Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.
A tiny group of Conservative Party members have foisted a toxic clown on the people of the United Kingdom — their new Prime Minister, BoJo.
WASHINGTON — Prime Minister David Cameron’s surprising success in winning an outright majority of seats in Britain’s Parliament is the result of a paradox: The center in Britain held and flew apart at the same time.
Neither the polls nor the pundits predicted the extent of Cameron’s triumph in Thursday’s voting. While they have something to answer for, their miscalculations also reflected the Conservative leader’s ability to translate a very modest increase in his share of the overall vote into many more additional seats than anyone thought possible.
On the latest count, Cameron’s Conservatives won just under 37 percent, roughly one percentage point more than they won five years ago. The center-left Labour Party, led by Ed Miliband, won roughly 30.5 percent, up about a point and a half. Yet Labour’s result was disastrous, in part because it was wiped out in Scotland by the separatist Scottish National Party.
That the two big parties could not even manage 70 percent of the vote between them is one sign of Britain’s political distemper. Another is the electoral revolution in Scotland.
Labour’s roots run deep north of the River Tweed. Scotland was always its bastion. Not this time. By giving the SNP all but three of Scotland’s 59 seats — Labour held 41 of them before the election — its voters signaled not only their frustration that Miliband’s party had taken them for granted over many years, but also that they were fed up with London politicians altogether.
Cameron profited twice over from the nationalist surge. Even on a better day, Labour could not have assembled a majority in Parliament without its Scottish base. And at the close of the campaign, Cameron almost certainly picked up votes in England by warning that Labour could only form a governing majority if it were willing to put the country in hock to separatists. Cameron presented himself as the man who would never pay a ransom and was thus the only choice for English voters who cared about political stability.
But the price of this gambit could be high. The Conservative majority is almost entirely an English majority. Cameron’s approach stoked English nationalism and anti-Scottish feeling, which can only aggravate Scottish resentment. Containing British disintegration will be Cameron’s biggest second-term headache.
His genius for cool political calculation was on display in another respect: In embracing the once center-left Liberal Democrats as coalition allies in his first term, he crushed them. Many on the right-wing of Cameron’s party disliked governing with the Lib Dems. But Cameron understood that allying with Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg would allow him to live up to his promise to create a more moderate brand of Conservatism — and would ultimately discredit Clegg’s party with its own voters.
During Prime Minister Tony Blair’s time in office, Liberal Democrats were to the left of Blair’s Labour Party. The abrupt transformation of the Lib Dems’ identity as enablers of a center-right government was too much, too fast.
And on Thursday, the party’s vote was cut by two-thirds, from 23 percent in 2010 to just under 8 percent. The Lib Dems went into the election with 57 seats and salvaged only eight of them. The Conservatives won more than two dozen of the lost Lib Dem seats, providing Cameron with his new majority. It was a two-step: Weakened by the loss of voters on their party’s left end, the Lib Dems were easy pickings for Cameron, and his party apparatus ruthlessly targeted his one-time allies.
In a lesson for American conservatives, Cameron went out of his way during the campaign to reassure economically hard-pressed voters with promises that he reiterated in his victory speech Friday, including, “3 million apprenticeships,” and “more help with child care.” Cameron was the candidate of a kinder, gentler austerity. By making enough concessions to Miliband’s argument that the working class was hurting, Cameron could focus the country’s attention on good economic news and the SNP threat.
But now that he has a parliamentary majority, Cameron will be challenged inside his party to move away from his signature moderation. Harder-line conservatives will point to Thursday’s thunder from the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party. UKIP won just one seat, but became the country’s third largest party in popular votes, quadrupling its share to nearly 13 percent. On immigration and Britain’s future with the European Union, Cameron will have limited maneuvering room.
David Cameron has proven himself an electoral wizard. Now he’ll have to reveal a good deal more about what’s behind the curtain.
E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.
Photo: Number 10 (Official Flickr Account of the Prime Minister’s Office)
By Bill Smith, dpa (TNS)
LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron promised Friday to deliver all the economic and political reforms in his manifesto after his Conservative Party won an outright parliamentary majority in the general election.
“We will deliver that in-out referendum on our future in Europe,” Cameron said, referring to his promise to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EU membership and hold a referendum by the end of 2017.
He said five years of the Conservatives’ coalition government with the Liberal Democrats had “laid the foundations for a better future.”
“As I said in the small hours of this morning, we will govern as a party of one nation, one United Kingdom,” he said outside his residence in London’s Downing Street after visiting Queen Elizabeth to inform her of his plan to form a new government.
“That means ensuring this recovery reaches all parts of our country, from north to south, from east to west,” Cameron said, adding that he plans to expand devolution for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland “as fast as I can.”
Cameron earlier hailed the “sweetest victory” of his political career, with the win giving the Conservatives around 330 seats and a clear mandate for another five years in office.
The Conservative majority in the 650-seat parliament surprised most political analysts.
The Conservatives’ main rivals, Labour, won some 230 seats, meaning it had lost about two dozen of those they had held since 2010. Their leader, Ed Miliband, resigned the party leadership after calling Cameron to congratulate him on the election result. Of his own position, he said it was “time for someone else.”
“The responsibility for the result is mine alone,” he said.
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg also resigned his party’s leadership, after accepting responsibility for the “catastrophic” loss of seats in the election.
The Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives’ coalition partners for the last five years, lost 48 of the 57 seats they held in 2010, with several seats still to be counted.
“It is now painfully clear that this has been a cruel and punishing night for the Liberal Democrats,” says Clegg, who served as deputy prime minister in the coalition.
He is one of only eight members of his party to have won a seat in Thursday’s election.
The London stock exchange was up around 2 percent during mid-day trading while sterling was gaining on the dollar and the euro.
“Clearly we have a mandate to get on with the work that we started five years ago,” Chancellor George Osborne said.
Most pre-election polls had forecast no more than 285 seats for Osborne’s party.
There was a rise in support for the right-wing UK Independence Party, although it won only one seat and party leader Nigel Farage failed to get one. He later resigned the party leadership.
In his resignation speech, Farage blamed his defeat on prospective UKIP voters choosing the Conservatives because they “were so scared” of a possible coalition government between Labour and the Scottish National Party, which right-wing tabloid newspapers had presented as a “nightmare” scenario.
Farage lost out to Conservative candidate Craig Craig Mackinlay, a former UKIP deputy leader, in the South Thanet constituency.
The Scottish National Party won 56 of the 59 seats in Scotland, wiping out all but one of Labour’s seats in what party leader Nicola Sturgeon hailed as a “historic watershed.”
The election shapes Britain’s economic future and could have major implications for the country’s welfare services, its relationship with the European Union — and even the future integrity of the country.
Cameron said the country “must hold” a promised referendum on EU membership and allow greater devolution for Scotland and Wales “as fast as we can.”
Turnout in the election was about 66 percent, a similar level to the last election in 2010.
In Brussels, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker congratulated Cameron on his victory.
The commission “stands ready to work constructively with the new British government,” said spokesman Margaritis Schinas, adding that it will examine any requests for a change in Britain’s relations with the European Union in a “polite, friendly and objective way.”
The 28-member bloc’s governments must decide on any EU treaty changes, Schinas said, warning that freedom of movement — an issue challenged by many eurosceptics in Britain — is a “non-negotiable” right that is essential to the bloc.
(c)2015 Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (Hamburg, Germany), Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Photo: The Prime Minister David Cameron delivers his victory speech at the Witney Constituency Parliamentary Count, Witney, Oxfordshire, on May 8, 2015 after winning his seat in Witney the previous night. (Andrew Parsons/i-Images/Zuma Press/TNS)
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