April 22, 2005, 1:27 p.m.
Tony and Tories
A little excitement on the way to Blair’s third term

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the May 9, 2005, issue of National Review.

It was very possible, indeed easy, to spend a recent Sunday afternoon walking around west London without ever bumping up against the May 5 election campaign. It was a warm, sunny, and wind-free day. London positively glittered with prosperity. Half of the world seemed to be on vacation here. And I would hazard that more people were interested in the report that, according to 500 international chefs polled by Restaurant magazine, London now has more world-class restaurants than Paris and New York combined than in the IMF’s criticism of Britain’s budgetary “black hole.”

Britain has now enjoyed uninterrupted economic growth for 13 years — and economic growth in 21 out of the last 23 years in all. It shows not only in the capitalist sheen of renovated London, with its biscuit-colored buildings that used to be black, but also in public attitudes. Politics is less important in people’s lives. They look more to work, enterprise, education, and their own efforts for prosperity.

Insofar as they consider politics, they credit Labour with the good performance of the economy. That is not exactly false, but it is vastly oversimplified. The last recession ended in 1992, when the Tories had five years more to go in office. Britain’s long-run economic recovery is the result of the Thatcherite reforms of the 1980s, the fiscal stabilization introduced by Tory chancellor Norman Lamont in 1992, and Labour chancellor Gordon Brown’s granting of independence to the Bank of England in 1997. In that order of importance. Whatever the economics, however, the politics favor Labour, which now enjoys a 20-point lead over Michael Howard’s Tories on the question of economic competence. That is a disastrous reversal for the Tories, who had hitherto been regarded as the “sound economy” party . . .

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