If you want to know what’s really going on in the United Kingdom, where wagers are placed on every conceivable trend in contemporary life, ask a bookie.
The word in gambling circles today is that a British political earthquake is underway. Its epicenter is the Liberal Democratic Party: a perennial outsider in trans-Atlantic politics that stands on the verge of becoming a major force in Western democracy.
According to William Hill PLC, the nation’s top bookmaker, the odds on the Liberal Democrats becoming Britain’s largest single party in the upcoming May 6 general election have dropped from 100-1 to 7-1 since March.
The shakeup has been so sudden and unexpected that most Americans have never heard of the party’s prime ministerial candidate, Nick Clegg – whose current poll numbers make him the most popular politician in Britain since Winston Churchill in World War Two – and haven’t the foggiest idea what he stands for. It’s a good bet that they’ll learn soon enough.
Mainstream political analysts agree with the bookies. A survey released Monday (April 19) by the authoritative YouGov research firm has the darkhorse Lib Dems, as Britons call them, supported by 33 percent of registered voters, with the Conservatives at 32 percent and ruling Labour sagging to 26 percent.
Four other pollsters have Clegg’s party at 30-32 percent in a near dead-heat with the Conservatives, whose once formidable lead is now in free-fall. As recently as mid-March, the Tories were backed by almost 40 percent of British voters.
The shift in public opinion “speaks absolutely of an appetite for change in much of the electorate,” says Martin Kettle, associate editor of the Guardian newspaper.
Echoes of Obama
In some respects, the emergence of the Lib Dems reflects a tide of U.S. influence on British politics. Clegg seized the electorate’s attention with a bravado performance in the nation’s first American-style televised debates between prime ministerial candidates, six decades after the celebrated 1960 Nixon-Kennedy showdown made such events a permanent fixture on the U.S. electoral scene.
Clegg was almost universally viewed as the “winner” in his April 15 tilt with Labour prime minister Gordon Brown and Tory leader David Cameron, and the Lib Dem race for the May 6 finish line went into warp speed.
The party has also borrowed an unmistakable page from Barack Obama’s play book. Clegg’s campaign motto, “Change for Real. Change for Good,” is a distinct echo of Obama’s “Change we can believe in.”
Like Obama, Clegg trades consciously on youth and perceived optimism. At 43, he is five years younger than the U.S. President, and has mounted a highly successful nationwide voter registration effort aimed 18-25-year-olds.
The debate’s message to young people “is that this is their chance to make a difference,” he said when the poll results appeared.
“We can be fairly confident in saying that young people have swung the most strongly towards the Liberal Democrats,” confirms analyst Anthony Wells of the UK Polling Report. Both of the authoritative YouGov’s post-debate surveys, he points out, “have had the Lib Dems in the 40-percent range among under-35s.”
The Lib Dems, again like the Obama team, have strongly argued for environmentally friendly solutions to energy needs, and favor deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions than either Labour or the Conservatives.
In other ways, however, the Clegg campaign has moved into much more radical ground than its Obama counterpart dared, or that Britons themselves thought feasible for a serious contender when the 2010 campaign opened.
To the surprise of most pundits, the strategy has gained, rather than lost, supporters – a precedent that U.S. Democrats are sure to be watching closely.
UNCONVENTIONAL
The very choice of Clegg as candidate was a rebuke to conventional assumptions that Britain has edged to the social right and grown more nationalistic. He openly admits that he is an atheist. His wife Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, an international lawyer and native of Spain, says she has no intention of seeking British citizenship if her husband becomes prime minister.
It is difficult to imagine a politician with a similar profile leading the pack for national office in the United States. But it was just as difficult in Britain before Clegg – as difficult as it was to imagine a black person elected to head a government on either side of the Atlantic a few years ago.
The Liberal Democrats’ platform is as forthright as their candidate. It promises to “crack down on big business and the super rich who exploit tax loopholes,” require the Bank of England to “take house prices into account when setting interest rates,” and raise the threshold at which people start paying income tax to £10,000 ($15,500) per year, exempting 4 million lower-income people from paying any income tax at all.
While the Obama Administration has adopted a cautious approach on potentially divisive social issues, the Lib Dems have made unflinching multiculturalism the centerpiece of their electoral strategy. A wide array of minority committees, including a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Action group, have been officially empowered to hammer out domestic policy.
In a Britain that had been regarded as profoundly skeptical about its membership in the European Union – ferociously anti-EU slogans pepper Tory rhetoric, and Labour largely avoided the subject under Brown and his precessor Tony Blair – the Lib Dems are unapologetically committed to a deeper relationship with the continent.
Clegg himself was among the youngest and most energetic legislators in European Parliament history, elected at age 32 in 1999 and spearheading a flurry of important reforms in five eventful years there.
Much of the Lib Dem program will earn a friendly hearing in the Obama Administration. But some passages in the party manifesto are likely to raise hackles in the White House.
“The Iraq War, and allegations over British complicity in torture and in secret ‘rendition’ flights of terrorist suspects,” the document reads, “highlight the dangers of a subservient relationship with the United States that neglects Britain’s core values and interests.”
“Simply put, the Special Relationship shouldn’t even exist in Clegg’s world view,” claims British political analyst Nile Gardiner, alluding to the longstanding marriage of Washington and London in foreign policy.
CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS?
Nowitstanding the phenonemal rise of Clegg and the Liberal Democrats in the polls, chances are slim that they can win a commanding majority of the sort that Blair and Brown have enjoyed with Labour since 1997, or Margaret Thatcher with the Tories in the 1980s.
Yet the political and demographic gap between both of the senior parties and the insurgent Lib Dems will make it hard, if not impossible, to form a workable coalition government. The result, worries the Guardian’s Martin Kettle, could be “one of the most intractable political and constitutional crises this country has ever seen.”
British parliamentary posts are awarded on a “first-past-the-post” system to the highest vote-taker, even if the total is well under 50 percent. The system worked when it was essentially a two-party race, as in the United States. But the odds are now very high – eight in eleven, say Hill’s bookmakers – that the three parties will attract roughly a third of the vote each in the election, with no definitive winner.
There is a real possibility that the worst-performing party on a national level could secure the largest number of seats at Westmininster, thanks to razor-thin victories in redistricted constituencies – while the winning party in total votes winds up with only a small legislative minority.
A BBC estimate, based on studies of the Lib Dems’ polling triumph after the debate, predicted that Clegg’s party might net a scant 100 parliamentary seats, while third-place Labour holds onto 276 and the Conservatives 245.
The resulting scramble could paralyze one of the world’s most important nations, at a time when the need for economic restructuring makes efficient management and productive change absolutely critical. “First, the markets might be going belly-up at the uncertainty about forming a new government and the unlikelihood of a strong one,” says Kettle.
More damaging yet, he adds, “there would be a mood of national outrage that a clear shift of opinion” among voters had in the end changed virtually nothing.
Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5