Natl Review John O'Sullivan

England’s Labour Pains
Even bad propaganda and rotten eggs help Labour’s fortunes.

May 22, 2001 2:00 p.m.

Following the progress of Prime Minister Tony Blair in the opening sallies of the British election campaign has been like watching one of those old-fashioned comic magicians on the vaudeville stage. Every trick goes disastrously wrong — the rabbit in the top hat bites his hand, the doves defecate on his tuxedo, and when he makes his lovely assistant disappear, she turns out to be too plump so that he draws back the curtain to show her top half wriggling desperately in the trapdoor. Still, the audience applauds him to the echo and demands an encore.

Mr. Blair opened the campaign with a speech to children in a London school where he was photographed singing piously from a hymnbook. As Matthew Parris of the London Times pointed out, this was not merely propaganda, it was bad propaganda because even the children could see how manipulative it was. (One of them described his speech as "a pack o' lies.") Mr. Blair looked like the worst sort of cynical politician rather than the Christian paterfamilias he doubtless hoped to suggest.

A few days later, he arrived in Birmingham to talk up his government's extra spending on the socialized National Health Service — only to be accosted by Ms. Shannon Storrer who denounced the dreadful treatment her boyfriend was receiving in the local hospital. On this occasion, the prime minister resembled an apologetic goldfish, opening and closing his mouth wordlessly as the lady's tirade swept over him.

On the next day, a heckler threw an egg at John Prescott, the deputy prime minister (and a former boxer from his days in the merchant marine), who promptly turned around and slugged the guy. Soon a national debate was raging around the question: Which side are you on — the deputy pm's or "the Egg-man's"? Pundits assumed this was bad for New Labour because it would revive Middle England's memories of the party's involvement in union strikes, anti-nuclear demonstrations, and general mayhem in the 1980s.

Yet, despite these pratfalls, at the week's end most opinion polls showed that Labour had increased its already large lead over the opposition Tories by two or more points.

Exactly why requires delving into the national psyche.

Four years ago, the British swept the Tories out and Labour in with one of the largest parliamentary majorities in history. It was more than just a routine change of government. Blair's New Labour had convinced the voters that they were idealistic, competent, and modern, where the Tories were greedy, sleaze-ridden, incompetent, and outdated.

Blair made the sale. The voters committed themselves emotionally to Labour and against the Tories. Since then they have been willing Labour to succeed and William Hague's Tories to fail.

In cold fact the government's record has been mixed — good on the economy so far, very risky on the Constitution, just as vulnerable to sleaze and scandal as the Tories, and above all disappointing on public services.

But the voters have been paying attention to their hopes as much as to the cold facts. They have been deaf to even the most reasonable criticisms from the hapless Tories. And they have swallowed the argument that after 18 years in opposition, Blair and Labour deserve two full terms to deliver the promised goods. So on the 7th of June they will walk past their overcrowded local hospital, ignoring the funeral pyre of animal corpses next door, in order to reelect Labour.

This is such a substantial apple for Mr. Blair to gorge on that it seems almost petty to point to the worm it contains. As Miss Storrer's tirade illustrated, the government's single most important broken promise has been its pledge to improve public services like health and education. The polls show that most voters share her view that the NHS is over-stretched and under-funded. They are willing to give Mr. Blair the benefit of the doubt — and the benefit of their original hopes — but only in this election. In four years time he will have to deliver the goods.

The prime minister is uneasily aware of this. Leaks from Whitehall reveal that in his second term he is prepared to call on the private sector if that is necessary to reduce waiting times for hospital operations or to cut class sizes in public schools. Social democratic dogma will be out; "what works" will be in.

His problem is that this theory of "what works" is essentially a surrender to the Tory argument that money alone will not improve monopoly public services and that you also need choice, competition, and private-sector financial controls and incentives. Unfortunately, that is exactly the kind of argument that led New Labour to denounce the Tories as greedy, sleaze-ridden, incompetent, and out-of-touch with modern thinking in the first place. And in 2005 the voters may reason that if they are going to get Tory policies in any event, they might as well vote for a government that really believes in them.

As Scarlett O'Hara remarked, however, tomorrow is another day.

-- Anonymous, May 22, 2001