The enforced resignation in 1990 of the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher occasioned public jubilation. There may well be similar scenes of rejoicing when Britain’s current leader Tony Blair finally leaves office. Commonly felt to have duped the British Parliament into supporting the war in Iraq on the basis of disingenuous intelligence, Blair has long since become a byword for phoniness, a walking illustration of the old showbiz maxim that “if you can fake sincerity, you can fake anything”.
To be fair to Mrs. Thatcher, on the question of public trust she will always have the advantage over Blair. For all her unpopularity, Thatcher retained a certain grudging respect even among those who loathed her uncompromising right-wing politics. Nobody doubted her fundamental integrity. The same can hardly be said of Tony Blair. Skepticism if not outright cynicism is nowadays the automatic response to his every utterance.
And yet, with just days to go until the 2005 British general election, all the indications are that this deeply discredited politician will be re-elected for a third term — in the process becoming the first “Labour” leader ever to achieve this feat. It is a prospect that is viewed by a great many people with utter dismay — not least because of the signal it will send that the British do not appear to mind that Blair backed US President George W. Bush in riding roughshod over international law and invading a country which posed no immediate threat to Britain, the United States or anywhere else.
The impression is that a substantial number of Britons — perhaps because it has practically dropped from notice in the news media — now regard Iraq as finished business. At any rate, what might seem to be the urgent national question of whether or not to maintain Britain’s military presence in Iraq has hitherto barely figured in election debates. Largely fought out on domestic issues, the election is shaping up as the most shamefully parochial and materialistic in living memory. The proverbial visitor from another planet might well conclude that the British are sealing themselves off from reality and retreating into a private world where their only concern is with their living standards and the threat posed to those living standards by immigrants and asylum-seekers. Small wonder if the British election — seldom of great interest in the United States, the nation extolled by Tony Blair as Britain’s closest ally — is getting even less attention in the American media than usual.
It is from the issue of asylum-seeking and immigration (both increasingly conflated in the public mind with the threat of terrorism) that Blair’s chief opponent the Tory leader Michael Howard has derived most political mileage. By suggesting that the government is soft on immigration and weak on national security, it looked as if Howard had at last found a way of setting clear blue water between the Conservative Party and a Labour government so reactionary as to have pre-empted the Conservatives on virtually every right-wing issue. Certainly, the Conservatives’ readiness to highlight immigration seemed to be helping them to close the opinion poll gap between themselves and Labour. Yet — despite mounting public anxiety over the permeability of Britain’s borders — the signs last week were that Howard’s attempt to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria was backfiring and that Labour was strengthening its opinion poll lead. Part of the explanation for this may be that the more Howard has pursued the matter, the more many who felt they could not possibly vote Labour have begun to feel that they had better vote Labour after all — for fear that Britain will end up with a prime minister whose instincts are even nastier and more illiberal than those of Tony Blair. Those tempted back into the Labour fold include not a few British Muslims who had sworn never to vote for Blair again — or so it appears. Already exposed to widespread Islamophobia, Muslims have good reason to fear that Howard’s Britain would be an even more uncomfortable place for them than the Britain of Tony Blair. Such people will perhaps be feeling all the more inclined to settle for Blair following the keynote speech the prime minister gave last week in which he paid tribute to the contribution immigrants have made to Britain and deplored Howard’s racist exploitation of the immigration issue.
None of this means that Tony Blair is anything resembling the electoral asset to the Labour Party he used to be — even if he still enjoys wider public appeal than either Howard or the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, the amiable but ineffectual Charles Kennedy. With its electioneering literature discreetly omitting photographs of the prime minister or indeed much direct reference to him of any kind, the Labour Party’s campaign has been so orchestrated as to play down Blair’s presidential pretensions and portray him as a team-player. Scarcely was the campaign under way before Blair began to be accompanied everywhere by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown whose much-vaunted stewardship of the British economy constitutes the principal reason why Labour’s position appears secure.
Having sought to sideline Brown, who has never made any secret of his desire to supplant Blair as prime minister, Blair found himself obliged not just to give his rampantly ambitious colleague a central role in the election campaign but to indicate his determination to keep him as chancellor in the event that Labour is re-elected. At press conferences, Blair has figured in a self-abasing new guise: That of presenter of the Gordon Brown Show.
All this has fueled speculation that the election that really matters will concern the question of Brown’s succession. What is certain is that if Labour is re-elected, Labour MPs will go back to Westminster knowing full well that they and their party owe their continuation in power not to Tony Blair but to Gordon Brown. The consequence of a Labour victory could be a sea-change in the general perception of the balance of power between Brown and Blair, with Blair’s prestige in the eyes of his party and the public-at-large fatally diminished. Blair has in any case given a pledge to stand down before the next election.
Yet no one is more conscious than Gordon Brown of Blair’s capacity to say one thing and do exactly the opposite. The chancellor is bound to be conscious, too, that the media magnate who has long exercised such a crucial influence on British politics, Rupert Murdoch, is emphatically not on his side. So far as this ardent champion of the free market is concerned, Brown, with his residual faith in public spending and belief that government has a role to play, is as great a potential menace as an old-fashioned socialist. When last week Murdoch committed his mass market tabloid, The Sun, to re-electing Labour, it was only, it seems, on the understanding that Blair will stay on as prime minister as long as possible — thereby ensuring that Britain remains wedded to neoliberal economic policies that are red in tooth and claw..
It remains to be seen whether the opinion polls are right to forecast a Labour victory on May 5. Fragmented, heterogenous and increasingly volatile, present-day Britain is a hard country to make sense of; it is, moreover, well to remember that great numbers of disaffected Britons will not vote at all and that the outcome of the election will be decided by a handful of “swing voters” whose choices could confound all expectations.
For many, including Muslims and other embattled British minorities, the appalling prospect of Prime Minister Michael Howard has still to recede. They cannot yet feel confident that they will merely have to contend with the appalling prospect of another four years of Tony Blair.
