Migrants march across the border into Slovenia in Europe's largest migration of people since World War II. Credit : Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
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At first sight, 2015 is, at best, a warm-up out for the standout year of the 2010s — the liberal Ragnarök of 2016. The former is to the latter what William IV is Queen Victoria; George Lazenby to Roger Moore; Sha Na Na to Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock.
But appearances can be deceptive. Take a closer look and it becomes clear that 2015 was one of the hinges of history — a pivotal year around which everything changed. Before we get onto world events, just consider what happened at home.
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2015 was an election year in the UK. It seems like another era now — but the shock result laid the ground for everything that was to follow. The election results in 2017 and 2019 were unexpected too, but at least in those years the pollsters correctly predicted the winning party, if not the winning margin. In 2015, however, we were expecting Labour to be the largest party and Ed Miliband to become Prime Minister. Then reality happened.
Labour limped in second with just 31% of the vote. They also lost their Scottish heartland. The SNP took almost every seat, leaving Labour with just one. A humiliated Ed Miliband resigned immediately and went off to Ibiza. Five years previously, at the start of his leadership, he’d spoken of a “new generation” of Brownite politicians. But in 2015, it proved to be the last generation. David Miliband (remember him?) had already quit Parliament and the country, while Ed Balls and Douglas Alexander (remember them?) both lost their seats. However, this was just the start of their troubles. The fatal blow was yet to fall.
I’ll come back to that in a bit. But first, a brief word about the Liberal Democrats — who were reduced from 57 seats to just eight. They’d expected to be punished for entering into coalition with the Conservatives, but this was beyond all expectations. A cruel twist of fate was that Nick Clegg was one of the few Lib Dems not to lose his seat. Having been deputy PM, he returned to the Commons as the outgoing leader of the fifth party of British politics (only to be unseated by Jared O’Mara two years later).
To make matters worse, the prime beneficiary of the Lib Dem collapse was the Conservative Party. In fact, the blues picked up so many yellow seats that they gained a wholly unexpected majority — the first for the Tories since 1997. And yet this moment of triumph for David Cameron and George Osborne would be their undoing. Having promised a referendum on the UK’s membership of European Union, they were now honour-bound to deliver one. And we all know how that worked out for them.
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