LONDON—The political atmosphere in Britain two days before the 2005 election is very different from what I found here eight years ago, when Tony Blair's New Labour party was about to win an enormous victory over the Conservative party, which had been in power for 18 years. Then there was a sense of hope and an expectation that Blair would forge a new consensus, a middle way between Old Labour leftism that had been so decisively rejected and the hard-edged Thatcher conservatism that had been so triumphant in the 1980s. "The time for argument is passed," Blair proclaimed in his victory speech at 5 a.m. the morning after the election. "Now we can go forward without rancor."
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Not quite. A policy consensus, perhaps, has been achieved on many issues. But British politics has not been purged of rancor. Nor should we have expected it: Democratic politics is an adversarial process, and parties and candidates will find things to argue about—and should.
To be sure, on the macroeconomic issues that were the bones of contention in British politics in the 1980s something like a consensus has been found. Blair's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, after avoiding tax increases for a couple of years, has increased taxes and poured money into the schools and the National Health Service in an attempt to improve services. The Conservatives are promising to cut taxes just a little; Conservative party leader Michael Howard forced a Tory M.P. in a safe district off the ballot after he said the party had plans up its sleeve to cut much more. On Europe, the issue that split the Tory government in the 1990s, Blair has been prevented, largely by Brown, from ditching the pound for the euro and was forced 13 months ago to pledge that Parliament would not adopt the proposed European constitution without a referendum approving it.
But all that does not mean that everyone is happy. Quite the contrary, to judge from a focus group of 25 undecided voters conducted by American pollster Frank Luntz for the BBC-TV program News Night in Milton Keynes Northeast, a marginal seat 40 miles north of London on Monday afternoon. They're all a bunch of liars, most of these voters said of both Labour and Conservatives. None of them can be trusted. Some of these voters focused on Iraq. Blair has been widely judged to have overstated the case for military action in March 2003, a judgment strengthened by publication last week of an internal memorandum stating that early that month the attorney general had not ruled that military intervention was legal. But the same official ruled later that month that it was.
But Blair's credibility has not been hurt just by Iraq. Essential to the New Labour project that Blair embarked on in the late 1980s and which he carried forward as Labour party leader since May 1994 has been a spin machine, run by his longtime aide Alastair Campbell, which relentlessly trumpeted New Labour triumphs and admitted no error. This has been at odds with what people see on the ground. The National Health Service is inefficient and sometimes callous; the schools don't seem to be teaching the basics very well; violent crime is common—most crime rates are higher than in the United States—and the police are shackled by rules that most Americans would regard as absurd. Any government that has been in power as Blair's has for eight years—as long as any American president can expect—will have generated some cause for complaint. The relentlessness of Blair's spin machine seems to have made these complaints angrier and more bitter than they might have been.
