At the 1951 UK general election, 97 per cent of voters (on a turnout of 82 per cent) voted either Conservative or Labour. Out of a total of 625 members of parliament (MPs) only nine came from other parties. This was an era of consensus politics. Voters divided almost evenly between two parties that for the next three decades, until Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, would seem indistinguishable from each other.
How different things look in Britain today. With the general election campaign underway, opinion polls show both main parties locked on 34 per cent each. The rest of a chaotic field is made up of nationalist parties, such as the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the Welsh national party Plaid Cymru, the various parties of Northern Ireland, and special interest parties such the Greens and the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the latter of which wants Britain to leave the European Union. A “hung parliament” looks likely.
On Thursday night the leaders of seven parties took to the stage for the only full debate of the election. Standing in a row behind their podiums on a metallic, ultra shiny TV set they looked like contestants in a show that mixed “Jeopardy” with “Britain’s Got Talent.” Yet it made for compelling viewing.
A relaxed David Cameron, the current prime minister, was happy just to play defense. Ed Miliband was less effective than he had been in last week’s TV election event, not least because he apparently unnerved so many viewers by staring awkwardly down the camera. Embattled Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, gave a gutsy performance, desperate to get the credit he surely deserves for keeping a stable coalition government together for five years.
Natalie Bennet, the hapless Green leader, looked lost, as if she had accidentally wandered onstage from the audience. Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood, on the other hand, was confident—calling out UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, for comments about immigrants with HIV, and taking on Ed Miliband for the failures of the Labour government in National Assembly for Wales.
Farage did what Farage always does: he divided people. That’s sometimes called a “Marmite” strategy, so-named after the British yeast-extract spread whose marketing slogan is “Love it or Hate it”; it’s proved a highly effective approach for UKIP in recent parliamentary by-elections and European elections.
And then there was Nicola Sturgeon. Of the three snap polls taken immediately after the debate, she won the YouGov poll outright and was the top performer (followed by David Cameron) when the results from the ComRes, ICM and YouGov polls were combined. That’s pretty impressive for someone who, because she’s already First Minister in the Scottish Parliament, is not even standing as a candidate in the UK general election.
Sturgeon’s strong performance was the latest stage in a remarkable turnaround for the SNP. They led the “yes” campaign in last year’s referendum on whether Scotland should leave the United Kingdom and lost comprehensively. Subsequently, the SNP had to admit that it had got its figures wrong on oil revenues by a whopping £6 billion ($9 billion), thereby undermining any reputation for financial and economic competence.
Nevertheless, six months after that lost referendum, the SNP now looks set to sweep Scotland, increasing its MPs from six to between forty and fifty (out of a total of fifty-nine Scottish constituencies).
Furthermore, if the polls are correct that no-one will command an overall majority, the SNP, as the likely third largest party, may well hold the balance of power in the House of Commons.
Alec Salmond, the likely leader of the party at Westminster after the election, has vowed to stop David Cameron and the Conservatives forming a minority government at all costs. Instead the SNP would offer to work with Ed Miliband, perhaps in a formal coalition, more likely in a “confidence and supply” arrangement that would prop up a Labour minority government.
That prospect has led to widespread consternation in England, particularly in business circles. Nineteen out of twenty FTSE 100 chairmen and chief executives approached by the Financial Times said they were fearful about SNP participation in the next government. One FTSE 100 chairman described it as the “nightmare” scenario. Another predicted a return to Seventies-style socialism.
Certainly it is beyond doubt that Scotland and the SNP never accepted the Thatcher conservative revolution of the 1980s.
“They hate her and they say she hates Scotland,” Damian Barr recalls of Thatcher in “Maggie and Me,” his childhood memoir about growing up 1980s Scotland.
Now the 2015 election looks set to give the SNP an unexpected opportunity as “kingmakers” to try to upend the Thatcherite settlement that has dominated British polity for three decades.