If British Prime Minister David Cameron felt that with the No vote in Scotland he would have a respite from political pressures, the loss of one of his Conservative Party’s seats in a by-election last week will quickly have brought him back to reality. For the result of the poll marks the victory of a fringe offshoot of the Conservatives, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) which has opposed Britain’s continuing membership of the European Union.
To make it worse, the UKIP’s victory was the result of the resignation of a Conservative Member of Parliament from both his seat and the Party who, by joining UKIP made it clear that the centrepoint of his challenge was Britain’s EU membership. This signals to Cameron that the challenge to his attaining another electoral victory will be focused on the UKIP seeking to draw the essence of its support from the Conservatives. And it seems to have been clearly shown, in another bye-election in a Labour stronghold where UKIP seems to have drawn heavily on the Conservatives’ support, resulting in the Labour margin of victory being only 617 votes, with UKIP polling second.
Bearing in mind that the present government is a coalition between Conservatives and Liberals, the result suggests that the partnership with the Liberals is unlikely to be advantageous to Cameron’s efforts at the next general election due at the latest in May of next year. And this must mean the Cameron will have to seek another formula for victory. However, the Labour party leader, Ed Miliband, is not presently seen by the electorate in any much better light than Cameron.
Cameron, leading a Conservative Party which, since the reign of Harold Macmillan’s Prime Ministership, has tended to favour Britain’s participation in the European Union, seems to be wanting to play a game, which Margaret Thatcher played during her premiership, of challenging the continental European governments to pay a certain price for continued British membership. He has obviously thought that he could survive domestic challenges on that basis, but the Party has now reached the point where the performance of UKIP is indicating that anti-European sentiment would appear to be increasing rather than stabilizing at a tolerable level.
Oddly, the successful No vote in the recent Scottish referendum does not seem to have reflected positively on Cameron. It has probably become clear to the electorate that the defeat of the Scottish National Party was really the result of what became a virtual coalition of parties on the English mainland, with the Labour Party, and in particular its former leader Gordon Brown, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, both of Scottish origins, seeming to have played decisive roles in the No victory.
But the British people (or at least the English electorate) seems to have put the Scottish vote behind them, giving little credit to either of the main British parties for holding the state together. And indeed, the issue seems to be becoming a divisive one in England itself, as Cameron has sought to respond to the vote by insisting that attention must now be paid, in deciding on the extent of devolution to be granted to Scotland, to assertions that the English part of the British electorate should have the same privileges, with the Scottish MPs being deprived of voting on specifically British issues.
Time has been moving on, and even the role of the Labour Party senior figures does not seem to have had any positive effect on the leadership of that party. Labour leader, Ed Miliband, who had challenged and beaten his brother, former Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary David Miliband for the leadership of the Party in 2010, has not seemed to be making much headway in the polls, with opinion of his performance at the Annual Conference of the party last month being not particularly favourable.
Opinion in England appears to be continuing to reflect a certain degree of disillusion vis-à-vis the government, as the country moves nearer to a general election. At the end of last week, the British Sunday Times poll recorded results of the last weekend of 32% for the Conservatives, 34% for Labour, 9% for the Liberal Democrats, and 13.5% for UKIP.
It can be surmised that while the Conservatives will try hard to pull back the vote that is now going to UKIP whose main antagonism is to Britain’s membership of the European Union, it is probably doubtful whether that will be sufficient to appease the British electorate. The Labour Party will try hard to capitalize on its positive image as far as the Scottish electorate is concerned, while Cameron’s main focus would seem to be to create a stance towards the European Union that will appease Conservative defectors to UKIP. And in that struggle nothing at present suggests that the Liberals can reassert themselves.
On the other hand the Conservatives, as the ruling party, may well feel that in making government policy, they are bound to be responsive to any negative sentiment emanating from the EU, where governments might feel that the British are seeking, or threatening, to diminish the effectiveness of their integration experiment at this uncertain time in global economic affairs.
How Cameron can seek to draw back favour on the basis of antagonism to the EU is left to be seen. But it is likely that the UKIP will try, if he asserts a combative or threatening approach to the EU, to outdo him on that score, leaving Conservative and UKIP voters to contemplate whether Cameron can be kept to his word in the event of a Conservative victory. And in that event, voters from other parties more favourable to the EU at this time will, no doubt, be inclined to assert themselves against the Conservatives.
In the Caribbean , we can only wait and see.