London
It isn’t easy being an American in London during an election campaign. To chattering class commentators here the most notable and praiseworthy feature of the British process is its contrast with campaigns across the Atlantic. On Election Day last week, historian Simon Schama used a four-page spread in The Guardian to tell his readers, “After the stifling incense-choked sanctimoniousness of American politics, getting back to Britain was like coming up for air. . . . Most wondrous of all, perhaps, is the conspicuous absence in British hustings rhetoric of the one campaign helper without whose assistance no American candidate can possibly hope to prevail, namely God.” Better still, in Britain it is safe for politicians to discuss expanding the welfare state, “the mere mention of which, in the U.S., would likely trigger the opening of a File in the Department of Homeland Security.” There’s more, but you get the idea.
This year’s U.K. election campaign, however, was a chance to get one’s own back, to use Britspeak for getting even. In 2000 smug BBC reporters told and retold tales of voting irregularities in Florida, with an “It can’t happen here” flourish. Well, it did. Tony Blair’s Labour party pushed postal voting on an unprepared bureaucracy and was rewarded with the support of thousands of voters so devoted to Labour that they cast their ballots from the grave. Labour was not the only beneficiary of Daley-esque shenanigans. One Jamshed Khan, campaigning for Haroon Rashid, the Conservative candidate in heavily Muslim Bradford West, registered 13 voters at his home and 12 more at a derelict house he allegedly owned. This was an election in which the postman only had to ring once in order to pick up sacks of ballots. By comparison, Florida was a model, if not of efficiency, certainly of integrity.
Similarly, the anti-Iraq media here greeted George W. Bush’s smashing reelection victory with the headline, “How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB: U.S. Election Disaster”–an expression of amazement that any politician supporting the unseating of Saddam Hussein could possibly persuade voters that he is not intent on world domination. Well, it turns out that millions of British voters are no brighter: They voted for Labour and Conservative party candidates who are on record as supporting the ouster of Saddam Hussein. True, the Tories wobbled at times, arguing that Blair had not been candid about the existence (or nonexistence) of weapons of mass destruction, but in the final week of the campaign their leader, Michael Howard, came out in support of regime change.
That said, the Liberal Democrats, the only antiwar party, did increase the number of seats they hold to a record 62, from 51, and their share of the popular vote by a significant four percentage points, to 22 percent. Also, many Lib Dem supporters voted tactically, switching to the Tories in constituencies where that meant a defeat for Labour. And in tallying the strength of antiwar sentiment one has to give weight to the fact that Saddam pal and supporter George Galloway, after having been tossed out of the Labour party, returns to Parliament, having defeated Oona King, the pro-war Labour candidate. King, a black, half-Jewish woman, simply could not win in a constituency that is 40 percent Muslim.
Add to that the victories of such antiwar Labour candidates as Glenda Jackson (more on her in a minute) and Claire Short, and it is certainly arguable that Blair’s unwavering support of America and the Iraq war contributed to the drop in his parliamentary majority. “Tony Blair paid a heavy price for his lies over Iraq,” trumpeted the virulently anti-Blair Daily Mail; Blair’s “huge majority was slashed as the antiwar brigade turned nasty and voted for anyone but Labour,” agreed Trevor Kavanagh, Britain’s most influential political commentator, in the pro-Blair Sun.
Just how strong antiwar sentiment was–is–is difficult to determine. Voters had a host of reasons for opposing Blair. Labour has antagonized rural voters by banning fox hunting, alienated others by raising taxes, and forfeited the support of voters concerned by rising crime and what seems to be uncontrolled immigration. During the campaign Blair tried mightily to follow the advice of John Cleese in his still-popular television series, Fawlty Towers. Cleese, some of you may remember, kept reminding himself, “Don’t mention the war,” when German guests arrived at his hotel. He failed, and so did Blair.
Not for want of trying. But the antiwar faction, with the full assistance of the press–and with no U.S. ambassador here to make the case for the liberation of Iraq–had the field to itself. Add to their feelings about Iraq their antipathy to Blair’s proposed reforms of the welfare state. He has announced plans to introduce consumer choice and use private-sector facilities, which is a not-red-enough flag to anti-Blair Labour MPs such as Glenda Jackson, MP for Hampstead & Highgate and the only member of parliament to have won an Oscar. Jackson is perhaps best known by those more interested in the cinema than in politics for her memorable 1970 performance in The Music Lovers, described by director Ken Russell as “the story of the marriage between a homosexual and a nymphomaniac” (Jackson played the latter).
Fans of politics rather than movies know her as a Labour MP best described during the recently completed election campaign by Times columnist Ben MacIntyre as “Brittle, and spiny as a sea urchin . . . more or less permanently peeved. Even with a pint of latte inside her, she carries an air of chilliness. . . . She has provided Labour voters with a way through an electoral conundrum. Vote Glenda: Bash Blair.”
STILL, Blair is back in Downing Street for a third term, and may end up as the longest-serving leader of the major powers that toppled Saddam’s tyranny. Indeed, Spain’s José María Aznar is the only major member of the anti-Saddam coalition to have been repudiated by the voters, and that for reasons largely unrelated to the war. Australian prime minister John Howard (no relation to the Tories’ Michael, who will be stepping down) was reelected, as was George W. Bush. And now, Blair, who is likely to remain in power after John Howard’s term expires, and after Bush and his chainsaw are massacring brush in Crawford–assuming, of course, that he does not get so frustrated by the left of his own party that he decides the time has come to make a bit of money for his family.
All of that is for later. Last week, the prime minister celebrated his 52nd birthday by returning to Downing Street and calling on the queen at Buckingham Palace, where he was asked to form a government. He may have been bloodied by the reduction in his majority, but he is unbowed.
The 355 seats Labour holds are well down from the 412 the party won in the last election, but not wildly out of line with the numbers chalked up by Margaret Thatcher’s Tories in her three runs for the premiership (339, 397, and 376 in 1979, 1983, and 1987), and in some sense an inevitable consequence of the animosities that accumulate towards a long-serving prime minister. That gives Blair a majority of 65, not as comfortable as the 167 he had after the 2001 election, but workable–perhaps.
Only “perhaps.” The paradox is that the rightward shift of the electorate towards the Tories strengthens Britain’s political left. When he had a large majority, Blair could survive revolts by his hard left, enabling him to accept and build on the reforms he inherited from Margaret Thatcher. That was then. The Labour left has never liked Blair. He was their meal ticket, so they went along with him on many issues. But not on the war, and not on his efforts to reform the welfare state. So Blair is in the uncomfortable position of having some of his bitterest opponents sitting on his side of the House of Commons, directly behind him, rhetorical knives poised, emboldened to withhold their support from a man they see as a lame duck whose replacement by their hero, Chancellor Gordon Brown, they can speed by making life unpleasant for Blair. Kavanagh reports, “Party whips . . . fear an upsurge of indiscipline among surviving MPs who are accustomed to rebellion.”
The “rebellion” faction numbers several dozen. When Blair proposed that universities be allowed to charge what are called “top-up fees,” to be paid only when the beneficiaries of what passes for higher education enter the work force and earn more than 15,000 pounds, some 71 Labour MPs balked (a few later went along after winning concessions). When he proposed to allow hospitals some freedom in managing their own finances, 62 members of his party voted “no,” and there would have been more had not chancellor Gordon Brown leaned on some of his friends on the left. Most important, when Blair asked the House of Commons to authorize him to take the nation to war in Iraq, 139 of his 412 party colleagues said hell no, we won’t let you go. Blair won Parliament’s backing for war only because the Conservatives, then led by Iain Duncan Smith, the Bush White House’s favorite Tory, provided the votes needed to allow Blair to let slip the dogs of war.
None of this seems to have cooled the prime minister’s ardor for radical reform. Or affected his conviction that his broadly pro-American foreign policy is right for Britain. Both parts of his agenda, the domestic and the foreign, will have important consequences for American interests.
On the domestic side, and worrying for Americans doing business in Britain, Blair and his chancellor plan to continue the Europeanization of Britain. Through a combination of bracket creep (taxpayers move into higher brackets as their incomes rise) and tax increases, Blair’s Britain will see the portion of its income claimed by Her Majesty’s Treasury pass the 40 percent mark, the money to be dispensed in large part by an ever-expanding army of bureaucrats whose sole aim seems to be to make the lives of the nation’s doctors, nurses, teachers, and cops more difficult, with form-filling now a major claimant of the time of these front-line public servants.
These higher taxes and a mounting regulatory burden are a consequence of Blair’s decision to expand the role of the state, with some of the burden falling on the many American companies doing business here. Labour’s manifesto unapologetically defends the “nanny state”: “Fear of seeming to ‘nanny’ has in the past meant British law and culture have not supported parents and children. Government cannot shirk its responsibilities.” So Blair is promising “universal childcare”; “Parents Direct,” an information service “to provide advice on all aspects of children’s services and parental entitlements”; reforms to minimize conflict in cases of divorce and make certain that both parents recognize their “responsibility for a meaningful relationship with their children”; and instructions to parents on proper diets for their children, in addition to increased spending on health care, cops, education, and a virtually limitless list of other good things. With government finances stretched, the Blair-Brown plan is to impose the costs of many of these programs on employers not only by increasing taxes but also by, among other things, increasing mandatory paid time-off for “parenting.” The many U.S. firms that are active here–America accounts for almost 25 percent of all foreign investment coming into Britain–are already noticing that Britain is decreasingly a haven from continental Europe’s stifling tax-and-regulate regime.
More important, and on the plus side of the ledger, Blair’s return to Downing Street means that America retains an ally in a Europe in which the major countries–France, Germany, Spain, and, perhaps soon, an Italy that may have returned Silvio Berlusconi to the business sector–are hostile to our interests. Blair will spend the balance of this year on the international stage, as chairman of the G-8 when it meets in Edinburgh this summer, and as president of the E.U. for six months starting in July. Bush will be delighted that those seats are occupied by his old friend, especially since the prime minister’s pro-American leanings have been reinforced by the savaging he received at the hands of the reliably duplicitous French president.
Jacques Chirac waited until Blair left a meeting in Brussels to call a press conference and demand that Britain increase its payments to the E.U. by forfeiting a rebate won by Margaret Thatcher, an issue that Blair definitely did not want raised during the election campaign. Blair’s private response can only be printed in a family publication if expletives are deleted. This distrust of France should keep Blair on America’s team when the inevitable controversies arise: He is already attempting to stall the Franco-German drive to lift the arms embargo against China.
But Blair remains committed to a European constitution that will deprive him and his successors of substantial power, and transfer it to a largely anti-American Brussels bureaucracy that is likely to dance to whatever tune happens to be emanating from Paris. And he seems not to understand that the European Rapid Reaction Force (known by military experts to be neither rapid, nor capable of reacting, nor a force) will end up draining NATO of scarce resources, thereby playing into long-standing French plans to reduce the U.S. presence in Europe.
All in all, and despite the negative aspects, from a purely American point of view, last week’s British election was a win. The voters not only failed to unseat Tony Blair for siding with America, and for declaring that neoconservative foreign policy sounds to him like progressive politics with a different name, they handed him an unprecedented third victory, leaving in place America’s staunchest ally.
Since one good turn deserves another, Bush can best reward Blair by appointing to the too-long-vacant post at the Court of St. James an ambassador sufficiently articulate to explain the American position to our critics in the vigorous British media, and by directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to remember our friends–and our enemies–when awarding contracts.
Irwin M. Stelzer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, and a columnist for the Sunday Times (London).
