Britain’s Conservatives should have been careful what they wished for. That’s our reaction to the predicament in which Prime Minister Cameron and the rest of the Tories find themselves as they plunge toward the general election Thursday. Less than a year ago they were practically pleading for Scots to vote against disunion. Had the Scots voted to separate from England, ending the Treaty of Union that has bound them since 1707, the Conservatives might have been able to rule England for a generation. Now the polls suggest they could well be cast out.

That is, the Indpendent is predicting that the Conservatives will win more votes than any other party but that Labor will form the government in a coalition with the Scottish National Party, a left-wing band of socialistic trouble-makers. Had Mr. Cameron let Scotland go, he’d have been free of this faction, and Scotland would be wooing England for all sorts of favors that only England can bestow. The Guardian reckons that the current ruling coalition is unlikely to be able to form a “stable” government, while Labor and the SNP would have the numbers.

This has precipitated a veritable nervous breakdown at the Financial Times, admittedly but one marker of the British establishment. It issued last week an editorial that was longer than the Iliad. It wrote of the prospect of an “inconclusive election.” The election, by our lights, is likely to be conclusive — of the fact that Britain lacks for leadership. The only politician who seems to have a cheerful, optimistic strategic vision is the cigarette-puffing pub-crawler Nigel Farage of the United Kingdom Independence Party, whose party will be lucky to get several seats.

Good on the bloke, though, even if, as seems possible, Mr. Farage fails to get into Parliament himself. The FT, which wants another Conservative-led coalition, characterized the choice Britain faces as between “Little England or Great Britain.” That is, “between a dynamic, flexible and open economy delivering higher living standards for all, and a pinched nationalism that clings to the past.” The paper failed even to mention UKIP, though some readers took the reference to “pinched” nationalism” to be a knock at UKIP’s campaign to exit the European Union.

There need be nothing “pinched” about it. The New York Sun is, insofar as we’re aware, the only American paper to have endorsed the British exit from the European Union. A British exit would be as good for the Conservatives (and the rest) of England as would have been the disunion with Scotland. What really attracts us is the opportunity that has been brewing for America. Where is the leader here who will reach out to Britain and offer an ever more special relationship if England seeks a go of it on its own?

We’ve been pressing this point for a while now, including a year ago when Alex Salmond was in New York to explain the agitation for an independent Scotland. We expressed a hope for a kind of trifecta — a secession of Scotland, a British exit from the European Union, and a Republican accession to the White House in 2017. That would, we thought, “clear the way for a broad assertion of the values of classical liberalism.” The only chance for a referendum will be if Prime Minister Cameron emerges with a new term as premier and honors his promise to take it to the people. It’s the best way out of the trap in which his government has found itself.