It was a favorite quip of the British pundit, Malcolm Muggeridge, that the faith reposed in opinion polls would be the “envy of an African witch doctor.”
Today such a remark might be deemed politically incorrect. But after the spectacular failure of opinion polls to predict the outcome of the UK general election, many must share Muggeridge’s derisive attitude toward them.
Not that the leader of the UK Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, is going to be bothered by fresh evidence of their fallibility. For Cameron, who has been Britain’s prime minister since 2010, is back in power — despite confident predictions that his party could not win the election outright. Moreover, he and his party are in power not, as before, as senior partner in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats — but in their own right, albeit by a slim margin.
Whatever explains their inaccuracy, it seems certain that the claims of polls that Cameron could not prevail assisted his victory — just as polls forecasting a tight result in Israel’s recent election assisted sitting prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In both cases, the incumbent leaders effectually ramped up public fears that if they were not re-elected their countries would fall into the hands of callow ideologues bent on placating menacing minorities.
In the hours before the Israeli vote, Netanyahu warned Israelis that the Arabs were “voting in droves.” By the same token, David Cameron and his fellow Conservatives warned that a vote for the Labour Party would place Britain at the mercy of a rabidly radical Scottish Nationalist Party that was expected to outpoll the Labour Party as the chief political force in Scotland — as it did. In English areas where the outcome of the election was finely balanced Conservative candidates canvassed hard on this issue. Nor can it be doubted they went to great lengths in doorstep campaigning to outflank the nationalistic United Kingdom Independence Party in their anti-immigrant and anti-asylum seeker rhetoric. Their election strategy was after all masterminded by an Australian spin-doctor, Lynton Crosby, whose stock-in-trade is visceral right-wing populism.
Though it polled 4 million votes, United Kingdom Independence Party won only one parliamentary seat and is now plunged in internecine fighting. Yet whatever UKIP’s future, its beleaguered leader, Nigel Farage, who failed to get elected to the Parliament himself, has done much to set the UK political agenda, forcing a harder government line on immigration and helping to ensure that Britain holds a referendum over membership of Europe before the end of 2017. Meanwhile, the Labour Party is in disarray following the resignation of its leader, Ed Miliband, whose mildly leftist electoral campaign backfired. As for the Liberal Democrat Party, they have been electorally decimated. Notwithstanding its vast inequalities, the UK — or to be precise, its largest component, England — is, like Israel, barren ground for progressive politics.
Cameron vows to rule Britain as “one nation” but has lost no time in making a speech liable to antagonize the Muslim community. During the election campaign, afraid to forfeit a single vote, he suspended divisive talk about radicalization. Now he insists that for too long Britain has been a “passively tolerant” society and proposes stringent new legislation to tackle extremism. Yet the truth is that the UK government already has anti-extremist laws galore at its disposal. Thoughtful people committed to social cohesion deplore Cameron’s failure to evince the smallest concern with addressing the roots of militancy. They also believe that his draconian proposals to ban radical speakers not only threaten free expression but could prove counterproductive.
Security fears may yet be systematically exploited to hold together a United Kingdom mired in existential crisis, as controversy rages about the pro’s and con’s of British membership of the European Union and Scottish Nationalists lobby for an independent Scotland. Seventy years ago this spring, the United Kingdom, then commonly known as “Great Britain,” was celebrating the defeat of Hitler’s Germany by the allied powers. United as seldom before, British people voted in astonishing numbers for a Socialist government that created a national health service and aimed to eliminate poverty. 2015 finds the United Kingdom divided as seldom before, a state whose very name rings hollow.
