With less than 10 days to go for the polling day in the United Kingdom, the only point on which parties are in agreement is that it will be an election like no other.
A hung Parliament seems as much on the cards as it was when predictions began. Tuesday’s YouGov survey on voting intentions put the Conservative party at 35 per cent; Labour at 34; Liberal Democrats at nine per cent; United Kingdom Independence party (UKIP) at 12; the Green party at five per cent; and others at six per cent.
SNP’s strong positionThis survey does not include an electoral player who is writing the story of the’2015 elections, the Scottish National Party (SNP), whose strong position has given it the potential to influence government formation after May 7.
Since the campaign started, the SNP has made clear gains in Scotland, according to poll surveys, and is poised to win an overwhelming majority of the 59 Scottish parliamentary seats. This is going to be at the expense of Labour, for which Scotland has traditionally been a stronghold. There were 41 Scottish Labour party members in the last House of Commons.
The SNP factor, and the fragmentation of the vote among more parties, has already set the 2015 elections apart from earlier one. “Traditionally, we would have said that elections in the U.K. are won or lost in the centre ground of British politics,” said John Curtice, Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde, and a specialist on elections and electoral behaviour.
“That is certainly not what this election is about. The biggest challenge to the Conservatives and Labour is coming from parties to their Right and Left — and certainly there isn’t such a thing as British politics any more because of what is happening in Scotland. So for both Labour and the Tories their principle difficulties are arising from challenges to their flanks rather than losing votes to the centre, because the centre has kind of collapsed when the Liberal Democrats collapsed,” he told The Hindu in a phone interview.
UKIP challengeThe challenge from the Right is from UKIP, which, according to Professor Curtice, will mop up two-thirds of the votes of those who are predicted to defect from the Conservatives. For Labour, it is the severe challenge it faces in Scotland. Therefore “winning or losing this election is about who does or doesn’t lose votes to the smaller parties. The rules of the game in advance of May 7 are clearly different, and if indeed the polls are correct and the SNP becomes the third largest party, then the rules of the game are not going to be the same after May 7 either,” said Professor Curtice.
The Conservatives may yet win a larger number of seats in Parliament, although its options in forming a coalition are more limited than that of Labour.
According to The Guardian ’s poll projection published on April 28, the next Parliament will have 274 Conservative MPs and 269 Labour MPs (326 seats are needed for a majority in the Parliament, which is of 650 members.)
The Labour party, however, has ruled out any post-poll alliance with the SNP whose leader Nicola Sturgeon has repeatedly offered her party’s support to form a government. It is an offer that Labour leader Ed Miliband has flatly refused. As recently as two days ago, on the BBC’s popular Andrew Marr show, Mr. Miliband said there would be “no coalitions, no tie-ins, no deals” with the SNP.
In her response, Ms. Sturgeon said that Mr. Miliband was being “bullied” by the Conservative party into taking this position vis-à-vis her party.
