This year’s general election in the UK, held on May 7, will be remembered for its momentousness. In many ways it defied expectations and predictions, and has set Britain on an irreversible constitutional course. For a start, British voters turned the opinion polls on their heads and confounded the pollsters and the pundits. For months and up till the eve of the election, all the opinion polls said Labour and the Conservatives were neck-and-neck. They turned out to be wrong. The Tories ended up with 2 million votes and almost 100 more parliamentary seats than Labour. The Scottish National Party (SNP) also virtually annihilated Labour in Scotland, while the Liberal Democrats (Lib-Dem) was reduced to a rump. These are seismic changes, and have implications for the UK and lessons for Nigeria. I want to explore them in this piece, but, first, a refresher on the British electoral system.
As many know, the UK operates a parliamentary rather than a presidential system. Thus, unlike the US president, the British prime minister is not directly elected by the people. Instead, UK voters elect individual MPs in 650 constituencies across country. In truth, however, when voters elect a constituency MP they are by proxy electing the prime minister, because the party leader whose party has the required number of MPs becomes the prime minister. The winning line or overall majority is 326 seats. Now, if a party has the largest number of seats than each of the other parties but does not have the overall majority, it can’t govern, except in one of two circumstances. First, it can try to run a minority government in the hope that the other parties would support some of its programmes and not collude to bring it down. But this won’t produce a stable government. Alternatively, and this is a better option, it can form a coalition with another party. That’s what happened in 2010 when the Conservative party won 302 seats, short of the overall majority, but more than Labour’s 256. The Tories then entered into coalition with the Lib-Dem, which had 56 seats. This gave the coalition government a majority of 76 seats, enough for them to govern for five years. They did successfully until this year’s election put them asunder!
Indeed, what happened in the May 7 general election was nothing but a political earthquake. It left the fates of the political parties shattered and destroyed the fortunes of key politicians. Let’s start with the parties. The Conservative party increased its seats from 302 in 2010 to 313 this year to form the next government, with a majority of 12 seats. Of course, that’s a slim majority, but it’s enough to govern assuming all the Tory MPs support their party at all times, which is a tall order. As for Labour, their seats dropped nationally from 256 in 2010 to 235 this year. Labour lost seats across the country, but it was in Scotland that the real wipe-out took place: from 41 Scottish MPs in 2010, Labour now has just 1! The Lib-Dem suffered a terrible blow too: they had 56 seats in 2010, but now have just 8; they also lost 10 of their 11 MPs from Scotland. The biggest beneficiary of last week’s election rout, however, was the SNP. They had just 6 Westminster MPs in 2010, but after almost wiping out the other parties from Scotland on May 7, they now have 56 of Scotland’s 59 MPs, leaving only 1 MP each for Labour, the Tories and the Lib-Dem.
But if you think the election was “cruel, merciless and crushing” for the losing parties, as Nick Clegg, the former Lib-Dem leader put it, consider the decapitations of key politicians. As the Financial Times put it, it was “the most dramatic defenestration of UK political leaders in memory”. Labour lost its shadow chancellor, a truly big beast in the party, Ed Balls. The party’s shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, also lost his seat – wait for it – to a 20-year-old final year politics student at Glasgow University, Mhairi Black, who is believed to be the youngest MP in the UK since 1667. Even the leader of the Scottish Labour party, Jim Murphy, lost his seat. On the Lib-Dem’s side, it was, indeed, a punishing night, as all the party’s senior ministers in the coalition government were wiped out. The voters booted out no fewer than five Lib-Dem ministers, including Vince Cable, the Secretary of State for Business, who once worked for Shell in Nigeria.
Of course, in those circumstances, it was untenable for the party leaders to keep their jobs; they had to take responsibility for their party’s abysmal failure. So, it wasn’t surprising that they fell on their sword. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, and the Lib-Dem leader, Nick Clegg, resigned immediately. Both parties are now looking for new leaders.
Now, what factors shaped the outcome of the general election? Well, a lot of forces were at work. First, a key cause of Labour’s downfall was its poor reputations on economic management and leadership. David Cameron was miles ahead of Ed Miliband on the two critical questions: who is better able to manage the economy? And who is a more credible leader? The truth is that, despite the painful austerity measures, the economy has done reasonably well under Cameron’s leadership, with unemployment below 6 percent and inflation at zero percent. By contrast, Labour was widely blamed for amassing huge debt and deficit when they were last in power. The Tories used this against Labour to devastating effect. For instance, everywhere David Cameron went during the election campaign he brandished a note left behind by a former Labour finance minister, who wrote: “I’m afraid there is no money”. Cameron used this note to argue that Labour was reckless with the public finances while in power and couldn’t be trusted again on the economy. And it worked. British voters dislike parties that are fiscally irresponsible! Furthermore, Miliband was seen as anti-business and too left wing. He did not appeal to business and aspirational voters.
However, the second, perhaps more powerful, cause of Labour’s failure was the effect of Scottish and English nationalisms. Last year, the Scottish people voted 55.3 percent to 44.7 percent against independence from the UK. Instead, they decided that Scotland should have a strong voice in Westminster. In other words, they wanted MPs who would fight the Scottish corner aggressively in London. And the only party they felt could provide this robust and aggressive representation was the SNP, which has been stridently against Scotland being governed from London. Thus, Labour became the victim of Scottish nationalism by losing all but 1 of its 41 seats in Scotland! At the same time, however, the fear that SNP MPs would “invade” London and prop up a minority Labour government, as the SNP promised, stoked English nationalism. Many English voters believed that a Labour government supported by Scottish nationalists who wanted to break up the UK would not be legitimate. It is estimated that about 2 percent of English voters switched, at the last minute, to the Conservative party to prevent a Labour government, supported by the SNP. Even the UK Independence Party (UKIP) eroded Labour support in England because of the fear of a minority Labour government propped up by the SNP, although UKIP also capitalised on Labour’s perceived weak record on immigration. So, in the end, Labour lost heavily because of its poor ratings on economic competence and leadership, and also because of rival nationalisms: the English and the Scottish!
As for the Lib-Dem, their massive defeat was of a cruel nature. They had gone into coalition with the Conservative party in 2010 to help stabilise the country, given the Tories couldn’t govern alone. But Lib-Dem supporters hated the alliance, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the party later broke its promise not to support any increase in tuition fees. Of course, in any coalition, the small parties always get slaughtered when things go wrong. So, the Lib-Dem paid a heavy price for going into alliance with the Conservative party, and for breaking their election promises.
The key issue about the May 7 general election, however, is the central role that nationalisms played in it, and the implications of this. For instance, no one can ignore what happened in Scotland, as the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has loudly stated! Almost everyone now agrees there should be a new constitutional settlement. The influential Times of London recently called for a “full constitutional convention” to agree a new relationship between the nations of the UK. And a growing number of influential politicians think federalism is now the only way of keeping the UK intact. For instance, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, believed to be the next Tory leader after Cameron, said that “there must be some federal structure”. One Scottish leader and elder statesman, Lord Owen, even put it more starkly: “Many Scottish people are ready to vote for separation unless they are presented with a new constitutional federal structure for the UK that allows Scotland to feel the fullest autonomy of nationhood within a federal state”. Few, indeed, believe things can be the same again in the UK, constitutionally and politically, after the seismic nature of the election.
More significantly, the re-elected Tory Prime Minister David Cameron gets the message. As he put it in a statement after his re-election, “We must bring together the different nations of our United Kingdom. With our plans, the governments of these nations will become more powerful, with wider responsibilities”. He added, “In Scotland, our plans are to create the strongest devolved government anywhere in the world .… And no constitutional settlement will be complete, if it did not offer, also, fairness to England”. In other words, the proposed constitutional settlement would mean a significant devolution of powers to the four nations of the UK – England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It would mean, in effect, a federal UK!
There are three lessons for Nigeria from the momentous British events. First, economic competence and leadership matter in elections. In 1992, when running for the US presidency, Bill Clinton coined the phrase: “It’s the economy, stupid!” That statement has been quoted endlessly. And it’s true! For instance, General Buhari won the presidency because President Jonathan was widely perceived to be weak on the economy and on leadership. Of course, it’s now Buhari’s turn to demonstrate economic competence and leadership in running the country. If he fails, his party would struggle with re-election in 2019.
Secondly, small parties in coalitions always get slaughtered, a lesson for the APC South West. The APC is a grand coalition of different parties, but it’s the alliance between the North and the South West that won the party the presidency. APC South West is clearly a junior party in the coalition, with just four states, yet it was the king maker. If the Buhari government fails to deliver on the party’s promises, APC South West would pay a heavy price. It would suffer the same fate as the Lib-Dem if its alliance with the North did not produce tangible results for Nigerians or, for that matter, left the Yorubas dissatisfied.
Finally, as I wrote recently in an article titled “A vision for the united nations of Nigeria”, ethnic nationalism is as strong in Nigeria as it is in the UK. Clearly, if the UK, a very conservative country, is moving towards a new constitutional settlement based on a federal structure, Nigeria has no excuse for ducking the issue. If General Buhari rejects the report of Jonathan’s National Conference, he should convene his own constitutional convention to agree a new political and constitutional settlement for Nigeria. The issue will not go away!
Olu Fasan
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