IN last week's elections for the European Parliament the British Labour Party recorded its worst results for a hundred years. The chief beneficiaries of Labour's plunging public esteem were the right-wing, anti-European United Kingdom Independence Party and the far right British National Party. The latter now boasts two members of the European Parliament. Never before has a party hostile to the whole concept of Britain as a multiracial country known such success. It is a development that bodes ill for ethnic minorities, not least the British Muslim community. There are many reasons for Labour's abject performance; the scandal over MPs' expenses which has provoked vast public outrage; the financial crisis which has given way to surging unemployment; widespread contempt for a government now palpably devoid of direction. But Labour's meltdown may be seen above all as the inevitable upshot of the modus operandi of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a politician whose lust for power for its own sake long ago supplanted all other considerations. It has been said that to oust Brown from office would mean prizing his fingers from the doorknocker of No. 10 Downing Street, the prime ministerial address. Brown's unyielding tenacity in the face of savage criticism of his leadership is indeed remarkable, testimony to this brooding Scotsman's pathological obsession with political survival. Yet Brown would never have survived thus far but for the Labour Party's blind tribalism. As colleagues galore deserted him last week, Brown was obliged to cede much of his authority to those who remained. Not even this would have saved him had he not enjoyed the crucial support of the most senior member of his Cabinet, the ultimate Labour tribesman, Peter Mandelson. The grandson of the famous 20th century Labour minister, Herbert Morrison, Mandelson will do anything to keep Labour in power. Calculating that for Labour to change leader at this point would precipitate a general election in which it would be wiped out by the Conservative Party, he cajoled a critical mass of Labour MPs into rallying to Brown's cause. Arguably, it is Mandelson, not Brown, who is now the most powerful man in Britain. The tribalism of the Labour Party has much to answer for. It was tribal desperation to regain power after 18 years in the political wilderness that led the Labour movement to endorse "New Labour", the free market-embracing version of the party of which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were the principal architects, with Mandelson operating as kingmaker and securing the leadership of the party for Blair. Many old Labourites were appalled by New Labour, but in the wake of Blair's landslide victory in 1997 the party speedily reconciled itself to selling out "Old Labour", with its left-wing agenda. Not only did it countenance the perpetuation by the Blair government of the privatizing policies of previous Conservative administrations, it also endorsed Britain's military support for the United States' pre-emptive war against Iraq, a stance wholly at odds with the party's historic principles. Led by Blair, with Brown as the rivalrous chancellor of the exchequer who could never accept that he was not prime minister, New Labour was a marketing operation based on spin, sound bites and media manipulation. During the years of economic buoyancy, for which Brown endlessly claimed credit, the Labour tribe turned a blind eye as their morally bankrupt party degenerated into a power struggle between a pair of duplicitous egomaniacs. Throughout the 10 years when Blair was prime minister, the ill feeling between Blair and his faction and Brown and his was forever threatening to erupt into bloody civil war. That the party managed a semblance of unity, despite the two sides' relentless briefing against one another owed much to the ruthless PR skills of the party's director of communications, Alastair Campbell. The Blairites insinuated that Brown was "psychologically flawed" and that he would be a disaster as party leader. The irony is that even those who were overjoyed to see Blair replaced by Brown have been forced to recognize that the Blairite verdict on Brown's lack of leadership qualities was true. What is even more ironic is that it should be the arch-Blairite, Peter Mandelson, between whom and Brown there was for years bitter enmity, who has ended up providing Brown with a political lifeline, however tenuous. Blair himself, meanwhile, now posing as an international peacemaker, has vanished from the British political scene, leaving his old adversary to endure the public fury of which he would otherwise have been the pre-eminent target. As a tortured figure convinced that he has been misunderstood, Brown has been likened to US President Richard Nixon. Just as Nixon portrayed himself as a maligned servant of the American people, so Brown insists that he came into politics out of a sense of public duty. Yet far from having served his fellow countrymen, Brown, by virtue of licensing the gargantuan expansion of private and public debt, has done them enormous damage. True, he averted the collapse of the banking system, but the fact is that his lavish indulgence of bankers exacerbated the crisis and that his vaunted rescue package will be a crippling financial burden on British people for years to come. At the same time, Brown's Stalinist methods (he took over from Blair through his command of party patronage, becoming prime minister without ever being elected) has undermined faith in the entire British democratic system. If British right-wing extremism is resurgent, it is because of the rage and despair that his betrayal of what the Labour Party once stood for have engendered among people who ordinarily would be Labour supporters. Sold as a progressive force, New Labour has done untold harm. Blair and Brown have even wrecked the party they purported to be reviving. For the tribal loyalty that has sustained their powermongering has finally become strained to breaking point. Though their ideological differences are petty, the Blairites and the Brownites are locked in self-destructive feuding over who will inherit control of the party following the heavy defeat that it faces in the next general election. In the years of political impotence that lie ahead, the British Labour movement will have ample opportunity to rue the cost of jettisoning principle for power.
