On a glorious May morning in 1997, I joined a euphoric crowd of people who were waiting for Tony Blair to emerge from his then home in the north London district of Islington. No longer the mere leader of the Labour Party, Blair had just become prime minister of Britain. Even those (like the present writer) skeptical about his “New Labour” politics, were grateful to Blair for ousting a Tory Party that had become an object of universal loathing after nearly twenty years in power.
How remote that “glad, confident morning” seems now. Long since robbed of moral authority by his high-handed prosecution of the Iraq war (now commonly regarded as a foreign policy blunder of historic magnitude), the Tony Blair of 2006 presides over a government that seems every bit as incompetent and mired in sleaze as the Tories during the twilight phase of John Major’s premiership. The abysmal showing of the Labour Party in Thursday’s local elections — which has prompted Blair to carry out a ruthless reshuffle of his Cabinet, including the demotion of his long-serving Foreign Secretary Jack Straw — was widely anticipated. Almost certainly, it brings forward the moment when Blair will feel obliged to honor his promise of making way for a successor before the next general election.
The spectacular ineptitude of Blair’s close colleague, the former Home Secretary Charles Clarke is only the most blatant example of mismanagement on the part of a government that appears to be in meltdown. Under Clarke’s aegis, a large number of foreign nationals were released from prison without any question of deportations being raised. Hugely embarrassing to Blair (he recently promised to harry criminal aliens out the country), the episode finally resulted in Clarke’s summary dismissal — but only after a delay that further injured the prime minister’s credibility. What stopped him from firing Clarke sooner was Blair’s anxiety not to lose a notably loyal minister at a time when he is plainly determined to delay his departure in the face of the leadership ambitions of his rival, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown.
Even before the crisis at the Home Office broke out, the government was contending with damaging allegations that peerages were offered to individuals prepared to bankroll the Labour Party. Now, despite Britain’s apparently buoyant economy, there is a rising tide of public resentment about the government’s whole approach, if not about its very existence. Resentment is particularly rife in the Health Service whose employees object to the hectoring manner in which market-led reforms are being implemented by Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt. Meanwhile, not a few Britons are aghast at the repressive legislation introduced by Blair in the wake of the July suicide bombings in London last year. Unease about this legislation is by no means confined to Muslims — even if they have most reason to fear the erosion of Britain’s vaunted civil liberties.
If Charles Clarke has made the government look ham-fisted, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has made it look preposterous. Much in the news following the revelation that he had a 2-year affair with his secretary, the overweight 68-year-old Prescott may not be guilty of incompetence, but his behavior has scarcely enhanced the government’s standing — especially since this is a government that has never hesitated to lecture the British public on the subject of morality. Many recall the relish with which Prescott himself used to jeer at Tory ministers for appearing more concerned with satisfying their promiscuous urges than with running the country.
You would hardly guess that it is just a year since Blair was re-elected with a reduced but workable majority. Already there is a stale terminal air about the present British government, the same sense of decadence that beset the last days of John Major when, as leader of the opposition, Blair was selling himself as the harbinger of a new and better Britain. Far from displaying the managerial efficiency so woefully absent under the Tories, Blair and his ministers have likewise been reduced to prevarication, bluster and humbug. The novel doctrine enunciated by Charles Clarke — that as the author of the debacle at the Home Office he was best placed to put matters right — will long be remembered for its brazen absurdity. There are unmistakable echoes of the Major era, too, in the government’s compulsion to “blame the messenger”. A creature of the media, Blair now complains that the media operate according to an agenda that magnifies minor problems into major crises and is ever hungry for negative headlines. He has been hoist by his own petard, for to an unprecedented degree, the Blair government has been preoccupied with news-management. New Labour ministers anxious to tell a good story about their achievements have themselves become the story. It is one of a bunch of clowns who keep landing flat on their behinds.
The impression is that Blair and his ministers resent the media and public alike for their ingratitude. The feeling is mutual. In truth, people are surfeited with Blair and his all too familiar mannerisms. Yet what is the alternative? Promoting himself as a new improved version of Blair, the new Conservative leader, David Cameron, can claim to have triumphed over the government in the local elections but he has yet to make any appreciable impression on the opinion polls. The trouble is that Britain’s two major parties subscribe to much the same center-right consensus, to the so-called politics of the “big tent”. Not that the triumph of this essentially middle-class consensus, with its glib talk of inclusiveness, would matter so much had it not left whole swathes of people feeling ignored and betrayed. Amid an increasingly sour and cynical national atmosphere, many can no longer be bothered to vote at all, while among the marginalized and alienated there is a growing disposition to embrace extremism.
The local elections saw the far-right British National Party record its best results in years.
Extremists are exploiting the bitterness felt toward immigrants who have come to Britain from countries like Poland and who are willing to work for pay that is regarded as derisory by native Britons, in the process forcing down wage levels. This is not something which ministers are apt to mention when they boast about the success of Britain’s privatized, de-regulated economy. Nor do they talk about the debilitatingly long working hours that have become the rule in Britain — or about the huge scale of absenteeism attributable, not to definable medical problems, but to stress. If de-regulation has energized the British economy, it has also created endemic insecurity and done much damage to the country’s social fabric. The phrase popularized by the late J.K. Galbraith, “private affluence and public squalor”, seems peculiarly applicable to Blair’s Britain. Most alarming, though, is the sharp increase in random acts of extreme violence. The other day in west London, a man who remonstrated with the owners of two troublesome dogs ended up being attacked with a meat cleaver, losing three fingers and nearly losing one of his arms. While pledging to place much stress on law and order, Blair promised a kinder, gentler society than the one bequeathed by Mrs. Thatcher, but his government’s unbridled courtship of the free market has exacerbated the most malign trends of the Thatcher era.
Britain is now a tense, deeply divided society much implicated in international conflict. It is the prime minister who is getting much of the blame for his country’s distempered state. When, on that May morning 9 years ago, Britain’s new leader stepped into view, the crowd went wild. Blair may enjoy a similar reaction again — but only when he walks out of his official residence at 10 Downing Street for the last time.
