The Conservative–Liberal Democratic coalition government

Voters gave the Conservatives their biggest seat gain since 1931, but the total still fell short of an outright majority. Days of political wrangling followed the election, with negotiators from the Conservative and Labour parties courting Liberal Democratic leader Nick Clegg in an effort to form a government. On May 11, after it appeared that the prospect of a “Lib-Lab” coalition would not bear fruit, Brown resigned as prime minister and was replaced by Cameron. He came to power at the head of a Conservative–Liberal Democratic coalition government—Britain’s first coalition government since World War II—in which Clegg became deputy prime minister. The two leaders seemed to quickly become comfortable with each other, perhaps because of their shared age (both were 43) and similar backgrounds.

In June Cameron addressed Parliament in response to the report of Lord Saville’s 12-year official inquiry into the events of “Bloody Sunday,” which found that British soldiers had been responsible for the deaths of 14 nationalist demonstrators in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in 1972 and that those demonstrators had posed no serious threat to the soldiers. “The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the forces,” Cameron said, “and for that, on behalf of the government—indeed, on behalf of our country—I am deeply sorry.”

One of the cornerstones of the Conservative-Liberal power-sharing agreement was a pledge to formulate a budget-reduction plan in short order. In October the man whom Cameron had appointed chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced a five-year austerity plan that included Britain’s most extensive spending cuts in decades, notably reductions to welfare entitlements and layoffs of up to 500,000 public-sector employees.

Early in 2011 the Middle East and North Africa were swept by a series of popular uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring. In February Cameron became the first Western leader to visit Egypt after Hosni Mubarak was ousted from power. Another event in the region, the revolt in Libya, particularly captured the attention of Cameron, who became an outspoken critic of ruler Muammar al-Qaddafi’s brutal repression of the rebels in Libya. Cameron’s calls for military intervention in that country and especially for the imposition of a no-fly zone to protect Libyan civilians from Qaddafi’s forces were echoed by French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy. Together they played a pivotal role in winning the UN Security Council’s authorization of a no-fly zone on March 17. Shortly thereafter a coalition of U.S. and European forces with warplanes and cruise missiles began attacking targets in Libya in an effort to disable Libya’s air force.

The results of the May 2011 local government elections in Britain, especially those for local councils in England, appeared to indicate that Conservative voters were more comfortable than Liberal Democrats with the deficit-reducing austerity measures introduced by the government. The Conservatives made moderate gains to their presence in local government, but their coalition partners experienced their worst performance at the polls since the founding of the Liberal Democrats. In the wake of the election, relations between Cameron and Clegg and their parties were widely described as having become more businesslike in nature. This cooling of coalition camaraderie was largely the result of the Conservatives’ active opposition to a Liberal Democrats-initiated referendum on a change from first-past-the-post elections to the alternative vote, which was strongly rejected by British voters.

Following the Scottish Nationalist Party’s overwhelming victory in the 2011 elections for the Scottish Parliament, Alex Salmond, the first minister of Scotland, announced that he would be forwarding a referendum on independence. Cameron announced that he would respect Scotland’s efforts in that direction but would “campaign to keep our United Kingdom together with every single fibre that I have.”

When the scandal involving the illegal hacking of telephone voice mails by reporters from the News of the World newspaper exploded in July 2011, Cameron was caught in the fallout. Andy Coulson, Cameron’s communications chief, had already left that post in January of the same year in the wake of the growing evidence tying him to the scandal. Coulson had served as the editor of News of the World from 2003 to 2007, when he stepped down after early revelations of the phone hacking came to light. Initially, Cameron had been supportive of Coulson after he left his government post, but, as the scandal deepened in July, Cameron said that he regretted having hired Coulson. Cameron announced on July 13 that a senior judge, Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, would head a public inquiry into both the hacking scandal and Britain’s system of media regulation.

In early August 2011 Cameron faced a new challenge, as a profusion of neighbourhoods in and around London as well as in a number of other British cities erupted in riots characterized by widespread looting, arson, and destruction of property. The civil disorder was sparked on the night of August 6 when a protest in the North London area of Tottenham over the police shooting of a young man escalated into rioting, which began spreading the next day. “This is criminality pure and simple, and it has to be confronted and defeated,” announced Cameron on August 9 as some 16,000 policemen prepared to take to the streets of London that night. Cameron also called members of Parliament back to London for discussion of the riots. In a speech on August 15, Cameron blamed “a broken society” for a “slow-motion moral collapse.” In a separate statement he promised tougher measures, especially against people living in rented social housing in the event that any member of the family broke the law.

The Cameron government’s first major social innovation started to bear fruit in September 2011 with the opening of the first 24 “Free Schools,” which were free to students and funded by the government but able to operate independently of local councils. The government enacted another major change in October at a meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Australia, where it was agreed that the British crown could pass to the firstborn child, regardless of sex, and that the ban, more than 300 years old, on a British monarch’s marrying a Roman Catholic was no longer valid. Also in October, the retirement age was set to rise to 66 by 2020 for public-sector workers, and mandatory retirement was lifted. In December Cameron took the nearly unprecedented step of vetoing a proposal supported by the other 26 EU heads of government to amend the EU’s rules to reduce the risks of future financial crisis in the euro zone. It was the first major proposal rejected by Britain since it joined the European Community.