The British general election produced a shock result. After it had appeared that neither of the major parties could win outright, the Conservatives did just that. Tony Travers explains how rumours of the death of majority government proved simply wrong.
The Conservatives’ re-election to Downing Street as a majority government was almost universally not predicted. Opinion polls had shown the Tories and Labour locked on 33-34 per cent of the vote for week after week. On the eve of the election, no fewer than ten polls suggested deadlock and the real possibility of a hung Parliament. In the event, David Cameron triumphed while the leaders of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and UKIP had all resigned within 14 hours of the polls closing. The Scottish National Party (SNP) won all but three seats in Scotland.
The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition formed in May 2010 had provided a stable majority government for a full five-year Parliament. The relationship between Conservative and Liberal Democrat ministers had been surprisingly harmonious, particularly when compared with the Blair-Brown stand-off which was such a problem for Labour during the previous government.
The need for a coalition stemmed from the 50-year-long decline in Conservative-plus-Labour voting. In the 1955 election, the two major parties won more than 97 per cent of the votes cast. But in 2010, this figure was down to 65 per cent. It recovered marginally in 2015 to 67 per cent. The Conservatives won the recent election with a vote share of 37 per cent (38 per cent in Great Britain), which was somewhat higher than in 2010. For a government party to increase its vote share in this way is most unusual.
Given the pre-election polling, a “win” by either the Conservatives or Labour was expected to mean it would be the largest party, but not with a majority, suggesting that the era of single-party majority governments in Britain was coming to an end. The first-past-the-post voting system, however, where simply having the largest vote share in a constituency wins the seat, proved instrumental in delivering Cameron a majority.
The election saw the SNP win 56 seats in Westminster with under five per cent of the GB vote. UKIP, by contrast, won one seat with 13 per cent of the vote. The Liberal Democrats were reduced to eight seats with 8 per cent of the vote. While such outcomes are fascinating for political scientists, they are unlikely to foster much confidence among a large section of electorate which is already sceptical (at best) about contemporary democracy.
The new Conservative government will have to set public expenditure and taxation plans in early summer. Chancellor George Osborne remains committed to reducing the budget deficit to zero by 2018-19 and also to cutting taxes. Public spending as a share of GDP is now expected to fall to 36 per cent by 2019. This figure is below the 42-43 per cent average seen over recent decades in the UK and was last seen consistently in the late 1950s.
Moreover, commitments to increase NHS and pensions expenditure, while protecting schools and international development, mean that there will inevitably be continuing deep cuts to defence, local government, police, housing, transport and capital investment. Some of these latter services have been cut by over 25 per cent since 2010. The British State will be radically different by 2020.
LSE held its own “election campaign”. Why not visit our General Election blog to see how we covered the contest?
Tony Travers is Director of LSE London and a visiting professor in the Department of Government.
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