Error occured during this request! Please try again later.
All polls were wrong. Everyone thought that it was neck and neck between the two main parties and some inclined, like me, to think the Conservatives would return with the Liberal Democrats. The Conservatives astonished everyone, perhaps themselves included, by securing a major victory and can govern alone. The Liberal Democrats were smashed. The Scottish National Party (SNP) destroyed Labour in Scotland. Labour is a shadow of its former self. Heads have rolled. Its Leader Ed Miliband has resigned, having lost key strategists including the shadow Chancellor and shadow Foreign Minister. Other leaders have gone.
Kurds will also be happy to see the back of George Galloway whose own indefatigability ended with a dose of self-conceited pomposity as he declared in his concession speech that 'The hyena can bounce on the lion’s grave but it can never be a lion and in any case, I’m not in my grave.'
A post-election week or longer that most thought would be about bargaining between parties is now about negotiating posts within one party and putting together a programme of government. David Cameron will first select a coalition of Conservative ministers to make sure that his relatively slim majority does not cause problems in the future. There will be new faces in different places and at all levels. Of particular interest will be who becomes Foreign Secretary and the Middle East Minister, more directly responsible for relations with Kurdistan and Iraq. And who, if anyone, will replace a LibDem as the UK's Trade Envoy to Iraq and Kurdistan.
This powerful Conservative victory is also an opportunity to reset relations between different parts of the UK. The SNP won, not because Scottish people want independence in the near future, but because many people no longer considered Labour as credibly able to represent their interests. There is a deal to be done between the SNP and the Conservatives about further devolution of power and financial responsibility. The Conservatives can be magnanimous in a way that Labour probably could not if it had been beholden to the SNP. Just as only Nixon could recognise Communist China or de Gaulle leave Algeria, so the Conservatives and the SNP could reach a far-reaching settlement. One would hope that this would copper-fasten the union and the other that it would enable independence. Time will tell which is right.
Labour will seek to hold the government to account but a long period of reflection is clearly due as a new leadership is elected. The political strategist whose guile secured the Conservative victory, Lynton Crosby rightly said that you cannot fatten a pig on market day. Labour lost credibility on economic strategy years ago by failing to answer the charge that its public spending made it harder to recover from the banking crash of 2008, which ushered in an age of austerity. It allowed the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to make a common sense case for austerity whose impact was not as awful as anticipated. The irony is that the coalition failed, as promised, to eliminate the deficit and carried out Labour's initial promise to halve it.
Labour also saddled itself with pig in a poke politics when it elected Miliband, who set the goal of returning to power by adopting a defensive, leftist strategy of retaining its low core vote in 2010 and adding disaffected LibDems who could, all things being equal, return Labour on a third of the vote. However, all things were not equal. Labour's soft underbelly in Scotland caved in.
Labour's narrow appeal failed to offset such losses. Labour over focused on great injustices by promising to end exploitation of casual workers, and the suffering of people pushed over the edge and using food banks to survive. Such issues are morally important, and matter to activists but are less immediate to most voters who saw little beyond them about credibly encouraging enterprise and hard work. Labour painted itself into a ghetto and over-dependence on state action. The fear of the SNP torturing a Labour government to extract concessions and then leave the UK proved toxic. I would add that Miliband's refusal to endorse action against Assad's use of chemical weapons in 2013 was a terrible betrayal and not a triumph of statesmanship, although many Labour activists thought it was the bee's knees.
Britain has woken up to a result that few expected. Not a shot was fired though many powerful people were fired or fell on their swords. It will soon be business as usual, not least in working out how best Britain can exercise its influence on foreign affairs, almost completely neglected in the campaign. It is also time to reestablish the all-party group on Kurdistan.
* Gary Kent was the director of All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG in the last British parliament. He writes this column for Rudaw in a personal capacity.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
Comments
Rudaw moderates all comments submitted on our website. We welcome comments which are relevant to the article and encourage further discussion about the issues that matter to you. We also welcome constructive criticism about Rudaw.
To be approved for publication, however, your comments must meet our community guidelines.
We will not tolerate the following: profanity, threats, personal attacks, vulgarity, abuse (such as sexism, racism, homophobia or xenophobia), or commercial or personal promotion.
Comments that do not meet our guidelines will be rejected. Comments are not edited – they are either approved or rejected.
Post a comment