Nor have the Conservatives overcome the mistrust they roused when they clung to government in the 1990s. Support for them collapsed in the polls in September 1992, when Britain was forced to go off the European Rate Mechanism, leading to a rise in interest rates—which hits homeowners hard since most have variable rate mortgages. The Conservatives had just won a narrow victory in the May election and stayed in office until they called an election at the last possible moment in May 1997. The standard rule in British politics used to be that a government and party that were credited with producing low inflation economic growth would be rewarded at the polls. But that rule did not hold for the Conservatives in 1997. And, while Labour seems sure to win a historically unprecedented third straight victory this week, that rule has not produced warm satisfaction with the Labour government this year.
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The polls tell the story. In the May 2001 general election Labour won 42 percent of the vote, Conservatives 33 percent, Liberal Democrats 19 percent. (Minor parties, the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists and the four parties in Northern Ireland, where the British parties do not run candidates, get the rest.) The most recent public polls averaged together show Labour at 38 percent, Conservatives at 31 percent, Liberal Democrats at 22 percent. Labour and Conservatives both seem to be down; Liberal Democrats up. To judge from the Milton Keynes Northeast focus group, voters are sick of the stale arguments and the "bickering" of Labour and Conservatives. And they seem surprisingly willing to consider the Liberal Democrats. Cynical about Blair and Howard, these voters were ready to accept Liberal Democratic leader Charles Kennedy as sincere and unprogrammed. Knowing nothing about his party's platform—it is well to the left of Labour on most economic and cultural issues—many former Labour and Conservative voters seemed ready to entrust him with leading the government.
There are some interesting contrasts here with American politics. In the United States enlightened opinion deplores the polarization of our politics, the wide separation of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. But the convergence toward consensus of New Labour and Conservatives has produced nothing like contentment in Britain. Enlightened opinion in America assumes that consensus politics will produce a surge of high turnout. But while our polarized politics produced a surge of high turnout in the United States in 2004, Britain's convergence produced a lower turnout in 2001 than in 1997, and Labour strategists' chief worry is that Labour supporters will not vote in 2005. Finally, in 2004 in the United States both parties' strong supporters and, it seems, most of the voters believed that great things were at stake—not just the direction of public policy but even the nation's safety.
I got the sense from the Milton Keynes Northeast focus groups that, at least among the lightly committed, there is no similar sense in Britain. These are voters who see no downside risks ahead. Many seemed ready to hand over power to an unknown leader and party without much thought to the consequences. They talked as if nothing really bad was going to happen to the economy—all memory is gone, it seems, of the high-inflation, low-growth British economy of the 1970s and early 198s0—and there was no threat to Britain from the rest of the world. Even on the one issue on which they seemed genuinely angry with the state of things, immigration, they seemed to see no need to use their vote to change things. Michael Howard and the Conservatives have called for stricter controls on immigration and deportation of many applicants for asylum. For that they have been excoriated by enlightened opinion, for appealing to the baser instincts of the British people. The polls suggest that, while they may have picked up some votes on the issue, they have not won many on balance.
To the extent there is suspense about the outcome of the election, it is over how much the New Labour parliamentary majority, now around 160, will be reduced. The districting plan insures that Labour will retain a majority of seats even if it gets the same percentage of popular votes as the Conservatives, so control of government does not seem in doubt. In the United States any Labour loss will be taken by many as a repudiation of Tony Blair's support of military action in Iraq. But Iraq is a much less important issue to voters here in Britain than it was to Americans in November 2004. It is just one of the things that have reduced Blair's credibility and have taken the shine off the New Labour government. The discontent that is so apparent to anyone watching British politics today is what you get when you get what enlightened opinion always wants, centrist government and consensus politics. People don't entirely like the results.
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