Smaller parties hold key to UK elections

The United Kingdom has been caught in the grip of election fever. Just ask the tens of millions of British voters who have been subjected to relentless negative appeals since campaigning officially began on March 30. When the polls open on May 7, Britain’s voters will be only too glad to put an end to things and elect a new Parliament.

The no-holds-barred campaigning suggests that the stakes of these elections are high. The Labour Party, under the leadership of a dull but worthy Ed Miliband, is hoping to unseat David Cameron’s Conservative Party and its austerity agenda. But thanks to the rise of smaller insurgent parties, the contest between the two establishment parties is shaping up to be one of the most unpredictable in generations.

At the heart of Britain’s changing political landscape is Scotland, where a referendum endorsing independence came unexpectedly close to succeeding last September. Next month, Scottish voters are expected to abandon their traditional support for Labour in favor of its bitter rival, the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP). Polls predict that the SNP, which currently holds just six out of Scotland’s 59 parliamentary constituencies, is likely to win 20 to 50 seats, most of them currently held by Labour. And some of the most recent surveys suggest that in excess of 50 would not be beyond the nationalists’ reach — with one even forecasting that all 59 could go the way of the SNP.

Under the direction of Alex Salmond until last year, the SNP has dominated the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh since 2007. In 2011, he led the SNP to an incredible majority victory — once thought impossible under the Scottish Parliament’s partially proportional system — that secured the required numbers to force through an independence referendum. Directly confronting the British state, the SNP unleashed the most powerful grass-roots operation in modern Scottish history. Panicking the forces of the union with a last-minute lead in one poll, the independence campaign ultimately lost by 10 percentage points.

But defeat has only galvanized the nationalist movement, leaving Scotland the most politically engaged part of the U.K. Since September, SNP membership has grown from 25,000 to more than 100,000. Polls have suggested either majority support for independence or something close to it, and the leadership transition from the talented but divisive Salmond to his combative protégée Nicola Sturgeon has given the SNP and the independence cause a boost. 

Victory made the SNP’s adversaries complacent, and they have done little to accommodate the 45 percent (1.6 million people) of the Scottish electorate who voted for independence. And the likely loss of traditional Labour seats in Scotland to the SNP is turning the general election into a potential nightmare for Britain’s committed Labourites.

The SNP isn’t the only force threatening to shake up the complacent ruling elite. In England the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) swept to victory in last year’s European Parliament elections by appealing to white working-class anxiety over immigration and European integration. Though it won just 3 percent of the vote in the last general election, the UKIP is currently polling in the teens.

Just as the SNP hopes to poach seats from Labour, UKIP wants to do the same to the Conservatives. Growing Euroskeptic sentiment has already forced the Tories to promise voters a referendum on EU membership. Against this background, the UKIP and its outspoken leader, Nigel Farage, could become a modest but effective force in Parliament — although its candidates’ tendency to indulge in racist and homophobic slurs will surely limit its appeal.

The Liberal Democrats, currently the third-largest party in the House of Commons, are unlikely to repeat the success they had in the 2010 general election. During their five years as junior partners in a Conservative-led government, the party has suffered a dramatic backlash from supporters who opposed the decision to form a coalition with the Tories, which is widely reviled in Scotland and swaths of northern England.

With polls showing that neither the Conservatives nor Labour can count on an outright majority, the SNP may end up determining the balance of power and dictating the terms of a coalition government or, at the very least, exerting some kind of U.K.-wide influence. This is a remarkable prospect for a party that operates only in Scotland, and the right-wing press has predictably tried to hold back the tide by decrying the SNP as nationalist bogeymen.

But in a democracy, surprise victories are always possible. For a parliament so deeply mired in stagnation, a curveball could be just what it needs.