Fraser Nelson, Editor of the Spectator

Photograph: David Levene/Guardian

By 2020 Britain will be – with enough Conservatism – a stronger, fairer society with prosperity far more evenly shared. Welfare reform will continue, as will the astonishing trajectory of job creation. Only a fresh global recession will stop it achieving full employment. There will be hundreds more free schools, bringing choice in education to parents who could never otherwise afford it. Reform of the National Health Service will bring hundreds fewer avoidable hospital deaths, among many other dividends. The minimum wage will be set at £8 an hour, a Labour pledge but one the Tories will deliver. It might be even higher. We’ll have more debt than George Osborne pretends we will – he’s never been very good at balancing the books.

My guess is that an EU referendum will lead to Britain staying in, but we will be fine either way. Ten years ago, David Cameron pledged to fix not just the broken economy but a broken society. Now, unimpeded by coalition, he is free to do just that.

Helen Lewis, Deputy Editor, New Statesman

Photograph: PR

Cameron’s unexpected majority hands him greater authority over his party, but at a cost. Whisper it, but some Tories would have been relieved to quietly shelve some parts of their election offer and blame it on a coalition partner. Delivering a budget surplus without raising income tax, national insurance or VAT, as well as making £12bn of welfare cuts without touching pensions, is an enormous challenge.

So, fiscal gymnastics ahead. At the same time, the sweeping success of the Scottish National party drives a wedge between England and Scotland. Cameron might give Scotland far greater fiscal powers but renegotiate the Barnett formula, telling the SNP they are welcome to reject austerity – by raising taxes north of the border.

An EU referendum is also coming, and if Britain votes to leave the Scottish nationalists could call for another referendum on independence. This time, they are more likely to win.

By the time the next election is due in May 2020, Great Britain might no longer exist and its remaining rump might be out of the EU. And with nowhere to put its nuclear deterrent, the UK could also lose its seat as a permanent member of the UN security council. At home, meanwhile, there might be no more resistance to the new welfare cuts than there was to the bedroom tax and the unfair benefit sanctions regime.

Even if the economy continues to improve, it’s not hard to see the remainder of Britain in 2020 being a smaller, meaner and more inward-looking place.

Neal Lawson, political commentator and ex-adviser to Gordon Brown

Photograph: Linda Nylind/Guardian

Free of any Liberal Democrat anchor, the Tories can find their true voice. But it could be paradoxical. On one side, by 2020 Britain could be transformed to the scale we haven’t seen since the first half of the 1980s. The last vestiges of the postwar settlement will be unpicked, privatised and spat out. The localisation of power, as in Manchester, will only come at the price of corporatisation. Public housing will be sliced and diced and sold to any bidder. Welfare will be further residualised and many “weak enough” to claim it will face a cliché come to life – the modern workhouse. Universal payments, such as child benefit, will be eroded and the minimum wage left to wither on the vine.

We may still be in Europe, but will not be of Europe. But if the economy continues to grow, talk of the big society could see a comeback – civil society and Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” championed to try to stake out the ground before any progressive revival. The living wage could also be promoted, but only as a way of getting the state out of the economy and income support.

All this and a mix of changes to the boundaries and electoral register could create a bias that entrenches Tory dominance. Any national appetite for political change could be satisfied by the new Tory leader before the next election arrives. Without the transformation of Labour, this could be a very long haul.

Ryan Shorthouse, spokesperson for Bright Blue

Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian

For his final term, with strengthened authority from electoral success, Cameron will trumpet his original passion: social reform. The prime minister will want his legacy to be the building of the big society, which –as the Conservative manifesto spelled out – has not been given up on yet.

Initially, while Labour looks inwards and his backbenchers get behind him, Cameron will see to unfinished business: constituency boundary reform, the draft communications data bill and the British bill of rights. But the real focus until 2020 will be finishing reforms to the education and welfare systems, and developing the northern powerhouse. Cameron is ambitious for the Conservatives to command much greater support, to be a truly One Nation party. So he will seek to own new ground: to prove that Conservatives are a party of the heart, not just the head; of social enrichment, not just economic management.

Naomi Smith, chair of the Social Liberal Forum

Photograph: PR

Cameron will find leading his party with a small majority much more difficult than running the coalition. Like John Major, he will lose byelections, suffer internal revolts from dissident Tory MPs and will be forced to play “the Orange Card”.

Ironically, although they are temperamentally rightwing, the Democratic Unionist party are collectivists. They will demand more subsidies and maintain an inflated public sector which, among other things, could bring about a reversal on the bedroom tax.

UK productivity levels will continue to decline relative to the US and EU. Inequalities between rich and poor will remain as wide as at present and, if anything, these inequalities will increase even further.

School performance levels will remain patchy, and with no overall improvement as funds become increasingly scarce. There will be yet more cuts to further education, and amalgamations and mergers among universities.

Amid a very choppy political, economic and social climate – and I’ve avoided the very real problems of the EU and Scotland – Cameron will not be able to continue with his austerity programme across the board. The DUP, and others – especially the SNP – will limit the prime minister’s manoeuvrability.

Andrew Harrop, General Secretary of the Fabian Society

Photograph: PR

Inequality in the labour market will almost certainly grow. A recent Fabian Society report revealed that if long-term trends continue the gap between top and bottom earnings will widen. This can only be stopped by tackling low pay, transforming non-graduate education and changing the balance of power in the economy. These are not Conservative priorities, though perhaps the party will accept the case for a decent rise in the minimum wage.

Levels of inequality and poverty will also by determined by decisions on tax and social security. If the new government does nothing then poverty will rise, because support for low-income families is not designed currently to rise in line with earnings or rents. But the Conservatives are not even promising inaction: their manifesto pledges will actively increase inequality and poverty.

Iain MacWhirter, political commentator, the Herald

Photograph: Chris Watt

British politics used to be dominated by class; it is now dominated by nation. Instead of the binary UK elections offering a choice of Labour versus Conservative with a side order of Liberal, Britain is now a multinational/multiparty democracy. The SNP leads in Scotland; the Conservatives in England.



But this is not a clash of cultural or ethnic nationalism. The divergence between north and south is based on profound differences of political culture.

The SNP, which won 56 out of 59 Scottish seats, is in many ways a conventional party of the European left. It stands for increased social protections, an end to nuclear weapons, proportional representation, higher taxes on the wealthy and liberal immigration policies. As the Conservatives pursue an agenda of radical spending cuts, a freeze on taxation, renewal of Trident, withdrawal from the EU, the tensions between the Holyrood and Westminster can only build.

The crisis will arrive in 2017, when Cameron stages his referendum on British EU membership. Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, will argue that it this should be a decision for the “family of nations” in the UK, and not for the father alone. This is not a proposition that is likely to find much favour south of the border.

A formal federal reconstruction of the United Kingdom might contain the contradictions – at least for a time. But it there is an absence of political will in Westminster for such radical constitutional change. By 2020, Scotland may already be in the antechamber to independence.