Scottish National Party candidate Carol Monaghan, center, campaigns in the Hyndland area of Glasgow, Scotland, on March 31, 2015. (LIan MacNicol/AFP via Getty Images)
The result of this week’s British election brings to mind the traditional refrain from “The Bonnie Banks O’Loch Lomond”: “O ye’ll take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye” — and in more ways than one. In addition to the narrow majority of parliamentary seats it delivered to the Conservative Party under David Cameron, the big news of the election was the victory of the Scottish National Party, which secured 56 of the 59 seats north of the English border.
As Scottish commentators like to observe, there are now more pandas in Scotland (two) than members of Parliament from the Conservative, Labor or Liberal Democratic parties (one each). This result will fuel demands for a constitutional change to deprive Scottish MPs of the power to vote on legislation that applies only to England, thereby reviving calls in Scotland for another referendum on independence. In the face of such geographic polarization, it is unclear how long the Kingdom can remain United.
However, the election is also notable for what it says about how parties win elections in the climate of slow growth, now common to all the developed democracies. Advised by Jim Messina, President Obama’s former campaign manager, the British Conservative Party ran a campaign based heavily on the politics of fear.
The rate of economic growth in Britain only recently regained its 2009 level, a sluggish response that many analysts attribute to spending cuts under the Conservatives. Based on a slight uptick over the past year, however, the central message of the Conservative campaign was this: Britain is recovering; don’t let another Labor government ruin it.
Hoping to capture the electoral middle ground, the Labor Party bought into the rhetoric of austerity, promising to hold the line on welfare spending and reduce the public-sector deficit, albeit at a slower pace than the Conservatives. But, under Ed Miliband, the party also ran on issues of inequality. Demands for social justice figured prominently in his campaign, as did promises to increase spending on public services and taxes on the wealthy.
Judging by the results, which saw Labor secure barely 30 percent of the vote against 37 percent for the Conservatives, the politics of fear trumped the politics of inequality — despite significant increases in income inequality in Britain over recent years. Moreover, as both parties ran neck and neck in the final weeks of the campaign, Cameron upped the ante by claiming that a minority Labor government would move even farther to the left to secure SNP support in Parliament. A late surge in electoral support for the Conservatives suggests that this message hit home. Issues of inequality may not resonate with voters, even in an era of rising inequality.
Of course, there are idiosyncratic aspects to all elections. Although Miliband’s personal popularity surged during the campaign, he was never especially liked by voters, and the SNP won by taking Labor seats in Scotland. But this election underscores how politics in an era of economic austerity differs from the politics of prosperity.
Two of the key planks in the Conservative platform were resolute opposition to increasing immigration and the commitment to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union. The U.K. Independence Party also secured 12 percent of the vote by running on these issues. Both evoke fears about the economic effects of globalization, seen as a process of deeper international integration that might move jobs abroad or bring cheaper labor in to compete for the jobs that remain at home.
But strong support for UKIP and the Conservatives in localities where there are relatively few immigrants and among those who are retired shows that these are not simply economic issues but emotive ones that evoke a resurgent, if inward-looking, nationalism. Nationalism was central to the appeal of both the SNP and the Conservative Party. In the English case, especially, it was a defensive nationalism, wary about the influence of foreign powers and worried about foreigners in the country. Such concerns are the natural complement to a politics of fear.
Does this mean that political parties cannot run successfully on issues of inequality even in an era of inequality? Not necessarily. The SNP and Greece’s Syriza have managed to do so, albeit married to a nationalism focused on the depredations of foreign powers. But this election suggests that, in times of slow economic growth and stagnant incomes, many people are more concerned about what they might lose than about issues of economic fairness, more or less in line with the ‘endowment effect’ familiar to behavioral economics. And, in an era of globalization, many who might otherwise be attracted by policies of redistribution may be distracted by fears about what foreigners might do to their livelihood or culture. This is the new politics with which all the developed democracies must now cope.
Peter Hall is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies at Harvard University and co-director of the CIFAR Program on Successful Societies.
