Posted on 04/27/2005 6:13:27 AM PDT by OESY
LONDON, April 26 - At a time when American conservatives are ascendant, the British Conservative Party is adrift, troubled by internal feuding, casting about for a defining theme and struggling to defeat a relatively unpopular incumbent, Prime Minister Tony Blair, in an election nine days away.
Most polls and analysts say the Conservative Party, led by Michael Howard, is heading for a historic third consecutive defeat against Labor on May 5. This prospect is all the more noteworthy given how vulnerable Mr. Blair is on issues of trust and leadership after his insistent assertions that prohibited weapons would be found in Iraq in the American-led war that he so strongly supported and that remains unpopular in Britain.
The political situation underlines what analysts describe as a growing divergence between the conservative movements here and in the United States, a decade and a half after the end of the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It reflects fundamental differences between the political makeup of Britain and the United States, but also the success of Mr. Blair on the left - and President Bush on the right - in realigning their political landscape, analysts say.
The social issues that have proved crucial to Mr. Bush's success in the United States have little resonance in this country. Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Howard has not been able to use abortion and gay marriage to transcend economic matters in appealing to voters, and he voted in Parliament in support of the war in Iraq, the issue on which Labor officials judge Mr. Blair most vulnerable.
"Tony Blair has repositioned the Labor Party as a centrist, catch-all political party," said Anthony King, a professor of government at Essex University. "And one of Michael Howard's difficulties is that neither he nor any Conservative Party figure has a clear perception of precisely what the Conservative Party should stand for. After a decade, the party still has not worked out what it wants to say."
Irwin M. Stelzer, a conservative scholar with the Hudson Institute in Washington and a columnist for The Sunday Times of London, said: "There is no reason to vote for the Tories. They're not offering anything different on tax policy. They are not offering anything different on crime policy."
"What the Tories have been unable to do - partly because Blair has been so successful at stealing their clothes - is to come up with a distinctively different policy," Mr. Stelzer said.
At a Monday morning news conference, Mr. Blair taunted Mr. Howard with the memory of Mrs. Thatcher, asserting that this Conservative Party had yet to lay out an agenda that offered voters a sharp contrast with Labor.
At his own break-of-day news conference at his campaign headquarters up the street from Mr. Blair's campaign offices, Mr. Howard grimaced when Andrew Marr, the political editor of the BBC, asked him if his statement that Britain was about to "sleepwalk its way to another five years of Labor" were the words of "someone who thinks they are losing the election campaign."
"That is absolutely not what I think," responded Mr. Howard, who, as the face of the Conservative Party in this fast-paced campaign, has provided a notably colorless alternative to the ever-energetic and telegenic Mr. Blair.
In many ways, the Conservative Party in its post-Thatcher era is like the Democratic Party in the post-Clinton era. Each is struggling to find a new defining theme in the face of an ideologically changing electorate and declining support.
Since Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher reinvigorated political conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980's, their movements have headed in notably different directions. Americans combined a free-market philosophy with a religious appeal and an emphasis on social issues. But British conservatives, having remade what was essential European social democracy, complete with government ownership of industry, have since stalled, providing an opening for Mr. Blair.
Mr. Blair has seized the center on issues including taxes, crime, immigration and Iraq, leaving Mr. Howard little room to maneuver as he tries to persuade voters to oust Labor next week. Any effort he might make to exploit the Iraq war is complicated by his vote, and those of many other Conservatives, to support it. More fundamentally, as became clear since the departure of Mrs. Thatcher, there is a much stronger appetite here than in the United States for governmental social programs, constraining what would traditionally be a bedrock conservative call to cut government spending and taxes.
As a result, Mr. Howard has been as apt in recent days to talk about increasing spending - at a World Poverty event on Sunday, he called for a £700 million ($1.3 billion) increase in British foreign aid - as he has been to cut government spending and taxes. Tony Travers, a political analyst at the London School of Economics, noted that Conservatives had proposed shaving just £4 billion off the £450 billion budget proposed by Labor - a difference that The Sun, a conservative newspaper, described as "pathetic."
"One of the abiding problems that Blair has presented the Conservatives is that he has managed to position himself just to the right of the British political center - in a party that tends to be to the left of the political center," Mr. Travers said. "It's not like Bush and Kerry where you had a massive gap in terms of their outlook of the world."
Mr. Travers argued that the Tories had been unable to keep pace with the social changes that have swept Britain over the past 30 years, as it evolved from a "rather repressed society" to a decidedly more socially liberal one. "The Conservative Party still finds it quite difficult to operate in this kind of world," he said.
So it is that Mr. Howard raised abortion for just a flicker of a moment - and only to the extent of suggesting that the time period where abortion should be permitted should be cut from 24 weeks to 20 weeks. And when Mr. Howard appeared in the pulpit at the Tabernacle Christian Center on the outskirts of London on Sunday, he did not mention God or religion once in the course of a 20-minute speech, an omission that would have been unthinkable for Mr. Bush or John Kerry, the former Democratic presidential candidate.
The social issue that Mr. Howard has used to try to drive up support - a strongly worded call for tough immigration restrictions - has inspired a backlash even among some of his own supporters as well as critics, who suggest that his appeal, encapsulated in the campaign motto, "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" was at the very least ham-handed.
"You can't ride the conservative tide from America here," said Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster from the United States who is advising Mr. Blair. "You have the leader of the free world being a self-conscious conservative, but based on ideas that seem foreign in Britain."
In a sign of the woes bedeviling the party, The Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch, endorsed Mr. Blair last week in what was widely seen here as an example of Mr. Murdoch's placing pragmatism (he has a history of going with a winner) over ideology. "When the Tories start acting like Conservatives, they might deserve our support," the paper said.
While it is hard to walk through Labor Party headquarters without spotting some familiar Democratic Party face who has flown over to help out - Bill Clinton appeared by satellite hookup to speak in support of Mr. Blair at a rally on Sunday - there are few if any American Republicans helping out the Conservatives. Mr. Bush, grateful for Mr. Blair's unwavering support on Iraq, has kept out of the contest.
Mr. Howard appeared exasperated Monday when he was asked what American president was supporting his campaign. "I'm more interested in the backing of the British people than the backing of American presidents," he said.
The British voters are fed up with uncontrolled immigration and rapidly rising violent crime.
They are also not very happy with centrally controlled schools and hospitals.
They are waiting for the right conservative party to appear. The Tories aren't it. They should disband and allow a true conservative party to form. It could be based on a merger of UKIP and the Countryside Alliance.
But the existing leaders of the Tories have to go. Blair is wildly unpopular, and they cannot put a dent in Labour's majority.
The success of the Republicans in the US has little to do with Bush's deft manipulation of "Social Issues", by which the Times means "Appeals to the Knuckledraggers Out in the Stix". It has to do with the Republicans having an integrated message that makes sense, across the board, from Abortion to Zebra Mussels. The Democrats, on the other hand, are the party of reflexive opposition, much as the Tories are in the UK, and thus have no consistent message of their own.
You can't build a party by opposing everything the other guy said. Thus the Tories look xenophobic on immigration, but downright wussie on terrorism. "I am not Tony Blair" will only get them so far.
Similarly, the Democrats based their entire 2004 campaign on "I am not George W. Bush". Bush should have been easily defeated, because lots of people were upset with him over one thing or another. But you can't beat something with nothing, and "nothing" is about as complete a description of the Democrat Party as you will find.
That is EXACTLY right. The Times also means that the GOP "Appeals to Bible thumping, homophobic, snake handlers".
The GOP won because of ground game, the Swift Vets, a crappy Brahmin northeastern liberal from a party out of touch with middle America and its decent values.
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