Legacy of UK's Cameron overshadowed by departure

By Michael Sercan Daventry

LONDON (AA) - Despite his achievements in office, the six-year premiership of David Cameron is likely to be remembered mostly for how it ended -- resignation following a shock defeat in the referendum on Britain’s EU membership.

However, during his time as Conservative leader Cameron successfully transformed his party, dismissed at the turn of the century as unelectable, and continued his reforming zeal after winning power in 2010.

He ambitiously led Britain’s first peacetime coalition government in almost a century, averted a break-up of the U.K. in a Scottish independence referendum and overcame social conservatives within his own party to legalize same-sex marriage.

But his final gamble -- to definitively settle the vexatious question of Britain’s place in Europe -- proved to be his undoing.

Cameron had only been a House of Commons lawmaker for four years when he became Conservative party leader in 2005. The then 39-year-old projected youth and dynamism as he pledged to radically overhaul the party that had suffered three successive electoral defeats at the hands of Labour’s Tony Blair.

He called for a “modern compassionate Conservatism” that would inspire a new generation of Conservative voters and recapture the contested center ground of British politics -- much as Blair had done to his own party a decade before.

The alternative to reform, Cameron told a London think-tank a few weeks after his election, is “irrelevance, defeat and failure.” It earned him the epithet “Heir to Blair”.

The Conservatives certainly seemed to change. Cameron repositioned the party as environmentally-friendly and declared they were now sensitive to the country’s social divisions. He promised to match the still-popular Labour government’s spending commitments and vowed not to reduce taxes simply to appease core right-wing voters.

But it was only when Labour, now led by Blair’s successor Gordon Brown, came to be associated with the unemployment and economic downturn caused by the 2007-08 financial crisis that the Conservatives’ popularity soared.

Cameron’s party won the most seats in the 2010 parliamentary election but did not have enough to govern alone.

- Coalition

His solution -- a “big, open and comprehensive offer” to share power with the third-placed Liberal Democrats -- was bold because it was so unusual in Britain, which had not seen a coalition government since World War II.

It installed Cameron at the head of a stable government that could dramatically reduce the size and expense of the British state.

Many of his earlier commitments on the environment, taxation and public spending were ditched in the name of rescuing the faltering economy as the coalition embarked on a radical cost-cutting exercise, reducing welfare payments and cancelling hundreds of projects under Cameron’s “austerity measures”. The economy responded with falling unemployment and a rising GDP.

However, the cuts exacerbated Britain’s social divisions, particularly among the lowest earners, and contributed in part to four days of rioting and looting across English cities in the summer of 2011.

Thousands of predominantly young people were arrested and criminal courts held overnight sessions to convict a huge number of offenders.

Cameron decried a culture “that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities”. He also criticized the police for getting their tactics wrong.

He promised extensive education reforms to tackle the underlying causes of the violence but made few references in later years to fixing what he had termed Britain’s “broken society”.

Overseas, Cameron sought to eclipse the legacy of Britain’s involvement in the 2003 Iraq war.

He responded to the 2011 Arab spring by committing British forces in Libya and tried to do the same in Syria after reports that Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons against his own people. However, the government narrowly lost a parliamentary vote on the issue in the first foreign policy defeat for a U.K. prime minister in more than a century.

In the battle against Daesh he was more successful, securing lawmakers’ support for U.K. air strikes in Iraq and Syria.

- Shock 2015 win

Cameron’s greatest success was perhaps his most unexpected: winning an outright, albeit narrow, parliamentary majority in 2015, the first for the Conservative Party in 23 years. It was a victory that stunned pollsters and analysts who had confidently predicted another minority or coalition government.

However, the surprise result gave notice of his downfall. Cameron had promised a referendum on Britain’s EU membership in part to satisfy demands by right-wing Conservatives who felt pressure from the burgeoning U.K. Independence Party.

Many believed Cameron would have to drop the pledge in a fresh power-sharing deal with another party, but the party’s unexpected majority meant he had to deliver.

Cameron spent months negotiating directly with EU leaders to secure a “special status” for his country within the 28-nation bloc but Eurosceptic voters turned against him in the June 23 referendum.

Speaking outside his official residence, 10 Downing Street, on the morning after Britain voted to leave the EU, Cameron defended his decision to call the referendum.

“We should be proud of the fact that in these islands we trust the people for these big decisions,” he said.

“We not only have a parliamentary democracy but on questions about the arrangements for how we've governed there are times when it is right to ask the people themselves and that is what we have done.”

He immediately resigned, prompting comparisons to Neville Chamberlain and Anthony Eden, both ill-fated prime ministers who resigned under a cloud of foreign policy failures.

For many, his legacy will be overshadowed by his departure and the likely exit of Britain from the European community it joined in 1973.