The Cameron-Clegg Challenge
The U.K. has massive problems.

Undismayed by my unsuccessful prediction of a narrow Conservative majority in the British election last week, I return intrepidly to forecast the consequences of the actual result of the election. At the risk of seeming to be motivated by sour grapes, I assert that what has befallen post-Thatcher Britain has been a cataract of disasters, and the late election result could be one of the heaviest of them.

In making the Labour party reelectable, for the first time, to consecutive full terms, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have enabled their party to bring the U.K. to the brink of a shambles almost as complete as awaited Margaret Thatcher when she conquered the smoldering ruins at the commanding heights of government left by the Wilson-Callaghan Labour party in 1979.

At 13 percent of GDP, the U.K.'s budget deficit is larger than that of the U.S. The public-sector share of GDP has risen more than 25 percent above its Thatcher levels, to over 50 percent. All economic indicators are gloomier than those of the U.S., Germany, and France. Brown has largely strangled London's ability to compete with New York as a financial center, with nasty and stealthy taxes.

Thatcher and the majority of Britons have avoided the Euro and have regularly refrained from total Eurofederalist immersion because the country did not wish to exchange the political institutions that have served it well for many centuries for the bureaucratized, new-fledged arrangements of the European Union. It did not wish high European taxes or a return to the chaos of pre-Thatcher industrial relations. And Britain did not want to have the Anglo-American relationship, so central to victory in World War II and the Cold War, subsumed into the rather conventional and indifferent relations between the United States and France and Germany.

Barack Obama has gratuitously returned the bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had been in the Oval Office; he gave Queen Elizabeth an iPod when he visited London. (Gordon Brown very thoughtfully gave him a fine carving from the timbers of a slave ship.) And Obama has made it clear that he attaches no importance at all to relations with Britain. He has reviled the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship, which saved Western civilization, as cozy and exclusive, and perhaps even bibulous.

Thirteen years of Gordon Brown as chancellor of the exchequer and prime minister have wiped out Britain's tax and other advantages over the rest of Europe, and — except for more flexible labor markets — Britain no longer has any such advantages, and is gasping in financial crisis in unison with most of it.

And now, there must be some question about the enduring value of British political institutions. The British and other foreigners snorted with derision at the uncertain outcome of the 2000 presidential election (as they confidently pointed to the inevitable end of the U.S. as a majority-Caucasian country, until they became accustomed to mass Muslim disturbances in their own countries). But the Bush-Gore election was a dignified transition compared with the shabby spectacle of double horse-trading that has gone on in the last few days over the composition of the British government.

Labour mismanagement was comprehensively rejected; the swift Liberal (Democratic) rise fizzled on election eve, as the party has for 80 years, but the Conservatives and their allies seem to have come in about ten seats short of a majority in what should have been a won election. A LibLab coalition would have only a few more MPs than the Conservatives, so the government would survive at the whim of the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish nationalists, a rather wild and woolly group, including the four members of Sinn Fein, unrepentant supporters of the terrorist IRA.

The Liberal leader, Nicholas Clegg, who gained only 1 percent from the previous election and actually lost a couple of MPs, successfully wrung from the rejected but resourceful Gordon Brown an agreement to share cabinet positions, which the Liberals have not held since Churchill's wartime government of national unity, and agreement on further policy moves to the left. Most important, there seemed to be agreement on proportional representation, which would radically alter the British political system — from constituency representation to slates of candidates — and would ensure that there would never be a one-party majority again. There would be muddled election programs, intense pressure for fragmentation of parties to maximize influence in the hands of schismatic groups, and the demeaning political bargaining so familiar in Israel, Italy, and other countries not best known for political stability and integrity.

The last chance for preserving a Britain distinctive from its continental neighbors in political and economic structure, and available to the U.S. as an important ally, was for Conservative leader David Cameron to a) win the beauty contest opposite Clegg without turning Britain into a silly, socialist twilight zone, b) persuade enough of the Celtic parliamentary fringe to undo the LibLab Pact, or c) yield to Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, who would become the seventh leader of his party in 20 years, and shake the pantomime-horse government apart in Parliament.

The treacherous tradition of the British Tories is that all their leaders since Stanley Baldwin in 1937, even Churchill and Thatcher, have been pushed out by their timorous or ungrateful supporters, except those who managed to resign before they could be deposed. This fact will soon become relevant to David Cameron. The last word before filing was that Clegg had gone back to Cameron and they had agreed that there would be spending cuts, Lib-Dem places in the cabinet, solidarity through three budgets, and a referendum only on a second-choice or alternate vote. (The last item is an electoral system where you write in your second choice, and a pool of MPs are added and chosen by a composite of first- and second-choice votes. The details haven't been worked out, but this is obviously not such a drastic change as chucking the constituencies and going straight to a slate of national parliamentary candidates elected by nationwide party vote.) This arrangement could work, but it will be a baptism of fire for the two young party leaders under intense pressure from all sides.

The Western world's greatest problem is the Euro death wish. Apart from perhaps the Poles, the whole continent has lost the energy to work hard or even procreate. It is torpid, flaccid, without serious leaders, and the historic nationalities are all shrinking as they try to replace the unborn with inassimilable immigration. Barely a third of Europeans work and the rest are family or welfare dependents. It is all coming apart at the seams.

For decades, the United States, including the present administration, has mindlessly promoted Euro-integration, in the hope that the British would make the other countries more purposeful Cold Warriors. This short-sighted policy has been on autopilot since the Cold War ended, and should be changed now, while there is still room to alter course, lest Britain become just another socialist Euro-state, eroding within, and waffling in foreign policy. Unfortunately, there is no sign that anyone in government in Washington grasps any of this.

Europe's shilly-shallying and hypocrisy have driven off the Turks. The Southern European countries sold Germany and France a false prospectus about their economic condition before taking on a hard currency. And now America's self-inflicted wounds and the blurred focus of this administration make it impossible for the U.S. to come to the aid of Europe again as Wilson and Roosevelt and Truman did in olden time. But even the right noises would be useful.

In the words of Europe's (and the world's) greatest postwar statesman, Charles de Gaulle, "We are crossing the desert." The fate of the Cameron-Clegg experiment will be important to whether we get to the other side or not.

– Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at [email protected].

© 2025 Conrad Black