U.K.CORRAL
2 pols duke it out in close fight to lead country
BRITONS MIGHT well wake up this Friday not knowing who their prime minister is.
With the tightest British election in living memory set for Thursday, polls suggest that neither the ruling Conservative Party nor the opposition Labour Party will obtain the 326 seats in Parliament necessary to govern.
While nobody doubts that either current Prime Minister David Cameron or Labour leader Ed Miliband will ultimately be the next premier, one burning question remains: Who will one of them have to ally with to secure power?
The latest BBC aggregate of recent polling shows 34% of British voters say they’ll support the Conservative Party, while 33% say they’ll vote for Labour. Another 14% support the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), rightwing nationalists who oppose membership in the European Union.
The race is a tossup, experts say, not because the parties are equally well-liked — but because they are equally disliked.
“The election is close because both the two main parties have been unable to shift their negatives,” said Peter Kellner, president of market research company YouGov.
Conservatives are seen “as a party of the rich and out of touch,” Kellner said, while Labour’s biggest liability is its leader, Miliband, who last week tried to engage uninterested young Britons by appearing on Russell Brand’s YouTube show.
Miliband, the son of Jewish immigrants who escaped the Holocaust, carries the baggage of having run against his own brother, David, for leadership of the Labour Party. A young questioner asked him on live TV in March: “Do you regret stabbing him in the back?”
Cameron’s posh background and manners alienate some voters.
“A lot of working people think ‘He’s not for us because he’s too upper class,’” said Evelyn Hall, 75, a retired music teacher from Liverpool.
But he is seen as prime ministerial, and many voters trust the Conservatives more to keep the British economy on a post-recession rebound.
“The Conservative Party is the only party that can continue to deliver on this front,” said Natalie Eliades, a 28-year-old attorney in London.
Others say the economic upswing only benefits the affluent. “There are food banks everywhere now,” said Alwyn Daniels, 53, a London-based actor who is switching from Conservative to Labour. “Don’t tell me we’re on the happy road to recovery when more and more in the country are starving.”
“The U.K. system,” like the American one, “is really based on two parties – Labour and Conservative — and is designed to give one of those parties a majority each time,” Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos MORI, a leading political market research company, explained.
But Page said the growth of small parties reflects Britain’s increasing diversity.
Cameron could end up forming a coalition with one of those parties — the Liberal Democrats, UKIP or the Democratic Unionists (DUP), a Northern Irish party.
Miliband could ally with the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party or the Scottish National Party, though he indicated Thursday that he would not form an official coalition with the Scots.
The Scottish party could undermine his chances of electoral victory by winning many or all of the 59 parliamentary seats Labour now holds in Scotland. “It won’t be a landslide, it’ll be a tsunami!” predicted Alasdair Stephen, 45, a Scottish architect.
What all this political horsetrading means in practical terms, according to Andrew Sparrow, senior political correspondent of the Guardian, “is a long period of negotiation before we get a clear view of who’s going to be in power and what it’s going to mean for the next five years.”