After such a political upheaval, a massive defeat for the British Labour Party unpredicted by any opinion poll before last night's ballots were counted, you might be tempted to believe that it was just about the economy. It's true – the English voted in droves for another five years of the Tory economic plan of paying back debt. U.K. financial markets are today celebrating an unexpected but welcome defeat for the old British Labour Left – the FTSE100 is up and sterling is up. But that would be to ignore a subtle but more interesting development. This is the first British election that was truly made and won by the power of women.
In the witching hour of Friday morning, we got a taste the scale of the emerging rout of the Labour Party in Scotland when Mhairi Black, a 20-year old Glasgow University politics student, stood up to the lectern in Paisley to give her acceptance speech. She had just overturned the 16,000 vote majority of Labour's Shadow Foreign Secretary, Douglas Alexander, who looked ashen-faced, as she set our her Westminster agenda – ridding Scotland of Trident nuclear missiles and ending austerity "north and south of the border".
She will be the youngest MP in the House of Commons for almost four centuries but she will be joined by a cohort of female politicians. A third of the House of Commons in the new parliament will be women, a record for Westminster. The SNP, which is led by Nicola Sturgeon, took 56 out of the 59 Scottish seats with a campaign slate that was also one third female. Ms. Sturgeon's performance on the stump, a mixture of impassioned nationalist rhetoric, combined with a very slick professional delivery reached places that her predecessor, the bumptious, aggressive and slightly comical Alex Salmond, could not penetrate in last year's referendum on Scottish independence.
Those places might be homes where you will find Cautious Cath. Psephologists and sociologists like to create caricatures of a typical voter when they think they see a demographic political trend. Margaret Thatcher memorably seduced Essex Man, the ambitious working class tradesman, a sort of Joe Plumber clutching shares in privatized companies. Tony Blair went after Mondeo Man, the middle England, middle-of-the-road, liberal-minded family breadwinner who polishes his new car on Sunday.
Today, that breadwinner is increasingly female. Cautious Cath is a 35-year old Mom who drives a Ford Fiesta, shops at Aldi, a discount supermarket, juggles the family budget, her job and her children. She makes frequent trips to the doctor with her kids so she worries about the National Health Service, making her a key target for the Labour Party. But her instincts may also be Tory because she struggles to make ends meet and therefore good jobs and a thriving economy matter to her.
The Cautious Cath avatar lives in Nuneaton, a market town in Warwickshire which had a slender Tory majority and was a key target for the Labour Party in the election. Last night, the Labour Party leadership felt the ground disappearing under their feet when The sitting Tory candidates increased their majorities in both Nuneaton and Warwickshire North, another key marginal.
Over the weeks leading up the poll, psephologists wondered whether the Tories truly understood Cautious Cath's concern about "soft issues" such as the NHS and social cohesion. But I reckon it was Labour that failed to get this voter's mindset. Cath does not like conflict and it was probably the Labour Party's drift towards the politics of class war; it was Labour's claim to support the interests of "ordinary working people" that failed to match this female voter's aspirations.
It was women voters who rejected Ed Balls, the hapless shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer who lost his seat last night to a female Tory challenger. When he was Treasury Secretary in the last Labour government under Gordon Brown, he wrote a notorious letter on election night in 2010, telling his replacement "there is no money". It was intended as a bit of black humour but David Cameron, keeps the letter in his pocket and he used it to good effect in the Tory campaign. Cautious Cath didn't like Ed Balls' dark male humour. She knows what it is like to have no money.
Nor did she care for the divisive and xenophobic, bar-stool politics of UKIP, the anti-EU party which last night lost one of the two Westminster seats it held. It's leader, Nigel Farage, is heading for political oblivion, after failing to win and he will join Ed Miliband, the Labour leader who has announced his resignation.
There are many political messages from this extraordinary upset, not all of them well understood. For the British economy, most of the runes are positive. Even the spectre of a British "Brexit" from Europe is now almost eliminated. With a working majority in Parliament and the poor performance of UKIP, David Cameron can lead a government without too much worry about his right wing English nationalist wing. Just as an independent Scotland failed to lure Cautious Cath, a Britain adrift offshore of Europe, will not appeal to her either. David Cameron can hold an EU referendum and comfortably win a majority for staying in, with Scottish support.
But for MPs who survived the night and for corporate CEO's who worried about turmoil under Labour, there is no room for complacency. The message is very loud and clear – politics is going to be different in future. It's going to be more inclusive, less divisive and consensus-driven. It may also become federal, if the Tories are going to head off another Scottish attack on the Union. The political mood will have business consequences. British businesses with their ear to the zeitgeist will scramble to get more women in the boardroom. There will be more demands that multinationals take local responsibility, pay their taxes and become good corporate citizens. Cautious Cath has spoken.
Carl Mortished is a Canadian financial journalist and freelance consultant based in the U.K.
Editor's Note: a previous version of this story incorrectly suggested Nicola Sturgeon would take a seat in Westminster. In fact, she remains leader in the Scottish Parliament.
Carl Mortished