Prime Minister of UK (including Scotland until 2014) from 2010 to 2017. Widely seen as the catalyst behind the renewed decline of the UK, after a brief respite in the 30 years previously (see entries for Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown). On becoming Prime Minister in 2010, embarked on a fiscal austerity programme which delayed a recovery from the Great Recession until 2013, accelerated the privatisation of public services and encouraged social hostility to immigration and the poor.
This proved to be a decisive factor in Scotland narrowly voting Yes to independence in 2014. (The other was his decision not to allow a third option for greater devolution.) His administration was then bogged down in negotiations with Scotland for the next two years, which caused increasing bitterness between the two countries. In the UK election of 2015 the SNP captured many Scottish Labour seats, but refused to form a coalition government with Labour, allowing Cameron to continue to lead a minority government with tacit support from the LibDems and (initially) UKIP.
Most analysts naturally point to his promise of a referendum on EU membership as his biggest mistake. In the short term this meant that UKIP’s success in the 2015 election was as much at the expense of Labour as his own party. But his decision to recommend voting Yes to continued membership in the EU referendum in 2017 led to an attempt to unseat him as leader which narrowly failed (see entry on Boris Johnson), and then large scale defections of MPs from his party to UKIP. Campaigning under the slogan ‘If Scotland can do it, so can we’, and with the support of large sections of the press, UKIP leader Nigel Farage achieved a very narrow majority to leave the EU, forcing Cameron to resign. Some argue that the Scottish independence decision was critical here, as he would have won the referendum vote if Scotland had stayed part of the UK. A few argue that the decision to break up the BBC and allow partisan broadcasting, and in particular the rebranding of ITV into FOX-UK, was a more important factor in losing the EU vote.
There is some dispute as to how much Cameron himself is to blame for these events, or how much was the work of his Chancellor (and his successor as Prime Minister) George Osborne. There also remains some controversy over whether the inability of the economy to make up the ground it lost during the recession was due to the initial austerity plan, renewed austerity after 2015, controls on immigration or the uncertainty created by the referendum itself and subsequent EU exit.
It is a great irony that the only leader of this period whose current reputation is lower than Cameron’s is his opponent in the Scottish independence debate Alex Salmond, now widely known in Scotland as the Great Deceiver. Scotland’s own economic decline following independence was far greater, following a collapse in oil prices and the loss in UK markets when Scotland joined the EU.
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