Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives may have won the British election and ushered their coalition partner out the door, but that doesn’t mean it’s all smooth sailing for his government for the next five years.
With influential Euroskeptics clamoring in his own party and a very slim majority in Parliament, Cameron will have a hard time tackling the big headaches looming over his second term: Britain’s membership in the 28-nation European Union and the growing movement for Scottish independence.
Cameron’s Conservatives won an unexpected majority in last week’s election, ensuring that he returns to 10 Downing Street with enough power to govern alone. Within hours of declaring victory Friday, Cameron re-appointed his four highest-ranking ministers — those heading defense, the Treasury, home and foreign affairs — to their posts. No big surprises are expected when the rest of the new, all-Tory Cabinet is unveiled this week.
The Conservatives now have a tiny majority — holding just over half of the House of Commons’ 650 seats — meaning that a dozen defiant Tories could potentially derail important policies.
Rebellion has long simmered in the Conservatives’ more right-wing factions, where many want Britain to pull out of the EU. The presence of the pro-EU Liberal Democrats in the government meant that such a move had been out of the question for the past five years.
Radical Conservatives also disagree with their more moderate colleagues over how to deal with the question of Scotland, where the separatist Scottish National Party gained an unprecedented landslide victory in the race for seats in the British Parliament, winning 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats.
Cameron and those who back him will do everything to keep Scotland’s centuries-old union with England, but some Conservatives are leery of ceding too much power to the north without getting reciprocal benefits for England.
The infighting over those two issues is likely to come to a head in the next two years.
