It is sixty years since the British people emerged victorious from World War II and voted into power the epoch-making socialist government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee. In that moment of national elation, a grand effort was made to mitigate the historic harshness of British capitalism. Priding itself on its commitment to the commonweal, Britain became a welfare state.

It was the collective euphoria of 1945 that Tony Blair was felt to be reviving when he led “New Labour” to power in 1997 after 18 years of divisive right-wing government. Yet last week, as the end of World War II was being celebrated in Britain and Blair was elected prime minister for the third successive time, tributes to his achievement were far from fervent. The truth is that Labour Party has just been returned to office in Britain despite — not because — of Tony Blair, with great numbers of Britons (thanks in no small part to Blair himself) now too disillusioned with mainstream politics to bother voting at all.

Even before Blair became distrusted for enlisting support for the war against Iraq on the basis of questionable intelligence, many members of the Labour Party had begun to feel that 1997 represented a false dawn, a mass self-delusion based on hyped-up folk memories of 1945. Last week found swathes of traditional Labour voters no longer able to stomach voting for a Labour Party led by Tony Blair and determined to advertise their contempt for his behavior over the war and much else. The defection of such voters helped to slash the huge parliamentary majority that has hitherto enabled Blair to behave more like a president than a prime minister. His wings have been clipped.

If a large section of long-standing Labour supporters have nevertheless carried on tolerating Blair, it is because he has rendered the party acceptable to “middle Britain”, to the broad mass of the British public, making possible the enactment of a modicum of the reformist legislation which was once the Labour Party’s stock-in-trade. Articulating a strand of progressive opinion, the Guardian columnist, Polly Toynbee, urged her readers to vote for Blair while holding their noses to keep out the stench arising from his various indecencies: His degradingly sycophantic relationship with US President George W. Bush, his complicity in an illegal war and his cavalier readiness to junk age-old British traditions of civil liberty. The alternative, she warned, could be a Conservative government that would rapidly undo what Labour had achieved on behalf of the disadvantaged.

Looking beyond Blair to a fresh leader of the Labour Party, Toynbee even offered to give readers hesitant to vote Labour free clothes pegs to clamp over their sensitive nostrils. It was, admittedly, a mildly amusing joke — though only until one recalled the bloody reality of the situation in Iraq. Arguably, such flippancy about Blair’s conduct says much about the prevailing lack of public engagement with what is happening in that unfortunate country. Much use Toynbee’s clothes pegs are likely to be to the countless Iraqi dead and maimed. Not until its final days, as it happened, did Iraq figure in the election campaign at all. And even when it eventually did, the debate was largely framed in terms of whether Blair had knowingly lied to the British people when he asserted that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction which could threaten British interests in a mere 45 minutes. The issue of the consequences of the invasion and of whether Britain intends to maintain a military presence there indefinitely was only fleetingly addressed.

In the event, Polly Toynbee and her fellow nose-holders did enough to stop a disastrous hemorrhaging of Labour votes to the Liberal Democrats, a party that opposed the war and which now stands significantly to the left of Tony Blair and New Labour. But Blair’s retention of power also owes much to the chronic inadequacies of Britain’s main party of opposition, the Tory Party.

Though it fared better at the polls than in recent general elections, the Tory Party remains ill equipped to mount a credible challenge to a Labour Party that has long since hijacked much of its own traditional ideological agenda. It may be that the Tories could have made a greater impact under a younger leader with a grasp of contemporary Britain that the 64— year-old Howard demonstrably lacks. Perhaps Howard’s biggest mistake was to make opposition to immigration a central plank of his campaign. Inflammatory though the issues of immigration and asylum-seeking may be, it now seems clear that it is simply not possible, given the massive demographic changes that have overtaken Britain, to base a whole campaign round them. What made Howard’s campaign especially distasteful is that he himself is a Jew of immigrant stock; moreover, having reviled the Labour Party for devising anti-Tory election posters which were alleged to be anti-Semitic, he appeared happy to exploit public anxiety about immigration while using his identity as a Jew to shield himself from the charge of being a racist.

Not least was Howard’s campaign handicapped by its relentless negativity, by its undignified resort to crass personal abuse. It did not help either that even as he attacked Blair for not admitting that his true motive for invading Iraq was “regime change”, Howard insisted that he himself would have pursued precisely the same objective; the only difference, apparently, was that he favored something that he confusingly termed “regime change-plus”. If Howard’s strategy was inept and counterproductive, it also signaled the extent to which Labour and Conservative leaders alike feel bound to profess unconditional loyalty to Washington. For the inescapable fact is that Britain only went to war against Iraq at all, and is only contending with the war’s moral and logistical consequences, because the British political establishment has more or less surrendered national sovereignty to the United States.

The result of the British general election of 2005 is widely felt to have delivered what many, if not most, British people want: A government of the center-right committed to the free market but concerned to preserve some semblance at least of the legacy of 1945. What millions of Britons positively do not want is a leader who is prepared to implicate them in pre-emptive wars and who acts as a mere stooge of the US. Whether the British people will ever again enjoy truly independent leadership remains an open question.