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BLAIR'S LANDMARK - Because the party of Government changed in 1997, it might easily appear that that British Election was more of a landmark than the one which has just handed Labour a second term. The reality is otherwise. Prime Minister Blair came in four years ago with a message of continuity, matching - even surpassing - his predecessor Conservative administration's mean financial estimates for the two years after that Election. The irony is that Blair the crypto-conservative, was forced by public will to promise higher spending on schools, hospitals, the fight against crime and transportation infrastructure. The public has forced "New Labour" Blair into a more traditional policy.
The significance of this Election is that Britain is now set to re-join the European pack; its unhappy adventure with liberal economics and illiberal greed is over. Without changing position we will change direction; instead of talking to Europe with America behind us we will be talking to America with Europe behind us.
After more than two decades of tax cutting, the public has decided that it wants the Government to make up for lost time. The demographics of epidemiology are piling pressure on the health and medical systems, the loss of manual and industrial jobs is forcing us to think about high levels of skill for all children, the media obsession has made us irrationally frightened of crime and -- although we love our automobiles -- we want a modern railway system; we look with awe across the English Channel where the French run their trains at more than 200 MPH.
The worry is that pouring taxation into these services will not be very efficient. In its various ways, the human services have a low absorption capacity. It takes, for example, more than two Government terms to build a hospital but it also takes more than a 5-year term to train a doctor.
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The result is that middle class children are suffering from the teacher shortage and their elders are demanding ever more from the medical system.
There is the clue. There never was all that much fuss as long as it was only the poor who had to put up with rotten schools and hospitals but one of the paradoxes of contemporary life is that the richer you are the more you expect.
At least in this Election the illusion that the poor can continue to pay for middle class expectations has been refuted. There is, however, the question of how much they really care and how much they are indulging in post-modern gesture politics. The voting turnout was down approximately 13% at 59% and the abstention rate did not vary so much according to social class as to the uncertainty of the outcome in individual constituencies.
There is another way in which Britain (and here I use the term deliberately rather than casually, to exclude the special political circumstances of Ulster) is finally breaking away from American practice and moving towards a more European model. As the Labour Party consolidates itself in the centre of the political spectrum, the Conservatives have moved sharply to the 'right' and the Liberal Democrats have moved smartly to the 'left'. For the time being at least, two party politics, defined by fiscal and spending strategies, has disappeared. For this reason, too, the 2001 Election will be remembered as a landmark.
The third, still tiny, phenomenon to remark is the election of a Member of Parliament on a single issue. In 1997 an independent, Martin Bell, was elected as an "Anti Sleaze" candidate but he had a clear run against the corrupt Conservative and he had been an heroic BBC Correspondent in the Balkans and elsewhere.
In 2001, on the other hand, Dr. Richard Taylor has been elected against the three major Parties on the single issue of saving a hospital where he lives. This message will not be lost on others discontented with public facilities they do not have or, in the case of mental hospitals, prisons, runways and railway lines, they do not want. Nor will it be overlooked by professional lobbyists and businesses.
Many years ago a wine seller worked out that it was cheaper to stand for Parliament and get his flyers delivered to every house in the town than using the normal advertising channels but Dr. Taylor's case is altogether more serious.
Media coverage of this election was disgraceful. At the height of the campaign, when Britain's position in the European Union was the main topic, the Prime Minister made what was reported as a major speech in Edinburgh on the subject. I know it was important because my two heavy newspapers and all the radio and television channels told me that it was an important speech --
but no medium actually told me what Blair had said.It was unrealistic for me to want a verbatim transcript - I could, after all, get that from a web site - but I would have thought a couple of paragraphs in quotation marks would not have been too much trouble.
One analysis says that more than 1/3 of the Election stories were about the process: how well were they doing; what were the polls saying; were the tactics sound? This was metanews and an awful lot of it was about media people.I frequently heard how well the doyen of interviewers, Jeremy Paxman, tackled a leading politician but never heard what the politician had said, or not said.
When a leading politician entered the square of a market town, the mob of journalists and camera operatives was so great that it shut out 'ordinary' people -- except as props for pictures and sound bites -- and then these same journalists would complain that politicians were not engaging with 'ordinary' people.
I've had my rant about the 'real people' issue already; but the point at the root of this discussion is that organised heckling by opponents is now so much part of campaigning that politicians would be foolish, which most of them are not, to sally forth uncontrolled and unconfined into a market square; for every smile there will be a concerted rant which provides the television with good pictures and the candidate with bad publicity.
As a contest in lying and deception it wasn't even close, the journalists beat the politicians hands down. It is time for us to ditch the illusion that the media is somehow 'The Fourth Estate', it is simply a collection of commercial enterprises.
Finally, the 2001 Election in Britain is a landmark because the Conservative Party, unable to sustain the myth that its 1997 catastrophic defeat was just an aberration, will have to change its whole way of thinking about social issues. The implicit, and all too often explicit, preference for white, two-parent, heterosexual families will have to be abandoned. Otherwise it will be reduced to a ranting anachronism.
