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What Britain Taught Us

By E.J. Dionne, May 8, 2010

WASHINGTON -- Britain produced an electoral earthquake all right, but not the one so many expected. The real lessons have less to do with two-party systems than with how economic change has challenged old strategies on both the right and the left.

The Conservatives under David Cameron came in first with the most votes and the most seats. The big Tory gains reflected Cameron's shrewd understanding that only a moderate and forward-looking conservatism stands any chance of victory.

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It did so because in parts of the country that have never shared in the great metropolitan prosperity around London, mistrust of the Conservatives still runs deep. In the final days of the campaign, Brown stoked memories in the country's older industrial areas of the havoc created by Margaret Thatcher's economic policies. He warned that Cameron's Conservatives were not as shiny and new as they claimed. It was not enough to win Brown the election, but it was enough to ward off utter disaster.

Clegg got caught in this crossfire. He was presenting the Lib Dems as the ultimate win-win, a center-left alternative that would allow voters to disentangle themselves from Labor without having to vote Conservative. Given the decline of Britain's old working class, always the heart of Labor's vote, this seemed a realistic prospect.

But many of Labor's bastions held. Britain's geographical and economic periphery proved quite resistant to the tides that swept across wealthier and trendier parts of the country. Labor actually gained ground in Scotland, where it was already dominant. It suffered losses in Wales, but still won nearly two-thirds of the Welsh seats. In the northeast and northwest of England, Labor also took some hits but largely held its own.

The outcome in Britain underscores a problem roiling so many democracies. The economic change brought about by globalization and technological advances is not creating the happy, unified world of progress its promoters keep promising. Instead, it is splitting regions within nations that are fully part of the global market from those being left behind.

This is a particular problem for center-left parties. They need to bring together progressive voters of the middle and upper middle classes -- they were the moving force behind Cleggmania when the Liberal Democrat leader was surging -- and older working-class voters who are the base of the social democratic left everywhere.

When sufficient numbers in these two groups of voters ally, the moderate left wins. This is how Barack Obama did it in 2008 and how Labor won elections in 1997, 2001 and 2005. The left fails when this alliance falls apart or is divided. That's what happened this time in Britain.

Cameron's genius was to accept that the future of conservatism lies in winning over moderately progressive voters in the classes doing reasonably well in this new economic world.

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