Wall Street Journal Europe, 9 May 2005

It was a famous victory--and yet the victor is mortally enfeebled, and his shell-shocked troops have turned against him and demanded that he promptly fall on his sword.

While Britain once again has a Tony Blair government, the first time that Labour ever won a third consecutive term, its majority was slashed by 100 seats. The government was elected with the lowest share of the popular vote gained by any ruling party in the nation’s history.

The principal reason for this drop was the tide of irrational hysteria that has engulfed Mr Blair over Iraq. The Prime Minister was widely believed to have exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein and taken the country to war on a lie. He had already lost public trust through a combination of political scandals and unfulfilled policy promises. This was amplified by a poisonous media presentation of the war and its aftermath, in which distortions, omissions and irrational arguments became accepted as truth.

In this election, those who had opposed the war in Iraq through both virulent hostility to what they saw as American ‘unilateralism’ and a prejudiced and snobbish hatred of President George W Bush united with those who supported the war but believed that Mr Blair had lied in order to sell it to the country.

Iraq thus became the lightning rod for voters’ disillusionment, and Mr Blair, hitherto his party’s most potent electoral asset, a liability. Labour candidates were shocked by the abuse they received on doorsteps from voters who called Mr Blair a liar. The party was saved from a rout by the visible attachment to Mr Blair at every opportunity of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who is popularly credited with running a successful economy.

Mr. Blair is back in 10 Downing Street but with less evident power and authority. Although on paper he still has a comfortable majority of 67, given the sizeable group of hard-left troublemakers on Labour’s backbenches he may now be their parliamentary prisoner, unable to push through proposals for anti-terror legislation or welfare reform. He will also be looking over his shoulder at the 62 Liberal Democrat MPs who are well to the left of Labour and whose opposition to the Iraq war helped them pick up nearly a quarter of the votes cast. Although the LibDems didn't make their hoped-for breakthrough. their 11 extra seats will help them join the Labour left in Parliament to make Mr Blair’s life difficult.

The Prime Minister's greatest attribute was his ability to neutralize the left. He was only able to do so because he was acknowledged to be an election winner. Now that act will be harder to pull off, all the more since Mr Blair already said that he'll step down before the next election. Even party loyalists are demanding that he go sooner rather than later to hand the Prime Ministership to the impatient Chancellor.

Along with the Prime Minister, Mr Brown was an architect of New Labour and is keenly aware of the need not to frighten the middle class. Nevertheless, his instincts are much more those of redistributive old Labour. One of Mr Blair’s difficulties has been that the Chancellor’s iron grip on the public services has progressively ruined them, while his expansion of dependency on state jobs and welfare has frustrated any radical welfare reform.

This government infighting should have provided ample opportunity for the Conservative opposition, which under Michael Howard’s leadership had been transformed from a party flat on its back into a disciplined force that added more than 30 seats and restored morale. But on the morning after the election, Mr Howard horrified his colleagues by announcing that he would resign as soon as a new structure was put in place for electing his successor.

This means Britain now has two lame-duck leaders, in charge of the government and opposition respectively. At a stroke, this took the heat off Mr Blair by plunging the Tories immediately into a feverish leadership election. The party now faces a period of fratricidal strife just at the time when it should be building on its new-found discipline to repair the gaping hole in its platform.

For despite the skilful professionalism of their campaign, the Tories did not increase their share of the popular vote from their previous dismal score of around 33%. Several of their new seats were only gained because disaffected Labour supporters voted LibDem and thus let the Tory candidate in by default.

The Tories’ main problem is that they no longer know what they stand for. They are split over Europe, between those who think the party is too right-wing and those who think it is not right-wing enough, between people who think the famous middle ground of politics means endorsing gay marriage and those who think it means deep tax cuts.

The result was this overwhelmingly negative campaign, providing no big picture of what kind of Britain they wanted. Worst of all, Mr. Howard tried to capitalize on the anger over Iraq even though he had supported the war. His repeated taunt that Mr Blair was a liar rebounded badly; British voters don’t like their politicians to trade insults, even if they agree with them. And it merely reminded them that they don’t trust any politician, including Mr Howard.

The Tory leader’s singular achievement was thus to be voted even less popular than a Prime Minister who has notched up the lowest public approval in electoral history. All this has led some to conclude that Britain now has a left-wing consensus. The truth is surely very different. Mainstream voters tend to have conservative impulses on many issues such as immigration, crime or European integration.

The problem for this conservative majority is that there is no party they wish to vote for. Although the Tories’ attack on immigration resonated widely, voters did not believe they would actually deliver on this or on anything else. This is because they view the Tories as flaky opportunists who don’t stand for anything except regaining power -- and that's because the Conservative party no longer seems to know what conservatism is for.

Because Mr Blair adroitly moved to embrace the market and squash the old Labour trade union left, the Tories concluded that he had parked his tanks squarely on their own lawn. They failed to understand that, although the left was defeated in its aim of workers’ revolution, its tactics merely switched to a culture war -- aided and abetted by Mr Blair’s unworldly belief in creating a kind of globalised utopia, which expressed itself in such things as the promotion of same-sex union.

Britain has thus sustained a relentless attack on the nation through multiculturalism, the destruction of the family and the surrender of self-government to Europe. It has produced a ruling class whose centre of political gravity has moved substantially to the left, producing a degraded education system, politically correct police officers and judges who think prison is a dirty word.

This cultural slide has produced a disturbing rise in irrationality, prejudice and extremism. There was a whiff of anti-Semitism in some Labour attacks on Mr Howard, while in east London Muslims voting en bloc returned the MP George Galloway, who had been thrown out of the Labour party for being the principal cheerleader for Saddam Hussein and who now represents a coalition of the anti-democratic far-left and militant Islamism.

The danger now is that, whoever leads it, the Labour government will preside over a further slide down this road while the Tories merely return to inspecting their own navel. As Britain ponders the ironic symmetry of a Prime Minister who is being entreated to depart and an opposition leader who is being entreated to remain, a resolution to its disturbing problems seems the last thing on anybody’s mind.

Posted by melanie at May 9, 2005