If you like to believe that no bad deed goes unpunished, don’t look at the British opinion polls. In its nearly 13 years in power, the United Kingdom’s Labour party has wrecked the economy, ruined the national finances, lost control over the country’s borders — and that’s just the beginning of the rap sheet. Labour is overbearing, sleazy, and skilled only in the arts of political survival. Selfish, self-absorbed, and feuding, it is now led by Gordon Brown, a Queeg-like character for whom the kindest adjective would be “troubled.” Despite all this, there is a chance that Brown may win a renewed mandate as prime minister in the general election that has to be held no later than June. Even new allegations — “Bullygate” — about the way he treats his staff do not appear to have damaged him at all.
The peculiarities of the British electoral system mean that if the Conservatives are to secure a solid majority in the House of Commons, they don’t just have to win; they have to win big. For much of last year, that’s just what the polls, sometimes showing a Conservative lead over Labour in excess of 20 percentage points, predicted the Tories would do. In the last month or so, the picture has darkened. The Conservative edge has dwindled to the mid-single digits, a range that would not be enough to give them an absolute majority. A poll released over the weekend recorded a Tory advantage of only 2 percent, a showing that implies that Labour will form the next government.
The best bet continues to be that Conservative leader David Cameron will still make it, but this trend has now lasted long enough to trigger jitters within his party. It’s also contributing to renewed weakness of the battered British pound. Expect more of the same. Investors won’t relish the thought of five more years of Labour.
The usual explanation for their stumble is that the Conservatives “do not stand for anything.” That perception is the inevitable consequence of two of Cameron’s more difficult challenges. The first reflects the fact that the hole into which Labour has dropped the economy is also a trap for the Tories. With a budget deficit of around 12.6 percent of GDP this year, a spiraling public-debt/GDP ratio, and financial markets increasingly twitchy, the incoming government will have to hack back public spending. Labour knows this. The Conservatives know this.
Cameron’s problem is that the boost the economy has received from emergency measures taken since the financial meltdown in 2008 has allowed many Britons to fool themselves that the situation isn’t quite as terrible as all that. For now, Labour can pretend that muddling through with a trim here and a snip there is a viable alternative to a more drastic austerity program.
To agree that muddling through might work is not a sensible approach for an opposition to take when it is resting a good part of its case on Labour’s mismanagement of the economy. At the same time, being the bearer of bad tidings is a notoriously risky assignment, particularly in this context, for the Conservatives, a party still tarred with the brush of the wildly exaggerated “Thatcher cuts” of the 1980s. That’s one of the reasons that Cameron has taken such pains to say that he will maintain spending on the National Health Service (NHS), a claim that undermines much of his credibility as the man who can restore order to the United Kingdom’s finances.
The pledge to defend the NHS is, however, about more than budgets. It’s also a part of Cameron’s continuing effort to “decontaminate” the Tory brand since becoming leader in 2005. After three consecutive election defeats, the Conservatives were desperate. Years of clever smears by Labour, skillfully aided and abetted by much of the media, had left the Tories labeled as the “nasty party” for whom only the aged, the out-of-touch, the racist, or the reactionary would vote.
To shatter that image, Cameron, a man with, tellingly, a background in public relations, had to tackle the hatred felt for his party among much of the media and cultural elite. That hatred was often contrived, a matter of fashion or careerism as much as ideological conviction. But its consequences were real and, given the top-down manner in which British political debate is shaped, they were devastating. The candidacies of the three Tory leaders between John Major (the Conservative prime minister defeated in 1997) and David Cameron were destroyed almost before they began. Cameron had to avoid the same fate.
He did so the old-fashioned way: He surrendered. In effect, he accepted that the caricature was true and then embarked on a series of policy and presentational shifts designed to show that the party had been transformed into something housetrained, something more respectable, something inclusive. Not all these changes were bad. More important, they have worked. The media and cultural elite still trend firmly left, but some of the old vitriol has gone, diluted further by economic collapse and Labour misrule. The Tories can now get the hearing they need if they are to get their message out.
The only problem is: What will that message be? If topics such as “Europe,” mass immigration, health-care reform, rising social disorder, and the failures of multiculturalism were all to be downplayed, what exactly were the Conservatives supposed to be “about”? Harping on about low taxes was thought to look greedy. There was always the economy, but explaining how the Conservatives would do better with that was something of a struggle at a time when the economy appeared to be faring just fine. So Cameron focused on happy talk about sharing the proceeds of growth and saying things like this (from a 2006 speech):
GDP. Gross Domestic Product. Yes, it’s vital. It measures the wealth of our society. But it hardly tells the whole story. Wealth is about so much more than pounds, or euros or dollars, can ever measure. It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money, and it’s time that we focused on not just on GDP, but GWB — General well-being.
Oh dear. The best thing to be said about remarks such as those was that they dovetailed nicely with Cameron’s big new theme: environmentalism. That was a theme that came with good ideas and bad, but it undoubtedly played a useful part in creating the kinder, gentler reputation without which the Tories would now have no chance of winning.
To be fair, the message has lately been toughened up a touch. The reluctance to confront the ugly reality of social disorder has been replaced by a focus on “broken Britain.” An innovative education-reform agenda has been put in place. Labour’s betrayal of the armed forces has come under fire. It’s a start, but the electoral strategy that has characterized Cameron’s time at the helm has forced the party into a place where its pitch makes for a pretty thin gruel. The Conservatives are primarily defined by what they are not, rather than by what they are. They are not the nasty party. They are not Labour. Given what Labour has done to the country, that ought to have been enough, but it isn’t.
Part of the problem is the absence of any popular enthusiasm for the Cameron project. In the place where you would most expect to find it — among the wider party faithful and their fellow travelers on the right — it’s as notable by its absence as its presence. These voters would be delighted to see the back of Brown, but they do not appear very excited by the prospect of a Cameron victory. They were never going to enjoy the Tory leader’s left turn, but their doubts about him have been reinforced by a series of recent moves that suggest that this shift is a matter of conviction as much as political calculation. The latter might be forgivable, the former not so much.
In this connection, it is interesting to see that the Conservative lead started to narrow shortly after the Tories reneged on a pledge to hold a referendum on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty in the event that they were to be elected. It’s possible — just — to defend that decision (the treaty had since passed into law, and it would take more than a British rejection to unwind it), but the same cannot be said of the Tory leadership’s attempt to use women-only shortlists to force local Conservative parties to pick female parliamentary candidates, or its refusal to recognize that the politics of global warming have shifted in the wake of the various Climategates. Then there was the spectacle of Ken Clarke, the most Europhile senior Tory, being dispatched to meet with EU high-ups in Brussels. Well, you get the picture.
And while Cameron’s achievement in increasing his party’s appeal to more centrist voters is real enough, the support he is winning among them looks shallow, tentative, and somewhat grudging. The Conservatives may be running on a platform of “change” (yes, yes, I know), but there is none of the groundswell usually seen ahead of elections in which that is what voters actually choose. That may be because they don’t really want it or, such is the paradox of the positions that Cameron has taken in the name of making his party “electable,” it may be because they think that all the Tories offer is less of the same.
Either way, in the absence of a complete financial collapse between now and voting day, this is shaping up to be a good election for “none of the above.” And that’ll be a bad election for Britain.
– Andrew Stuttaford is a contributing editor of National Review Online.