Posted on 05/27/2005 4:56:57 PM PDT by quidnunc
To judge from the British media’s treatment of the General Election result, from 5th May (2005), one would have thought, unless one hesitated, that Tony Blair’s Labour Party had just suffered a defeat - such has been the slumber of British politics since his first election in 1997. Much stress, correctly, was placed on the return to credibility of the Conservative Party and the further progress (albeit frighteningly slow) of the centrist Liberal Democrats. Yet, net gains should not mask the simple truth that the past 8 years have been wasted for the Tories and that it is policies, in the main, that continue to condemn them to another term in opposition.
Much praise has been heaped on Michael Howard’s leadership. Certainly, he has made the Conservative Party look as if it can one day return to power. The campaign he spearheaded was thorough and professional. However, his failure to increase the party’s share of the vote (to any significant extent) from the elections in 1997 and 2001, whilst Labour’s support plummeted, should be admitted as a very serious failure. The ‘dog whistle’ approach may have secured that the committed turned out, but how many former supporters from the Thatcher and early Major days have been returned and what is the Party’s strategy towards those under 40?
With hindsight the biggest error of the Conservative Party, during the 1990s, was their shift to the right at the very moment when Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party. With this move a very significant part of the ‘soft right’ of British politics was handed, almost without a blink, to the very social democratic ‘New Labour’. Apart from the obvious fact that the Tories remained in power too long, instead of refreshing and offering the British electorate an ideological hiatus, they turned to securing ‘clear blue water’ between themselves and Labour.
Perhaps they were destined to lose in 1997 anyway, but they failed to grasp the obvious in the run-up to the June 2001 election — focussing on saving the pound sterling — and in 2005 selected immigration, which, whilst certainly an issue that needed to be tackled, smacked of mild xenophobia and for every elector (probably already a Conservative) that it attracted, it probably turned off two. In the end, the familiar and rather hackneyed totems of policemen on the beat and lower taxes failed to excite interest.
-snip-
Enough of the Britisn electorate has simply moved so far left and become so inured to welfare-state nannyism that it is unthinkable for then to vote for any party other than Labour/Liberal.
I think the problem is simply that Blair has been successful in capturing the center and even the center-right. His policies have been pretty moderate and the economy has been strong for both of his reelection campaigns. Also, the Conservatives (as the article points out) have been focusing their campaigns on narrow social issues. It is generally economic and national security issues that bring the right into power.
I have a feeling Gordon Brown won't be able to resist moving Labour back to the left. That will probably lead to economic difficulty... leaving fertile ground for a Tory party that is willing to focus on economic issues. I'm not sure why the writer is heaping praise on Michael Howard... I think he just wasted 1 more election cycle.
This editorial seems to think that the problem is that the Conservative Party is too conservative. I would have said the opposite. It's not conservative enough. It doesn't offer a real choice. Ever since they pushed Margaret Thatcher out they have been the "me too" party, just as they were for most of the 20th century before Thatcher came on the scene.
"Enough of the Britisn electorate has simply moved so far left and become so inured to welfare-state nannyism that it is unthinkable for then to vote for any party other than Labour/Liberal."
I'm not really sure what you base that view on. People don't vote for Labour because they are 'left wing' anything but in most cases. If you look at British society now compared to 1979 when Margaret Thatcher won power, the actual left wing segment of society is greatly diminished. The proper socialists are just an anachronism now. The British electorate has always been greatly concentrated in the centre and that is even more true now than ever. Those people voted for Thatcher because she was a strong leader whose ideas seemed to promise improvements in their lives. The same kind of people voted for Blair for exactly the same reasons (although less enthusiastically last time of course).
To say that the Conservative Party has moved to the right in the 90's is probably incorrect and certainly painting with too broad a brush. They maybe have on some issues, and the wrong issues in the main. What they really need to do though is to end the pointless debate about whether they should be 'more right' or 'more left' and actually come up with a coherent and distinctive set of policies that will actually present an alternative to the electorate at the next election.
" I have a feeling Gordon Brown won't be able to resist moving Labour back to the left"
I read this view expressed a lot, and I think it is more a case of wishing rather than something that will actually happen. Gordon Brown, I would argue, has been at least as responsible as Blair for the direction of domestic policy since 1997. A Brown government will not be hugely distinguishable from a Blair government in those terms.
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