This was written in September 1997. It will be updated soon.
The Election
In 1996 and 1997, political life in Britain was dominated by the election campaign which ended with the stunning victory by Tony Blair's Labour Party on 1 May (the table after this paragraph has the results. There are other issues in British politics, including the infamous mad cow disease and concerns about European integration, but when all is said and done, they are best viewed from the perspective of an election that brought eighteen years of Tory rule to an end.
|
Party |
|
|
|
Labour |
43.2 |
419 |
|
Conservative |
30.6 |
165 |
|
Liberal Democrats |
16.7 |
45 |
|
Others |
9.5 |
30 |
The Labour Party took the election with one of the biggest landslides in history. As the table shows, it wasn't so much that Labour won a huge share of the vote; indeed, its total was no higher than the ToriesÕ in 1983. However, a combination of tactical voting by supporters of all anti-conservative parties plus an effectively run Labour campaign gave the party its largest parliamentary majority ever.
It was not immediately clear what the victory meant. Labour's strongest supporters (including this author) saw it offering a new model of what it means to be on the left, blending market mechanisms with a commitment to a more egalitarian and democratic society. Its left wing critics thought it had sold out commitments made over the generations.Thus, a cartoon in the pro-Labour Guardian at the time of the rumored break up of Oasis showed a boy telling his father, "Dad, at least when the Beatles broke up, you had a Labour Party you could believe in."
There is no question that Blair's new government marks a radical departure from the past. There are five women in the cabinet plus over 100 Labour women in Parliament. The cabinet also includes the first openly gay man and, probably, the first blind person in any government in an industrialized democracy.
More importantly, Labour has made a number of new policy initiatives in its first two months in office on welfare, constitutional, European, crime, and other issues. Given the size of its majority, those bills which are still in the legislative pipeline, are all but certain to be passed.
On 2 May, defeated Prime Minister John Major announced that he would step down as party leader, setting off a leadership contest which only deepened the splits. It took three rounds of voting only the 164 Tory MPs could vote (one had died since the election) to determine his successor. Thirty six year old William Hague--dubbed Hague the Vague by his critics--finally won, thus continuing the party's drift toward the right.
The leadership contest settled little within a party devastated by its loss after so long in power. The party has been further racked by further allegations about "sleaze" within its ranks. Although most of the MPs implicated in the scandals (most notably Neil Hamilton who lost to BBC correspondent Martin Bell in one of the safest Tory seats), the party's image continues to suffer badly.
The Liberal Democrats did surprisingly well in the election. Although their share of the vote did not go up much, they did end up with 45 seats more than doubling their 1992 total. More importantly, many observers thought the Lib-Dems had the most innovative programme of the three major parties and agreed that it ran the most principled campaign under the leadership of Paddy Ashdown. Given the size of the Labour majority, however, it is not clear how much influence the Lib-Dems will have during this parliament.
Europe remains the most divisive, if not the most important issue in British politics. Labour has taken a more constructive approach to British dealings with Europe (see the EU Update) in particular during the negotiations on the Amsterdam Treaty in which the British gained several major concessions. The so-called mad cow disease crisis remains the most visible and touchy issue for the British government which still could not export any beef as this was being written.
Northern Ireland has become, if anything, a more difficult problem. A series of IRA attacks and violence allegedly from Protestant loyalist groups dealt the peace process a number of blows during the year. Meanwhile, Sinn Fein saw it support grow, as it won two seats in parliament. There was violence, as well, at the start of the summer Òmarching season,Ó though the various Orange Order and other loyalist groups did decide to curb their plans for the all-important weekend of July 12. As of this writing, the peace process is alive, but just barely.
It's not just Labour that is enjoying a good spell. So, too, are Britain's international teams. Britain came close to winning the football European Cup in 1996, but after Labour's victory it swept Le Tournoi in France, beating France, Italy, and Brazil. Two British men reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon, England made a good start toward winning the Ashes cricket showdown with Australia, something it had not done in more than 20 years, and a combined British team had defeated the world champion South Africans in rugby. It is hard not to sympathize with the sentiments of 1960s Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson emblazoned on the t-shirt I'm wearing as I write, "Have you ever noticed how we only win the World Cup under a Labour government?"
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Town Hall | |||