Tories in Transition
Next time round, the Tories must be brave and principled across-the-board.

June 7, 2001 9:00 a.m.

here are no permanent victories in politics," said Lady Thatcher presciently in 1990 — a mere six weeks before she was ejected from office. By the same token, there are no permanent defeats in politics either. Politicians and journalists often forget this, treating a particular landslide as the Verdict of History binding on all future governments and electorates. In his recent accomplished history of the Goldwater campaign, Before the Storm, radical historian Rick Perlstein enjoys himself in the final pages, quoting all the wise men on both sides who saw LBJ's victory as the permanent installation of a consensus liberalism and the final defeat of a nineteenth-century conservative philosophy.

He concludes drily: "At that there seemed nothing more to say. It was time to close the book." In fact all that had concluded was the foreword to a new and historically momentous volume of political history.

I am writing these words before the results of Britain's general election are known. Unless a reversal greater than Truman-Dewey proportions has taken place by the time you read this, however, New Labour's Tony Blair will have achieved a landslide victory and William Hague's Tories will have suffered the greatest defeat in that party's long and successful history. What remains to be seen, however, is whether this result is the last hurrah of a failing ideology as was LBJ's victory. Or the confirmation that a new establishment liberalism is now firmly ensconced as with FDR's defeat of Landon in 1936.

National Review has never claimed to speak with History's voice — quite the reverse. NR was established to halt and reverse a particular course it then seemed to be taking. And the publication's relative success in that endeavor prompts me now to point out that none of the trends I discern below should be seen as inevitable. They will only occur if right-minded people organize and work for their success.

That said, I regard New Labour's success as the end of an intermission between the collapse of Communism and the establishment of a genuinely post-Cold War politics. That intermission has been marked by the success of left-wing social-democratic parties making the apparently reasonable appeal that they can run the market economies (all parties now accept) more compassionately than their conservative opponents. The beginnings of a disillusionment with this style of mildly interventionist government have been seen in the victory of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, the success of Spain's center-right governing party, and arguably even in George W. Bush's victory last year.

Britain has not yet caught up with this trend in part because Britain was late in swinging leftwards to the social democrats. New Labour was elected only four years ago — five years after Clinton and three years after the Italian leftist "Olive Tree" government. Furthermore, it compensated for its lateness by swinging left with particular force. After Lady Thatcher's great historic achievements, John Major's last four years of Tory government were almost comically accident-prone, sleaze-ridden, appeasement-minded toward the European Union, and above all directionless. It lost the Tory party's traditional reputation for economic competence when its misguided policy of joining a pre-euro system of European fixed-exchange rates collapsed under market pressures on "Black Wednesday." And it clung to office through every disaster with the pointless desperation of a man clinging to the mast of a sinking ship. By May 1997 British voters thoroughly loathed and despised the Tories; they flung them out of office with the virtuous feeling that they were cleansing the Augean Stables; and the Tories have not yet been able to persuade the voters that they were wrong.

Mr. Blair was the beneficiary of those feelings in 1997. Where the Tories were seen as corrupt, incompetent and even heartless, he was invested by the electorate with the qualities of idealism, efficiency, compassion, and "modernity." Not enough has gone wrong since then to persuade the voters that they were completely mistaken. In particular, the strong economy that New Labour inherited from Major (his sole, and characteristically cursed, achievement) has been maintained. Britain voted this week in a climate of tranquil prosperity. Radical-left political errors have been confined mainly to constitutional reforms which, like depth charges, produce delayed explosions, metaphorically in Scotland where a botched federal devolution is encouraging Scottish nationalism, literally in Northern Ireland where the peace process has advanced the political fortunes of terrorists and hindered those of democratic moderates. And the emollient and ideologically androgynous Mr. Blair is himself regarded by nervous Middle England voters as the only force protecting them from a socialist government.

All of this helps explain why Britain probably sleepwalked to a curiously dull Labour victory today. But it also suggests why that victory may vanish like mist on a summer morning. Britain voted Labour because it thought that the Tories deserved continued punishment and that Labour deserved a second term to carry out the promises of improved public services it had plainly not delivered in the first term. From now on, however, the voters are unlikely to acquiesce in blaming Labour's failure to improve health and education on Tories who lost power in 1997. That damages the Blair government below the water-line — for it cannot deliver improved public services simply by throwing money at them — and gives the Tories their opportunity to recover.

Probably nothing the Tories did this time could have won them the game. It was rigged in advance by deep-seated public resentment against them. As it was, William Hague fought a decent, cautious, and moderate campaign in general — and in his opposition to Britain's adoption of the euro and its larger absorption into a European federal state, he fought a brave, principled, and (according to the polls) popular campaign. Next time, however, the Tories must be brave and principled across-the-board. They must make the case for limited government, seriously lower taxes, the improvement of monopoly public services not simply by pouring money into them but by subjecting them to private-sector competition through vouchers and private insurance, and a foreign policy based clearly on preferring Britain's traditional support for a U.S.-led Atlantic alliance to Blair's evident desire to participate in the emerging European superpower.

All of these themes were present below the surface of the recent Tory campaign. When they emerged into the open, they were denounced as evidence of "nostalgia," "irrelevance," or "extremism." But they are about real political issues; they tap into deep public sentiments (and where they concern declining public services, deep public anger); they reflect the main, if presently submerged, classical liberal and conservative traditions of British political life; and they are likely to provide the tinder for the political conflagrations of the next four years.

Whether they are also, Goldwater-like, a wave of the future, or a backwash from the recent Thatcherite past — that I will leave to the National Review editors of 2038.