Coalition quagmire
No deals in sight as hung Parliament looms in U.K.
For an election that is universally regarded as a cliffhanger, the British campaign to elect a new government on May 7 has been remarkably tedious.
That changed dramatically Thursday when the leaders of the three largest parties parried questions from the public for 30 minutes on national television. Instead of fairly respectful questions from journalists, the leaders encountered an audience in the working class city of Leeds that repeatedly called out Labour leader Ed Miliband for claiming he will cut the deficit when previous Labour governments added to it and the Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, for not being honest about how he will achieve his plan to cut spending by $22 billion.
The exchanges became so confrontational that a BBC analyst said the leaders had been put “on the torture rack.”
Cameron, Miliband and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg were also aggressively questioned about how they might form or be part of a coalition government if, as seems increasingly likely, there is a hung parliament.
The latest polls show a dead heat between the Tories and Labour, with each party getting about 33 per cent of the vote and the Tories projected to win a few more seats. With almost no change in public sentiment for several weeks, what looms may be a new Parliament where Cameron’s Queen’s Speech (the equivalent to Canada’s Speech from the Throne) is defeated. In this situation the Queen would undoubtedly ask Miliband to try to cobble together a working majority.
But Thursday’s ballot will probably produce a hung parliament with a forbidding complication. The balance of power after the election will almost certainly rest with the separatist Scottish National Party, which appears poised to obliterate Labour’s historic stranglehold on seats in what has become the most restive part of the not-so-United Kingdom. The SNP’s lead over Labour there is a staggering 34 percentage points, which should translate into at least 45 of the 59 seats there and quite possibly every one of them.
Just as Bloc Québécois support poisoned Stéphane Dion’s attempt to form a Liberal-NDP coalition during the winter of 2008-2009, so SNP support for Labour threatens Miliband’s prospects of forming the next government. Sensing the peril of having separatists under his tent, Miliband was adamant that “if the price of having a Labour government is a deal or a coalition with the SNP, it’s not going to happen.”
Yet many wonder how Mil- iband can possibly become the next prime minister unless he embraces the Scottish nationalists.
Nicola Sturgeon, the pugnacious SNP leader who has repeatedly outperformed the other party leaders since taking over after the SNP lost last year’s vote on Scottish independence, was not invited to the leaders’ televised Q&A session with voters. Not for the first time, the potential kingmaker was quick on Friday to taunt Miliband for preferring to let the Conservatives remain in power, rather than come to an arrangement with her party.
But frankly, it is difficult to see how the other three parties could ever work with Sturgeon when she has been totally inflexible on many key issues. One of them has been her demand that the Royal Navy’s hugely expensive nuclear submarines be scrapped.
Even pulling the submarines out of their only base in Scotland would cost taxpayers billions of pounds as they would need a new home port in England at a time when even the Conservatives favour slashing defence spending to deal with a budget crisis.
On the other side of the equation, Cameron, whose party is projected to win about 280 seats, did not exclude a coalition with the centrist Liberal Democrats who have said they will listen to offers from the Tories and Labour.
The problem for Cameron is that the Liberal Democrats — his only meaningful potential dance partner — are not expected to win more than a few dozen seats. Even with them the prime minister would only secure about 315 seats, still 11 shy of the 326 needed to ensure he continue as prime minister.
One of the reasons that Cameron has few coalition options is because the strongly anti-immigrant and anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party, which was surging last year, is now fading fast. UKIP’s only member of Parliament may be its tough-talking leader, Nigel Farage.
A further obstacle to forming the next government is that the Liberal Democrats have declared that they will not have anything to do with the Tories if they include UKIP in a coalition and nothing to do with Labour if they include the SNP.
Understanding his predicament, Cameron, who just spent five years in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, angrily said Friday that, “We’ve done coalition, We made it work. I’ve got the T-shirt.” What Britain now needed, he said, was a majority government.
The pollsters reckon that as things stand now, Labour will win about 268 seats. With support from the Liberal Democrats, Irish and Welsh splinter parties and the Greens, they might get to 317 seats, but that is still nine seats short of the magic number needed to rule.
With everything still to play for, and harsh truths now coming out, the final week of the campaign may not be so tedious.