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 ollowing
the progress of Prime Minister Tony Blair in the opening sallies
of the British election campaign has been
like watching
one of those old-fashioned comic magicians on the vaudeville stage.
Every trick goes disastrously wrong — the rabbit in the top hat
bites his hand, the doves defecate on his tuxedo, and when he makes
his lovely assistant disappear, she turns out to be too plump so
that he draws back the curtain to show her top half wriggling desperately
in the trapdoor. Still, the audience applauds him to the echo and
demands an encore.
Mr. Blair opened
the campaign with a speech to children in a London school where
he was photographed singing piously from a hymnbook. As Matthew
Parris of the London Times pointed out, this was not merely
propaganda, it was bad propaganda because even the children could
see how manipulative it was. (One of them described his speech as
"a pack o' lies.") Mr. Blair looked like the worst sort
of cynical politician rather than the Christian paterfamilias he
doubtless hoped to suggest.
A few days
later, he arrived in Birmingham to talk up his government's extra
spending on the socialized National Health Service — only to be
accosted by Ms. Shannon Storrer who denounced the dreadful treatment
her boyfriend was receiving in the local hospital. On this occasion,
the prime minister resembled an apologetic goldfish, opening and
closing his mouth wordlessly as the lady's tirade swept over him.
On the next
day, a heckler threw an egg at John Prescott, the deputy prime minister
(and a former boxer from his days in the merchant marine), who promptly
turned around and slugged the guy. Soon a national debate was raging
around the question: Which side are you on — the deputy pm's or
"the Egg-man's"? Pundits assumed this was bad for New
Labour because it would revive Middle England's memories of the
party's involvement in union strikes, anti-nuclear demonstrations,
and general mayhem in the 1980s.
Yet, despite
these pratfalls, at the week's end most opinion polls showed that
Labour had increased its already large lead over the opposition
Tories by two or more points.
Exactly why
requires delving into the national psyche.
Four years
ago, the British swept the Tories out and Labour in with one of
the largest parliamentary majorities in history. It was more than
just a routine change of government. Blair's New Labour had convinced
the voters that they were idealistic, competent, and modern, where
the Tories were greedy, sleaze-ridden, incompetent, and outdated.
Blair made
the sale. The voters committed themselves emotionally to Labour
and against the Tories. Since then they have been willing Labour
to succeed and William Hague's Tories to fail.
In cold fact
the government's record has been mixed — good on the economy so
far, very risky on the Constitution, just as vulnerable to sleaze
and scandal as the Tories, and above all disappointing on public
services.
But the voters
have been paying attention to their hopes as much as to the cold
facts. They have been deaf to even the most reasonable criticisms
from the hapless Tories. And they have swallowed the argument that
after 18 years in opposition, Blair and Labour deserve two full
terms to deliver the promised goods. So on the 7th of June they
will walk past their overcrowded local hospital, ignoring the funeral
pyre of animal corpses next door, in order to reelect Labour.
This is such
a substantial apple for Mr. Blair to gorge on that it seems almost
petty to point to the worm it contains. As Miss Storrer's tirade
illustrated, the government's single most important broken promise
has been its pledge to improve public services like health and education.
The polls show that most voters share her view that the NHS is over-stretched
and under-funded. They are willing to give Mr. Blair the benefit
of the doubt — and the benefit of their original hopes — but only
in this election. In four years time he will have to deliver the
goods.
The prime minister
is uneasily aware of this. Leaks from Whitehall reveal that in his
second term he is prepared to call on the private sector if that
is necessary to reduce waiting times for hospital operations or
to cut class sizes in public schools. Social democratic dogma will
be out; "what works" will be in.
His problem
is that this theory of "what works" is essentially a surrender
to the Tory argument that money alone will not improve monopoly
public services and that you also need choice, competition, and
private-sector financial controls and incentives. Unfortunately,
that is exactly the kind of argument that led New Labour to denounce
the Tories as greedy, sleaze-ridden, incompetent, and out-of-touch
with modern thinking in the first place. And in 2005 the voters
may reason that if they are going to get Tory policies in any event,
they might as well vote for a government that really believes in
them.
As Scarlett
O'Hara remarked, however, tomorrow is another day.
This
originally appeared in the Chicago
Sun-Times.
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