Cameron's Challenge

Share

There is no guarantee that David Cameron will walk into Downing St next year as Prime Minister – and he knows it.

This is not like 1997 when visions of a New Britain had intoxicated the chatterati.

The only voices who believe that the UK’s journey to the brink of economic collapse has created a golden moment of opportunity for social and economic reform are on Labour’s radical fringe.

Voters will go into the polling booth and decide which party they want in charge of a programme of swingeing cuts.

As electoral experts have noted, winning an outright Conservative majority will involve holding every seat won in 2005 – and then turning another 117 blue.

This is at a time when memories of moat-cleaning expenses shenanigans are still bright.

Many MPs will be quitting, so fresh-faced Conservative candidates will have to pace the streets persuading people to embrace a Tory future and resist overtures from nationalists, Liberal Democrats, Greens, Ukip, zesty independents and unsavoury alternatives.

These factors bring two immediate possibilities into play. One is that there will be a hung parliament and we will see days (weeks?) of horse-trading. In such a scenario the LibDems could be kingmakers, or we could see the SNP and Plaid Cymru successfully negotiate as one and agree to keep a party in power in return for new fiscal powers for Scotland and Wales.

There is also the real chance England will narrowly go Conservative but not win a UK majority if the party fails to make inroads in the Celtic nations.

Any lingering attachment to unionism in the Tory party could be torched in such a scenario – especially if they have to cut a deal with the SNP and Plaid.

You can imagine the conversation: “You want a parliament in Wales and greater independence in Scotland? Fine! But I’m sure you won’t mind if we take a scythe to the number of MPs your nations send to Westminster.”

The Tories will have to labour for a real victory, but the election is still theirs to lose. And if Labour is ousted from Westminster, the First Minster of Wales is likely to be the most senior elected official of the party of Blair and Bevan.

In such circumstances, he or she will have mighty challenges ahead as they try to do more with much less in this era of austerity (and the 2011 Assembly elections will loom over each day in office).

But Wales will be an alternative vision of Britain – a laboratory where left-of-centre politics will either flare of fizzle before a watching Britain.

Even with the Conservatives in Westminster, it is unlikely that British socialists will identify Cardiff as the New Jerusalem. But as the winter of cuts descends, it may be seen as the warmest home they have got.