The British general election appears to have resulted in another crushing victory for the Socialist Labor Party of Tony Blair, but the appearances are deceptive. Upon closer analysis, this widely predicted result has some startling elements. Beneath the historic fact that this is the first time that a British Socialist government has been returned to power, after an effectively full first term in office, lies some much less satisfying data. This was the lowest poll turnout since 1918, when hundreds of thousands of British servicemen were unable to vote because they were still overseas at the end of World War I. There were no such excuses in 2001.
Because of this appalling figure, in a country which has always resisted efforts to make voting a compulsory civic duty, it means that only one in four of the less than sixty percent of the electorate who bothered to vote, actually voted for Tony Blair’s Labor party. Even more disturbingly, the number of people who decided not to vote is actually larger than the number of people who voted Labor. The Labor vote dropped a few percentage points throughout the country. However the net result was that less than 20 seats have changed hands between the parties.
Meanwhile for the Conservative Party, after four years in unaccustomed opposition, the news has been bleak. It has ended up with precisely the same number of seats that it held on to in the previous electoral rout of 1997. That is why as soon as the extent of the disaster became clear, Conservative leader William Hague fell on his sword and announced that he was quitting as party leader. The only real beneficiaries from the 2001 elections are the Liberal Democrats under their charismatic and astonishingly relaxed leader Charles Kennedy.
Despite promising to raise taxes to fund extra spending on education and health, the LibDems saw the number of their MPs past the fifty mark and rise to the highest level in ninety years. The LibDems are politically to the left of Blair Laborites who have in turn seized much of the central political ground once dominated by the Tories. Kennedy has argued that with the upcoming Conservative leadership battle likely to split the party between pro and anti-Europeans, it will be the Liberal Democrats who will provide the real opposition.
It is too early to write off the Tories, who were once almost the natural party of British government. But when the Blair government runs into the looming recession, is forced to overspend and restart a major borrowing program, on present showing it is likely to be the buoyant Liberal Democrats who will be most effective at forcing the government to account for its errors.
The low turnout has other implications. It allowed the neo-fascist British National Party (BNP) to do well in certain inter-racial flash point constituencies, such as in Oldham, scene of recent riots, where a BNP candidate scored a creditable 3.5 percent of the vote. But perhaps more worrying, the low turnout may be a reflection of a general distaste for the modern political establishment. This is likely to lead to the emergence of many single issue protests, such as Britain has already seen over high fuel prices and attempts to change the rural way of life by banning hunting. Civil disorder and protest on the French model could become a regular occurrence in once staid Britain.
If voters have markedly diminished faith in the ability of politicians to represent and protect their interests, direct action will become the only option. One clear and emergent danger is over the issue of membership of the European single currency. Premier Blair, who favors the euro, has promised a referendum. However if the new Tory leader joins Euro-enthusiast Charles Kennedy to push the euro, anti-euro voters will with justice ask who in the political establishment is representing their views? Boring, drawn out and predictable though this British election has been, it may prove a watershed in British political life.
