Yuletide
  • Yuletide blog
  • About Me
  • Links
  • List of All Posts

Post-304: The UK Election 2015 Decided by "Local Nationalism"

5/11/2015

0 Comments

 
The UK's general election of 2015 has come and gone. The Conservative Party won. They had been governing in coalition with the Liberal Democrats since 2010, but now have enough seats to govern alone, in the majority.

Every pre-election predicted a "hung parliament" (no party having a majority), with Labour probably able to govern in coalition. One poll even put the odds of a hung parliament at "100%". All wrong. The Conservative Party won an outright majority of seats.

The other big story is the "sweep" of Scotland by the left-wing Scottish National Party, which calls for Scottish independence. This is the first election in which they have done so well. The result must be a carry-over of political energy from the failed independence referendum of 2014
(see posts #228, #229, and #233). Anyway, the polls got the Scottish result right. It was predicted they'd win nearly every seat in Scotland and they did.
Picture
UK Parliament Election Results 2015
What explains the rise in support for the Conservative Party in England?
.
Read More
From my reading and thinking, nationalism explains it.

Given the opinion polls all predicting a close outcome, there was much talk in England, it seems, of the "anti-British, far-left" Scottish National Party becoming junior partners with the Labour Party in a new coalition.
This would inevitably lead to a "Scottish Tail Wagging the Labour Dog" situation in parliament. And what a strong tail it would be. The SNP is aggressive and goal-oriented, while the Labour Party seems to me to be limping along on political inertia from decades ago, generations ago. It seems to lack a clear vision or purpose.
Britain is no longer some kind of old-style Oliver Twist industrial economy. What is the purpose of labo(u)r politics? Today's Labour Party seems to be all about maximizing welfare handouts. This calls to mind the classic criticism of democracy made since ancient times. A party much more disciplined, focused, and relevant in today's world, the SNP, would exert a huge influence on a Labour government. (I say all this as an outsider who has never even been to the UK, of course.)

A Labour-SNP coalition ruling Britain would be a humiliation for England, akin to a kind of foreign occupation. Millions of English voters shifted their votes to the Conservatives, given this prospect. A full 600,000 more votes were cast for the Conservatives in 2015 than in 2010, but this is magnified much more when taking into account that the Conservatives lost a lot of their own right wing (probably over three million) to the UKIP party (often called a UK version of the USA's "Tea Party," which calls for the UK's immediate exit from the EU). This means millions of English votes shifted to the Conservatives from other parties.

The two decisive turns in the election (the rise of the SNP and the rise to majority status of the Conservatives) are both, probably attributable to local nationalism.
The rise of UKIP, which got an amazing four million votes of 31 million cast when almost none of its candidates individually stood a chance ("throwing your vote away") is also clearly attributable to a kind of rising nationalism.

Following the election, a British journalist specializing in the Middle East, Patrick Cockburn, wrote an article about this, "Modern States are Fragile in the Face of Local Nationalism" (Originally published in The Independent):
Knowing [Middle Eastern] countries has given me a strong sense of the fragility of nation states when confronted by strongly rooted local nationalisms. The glue holding together nations is always a mixture of myth and self-interest which tends to become ossified and discredited over time. [....]

The triumph of the Scottish Nationalist Party on Thursday and the annihilation of all other parties in Scotland has led to lamentations on left and right over the likely passing of Great Britain as a unitary state. There are panicky whiffs in the air as people who had scarcely noticed there was such a thing as the union between England and Scotland come to realise that it may soon be dissolved and wonder what the future will hold. It is ironic to recall that a decade ago British officials talked glibly about “nation building” in Afghanistan and Iraq, without a thought about the staying power of their own nation. [....]

What is striking about the coming dissolution, be it partial or total, of the British state is the lack of resistance to this from its political establishment. It is but one more element in the decline of British power in the world over the past decade.    [Continues]
I'm mostly talking about things I don't know well here, that is to say about the UK and its politics.

I can say that I think I do understand the principles at work behind what Cockburn calls "the coming dissolution, be it partial or total, of the British state". All the same ingredients exist in today's USA!

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.


    About

    Welcome. This is a place I write things that may or may not be of interest. Thanks.

    See here for more.


    Search this site:

    List of All Posts
    List of all posts
    Subscribe via email:

    Subscribe to the Feed:

    Enter email address to subscribe to daily updates:



    RSS Feed

    Archives

    November 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013


    Contact by Email
    Yuletide5142 at y@hoo.com


    Picture
    Me

    I thank you for
    stopping by
    this quiet corner
    of the Internet.

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.