Tories to lose badly in poll despite xenophobic appeals

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "Vote Tony Blair for another Tory government."

The slogan, which has been appearing all over London, was not made up by Tony Blair's Labor Party, of course. The real authors were more likely the Revolutionary Anarchist Workers' and Peasants' Conspiracy (Marxist-Dogmatist), or some other bunch of aging Trots whose membership could meet in a taxicab. But it does sum up what is going to happen in Britain after the election on May 1.

The real Tories, led by Prime Minister John Major, will be swept from power after eighteen years of Conservative rule. The only interesting question on election night will be whether the Labor victory is a landslide or an avalanche. But Tony Blair's 'New Labor' has already promised that it will not change any of the major Tory policies pioneered by Margaret Thatcher and perfected (if that is exactly the word we want) by John Major.

No wonder the Trotskyites are cross. It would seem that the 'Tory revolution', from privatization and deregulation to the breaking of the trade unions and an assault on the welfare state, has become the new national consensus in Britain.

So Tony Blair pretends to be a kinder Conservative (but not dangerously different from the real thing), and counts on coasting into power because voters are just fed up with the same well-fed Tory faces after 18 years. It makes you wonder if the Tories were not basically right (though breath-takingly arrogant) in the six-word poster campaign they mounted last year which simply said: "Yes, it hurt. Yes, it worked."

Did it work? Is Britain really a richer, more competitive country now than it was when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979?

Politically, Thatcher's success was based on a great and cruel insight: that you could safely ignore the bottom ten or fifteen percent of the electorate. They mostly live in poor, densely populated urban areas that elect relatively few left-wing members of parliament by huge majorities, effectively wasting most of their votes -- and many poor people don't vote at all.

So write them off, and concentrate on policies that will win over a majority of the comfortable. Eighteen years on, the Britain created by that strategy is certainly more unequal, less secure, and less caring. In his recent best-seller The State We're In, Will Hutton, editor of The Observer, described the 'three-speed' Britain of today as 30 percent disadvantaged, 30 percent precarious, and 40 percent privileged.

But that's excellent electoral arithmetic. A conservative party can naturally count on the support of the privileged, and to win an absolute majority it need only win over another 10 percent from among those clinging to economic security by their fingertips.

This political lesson was copied around the world by right- wing parties (George Bush and Newt Gingrich were Thatcher's American avatars). And formerly left-wing parties like Britain's Labor had to move right to counter the new strategy.

So much for Thatcherist politics, but what about the economics that was allegedly the heart of the revolution? What can be said about a British economy, once the world's richest, that had already been in relative decline for a century when Thatcher came to power?

The decline has continued. Since 1980 the British Treasury has taken in an extra US$125 billion by selling off most state-owned enterprises, but the net burden of taxation on the economy has hardly diminished at all. And in the mid-80s Britain was overtaken by Italy, not exactly the world's most deregulated economy.

Some successes are real enough, like the huge flow of foreign investment into Britain. However, if you have some of the lowest wages and the easiest-to-dismiss workers of any European Union country it's not too hard to attract foreign investment.

And some of Britain's apparent successes are mere smoke and mirrors, like its vaunted low unemployment. British unemployment is now officially 6.2 percent, compared to 12.8 percent in France -- but Britain has changed its rules for calculating unemployment ten times under Tory rule, each time in ways that bring the total down.

Britain and France have about the same population, but there are actually more men aged 25-49 out of work in Britain than in France. Add in the fact that Britain's total population of working age has fallen by 3 percent since 1990, while France's has risen 3 percent, and where is the British miracle?

So what kept the Tories in power so long? Firstly, late-70s Britain had a stagnant, over-governed economy beset by over- mighty trade unions: everybody knew it badly needed reform. Secondly, there was the electoral magic of Thatcherite economics, which certainly enriched a significant minority of the population. And thirdly, there was nationalism.

All that saved Margaret Thatcher from defeat at the end of her economically disastrous first term was the 1982 Falklands war, which put her back into power on a wave of jingoistic nationalism. The later 1980s were boom times throughout the West --but the Tories quickly dumped Thatcher in 1990 when her economic dogmatism (especially the hated poll tax) began to hurt their popularity.

John Major's years in office have been a painful rear-guard action against economic difficulties and growing discontent. So the Tories once again resorted to nationalism, directed this time against Britain's own partners in the European Union.

Britain, almost single-handed, has obstructed further European integration. The spiteful anti-Europeanism of the Tory press, Tory politicians, and even many of John Major's own cabinet colleagues, has grown ever more pronounced. It has been a petty, ugly strategy -- and it has not even worked.

Despite their xenophobic appeals, the Tories are going to lose very badly. Despite Thatcherite triumphalism, Britain's economic performance remains no more than middling. Which suggests that Tony Blair, despite his current pledges of neo-conservative economic orthodoxy, has plenty of room to make changes over the next five years.