BRITAIN:
British Politics Is Exciting Again

By Gerald A. Dorfman

The Tories have finally pulled even with Labour, Tony Blair has promised to step down this spring, and nobody knows what Gordon Brown, Blair’s heir apparent, will do when he finally becomes prime minister. What fun! By Gerald A. Dorfman.

Blair may have always intended to leave office after 10 years as prime minister, but he certainly never intended to be pushed out. Up to the time that Blair decided to join President Bush in the Iraq conflict, he had enjoyed an unusually long political honeymoon, lasting more than five years. But the decision to join the Iraq conflict has proved to be a political disaster for Blair, who, unlike Bush, has never had total support from his own party. The continuing troubles in Iraq have sharply eroded Blair’s support, exposing him to virulent opposition by a majority of Labour Party leaders and members.

Blair’s troubles over Iraq were made worse by the emergence of three other problems. First, there was a growing dissatisfaction within Labour about Blair’s policies. His embrace of the Thatcherite economic and fiscal revolution alienated many traditional Labour leaders and voters, who increasingly accused Blair of being a closet Conservative not in touch with his own party. Second, Blair’s long tenure in power caused him and his government to suffer from the sort of political “geriatrics” that afflicts all aging governments, but Blair has suffered more than usual. The Iraq war so alienated his political allies that it unleashed an unusually early and powerful backlash.

Finally, and more recently, there has been a spate of corruption charges against individuals in Blair’s administration, including charges that Blair’s closest advisers in the prime minister’s office had been involved in offering rich Labour donors lordships in exchange for large campaign donations (technically called loans) during the 2005 election campaign. Scotland Yard is undertaking the investigation, which has included interviewing Blair himself. It is uncertain at this point where the investigation will lead, but for the Blair government and Blair himself—who had promised to conduct an absolutely “clean” administration—what is called the “Cash for Honors” scandal has already become politically damaging.

The Conservative Party Revival

The key beneficiary of Blair’s (and Labour’s) troubles is the Conservative Party, Britain’s other major political party. Although the Conservatives have been politically weak and barely competitive in recent years, they are in fact Britain’s oldest and historically most successful party. Before Blair became prime minister, the Conservatives enjoyed an amazing period of electoral success, for 18 long years, from 1979 to 1997, under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. But their last term in office was a disaster, and they suffered a horrendous defeat at the polls in 1997, casting them out into the miserable political wilderness—until now.

Tony Blair’s long tenure in power caused him to suffer from the sort of political “geriatrics” that afflicts all aging governments, but Blair has suffered from it more than most. The Iraq war so alienated his political allies that it unleashed an unusually early and powerful backlash.

Finally, after 10 years of Labour rule, the Conservatives seem to be recovering. The party’s appetite to regain power seems to be returning as Labour’s troubles pile up. The Conservatives have a charismatic new leader, 39-year-old David Cameron, who has been defining a more voter-friendly and softer image designed to attract support beyond the traditional Conservative voter base, which in recent elections has amounted to no more than a third of the electorate.

Cameron’s political script for Conservative recovery seems borrowed from the script Tony Blair used a dozen years ago to successfully reenergize the moribund Labour Party. Like Cameron today, Blair was at that time a young, energetic, charismatic fresh face in British politics who worked with determination and skill to refashion his party. Blair’s greatest achievement in this rebuilding effort was to persuade his party to abandon its long-held and emotionally charged social democratic tradition, even renaming the party “New Labour” to emphasize its new moderate and promarket orientation. Blair was eager to recapture the electorate’s trust of Labour as a credible governing party.

David Cameron’s challenge is to make the Conservatives more broadly attractive to the electorate without abandoning the still politically attractive and successful innovations from the Thatcher era.

In his current effort to remodel the Conservatives, Cameron has one advantage that Blair did not enjoy. Cameron is following in a long and successful Conservative tradition of pragmatic policy U-turns to recapture electoral support. For example, after Winston Churchill’s government suffered an unexpected defeat in the first post–World War II elections in 1945, Churchill led the Conservatives in a dramatic policy about-face. The Conservatives decided to accept most of Labour’s democratic socialist program (including the managed economy and a comprehensive social welfare program), but they promised the electorate that they could do a better job administering the program than Labour. The strategy worked: In 1951, the Conservatives won back power with promises of better times to come, even though the electorate continued to support the basic concepts of Labour’s social democracy.

A quarter-century later, during the late 1970s, when the ruling Labour government fell into economic chaos and Britain was paralyzed by strikes, Thatcher led her Conservatives in yet another dramatic reversal—this time against much of what Churchill had embraced. Thatcher renounced a large portion of her party’s commitment to “collectivist politics” and pressed instead for a strong commitment to free markets, the privatization of nationalized industries, and so on. Operating her new style of politics, Thatcher successfully created a revolutionary change in the style and substance of economic and fiscal policies that did indeed produce a British prosperity unknown for half a century. In fact, by the time Thatcher left office in 1990, Britain was well along on its journey from being the economic “sick man” of Europe to becoming its most successful economy.

Now, 10 years out of power and 31 years after Thatcher first became Conservative leader, David Cameron is trying to move in yet another direction to produce another Conservative renaissance. The challenge is to make the Conservatives more broadly attractive to the electorate without abandoning the still politically attractive and successful aspects of Thatcher’s policy innovations, especially her economic and fiscal policies. Cameron is betting that he will be able to pull off his “revolution,” which involves both recognizing that Labour has done a good job managing Britain’s economic well-being (albeit by accepting Conservative Thatcher policies) and attacking Labour for its poor management of its vaunted public service and social welfare programs. In other words, Cameron wants to compete most aggressively on Labour’s turf, arguing that Labour has failed to fulfill its core promises to rebuild, reform, and reinvigorate public services. Cameron wants to convince the British electorate that the Conservatives, not Labour, can best reform and manage the National Health Service, the education system, transportation policy, and a whole galaxy of other social policies.

Don’t Underestimate Labour

But even as the Conservatives begin to smile, Labour is not without significant advantages in this struggle. This renewed political competition is occurring at a time when Britain continues in a remarkable period of economic prosperity. In fact, Britain today is one of the strongest economies in Europe, even while keeping itself outside the euro zone. Over the decade that Labour has been in office, Brown has administered the economy with greater success than perhaps any chancellor before him. Although he is a much less charismatic figure than David Cameron (read dour), Brown can rightly boast about his successes in government. The Labour Party under Brown and Blair has decisively driven off the previously successful Thatcherite argument that only the Conservatives could protect and enhance Britain’s economic well-being—and that Labour leaders were hopelessly incompetent in their economic management when in government. In fact, Labour now uses that argument in reverse.

Tony Blair’s announcement that he will leave by the autumn of 2007 has produced a calming effect on what had been becoming a damaging Labour intraparty power struggle. Gordon Brown’s supporters had become openly rebellious and contemptuous of the prime minister (while Brown himself remained carefully away from what some in the British press called an attempt to force Blair to resign). The press was describing Labour as being in chaos, and sinking poll numbers seemed to confirm the gloomy comments about Labour’s future. But since Blair’s retirement announcement, increasing signs of consensus within Labour indicate that Brown will be able to succeed Blair without further political bloodshed and maybe even without any competition. Additionally, Brown, who seems to be on better terms with Blair personally, is cooperating with Blair in an inspired effort to redefine and reinvigorate Labour’s third-term policy agenda. This is no less than an effort to try to stop the traditional political decline of aging governments. It’s a hard task with long odds against its success, but the cooperation between Brown and Blair will go a long way toward stopping the loss of political support that flows from intraparty warfare and disarray. The Conservatives themselves learned the hard way about the costs of intraparty warfare during their last term in office (1992–97), and those scars remain to this day.

A Likely Scenario

What, then, will the British political landscape look like in the years leading up to the next national election, which must be held by mid-2010?

First, the next big political event that will set the scene will be the election of a new Labour leader. Assuming Brown is elected, as seems likely, he will probably enjoy a political honeymoon of sorts, both as party leader and as prime minister. But, because Labour is already in power, it will not be the sort of honeymoon that Blair enjoyed in 1997, when Labour ended 18 years of Conservative rule.

Political competition is being renewed while Britain continues in a remarkable period of economic prosperity. It is one of the strongest economies in Europe, while keeping itself outside the euro zone.

There is no clear historical pattern to suggest how Brown’s tenure might proceed, but examples since World War II offer some predictive value. Anthony Eden succeeded Churchill in 1955, after waiting for years for the great leader to retire. Eden, however, quickly destroyed his leadership by leading the disastrous and unpopular British-French-Israeli invasion of Suez. However, the then-ruling Conservatives chose a second leader, Harold Macmillan, who proved to be a successful and popular prime minister for several years. His successor, Alexander Douglas-Home, took over when Macmillan became ill in 1963, after the Conservatives had been in power for 12 years. Home was not very popular, and he lost a close election within the year. In 1990, John Major was Thatcher’s handpicked successor as prime minister, and in 1992 he won an upset victory followed by a disastrous five-year term. The only obvious conclusion to draw from these examples is that Gordon Brown’s future as prime minister can go in any direction.

One political avenue that Brown might take is to fairly quickly call an election. (The prime minister has the power to call an election at any time of his choosing during the five-year term created by the previous election, in mid-2005.) This strategy makes sense, of course, only if Brown enjoys a significant political honeymoon that seems sufficient to produce a probable victory. The value of an election is that, if he wins, the victory immediately legitimizes Brown’s government and provides further political room beyond whatever honeymoon that might come to him as Blair’s successor. Anthony Eden used this approach to good initial political advantage in 1955 after succeeding Churchill, and the strategy worked again when the Conservatives won a strong electoral victory. If Brown does call an election, the Conservatives would be hard pressed to defeat Labour with Brown campaigning on his credentials as a very successful chancellor and a promising prime minister.

Labour has another important advantage for the time being. The map of election districts (called “constituencies” in Britain) has a built-in demographic Labour bias. Britain’s parliamentary boundaries are drawn up every decade or so by a nonpartisan independent commission, but population shifts in recent years have caused Labour voters to be more efficiently distributed around the country than Conservative voters, who are heavily concentrated within certain constituencies. In fact, the Labour advantage is so important that political observers have calculated that the Conservatives will need to garner more than 43 percent of the popular vote to win enough seats in the House of Commons to defeat Labour (a prospect made difficult by the fact that Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats, has won about 20 percent of the votes in recent elections, making it challenging for either major party to win 43 percent). Labour, by contrast, likely will need only 38 percent of the popular vote to keep its majority in the House of Commons.

In sum, although political competitiveness in British politics is clearly returning at the moment, the full story of the electoral possibilities in coming years is complicated. Many countervailing arguments prevail against the simple expectation that it’s time for the Conservatives to recover and to win the next election: the political quality of Labour’s likely new leader, Gordon Brown; the potential for a quick election to legitimize the new leader; and the complicated electoral math that leaves the Conservatives with a considerable challenge in their effort to produce a majority in the House of Commons.

Stay tuned. It should be an exciting next few years in British politics.

Available from the Hoover Press is Politics in Western Europe, Second Edition, by Gerald A. Dorfman and Peter Duignan. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

Gerald A. Dorfman is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor (by courtesy) of political science at Stanford. He was formerly associate director for research at the Hoover Institution.