What Is Going on in Blighty?

National Review Online, May 10, 2010

Britain’s election has left the country’s politics in a chaotic, confused mess. With the situation in such flux, there’s a decent chance that much of what I might write now (Sunday afternoon) will be obsolete by the time that you read it. So here instead are the answers to nine questions that should be relevant for some time. Well, a few days, anyway.

HOW DID THE VOTE GO?

To use an understatement: inconclusively. The House of Commons now has 650 MPs, so for one party to secure a majority, it needs to win 326 seats (in practice one or two fewer, but let’s not worry about that). For the first time since 1974, no one party has won that absolute majority. Parliament is “hung.” So far, the Conservatives have won 306 seats in the 2010 election and are forecast to win another after a special vote later this month, but it still won’t be enough. Labour came in second, with 258, and the Liberal Democrats third, with 57. With the exception of the eight sturdy Ulstermen of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party, the remaining 28 seats (located in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and, in the case of Brighton — where a Green was elected — outer space) were mainly won by Celtic nationalists, few of whom have any time for the Tories. David William Donald Cameron has two Scottish names, but only one Tory MP in Scotland.

DID THE CONSERVATIVES BLOW IT?

Yes, if by less than some would claim. Thirteen years of Labour misrule capped by an economic and fiscal crisis ought to have paved the way for a solid Conservative victory. For most of 2008 and 2009, the opinion polls signaled that the Tories were set for an overall majority. Then something changed. In part this was the usual reversion of voters to their traditional voting habits in the run-up to a general election. And in part it was the fallout from a parliamentary expenses scandal that left the electorate disgusted by politicians of both the main parties. But there was something else. Looking at the support for David Cameron, it was striking how little enthusiasm for him there really was, even amongst the Tory faithful. To many voters, he came across as likable enough, even if he had a touch too much of the salesman about him, but that was it. In particular, he did not appear to be for anything worth getting excited about. I’ll go into the reasons for that in the answer to the next question, but let’s just note for now that in 2010 being Not-Labour was not quite enough.

But the word there is “quite.” Critics of David Cameron need to remember how far his party has come since the last election, in 2005, its third consecutive humiliating defeat. This time round, the Tories increased their tally of votes by 2 million, the same number by which their score exceeded Labour’s. They won more new seats than at any election since 1931, and they secured almost as big a swing against Labour as did Mrs. Thatcher in her legendary 1979 triumph. With 97 additional seats in the bag, the parliamentary party is roughly 50 percent larger than it was a week ago.

At the same time, the Conservative share of the popular vote only increased from a little over 32 percent to 36.1 percent. Financial crisis, broken borders, rising social disorder, and the peculiarities of that strange Gordon Brown ought to have been worth more than that.

WHAT DID THEY DO WRONG?

David Cameron took over a Conservative party that was, to put it bluntly, unelectable. Rightly or wrongly (in my view, wrongly) it was seen by many as the “nasty” party, not least thanks to the efforts and metropolitan prejudices of a media elite that is far more influential in Britain than are its counterparts in the United States. To tackle this, Cameron had to soften media hostility to a degree sufficient to enable his party to get its message out. He succeeded, but it meant dragging the Conservatives in an ostentatiously (to use the bleak newspeak) “inclusive” direction, a direction that (to be fair) at least partly reflected contemporary political attitudes amongst the wider population. Britain is no longer the Britain that elected Mrs. Thatcher.

Unfortunately, Cameron failed to realize he won the argument years ago. He had “decontaminated the brand,” and yet he went into the election still seemingly apologetic for it. He campaigned in 2010 as if it were 2007, afraid or unwilling to play those traditional Conservative tunes that — whatever they may say in Notting Hill — are still capable of pulling in the crowds. Instead, Cameron made clear that his faith in Al Gore’s gospel was undimmed by Climategate. He could barely bring himself to mention immigration, and his big vision was of a “Big Society” (I have no idea). Meanwhile, sending his most senior Europhile on a secret mission to Brussels added insult to the injuries of the Tories’ restless Euroskeptic core. In that context, it’s worth noting that Cameron’s lead at the polls started to decline almost immediately after he reneged late last year on a “cast iron” pledge to hold a referendum on the EU’s Lisbon treaty. This wasn’t an altogether unreasonable decision (the treaty had since come into effect, and would be extremely difficult to unscramble), but politically it was a serious mistake.

Perhaps this was simple miscalculation, the error of an out-of-touch individual surrounded by a small, like-minded clique. Perhaps. But there was another possibility: Had Cameron drunk too much of his own Kool-Aid? For the Tory leader to have changed his party’s course out of cynical political calculation is understandable; for him actually to believe the more obviously idiotic “progressive” nonsense he has been spouting would be unforgivable.

Either way, the base was unimpressed. In the most telling sign of this, over 900,000 people (roughly 3 percent of the popular vote, and an increase of 50 percent over 2005) voted for the euroskeptic UKIP, Britain’s fourth-largest party. To quote blogger Archbishop Cranmer, UKIP is a “lost tribe” of conservatism, made up of natural Tories whose politics are, to quote another blogger, the entertaining Guido Fawkes, those of the Conservative party “after a few gin and tonics.” Their votes may have cost the Tories as many as 20 seats, and thus a parliamentary majority. More than a few of those UKIP supporters might have returned to the Cameron fold had he been prepared to give them some sort of sign that he was, you know, just a little bit like them. Instead, he did the opposite.

IS THERE A LESSON FOR U.S. CONSERVATIVES?

When it comes to policy specifics, not so much. The U.K. is not the U.S. Its politics are very different (to start with, the British mainstream tends more to the center-left than is often understood over here). The challenge faced by David Cameron was very different from that now confronting the GOP. If there is one thing, perhaps, that Republicans could learn, it is this. Neither RINOs, nor the “reformers” of various hues, nor the various keepers of the conservative flame should drink too much of their different varieties of Kool-Aid. They should deal with the electorate as it is, not as they would like — or believe — it to be.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CLEGG?

Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third party, shot to prominence after a strong showing in the first televised party leaders’ debate. According to one opinion poll, “nice Nick” had become the most popular politician since Winston Churchill. He was articulate, a fresh face, and, briefly, “none of the above.” Unfortunately for Clegg, he was also a Liberal Democrat, and he was unable to carry his reliably unsuccessful party along on his coattails. The Liberal Democrats ended up losing a net five seats. Their 23 percent of the vote, slightly more than in 2005, was well below the high 20s (and more) recorded in the giddy days of early Cleggmania.

Despite that, the hung Parliament has left Nick Clegg in the game, busy being wooed by David Cameron and shouted at by Gordon Brown (it’s a tough-love thing).

HOW BAD ARE THE LIB-DEMS?

Pretty bad. The Liberal Democrats are usually described as left-of-center, and so they are, but that’s not the end of it. Nine decades out of office will leave any party looking a tad strange, and Clegg’s crew has proved no exception. Their ideology is a ragbag of policies, some good, some bad, some plain loopy, some well-intentioned, some not, the flotsam and jetsam of nearly a century of passing fads, prejudices, and dreams untouched by the realities of government. What does unite this somewhat fractious party, however, is a belief in electoral reform.

ELECTORAL REFORM?

British general elections operate on a strict “first past the post” basis. The candidate with the most votes in each constituency wins. Historically, this simplest of systems has been a force for political stability, generally producing governments with a majority large enough to govern by themselves for the whole of their term. Thus, Tony Blair’s Labour party won 55 percent of the parliamentary seats in 2005 with only 35 percent of the national vote.

This extreme, but not entirely untypical result was just the latest in a series bound to raise questions of fairness, questions that have been asked with mounting insistence in recent decades. The old system worked well enough when the two major parties carved up most of the vote between them, but in the multiparty Britain that has been evolving since the 1970s, it has come to look increasingly rough-hewn.

Crucially, first past the post squeezes a third party with appeal across much of Britain, but lacking the regional redoubt enjoyed, say, by the Scottish Nationalists. In short, it squeezes the Liberal Democrats. With 23 percent of the vote in 2010, they only won 9 percent of the seats. That’s why they are yet again calling for some move towards proportional representation as the price for their support. Labour is now desperate enough to make a move in that direction. For the Tories, it’s not so easy. Not only are there good practical arguments for preserving the current system, but also, a change to proportional representation would almost certainly mean that the Right would never rule Britain on its own again.

HAS HER MAJESTY BEEN MINDING THE STORE?

No, the constitutional position is that Gordon Brown continues to serve as prime minister (basically as a caretaker) until a replacement is found. It would take a vote of the newly elected House of Commons to force his government out of office, but Parliament is not due to sit until May 18.

AND THAT DEBT BUSINESS?

The renewed spasm of global financial uncertainty could hardly have come at a worse time. With a public-sector deficit at a Greek 12 percent of GDP, the United Kingdom is highly vulnerable to market panic. International investors have waited for months to see what steps Britain would take to reduce its deficit and when. Neither the Liberal Democrats, nor Labour, nor the Conservatives have come up with a convincing plan, but many market players seem to have taken the view that such discretion was inevitable in a closely fought electoral contest. They appeared to have been reassured by the thought that the Tories would prevail and that somehow “something” would be done. That comforting illusion has now been dispelled. However you parse the election results, there was no majority for spending cuts on the scale that will be needed, and with another election almost certainly in the offing who now will be prepared to suggest them?

Hang onto your hats.

Iceland Without the Fish

National Review Online, February 4, 2009

Gulfoss, Iceland, 2007 © Andrew Stuttaford

If there’s one thing that can be said in defense of Tony Blair and his successor (and former finance minister), Gordon Brown, it’s that they took longer to squander Margaret Thatcher’s economic legacy than some first expected. But squander it they did, and credit’s Armageddon has at last exposed the full extent of the damage.

As Warren Buffett once observed, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” That’s not the nicest way to visualize Gordon Brown, but, seen from the vantage point of the markets, the view is not much prettier. Stocks have crashed, of course, as they have across the planet, but so, more ominously, has the pound. The British currency hit record lows against the euro at the turn of the year. And when it comes to the greenback, the pound buys less than a buck and a half (it fetched more than two dollars earlier in 2008). That suggests the United Kingdom’s troubles are nastier than elsewhere, a view echoed by the IMF, which now predicts that Britain is facing the deepest recession of any major industrialized economy.

Yes, yes, the pound has gone through other ugly episodes in the relatively recent past, but the present fall (on a trade-weighted basis, sterling dropped by more than 20 percent last year) is the most dramatic since 1931. For the first time since the Labour-controlled mid-1970s, Brits are wondering if they face a genuinely catastrophic collapse in their currency.

For a country such as Britain, burdened with a large trade deficit, devaluation can be a shot in the arm by making its exports more internationally competitive. But that only holds true if there’s a market for those goods in the first place. In a time of shrinking trade flows, nobody can be sure of that. More worrying still, with the U.K.’s combined external debt (public and private) rising rapidly from a total that already exceeds 400 percent of GDP (a gross number, but even so), the usual cost-benefit analysis may no longer apply. Repaying overseas debt in a devalued currency can be a very tricky business, indeed. Will the sceptr’d isle become Iceland without the fish? (The EU took all those.)

In some respects it was only to be expected (if not by Gordon Brown; he’s saying that he never saw this coming) that the land of the much-vaunted Blair/Brown economic miracle is turning out to be more storm center than safe haven. The global meltdown revolves around the embattled international financial system, a system in which the City of London has become a key hub. That role brought a great deal of cash into the United Kingdom, but with it a great deal of risk. The City’s international business has proved, in a sense, to be hot money–fun while it lasts but with a tendency to evaporate in times of trouble. And trouble has now come calling.

The problem for Britain is that, with the financial sector in disarray (and most of the North  Sea oil gone), eleven years of Blair/Brown have left the country with dangerously little else to fall back upon. This was not how it was meant to be. Back in 1997, Tony Blair had won his way into 10 Downing Street as a representative of “New” Labour, a supposedly reformed party ready to renounce the taxing, spending, and relentless class warfare of previous socialist governments, to support free enterprise, and to do what it could to avoid the “boom and bust” cycles that had characterized so much of the U.K.’s postwar economic history. Oh, well–people believed Bernie Madoff, too.

The Blair and Brown governments were careful not to increase the top income-tax rate, but everything else was up for grabs–and was duly grabbed. Overall taxation has risen by far faster than the OECD average and has been accompanied by regulatory excess (much of it, admittedly, at the behest of the EU) and a public-spending binge that long preceded the current emergency but left the country woefully unprepared to deal with it. Gordon Brown may be the son of a Scottish clergyman (who had, marvelously, the middle name Ebenezer), but the whole preparing-for-the-seven-lean-years thing just doesn’t seem to have sunk in. In the decade that followed the 1996–97 spending year, “managed” public expenditure jumped by roughly 90 percent, and that’s before taking account of liabilities incurred but kept off the books with the help of legerdemain that would have shamed Enron.

Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that the U.K.’s productivity growth has, at best, been uneven, despite (up until now) broadly respectable increases in GDP. It’s perhaps telling that most (around two thirds) of the new jobs created since 1997 have been located in the public sector. What’s more, in a strikingly high percentage of cases, they have gone to recent immigrants rather than to native-born Brits, too many of whom have remained on the dole for too long. We can debate why that is, but we cannot debate the grim fact that nearly 2 million people are now registered as unemployed, a bad number that is getting rapidly worse. Another 2.7 million (more than 7 percent of the working-age population) live on “incapacity benefit,” a handout that defines them as too sick to work–a statistic that implies either repeated epidemics, a failed National Health Service, or a seriously dysfunctional labor market. I know which explanation I’d pick.

If the British are not working enough, they are not selling enough, either. The trade deficit has continued to deteriorate. For goods (“visibles”) it now stands at well over 6 percent, the highest level since proper records began in the late 17th century. In the past, the overall deficit has been narrowed by the U.K.’s ability to export services (many of them, problematically, financial), but this is just another reminder that the City’s relative preeminence is as much an expression of the weakness of the wider British economy as it is of London’s success in playing host to the choosy and itinerant international financial community.

It would be wrong, however, to blame all the horrors that are pummeling the City on Messrs. Blair and Brown. This is a fiasco with deeper and wider origins than the cack-handed fumbling of two economically illiterate politicians, but Labour’s decision to take responsibility for banking supervision away from the Bank of England (historically the country’s most experienced, and most respected, regulator) helped pave the way for disaster. It was a dumb move, made in the name of modernization but more truthfully explained by the Labour government’s disdain for anything smacking of Britain’s past. In America, the existence of a series of distinct financial regulators, each with agendas and areas of expertise all of their own, played no small part in the failure of regulation that contributed so much to the current debacle. Britain’s new tripartite regulatory system (which splits duties between the Treasury, the Financial Services Authority, and the central bank) has proved a disastrous failure for very similar reasons, a failure made all the more galling by its needlessness: Resentment is not a good basis for public policy.

In any event, the U.K. went through a bubble that in all its excess, shoddy lending practices, and baroque speculative mania bore a depressing resemblance to the horrors here in America. To take two numbers cited by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson in Fantasy Island (a broadly leftist, sometimes oddball and often fascinating critique of the Blair years), between January 2000 and December 2005, outstanding consumer-credit balances rose by two thirds, and mortgage debt nearly doubled. The appalling consequences are now all too visible in a shattered housing market, on a shuttering high street, and on what is left of the balance sheets of Britain’s devastated and partially nationalized banking sector.

The damage to Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy has therefore already been bad enough, but the financial cataclysm (or, more accurately, the government’s response to it) may well, ironically, make its final destruction Gordon Brown’s best hope of remaining in power. The political reaction to his early attempts to bring a halt to the developing economic disaster shows why.

So what did Brown do? Unburdened by ideological objections to the idea of the state assuming direct stakes in the nation’s banks, the prime minister was the first to borrow (very loosely) from the successful Swedish precedent of the early 1990s and take this necessary (if regrettable) step. At the same time, his government launched a £20 billion stimulus package with, given the shaky state of public finances, little obvious idea of how to pay for it. As The Economist noted in December, even on the government’s “optimistic” projections, borrowing will hit 8 percent of GDP in 2009–10 and debt 57 percent in 2012–13. America’s budget may be a shambles, but with the dollar an internationally accepted reserve currency (for now), the United States at least has the ability (fingers crossed) to print money and buy its way, however imperfectly, however clumsily, out of the present mess. The U.K. does not–thus the tumbling pound.

Initially Brown’s rapid and decisive response played well with frazzled voters desperate to see the government do something. With the financial crisis widely blamed on three decades of (largely imaginary) laissez faire, Labour rediscovered the electoral allure of unashamedly interventionist government. Dour, stern, and carefully wrapped in an image of egalitarian rectitude, Brown came across, however absurdly, as a serious man for serious times. The Tories jeered, but for a while their advantage in the polls faltered: Their impeccably upper-crust leader (who is burdened both by youth and a past in public relations) was caricatured in ways that made him appear a feckless, callow Wooster to Brown’s shrewd, capable Jeeves.

That moment may have passed for now. Swept along by a torrent of economic bad news, the Conservatives are once again clearly ahead. That probably puts paid to the once widely rumored prospect that Brown would call a snap election before the bills finally fall due. Nevertheless Labour’s brief revival was an early warning that this crisis may yet represent an opportunity for a return of the more full-bodied socialism of the party’s destructive past. If Brown is to win another term (an election has to be held no later than June 2010), he will have to shift left. In frightening times in which capitalism is widely (if inaccurately) believed by voters to have failed, there is an obvious opportunity for the hucksters of big, redistributionist government. The announcement that Labour, if reelected, will hike the top income tax rate from 40 to 45 percent (and that’s before onerous social security levies) is only a beginning.

Somehow I suspect that the pound has far further to fall.

Chimps, The Cheshire Cat & The Fall of Tony Blair

National Review Online, May 26, 2005

When, after a great victory, a Roman general marched in triumph surrounded by plunder, captives, and, quite probably, hot chicks, he was always accompanied by a slave whose job was to hiss periodically in the great man’s ear the irritating reminder that he was only human, not a god. Something a bit like this (well, I don’t know about the plunder, captives, and hot chicks) happened to Tony Blair in the aftermath of his party’s triumph in the recent British elections. Within hours of victory, numerous Labour politicians lined up to tell Blair to get lost. Former foreign minister Robin Cook took time out from his usual bilious routine to report on the views of the nation’s boulevardiers. “Anyone on the streets knows we were not elected because Tony Blair was popular....” Another former, a former health minister better known for the elections he has lost than those he has won, said it was time for Blair to go. Former actress and current hysteric, the shrilly leftist MP Glenda Jackson chimed in with the claim that the “people have screamed at the top of their lungs. And their message is clear. They want Tony Blair gone.”

Well, Glenda, in case you weren’t paying attention, the people have just made Tony Blair the first Labour prime minister to win three consecutive election victories. While the party’s parliamentary majority was substantially reduced, it remains, well, substantial.

To the novelist and journalist Robert Harris (an old friend of Blair’s Svengali, Peter Mandelson, but a clear-eyed judge of British politics nonetheless), this all looked like madness: “it does not…require a political genius to see…that it is a thoroughly bad idea for a minority party-cabal to bring down an elected prime minister. The Liberals did it to Asquith in 1915 and have never gained power again. The Tories did it to Thatcher… and have since suffered three successive election defeats… Now Labour, like a chimp examining a loaded revolver, shows alarming signs of the same casual attitude to its political extinction.” Harris noted that an opinion poll conducted shortly after the election had shown some 83 percent of those who had voted Labour said that Tony Blair should stay on for at least another twelve months.

The same poll, however, revealed that over 60 percent of Labour voters want Blair out within three years, an indication, perhaps, that all is not rosy for Tony. And it’s not. Take a closer look at the stats: the Labour party’s share of the vote, a dodgy postal ballot or two over 35 percent, was the lowest enjoyed by an incoming government for nearly 200 years, and impressive as Labour’s haul of parliamentary seats undoubtedly was, it came in at well below the total secured in the previous two general elections. The number of votes cast for the party has slumped by a third since the 1997 election that swept Blair into power. For the first time in a decade, many Labour MPs are sweaty, anxious, and paranoid about their parliamentary futures, something that bodes ill for Blair’s.

It seems a long, long while since the bright, confident afternoon that Tony Blair first took possession of 10 Downing Street to the cheers of a supposedly spontaneous jubilant flag-waving crowd (in fact Labour-party workers and their families, but never mind). Years of spin, manipulation, and dishonesty, made all the more grating by relentless prime ministerial preachiness, have made Blair a deeply distrusted figure, part curate, part conman, all charlatan. Of course, there’s nothing new about the British loathing a repeatedly reelected prime minister—there were few politicians so disliked as Mrs. Thatcher at the height of her powers—but Blair has to contend with a threat that never really troubled the Iron Lady: the Labour party.

Once firmly established in Number Ten, Mrs. Thatcher could always rely on the adulation of her party’s rank-and-file and, until the Gadarene meltdown of November 1990, her MPs. Tony Blair cannot. As Labour leader he has filled an abattoir with the slaughtered sacred cows of party orthodoxy. This has won him elections, but lost him the love, affection, and loyalty of his activists. They, poor souls, remain trapped in a mindset that blends traditional working class belligerence with the idiot radicalism of a third-rate provincial university. To them, Tony is the outsider, the toff, Bush’s poodle (pick your insult), a necessary evil to be tolerated only so long as he brought in the votes.

And that means that Blair is now looking very vulnerable indeed. At the election Labour lost most ground in those parts of the U.K. where his emollient appeal had once been greatest. The affluent southeast has largely returned to its Tory roots. In England itself more voters opted for the Conservatives than for Labour. Labour is once again dependent on its traditional heartlands, the industrial north, and those grim socialist satrapies better known as Scotland and Wales, territories where Blair’s message has very limited intellectual, emotional, or electoral appeal.

Compounding his weakness, Blair has already said that he will resign before the next election. Quite why he chose to hobble himself in this way remains unclear. It’s probably best to ask Blair’s chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister) and presumed successor, the sulky, scowling, and increasingly impatient Gordon Brown. In circumstances that have been obscured by controversy, mystery, and mudslinging Blair may (or may not) have promised to step down in favor of Brown at some time during his first term and he may (or may not) have promised to step down in favor of Brown at some time during his second. He may also have sold his chancellor the Brooklyn Bridge, a secondhand Pinto, and a three-dollar bill. Who knows? In any event, it’s 2005 and Blair’s still in office, but the trusting Mr. Brown has finally and painfully come to the same conclusion as the rest of the country. “There's nothing,” he told Blair, “you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe."

Eventually, Blair did what he always does (or may not have done) on the previous occasions that he needed to keep Brown onside: He promised to stand down at some point in his next term, but this time, there was a difference. He made that promise in public. The moment he did, the game was up. Politicians at Westminster, a British journalist told me, know that Blair is mortally wounded, “they can see the trail of blood all across the lobby floor.” Power, sycophants, and the ambitious are all ebbing from the prime minister, as Gordon Brown, whose fondness for some of old Labour’s more numbskull pieties has already made him the party’s darling, painstakingly cements his hold over the constituencies he will need to assure him the premiership, a union leader here, a key MP there, a friendly journalist here, a member of the House of Lords there. According to some estimates there are now three times as many Brownites as Blairites within the ranks of the parliamentary Labour party.

Superficially, Blair’s actions since the election seem to show that the maestro has lost none of his touch. The usual crop of meaningless, destructive, and plain dumb "reforms" have been announced, the House of Lords has been stuffed with another batch of cronies, dubious government appointments have been made and dissidents have been roughed up at a parliamentary-party meeting. But this is all flim-flam, flash, and empty glitter, a show that signifies nothing. A better indication of where power now lies comes from the fact that Blair was unable to push through many of the personnel changes he wanted in his new administration, a deeply humiliating rebuff for any newly reelected prime minister, let alone one who has been in office for the better part of a decade.

And the misery doesn’t end there. Blair has for a long time delegated large amounts of the domestic agenda to his chancellor (that was part of the agreement between them), but now, after Iraq, even his hold over foreign affairs is palsied, feeble, and pointless. Britain’s EU policy is a shambles, and so far as the threat from Islamic extremism is concerned, the idea that Blair could bring his party with him alongside the U.S. in doing anything that lacks the approval of the "international community," Hollywood, the Guardian and the New York Times is absurd. All that is left to Blair now is the peddling of a grandiloquent, if benign, idea—saving Africa—ripped off from a rock star.

The next step in Blair’s decline will be guerrilla warfare> against his government from the Labour Left, but this will not be enough to unseat him, and nor, probably, would Brown want it to. Despite a history of awe-inspiring and entertainingly destructive temper tantrums, Brown, like Harris, clearly understands that a coup could come at a terrible electoral price. He has resisted the temptation to play Brutus in the past, and he will do so again. He wants to inherit a united party. Ideally Brown wants that “smooth and orderly” handover that Blair is always talking about, but sooner, please, please, sooner, please, please, sooner, rather than later. So when might that be? Before the election, conventional wisdom was that Blair would oblige his impatient heir about three years into his final term, now the talk is that he might quit next year.

The problem is that there is still no obvious moment for Blair to go. Given his druthers, the prime minister, who is still only 52, would probably prefer to soldier on up to the last minute or, quite frankly, beyond. If he does have to go, this most theatrical of politicians will want it to be on a high note. The conundrum for Blair—and Brown—is that there aren’t many potential high notes around. It’s long been mooted that Blair should resign after tricking the Brits into voting for the EU’s draft "constitution" in the autumn of 2006, but so far his stubbornly euroskeptic countrymen show few signs of playing along. Of course, a British "no" might also signal the end of Blair’s show, if not quite so gloriously as he would have wished. Needless to say, all this may soon become academic: If the French and the Dutch reject the constitution in the next week any British vote may be shelved indefinitely.

The British economy won’t be much help either. After eight years in office, it looks as if Labour is finally going to have to start paying the price for the way in which it has squandered the golden inheritance of the Thatcher-Major years. Quite how this will reflect on Gordon Brown, as Chancellor the man most responsible for the coming mess, is hard to say, but increasingly unappetizing economic news will mean that Blair’s departure will look more like an exit from the scene of the crime than the glorious finale of which he must dream.

So nothing’s certain other than months, and perhaps, years of intrigue, febrile speculation and plots as Blair’s premiership fades, fades, and fades away until, like a New Labour version of Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, all that will be left is an oddly compelling smile, faint, strained, and insincere.

The Trouble with Tony

National Review Online,  May 3, 2005

It can be a lonely business being a critic of Tony Blair in this country — outside, at least, the fever swamps of the far Left. Speaking at a crowded debate in downtown Manhattan last week, my myopic eyes could only find one brave individual who agreed that the British prime minister did not deserve reelection As my solitary supporter (thanks Myrna!) writes for NRO, I suspect kindness to a beleaguered colleague played no small part in this welcome gesture of support. Perhaps my feeble, muttered oratory was to blame, or was it the arguments skillfully marshaled by my opponent?

Maybe, but it’s just as likely that this result was mainly a reflection of the American infatuation with Tony, the saint, the hero, the Churchill with hair, but no cigar. Whenever I post any criticism of Blair over on The Corner a few angry e-mails usually come my way. Their gist: Blair is a great, great man, America’s ally; don’t bother us with the internal squabbles of your miserable little islands. This misses the point. In understanding why Tony Blair deserves to lose, remember that he’s the prime minister, not of the world, but only of those unfortunate specks in the sea. He may have been good for America, but he’s been bad for Britain.

And yet, when Britain votes on May 5 Blair will win. The only question will be by how much. But this seemingly inevitable success will owe little or nothing to Blair the international statesman (it will not be a referendum on the war, which, however unfairly, has done little for Blair other than to bolster his reputation for untrustworthiness) and almost everything to an economy that appears, however deceptively, still to be ticking over quite nicely. Critically too, Blair benefits from the weakness of an opposition seen by most voters as unprepared for prime time.

Beyond the usual ragbag of Celtic nationalists, single-issue campaigners, maniacs, madhats, and cranks, there are two opposition parties that count, one worse than Labour, and one better. The one that is worse, the Liberal Democrats, is the successor of a party that has not won an election since it dragged Britain into the First World War (thanks guys!) and it is not going to now. Nowadays it is a pro-tax party of the left that calls itself centrist, defines itself by its opposition to the liberation of Iraq, and has an alarming tendency to appeal to the sort of men who like to wear socks with their sandals.

The Conservatives would, at least, be an improvement on Labour. They aren’t much, but they’ll do (come to think of it, that should be their slogan). After the traumas of recent years, they have been reduced to a rather tatty rump, led by a man sometimes compared to a vampire (well he has been endorsed by Christopher Lee), but, given the obstacles they face, this is inevitable. Nobody entirely normal would agree to take on the task of toppling Labour. That this is such a challenge is a measure of the Conservatives’ failure. Labour rule has been marked by sleaze, spin, economic mismanagement, relentless political correctness and a chaotic immigration policy, a record that, given more effective opposition, should be enough to ensure defeat.

Of all the blots on Labour, it’s the sleaze that is the most ironic. Accusations of "Tory sleaze" played a very large part in helping Blair to his 1997 landslide. These were often unfair, but sometimes deserved. The Conservatives had shown themselves increasingly prone to the petty — and occasionally not so petty — corruption that characterizes political parties in power for a long time. Throw in John Major’s ill-advised, and impertinent, family-values campaign (which opened the door to a relentless procession of revelations about naughty Tory MPs), and Tory sleaze, whether it was payments in brown envelopes, numerous adulteries, dodgy foreign donations or, even, an autoerotic disaster, became the media story of the day, the month and the year.

Labour was going to be different — and so it was if not quite in the way (“purer than pure”) that the electorate had been led to believe. Labour scandals may have actually exceeded anything associated with the Conservatives, and might even include the electoral process itself. In an attempt to boost turnout by its supporters Labour has made it much easier to vote by post. To the judge presiding over an election court (the first to be summoned to investigate corruption for more than a century), the new system is an “open invitation to fraud” — an invitation apparently accepted by a number of Labour politicians in Birmingham. And if it’s happening there, where else?

But the most important thing to understand about Labour sleaze is not that the entire national party is corrupt (it’s not), but what it reveals about a government that became too used too quickly to the exercise — and abuse — of power. In eight years in office it has wrecked civil-service neutrality, taken a chainsaw to the constitution, packed the House of Lords with its cronies, and never seen a freedom anywhere that it did not want to crush. Worried about overreach by the "religious Right" over here? Well, take a look at Blair’s plans to make incitement to "religious hatred," whatever that might be, a crime. Salman Rushdie is horrified and he is right so to be.

And then there’s Britain’s economic performance since 1997, supposedly the definitive proof that "new" Labour has shed the caveman economics of the party’s past. Writing a panegyric to Blair in a recent edition of the New York Times, Tom Friedman managed to conjure up a portrait of Britain so misleading that Baron Munchausen would have been proud to call it one of his own. In between sips of Kool-Aid, Friedman gushed about the strong economy “engineered” by Blair and his “deft” finance minister, Gordon Brown. New Labour had, he argued, embraced the free market with such gusto that the resulting prosperity had enabled the government to deliver much-needed improvements to public services: “And these improvements, which still have a way to go, have all been accomplished so far with few tax increases. The vibrant British economy and welfare-to-work programs have, in turn, resulted in the lowest unemployment in Britain in 30 years. This has led to higher tax receipts and helped the government pay down its national debt.”

Oh really?

Now, it is certainly true that Britain has continued to prosper since Labour took over, but with one exception — the bold decision to give the Bank of England operational independence — this is despite Labour, not because of it. In 1997, Blair and Brown took over an economy that was already in excellent shape. The only surprise has been how long it has taken them to mess it up. Contrary to the fears of many skeptics (including this one), they had learned from the failures of previous Labour governments. The traditional smash and grab has been replaced by something subtler, but the consequences will, in the end, be just as poisonous.

Much of the blame for this lies with that “deft” Gordon Brown, the oddball Scot to whom Blair has delegated control of the British economy. Brown is living, snarling, and sulking proof of P. G. Wodehouse’s observation that it is “never very difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.” To cut a (very) long story short, Brown believes that Blair reneged on a promise to hand over the premiership to him at some point during his second term and, while he bides his time, impatiently waiting to play Brutus to you-know-who’s Caesar, he is taking out his rage and disappointment on the luckless British taxpayer.

Brown is an intense, slightly loopy son of the manse, a weird blend of Karl Marx and Ken Lay, whose term in office has been marked by messianic egalitarianism, exciting accounting and resistance to the real reforms needed to bring Britain’s crumbling public services into the 21st century. Rather than challenge the existing model (which dates back to the 1940s) his only remedy is to throw people and pay rises into what has become a bottomless pit. Overall public spending has increased by over a quarter in real terms since 1999, and there’s much, much more to come. Half the new jobs created since 1997 have been in the public sector, twice the rate of job-creation in the economy as a whole. The state now employs one in four Britons, a handy constituency, doubtless, for future Labour governments, but a powerful brake on future attempts at reform. Needless to say, Brown is beloved by Labour party loyalists and he will almost certainly be Blair’s successor. A vote for Blair now is a vote for Brown in a year or so.

Paying the bill for Brown so far has sent Britain’s tax burden heading for its highest levels in 25 years and government borrowing is accelerating alarmingly. In 2001 Brown forecast he would borrow 12 billion pounds over the following six years, the actual figure will be (touch wood) 112 billion pounds. Include Brown’s, um, off-balance sheet financing, and government debt has increased by 13.4 percent of GDP under Labour, a dismal achievement at a time of consistent economic growth. The tragedy is that all this spending has produced little in the way of results. Education standards have barely budged and productivity in the National Health Service may have actually declined. That’s not a lot to show for all those taxpayer billions.

And the cracks are beginning to show: crippled by one of Brown’s stealth taxes, the occupational pension system is in crisis, private savings have fallen by a half, inflation is rising (the day Brown took over it was 2.6 percent; it is 3.2 percent today) and the trade balance has deteriorated. Allocating all those resources to the public sector has taken its inevitable toll, made even worse by the imposition of a massive regulatory burden (now priced at £75 billion): productivity growth is slowing (2 percent to 1.5 percent), and GDP growth is slightly lower (2.75 percent) than in the Major years (3 percent).

And if, as Blair intends, Britain signs up for the draft EU "constitution," matters will only get worse. The U.K. will be forced to give up what is left of Thatcherite deregulation in favor of micromanagement by Brussels and the adoption of the Franco-German economic model, a sure route to economic stagnation.

Just as damagingly, once enmeshed within the EU’s constitutional system, Britain will rapidly lose the right to an independent foreign policy. It’s this freedom that has enabled Blair to stand so resolutely alongside the U.S. over the last few years, the stance that has won him so many admirers over here. To his credit, the prime minister has been prepared to react to the threat represented by Islamic fundamentalism far more forcefully than most European politicians and to his credit, and at considerable political cost, he also understood what had to be done in Iraq.

But taking such positions will be all but impossible once the UK is subject to the disciplines of the EU constitution. Article 1-16 commits all member states to a "common foreign and security policy." Member states are required to "actively and unreservedly support the Union's common foreign and security policy in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the Union's actions in this area. They shall refrain from action contrary to the Union's interests or likely to impair its effectiveness." This is quite clearly designed to pave the way for a European defense capability owing little to the Atlantic alliance, and everything to the agenda of Paris, Berlin, and Brussels.

For Brits, that’s another good reason to reject Blair, and it even ought to make his American fans pause for thought.