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In what is termed "tactical voting" here, in 1997 the Liberal Democrats formed a virtual alliance with the Labour Party to oust the Tories from the longest run in power of any political party in the industrialized West. In this past week's election, the conclusion to be reached on Friday morning, as the results were announced, was that tactical voting had benefitted the Liberal Democrats again. While much of the pre-election press coverage focused on the Tories' William Hague and Labour's Tony Blair, the hardest campaigner was certainly Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democratic leader.
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Hague resigned as Conservative party leader in the early hours of Friday morning when it was clear the Tories had taken a further trouncing in this election. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, were predicted to have secured more than fifty seats in the Commons. Kennedy's approach had proven dead-on.
Kennedy has promised to hold Blair's New Labour Party accountable for its seeming support of George W. Bush's "Son of Star Wars," as the American missile defence proposal is called here in the UK, on environmental issues, and on delivering on its promise to focus on public services. That public service emphasis has moved Labour closer to the European concept of social policy than the American, something British voters wholeheartedly support.
The other big news of this election is that the trend toward lower voter participation continues. Less than 40% of eligible voters came out last Thursday. Significantly, younger voters stayed away in droves, with polls here indicating that only 38% of eligible young voters bothered to come out. The Conservatives grasped at that straw to pooh-pooh Blair's history-making second term victory. (Blair is the first Labour Prime Minister of this century to win consecutive elections.) But it was the Conservative Party's man who fell on his sword the day after the voting.
Nonetheless, Tony Blair is the first PM to have been elected by fewer people (11 million) than did not vote at all (18 million.)
Though that ostensibly gives Mr. Blair a five year mandate, the British public can easily turn on him in as quickly as two years, the way this system operates, should he fail to deliver on the two crucial areas of health service and education. The British system of social services has been in notorious decline for years, in part the legacy of the Thatcher era.
One of the chief complaints about Mr. Blair's first term has been that it was short on substance and that he was insecure about a revival of Thatcherism. Mrs. Thatcher campaigned for the Tories in this election, a move that may have backfired for the party, reminding voters as it did of all the reasons they had come to hate the "Iron Lady." Tony Blair hammered away at the idea that the Conservatives still "do not believe there is any such thing as society," (a Thatcherism) during this campaign.
The British, even though they claim to accept the end of Empire, are psychologically adverse to admitting that London is not The City of Europe.It is difficult indeed for Britons to accept that the cultural and social center of the emerging Europe might be in Berlin or Paris, as opposed to 10 Downing Street in London.
Even otherwise cosmopolitan and internationalist Britons admit that they have difficulty letting go of the notion of London as the World City of the hemisphere.
The Conservative Party tried to play on this atavistic impulse, even as more and more dissidents in their own party, and the more rationalistic people in other parties, recognized that it was time for the United Kingdom to grow up, move on, and accept the new Europe.
Issues like "Son of Star Wars" and Washington's unilateral rejection of the Kyoto environmental treaty only underscore the need for an independent identity and leadership for Europe in the mind of such rationalists. The notion that Europe needs its own defence policy and resources, separate from that of the seemingly capricious and arrogant superpower across the Atlantic, is gaining currency here. The question of whether American political leadership has the intellectual sophistication to grapple with global problems is a very real one outside of the United States.
The initial moves of the Bush Administration have done little or nothing to mitigate this concern.
Thus, impatient voices are already being raised with the newly victorious Blair regime. Many say that the initiative -- now that Blair no longer has to obsess with achieving a second term -- must be taken on the European question rapidly and Labour must also deliver on its social services promises with substantive results, not more "Spin."
While even normally conservative elements of the British press like the Financial Times gave Mr. Blair their endorsements this time out, it was not without caveat. Failure to deliver in this second term will leave Blair and Labour open to the waiting hyenas.
Which is why G21 believes, as we assess this British general election, that "Everyman" Charles Kennedy and his Liberal Democrats are the real story to watch during the next four years.
While luminaries like Michael Portillo are being mobbed by the Tory faithful now that Hague has stumbled, that party has a long history of not choosing the apparent "comer" to fill its leadership. No one would have expected the emergence of John Major, for example.
Kennedy's prediction that the Liberal Democrats would become the second party here seems to be proving relevant. Which leaves Tony Blair in as precarious a position after victory as before it. He has had amble opportunity to see how easily the Labour Party can be abandoned by the voting public. So, while planning his largest government reshuffle ever, Mr. Blair must have certainly been thinking about the next two years, rather than the next four or five.
Some argue that Blair knows he must move quickly on all fronts and, being a pragmatist, he will. In the case of the European question, for example, those of this opinion argue, Blair will push for acceptance of the Euro within two years and full participation in the EU within five. He has no choice, this argument goes, in that he has gone to victory with a basic, if soft, pro-Europe stance twice now.
The fact is that many people in the position to analyse the time-to-realization of policy initiatives believe that Blair has already squandered the opportunity presented by Labour's 1997 victory to push for the UK's inclusion in the European Union. Because of his timidity about power, this argument goes, resistance to the Europe idea in Britain has only crystallized, the adoption of the Euro is in serious question and it could well take as long as twelve years for the UK to become a completely integrated part of the EU.
This kind of delay and the continued isolation of Britain, these same analysts believe, would be disastrous for the UK. Tantamount, they argue, to a return to the distant era when Britain was a barbaric little collection of islands totally outside of the mainstream of world events. In our view, such a delay would not be quite that dramatic but it would undermine any chance of Blair's historic victory being looked upon as a positive result for the UK in the long term. Even worse, it is questionable how long the rest of Europe would continue to tolerate Britain's psychodramatic intransigence on the issue of unification.
This is bad news for Tony Blair. He clearly wants to be remembered as a dynamic and epoch-making leader, not only for the UK but also on the world stage. But it his own timidity, it would seem, and the lingering question it causes as to whether there exists a "real" Tony Blair that seems destined to prove his undoing. The phrase "Too little, too late" comes to mind.
© 2001, GENERATOR 21.
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