British voters opposed to the occupation of Iraq, the galloping privatization of public services and the shameful inequality of Britain in 2005 -- a majority of the British people, according to opinion polls -- face a problem at next month's UK general election. In most constituencies, they will have no one to vote for.
That is because none of the three main parties will be offering a meaningful alternative on what are, by any reckoning, central issues in political and social life. But of course it's not only the voters who have a problem. So does the government -- because the majority of those who are most angry about the war, privatization, inequality and attacks on civil liberties have in the past been committed Labour voters. And polling evidence suggests that millions of them could stay at home or switch to the Liberal Democrats or a protest party as a result.
New Labour has only itself to blame. The political boil of the war -- and the attendant collapse of trust in the government -- could have been lanced if Prime Minister Tony Blair had been induced to step down last summer, when the scale of the disaster unleashed in Iraq and the deception used to sell it had become fully apparent. That would have been better for the country, but also for Labour. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, Blair's natural successor, was obviously tainted by the decision to go to war and responsible for some of the most damaging privatizations. But the ousting of Blair would have at least demonstrated that the government had been held to account and allowed a shift of policy, both domestically and over Iraq.
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What's more, polls have repeatedly shown that Labour would attract significantly more support with Brown as leader, whose popularity now far outstrips the prime minister's dismal ratings -- something Blair implicitly acknowledged on Wednesday, when he signalled that he did not plan to move Brown from the Treasury after the election after all. If a Labour victory remains the likeliest outcome, given rising living standards and the lack of enthusiasm for the Tories, that is now in spite of Blair. But if Labour were to be defeated or lose its majority next month, the party would be paying the price for Tony Blair's ego.
Government supporters who insist that the dominating political controversy of the last four years can be safely ignored for the purposes of the election are dreaming. Of course the war does not affect British people's daily lives. But awareness of the crime that has been carried out, the scale of the slaughter, the falsehoods peddled to justify it and the contempt for public opinion it involved runs deep in Britain.
So does revulsion for the craven relationship with the US that underpinned it -- frankly highlighted by leading Labour politician Alan Milburn last month when he told the Guardian that the war had been in Britain's interests "because you've got one superpower in the world nowadays." But, as health secretary John Reid's ham-fisted performance on BBC radio demonstrated on Wednesday, New Labour has little clue as to how to defuse visceral public hostility over the debacle.
The same goes for the privatization of public services -- more of which is due to be laid out in Labour's manifesto under the banner of reform and choice, taking the sheen off Brown's popular public-spending increases for many traditional Labour supporters. In health, education and social housing, profit-seeking private corporations are already being given a free hand with the price of new hospitals and schools, modernization and quicker treatment -- and we know what that means for service quality, jobs, pay and conditions, public control and accountability. And in defiance of overwhelming public support for bringing the failed privatized rail system back into public ownership, the government is busy returning rail franchises to private companies. Meanwhile, despite Brown's limited efforts at redistribution, income inequality has actually increased during Labour's period in office -- mainly because of the government's refusal to raise tax for the highest earners -- while wealth inequality has ballooned.
But in all these cases there is no clear way for voters to make their views felt, because the main opposition party either agrees with the government -- as on the war -- or in the case of privatization, is even more extreme, planning sweeping extensions of private provision.
Many disillusioned Labour voters seem bound to be drawn to the obvious alternative, the Liberal Democrats. But although they originally opposed going to war and back a 50 percent tax rate for high earners, the Lib Dems have supported the occupation of Iraq and moved sharply to the right on the economy and public services, backing privatization of health provision and the private finance initiative -- while opposing trade-union rights and a national minimum wage. In any case, in the large majority of seats likely to change hands, votes for the Liberal Democrats risk delivering them to the Tories.
The only possible outcome of the election is a Labour or Tory government and it would be absurd to discount either Labour's achievements -- such as the boost to health and education spending, new employment and other social rights, the cut in child poverty -- or the crucial domestic policy differences between them. But there is also no avoiding the fact that hostility to New Labour over the war and its featherbedding of wealth and corporate power is at such a pitch that many Labour voters will not support the party again while Blair is leader and will instead look for points of pressure and protest.
In Wales and Scotland, that may mean the nationalists and others to the left of New Labour; in a minority of seats in England, the Greens and, more pointedly, George Galloway's Respect, the party that grew out of the anti-war movement and outpolled New Labour in parts of east London in last year's European elections.
Respect is calling on supporters to vote for "credible anti-war candidates" in constituencies held by those most closely associated with the war, such as Blair and Foreign secretary Jack Straw. Elsewhere it is backing a Labour vote. Others will focus support on those Labour members of parliament who voted against the war or attempt targeted tactical voting, while trying to force issues that the main parties don't want to discuss on to the campaign agenda.
There is in reality no "correct" answer to the problem of how to punish New Labour without
punishing the British people, let alone how to elect a Labour government with a small enough majority to encourage pressure for a change of political direction. The fact that vast swathes of public opinion effectively now have no voice inside the main parties demonstrates that the political system isn't working -- and the Iraq war has made that crisis of representation much sharper.
A two-party system can only function if both main parties are broad coalitions. By moving Labour so far to the right while silencing those on his left, Blair has made that impossible. The battle inside Labour for a change of direction will have to begin the day after the election -- or the current process of political and electoral disintegration may become unstoppable.
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