The world woke up last Friday with news of a vote in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. With the result, British Prime Minister David Cameron threw in the towel, setting stage for a successor to be in place by September. The Labour party, the official opposition, is in turmoil. The Scottish nationalists, the third largest parliamentary party with 59 MPs but just 5 per cent of the national vote last May, are contemplating a second independence referendum. It’s not as easy as it sounds as the Scottish nationalist vote is inflated by gerrymandering from the Labour years that gave Scotland an outsize number of constituencies. In the most recent polls for the Scottish parliament in Holyrood, SNP carried a bare plurality of the vote – 40 per cent, which is closer to the 45 per cent referendum result. A referendum may do little more than confirm this result.
So what happened? Too many voices are locked out. Even as total vote share shrunk for the largest parties, Conservative and Labour, their stranglehold on Westminster tightened. In 2015, Conservative and Labour total vote share shrunk to 66 per cent of the total vote. UKIP, an indirect breakaway on the right from the Conservatives, earned nearly 20 per cent of the vote but earned just one Member of Parliament. In a referendum, the Remain campaign failed to understand their opponents began off with 20 per cent and a majority of conservative voters who voted to leave the UK. One third of Labour voted to remain but that wasn’t good enough to offset Conservative votes lost to leave.
Britain, since the debacle of the Second World War, has mostly been living by the rules. It has settled its war debts, released the colonies even though manoeuvers at independence left them unstable with teething problems. It just paid off its war reconstruction loans to the Bretton Woods Institution in 2001.
The Conservatives in 1979 inherited another problem; an industrial state which was suffering from disinvestment and persistent labour unrest. Turning off the tap quieted many of these industrial towns all over England. Most of the towns that voted Leave were long ago left behind by prosperity that concentrated more in London, the centre of financial services and more than 20 per cent of the UK economy.
There has been a minority view that what UK needs is a special relationship with Europe. The EU in anger says no. Special arrangements like the one afforded Norway, Switzerland and a few other states require them to contribute to the EU budget, implement thousands of EU regulations without a direct input to them.
The EU politicians need time to sober up. With Britain gone, they have lost 20 per cent of the size of the EU economy. Britain is the world’s fifth largest economy. The Conservatives, better at public finances than the wastage during the flush Labour years, have spent the last six years shoring up the treasury even though the deficit is not entirely closed. Painful cuts gave Britain a lot more room to grow and it has swept past France but the growth inside Britain has been less equitable. Scotland has a golden handshake to keep it happy even though its oil reserves will soon run out.
Labour, in opposition under Jeremy Corbyn, has an internal war partly centred on the return of the Blair people. Tony Blair, much a charm when he won power in 1997, is now largely discredited after the Iraq war. Corbyn’s people are promising war in the primaries to deselect a number of MPs. The Conservatives are locked in a major internal war. Britain may eventually end up with multiple parties and coalitions that may never agree on the actual terms of Brexit.
Mr Ssemogerere is an Attorney-at-Law and an Advocate. kssemoge@gmail.com
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