It is now evident that the May 2010 British Election has not produced a decisive outcome. The Conservative Party (with one seat left to declare) has secured 305 seats in the House of Commons, falling 26 seats short of an absolute majority. The Labour Party has secured 258 seats and the Liberal Democrats 57. A motley group of other parties holds the remaining 29 seats. So the Conservative Party has most seats in Westminster, secured by an overall vote plurality 0f 34 per cent of the popular vote in a multi-party election. Such indecisive outcomes are periodic features of the Westminster model, even though the plurality (first-past-the-post) system is custom-made to secure a single-party majority. Hung-parliaments occurred on several occasions in the 1970s, always resulting in short-lived governments and new elections.
For the most part, such hung parliaments have been accidental consequences of close run competition between the two major political parties, Labour and Conservative, each driven by significantly differing political philosophies. The May 2010 British Election differs sharply from this model, for reasons that I must explain.
Over the past 13 years, since New Labour under Tony Blair secured a landslide electoral victory, a decisive plurality of the British electorate in each of the 1997, 2001, and 2005 elections, threw its support in favor of a political party that has pursued a supposed Third Way in domestic politics, paying lip-service to laissez-faire market economics, while aggressively endorsing a progressive social market policy agenda. Ultimately this Mediterranean diet has proved to be indigestible, as Friedrich von Hayek long ago warned would be the case, and as the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) of Euroland unambiguously exemplify.
When governments set out to bloat their public sectors, to protect individuals from the economic consequences of privately uneconomic behavior, and to securitize their citizens against all misfortunes, from the cradle to the grave, they shape and form a people less and less capable of forging its own success by rational decision-making, hard work, thrift, and healthy living, most especially in difficult times. Once a politically decisive majority of the electorate has become addicted to such a diet, and has become individually disabled by that diet, no major political party can distance itself from the PIGS diet without courting ongoing minority status; at least until final economic collapse.
In consequence, the 2010 British Election has not been fought out among political parties with significantly varying philosophies, outlined in the form of significantly divergent political platforms. The words Margaret Thatcher are now unambiguous harbingers of landslide defeat in a largely socialized Britain. So the 2010 Election has been waged over a narrow social market terrain, with the three relevant political parties, Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrats separated by hairs-breadth differences on matters economic. In spatial terms, the Liberal Democrats are to the left, Labour is in the Middle, and the Conservatives are to the right. But the distances are slight.
Given the serious nature of the economic indigestion confronting Mediterranean-diet Britain in May 2010, one might have thought that the voters would have sensed the importance of decisive government. Given the scandals that have encompassed New Labour throughout the Prime Ministership of Gordon Brown, one might have thought that the British electorate would have coalesced around a majority Conservative administration, especially once it became apparent that the Conservatives enjoyed a plurality in the pre-election polls. That this has not come to pass, I suggest, is no accident. A plurality of the British electorate is addicted to its PIGS diet. It does not wish to adjust its lifestyle towards rational decision-making, hard work, thrift, and healthy living. By endorsing weak government, this plurality intends to stave off diet change, to continue living unsustainably just as long as it can.
This is the forked tongue message that has flickered out from the British electorate on May 6, 2010. All the rest is pomp and circumstance. I shall analyze the political and economic consequences of such an unwillingness to recognize inescapeable reality in two forthcoming columns.
