadily building up its momentum.

The United Kingdom is becoming even more parochial than before. If one looks at the collective vote of the Conservatives and the UKIP seeking to appeal to those who want a purist Britain rid of ‘foreigners’, they already seem to constitute almost half of the country. The growing popularity of UKIP’s anti-immigrant and anti-EU platform pushed the Conservative party further to the right. Which left the Labour party further exposed. In a xenophobic and racist Britain, the Labour Party’s attempt to project itself as pro-people and anti-austerity didn’t go well. This is because even though people are suffering under the Conservatives’ austerity regime, they seem even more concerned with ‘foreigners’ of all hues and colour ‘flooding’ the country.

The Labour under Ed Miliband, who has since resigned following the party’s defeat, sought to do two things. First, it tried to recover and foster the party’s old empathy with the under-privileged as against the Conservatives’ engaged in cutting all sorts of social benefits. But they didn’t succeed in selling it because, tarred as they were with the recession that occurred when they were the government, they lacked credibility. Indeed, Tony Blair’s new Labour had legitimized former Tory Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, as a national icon cutting across party lines. And under his successor, Gordon Brown, the country was hit with recession. The Labour never really recovered from their stewardship of the country, which brought into power, in the first place, the Conservative-led coalition Cameron government.

Now Ed Miliband’s brother, David Miliband, who was sidelined by his younger brother in snatching the Labour leadership, has all but slammed his brother’s stewardship calling for a return to the new Labour times when the party followed “the principles of aspiration and inclusion.” And let us not forget that the Tony Blair’s new Labour also took Britain, as the US’s loyal followers, into the disastrous Iraq war, which is still causing havoc.  If this is the best some in the Labour have for the country, the future for the United Kingdom seems even bleaker than it is today.

At another level, the Labour under Ed Milband sought to distance itself from the Scottish Nationalist Party by strongly declaring that they would not form a coalition with the SNP to form a government. In the event that the Conservatives won in their own right, that is now hypothetical. But it seemed that they were keen not to be seen as sympathetic to SNP’s nationalist platform in the wider electorate.

An important development has been that the Labour Party, which had a significant electoral base in Scotland for a long time, has been wiped out from there. The SNP won 56 out of the 59 parliamentary seats from Scotland. Even though the SNP had lost the last year’s referendum for independence by a narrow margin, its massive win in the parliamentary seats in Scotland would suggest that more Scots would like to have another go for a yes vote.   As David Runciman wrote in the London Review of Books at the time of the referendum, “Whatever happens on September 18 [2014] it is hard to imagine that the argument ends here… The pressure for change will grow, not diminish. At the same time, English nationalism is going to rear its head… The other regions are going to want their say.” He added, “The status quo inside the UK is defensible in the short term but not sustainable in the long run.”  The massive endorsement of the SNP in Scotland clearly indicates that the United Kingdom might not remain united for long.

Another issue plaguing the United Kingdom is that there is a growing constituency, even if it might not be a majority yet, that wants the country out of the European Union (EU)--- part of the same xenophobic and small-island mentality behind the rise of UKIP. To appease this growing constituency, David Cameron had promised to hold a referendum on it in 2017. And even if the referendum is lost, it still will not be the end of the story. Like the Scottish issue, it will keep popping up at times until it is finally resolved with the country becoming the small parochial island it is. 

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au