Party politics and bad luck are dragging Britain towards Brexit (Matthew Harries, IISS)

David Cameron is a weak prime minister leading a divided government. The peculiar thing about this assertion is that it is true now, and not a year ago, when Cameron was in charge of a two-party coalition government, a rarity in British politics. In May 2015 Cameron won an extraordinary general-election victory, becoming the first full-term incumbent prime minister since 1832 to increase both his party’s share of the vote and its total number of seats in the House of Commons. He returned as prime minister having shed his coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, who were beaten almost out of political existence. In the following months, Labour proceeded to elect as leader a veteran MP drawn from the party’s hard left, Jeremy Corbyn, who duly appointed as his shadow chancellor a backbench colleague, John McDonnell, who in 2006 had described his greatest intellectual influences as Lenin, Marx and Trotsky. Corbyn told the BBC he would never, under any circumstances, use Britain’s nuclear weapons – thereby breaking the taboo that held, based on Labour’s electoral annihilation in the 1980s, that the party should leave unilateral disarmament well alone – and McDonnell, having declared his plan for the British economy to be ‘socialism with an iPad’, quoted from Mao’s little red book on the floor of the House of Commons. Meanwhile, the rapid rise of the Scottish National Party north of the border had cost Labour more than 50 seats, and with the Conservatives dominant in England, there was a reasonable chance that the Labour Party would never again win an outright parliamentary majority.

https://www.iiss.org/en/politics%20and%20strategy/blogsections/2016-d1f9/april-6904/bad-luck-and-party-politics-979b