BackUK heads for election chaos as polls promise no victors
Unlike in 2010, when Cameron conjured up a coalition, there's a possibility that nobody will manage to repeat the feat this time
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London: The only dependable prediction for the outcome of the UK’s 7 May election is this: chaos. All of the opinion polls are clear: Instead of a decisive winner, there will be hobbled aspirants, each cajoling as many as seven smaller parties to give up their independence and prop up a minority or coalition government for a fixed term of five years.
Forming a government could take a while. It will without doubt be untidy. And unlike in 2010, when David Cameron succeeded in rapidly conjuring up a two-party coalition that survived a full term, there’s a very real possibility that nobody will manage to repeat the feat this time.
Indeed, by the time this election is over, political analysts say the UK may end up with a government quite unlike any in the past 35 years—weak, with no clear mandate to rule, cobbling together deals to get even the most minor issues through an unruly Parliament.
“If the polls are right, it’ll be a total mess," said Rob Ford, a politics lecturer at Manchester University. “Every single vote in Parliament is going to need constant wheedling to get it over the line. You could be having regular confidence votes, with games of brinkmanship on both sides."
Surveys from the most prolific polling company, YouGov Plc, over the past week have shown Cameron’s conservatives and the main opposition Labour Party neck and neck at support levels between 32% and 34%, with the anti-immigration UK Independence Party at about 15%, Cameron’s Liberal Democrat coalition partners at about 8% and the Greens a point or so behind. There’s been little change in that overall picture in the past few months.
While the election result might be ragged, the stakes are high. Government instability could hamper the decision-making ability of the world’s sixth-biggest economy, a long-term US ally that’s also a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a nuclear power and a key advocate of tough sanctions against Russia over Ukraine. And there’s the threat of renewed moves to make Scotland independent and Cameron’s promise to hold a referendum on British membership of the European Union if re-elected.
Hedging Sterling
Investors are already paying more to protect themselves against a weaker pound as political uncertainty mounts. Last week, the cost of those options reached the highest in more than three years, while a gauge of the pound’s future volatility has climbed more than that of any of the other major currencies this year.
None of the possible scenarios suggested by current polls points to stability for either the political landscape or the economy, analysts at Bank of America Corp. said in a research note. Steve Barrow, the head of Group of 10 strategy at Standard Bank Plc in London, recommends hedging sterling investments through the election, and also its aftermath.
“The market is prepared for the bad, or the very bad, but not for the disastrous," Barrow said by phone.
Whereas coalition building is the norm in countries such as Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel took almost three months to form an administration in 2013, it’s still unfamiliar territory in Britain.
Election Night
“Not being able to form a government in Germany doesn’t rattle markets at all, but in the UK, markets would get very worried," Philip Shaw, the chief economist at Investec in London, said in an interview. “On election night, we’re going to have to wait and see—you may know the seat numbers, and yet it’s very difficult for any party to form a majority government and we’re still running on the old administration."
UBS Group AG said this month that a Labour-led government might pose risks to some industries, highlighting banks, utilities and rail and bus operators. The bank warned, though, about the “broader uncertainty" of a referendum on EU membership under a Conservative-led administration.
The last time the UK had such an unclear election result was in February 1974, when the Conservative Party won the popular vote while Labour took more seats in Parliament, though without a majority. There was a second election eight months later.
Fixed Terms
This time around, that option is pretty much off the table. An untested Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011 removes the prime minister’s option to call an election when he wants to. He can only do it with the agreement of other parties in Parliament. Instead, the different sides will have to negotiate. While these negotiations—for which the only time limit is the 2020 general election—roll on, Cameron and his ministers will continue in office, technically in power, but potentially lacking the moral authority to govern or the practical ability to win a vote in Parliament.
To outsiders, it might seem odd that even if Cameron doesn’t win the election, he gets to keep leading the government. But Britain has no written constitution, relying on precedent and specific laws instead.
And because the existing political structures in the UK haven’t had to deal with this sort of situation, there isn’t even a formal mechanism that governs when Cameron would have to resign, said Philip Norton, a Conservative member of the House of Lords, the unelected upper chamber of Parliament, and a professor of politics at Hull University. The Fixed-Term Parliaments Act stops the premier calling another election without saying what should happen if there’s no deal.
“Theoretically, you could have negotiations lasting five years; if they can’t reach agreement, they can’t reach agreement," Norton said. “You could make it virtually impossible for the government to govern, and it would then be up to the government to resign, but that doesn’t trigger an election."
Kellner’s Forecast
The likely level of difficulty can be seen in the latest prediction of the result from YouGov president Peter Kellner. He sees the Conservatives getting 293 seats, and Ed Miliband’s Labour Party 270—both well short of the 326 target for a parliamentary majority.
Cameron’s current coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, would lose nearly half of their current seats, meaning they no longer have the ability to hoist either main party to victory single-handedly.
Scottish Nationalists
Cameron and Miliband will instead have to look elsewhere, perhaps to the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP), which tops opinion polls north of the border. Kellner predicts them gaining a record 30 seats, at the expense of Labour and the Liberal Democrats. If Miliband could reach agreement with the SNP and the Liberal Democrats, he would have a majority on Kellner’s figures.
But the SNP says it doesn’t want to join a coalition. Instead, it’s proposing to back a Labour minority government in confidence votes, at a price. And top of the wish list is getting rid of the Trident nuclear-weapons system, based in a deep sea loch in western Scotland. Could Miliband, having come second in an election, abandon a central pillar of British defence at the behest of a party that wants to leave the UK?
Meanwhile, Cameron might look for a deal involving the Liberal Democrats, eight or so Democratic Unionist lawmakers from Northern Ireland, and UKIP, which Kellner predicts will get five seats. UKIP and the Unionists have also been clear that they don’t want to be in a coalition.
Even assuming Cameron or Miliband can reach a deal that satisfies two or three other parties, they have their own side to worry about. According to Philip Cowley, professor of politics at Nottingham University and an expert on parliamentary voting, the Conservatives and Labour Party each have around 50 lawmakers who can’t be relied on to vote with their party, which makes a theoretical majority of 10 look shaky. Past governments have seen small majorities eroded over their terms as members of Parliament die, defect or, in one memorable case in the 1970s, fake their own death.
It may be messy, but at least it’s not boring, according to Ann Taylor, who was elected to the second Parliament of 1974, and became a junior whip responsible for party discipline in 1977, just as the Labour government lost its Commons majority.
Those five years in Parliament were so dramatic, Britain’s National Theatre staged a play about them in 2012.
“It was desperately exciting — every day mattered," Taylor said in an interview. “Ministers were driven to get things done, because they didn’t know how long they had." Bloomberg
Paul Dobson contributed to this story.
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