How can 36% of the vote give one party total power?

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/election/comment/0,15803,1478608,00.html

How can 36% of the vote give one party total power?

Blairite loyalists now fear a bonfire of New Labour plans

Jonathan Freedland
Saturday May 7, 2005
The Guardian

Even a win can signal a kind of defeat. Few doubt, for example, that Thursday marks the beginning of the end of the Blair era. But might it also presage the end of the political force he helped create - New Labour?
The logic is plain enough: with his majority slashed, Blair simply won't have the votes to drive through the "unremittingly New Labour" programme he promised just a few weeks ago. Remember that university tuition fees was passed by five votes. In today's Commons, those votes would not be there.


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Instead, backbench Labour rebels - once so easily dismissed as the awkward squad - will suddenly have the whiphand. With a government majority in the 60s, a rebellion of 30 could make the difference between victory and defeat. As one Blairite minister put it to me yesterday: "The nightmare scenario is that the country is about to be run by a combination of Jeremy Corbyn and Gwyneth Dunwoody."
The government will have to adjust accordingly. Blairite pessimists fear that will mean a bonfire of New Labour plans. ID cards will be on the scrapheap, and so will Charles Clarke's anti-terror control orders, when they come up for renewal. On public services, the new parliamentary party will vote for continued investment - but won't have much interest in Blairite reform. It will be Labour, but not too New.

If this were the pattern, Blairites would surely kick themselves for wasting the diamond opportunities of 1997 and 2001. When their majorities were invincibly large, they will wonder, did they merely tinker at the edges of public service reform? Did they leave some of the hardest work till now, when they don't have the political clout to do it?

Of course, Blair loyalists dispute all that. They say that plenty of heavy lifting on reform has already been done, especially during the second term when the rest of us were looking the other way - distracted by Iraq. Tuition fees are a case in point. The hard political battle is over, they say. Now, in the the third term, the changes will be implemented.

What's more, add the Blairites, there is much reform that doesn't need legislation. The government can keep busy, changing the way schools work, for example, without having to pass laws in a newly troublesome House of Commons. Above all, New Labourites insist they are not about to throw up their hands in intellectual defeat, bowing to the traditionalists. "If we become the party that cannot reform," says one, "we lose."

For Labour's high command, there are enemies within and without - and they all just got stronger. The external threat is now on two fronts, both left and right. In several of the big cities, the Lib Dems are just over Labour's shoulder, threatening from second place. To keep seats in the likes of Durham, Newcastle, Birmingham and Manchester, Labour will need to protect its left flank.

And yet it also has to watch its right, to ensure the Tory success in London is not repeated elsewhere. The raw number of votes cast shows the Conservatives are, once again, the biggest party in England. That means New Labour's original animating purpose - appealing to a middle England once locked up by the Tories - remains as necessary as ever.

That will not be an easy trick to pull off, reaching out to former supporters disaffected over Iraq on the left and immigration on the right. But someone has to do it. Should it be Blair? Several defeated MPs will blame the "Blair factor" they encountered on the doorstep for their failure. They and their allies will want him gone. Many of those who survived will credit Gordon Brown's late intervention. "Without him," says one MP, "I dread to think what would have happened."

Guesses range on when the transition will come. Some say it will be next year, some predict this autumn. But the new landscape will have an influence. For how well will Tony Blair cope with the new dispensation? Yesterday his best stab at sounding collegial was the odd formulation, "I, we, the government" - run together as if it were a single word. It was meant to sound inclusive; in fact it sounded self-aggrandising, rather in the manner of "We are a grandmother."

It's possible, then, that Blair might not like operating as a non-presidential prime minister, forced to reach out to truculent backbenchers. It's also possible that Brown, always more of a Labour creature, will simply be more adept at that kind of task.

In the meantime, Michael Howard has done Labour a service. By announcing his intended resignation yesterday he has ensured that the Tories do not keep up the pressure on Labour, but turn inward. Now they will be mired for at least a year in discussions about their party rulebook, followed by a leadership battle. In this one act, Howard will have undone much of the good he had done for his party.

Yesterday's result was also insufficiently conclusive for the Tories to plot their next move. Should they modernise Ã* la New Labour or wait for one more heave next time? And while Lynton Crosby's dog whistle brought them some tactical gains, picking up new seats, it also left them an unwelcome legacy. Surely the immigration-obsessed campaign of 2005 means the Tories are seen, once again, as the nasty party.

The Lib Dems have some soul-searching to do, too. Has their positioning to Labour's left brought them advantage in Labour areas, only to make them less attractive in Tory seats, where they struggled to make progress? Was Iraq a one-off boost that cannot be relied on next time?

For everyone else, this election has also left some important questions. Those on the centre-left need to wonder if they have forgotten the lessons of the 1980s, when by splitting their votes they kept the Tories in power. Some results, in London especially, showed that pattern recurring. More deeply, how legitimate is a system that gives total power to a party with barely 36% of the popular vote? Trust in politicians was a big theme of the last term. Maybe trust in the system will be a big theme in the next.

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