"New Labour,"

...Oddly, the history of Labour governments since 1945 suggests that with the exception of the Attlee government of 1945-1951, which faced enormous economic difficulties and tackled them with considerable success, Labour has been no more competent than the Tories in matters of economic management, but has been distinctly more enlightened on civil liberties issues, and issues of humanizing government...

...Threats of the bill that the unions would surely be presenting for their silence during the election failed to stir the electorate...

...and there is no sign that Jack Straw, the new home secretary, intends to be a model of liberalism...

...Because Britain had been forced to retreat ignominiously from the exchange rate mechanism of the European Community in September 1992—devaluing the pound by 20 percent and giving George Soros the easiest $1.5 billion a currency speculator has ever earned—John Major's Conservative government had been 20 percent behind Labour in every opinion poll...

...Even in these first, heady weeks, it is hard to believe that New Labour has found a magic formula that will somehow transform a new "hands-off' approach to economic management into a peculiarly sophisticated form of late-twentieth-century socialism...

...Ordinarily, the British electorate is skeptical but forgiving— they appear to expect politicians to heat up the economy before an election and to throw cold water on it immediately afterward, but vote for them nonetheless...

...Still, Labour supporters came to believe that the party's ability to lose elections against all the odds was matched by the Tories' ability to win them...

...It seemed an odd way to start on a program that needs more rather than less government influence over the economy...

...Labour Snubs Union," said all the headlines...

...Until now, plaintiffs who believe that their human rights have been violated have had to exhaust the resources of the British legal system, and only then apSUMMER • 1997 • 15 Politics Abroad peal to the European Court of Justice to provide remedies that the British system could not...

...A freedom of information act is promised for the further future, and a privacy act that will allow individuals to sue intrusive newspapers—and allow newspapers a "public interest" defense so that politicians aren't protected from proper scrutiny...

...Labour had never had a lead of more than 3 or 4 percent in the months before the election, and it had been visibly slipping in the run-up to the election...

...How he could do any of the things the Labour party was committed to—smaller classes in elementary school, a program to get as many young people as possible off the welfare rolls and into jobs, community development schemes to reduce the amount of crime and general antisocial behavior in the big public housing projects that are such a feature of Britain's decaying inner cities—if he had only the resources that a Conservative government was willing to spend...

...Curing that pathology is the real task for the new government...

...Whether it would have done them any good to have got their message out more clearly is anyone's guess...

...Until now, British governments—even Labour governments—have been reluctant to see the courts acquire the authority to invalidate legislation as they will now be able to...

...The Welsh and the Scots are not only disaffected from the Conservative party but from the whole idea of centralizing power in London...

...It was, on the face of it, an odd reaction...

...Over the past twenty years Britain has followed an economic path similar to that of the United States...

...The best-off 20 percent of the population have seen their incomes rise by 60 percent, and the worst-off 20 percent have seen theirs fall slightly...

...The electorate continued to give Labour the wide lead it enjoyed throughout...

...This was before one started asking awkward questions about the condition of the National Health Service, where a million patients wait for treatment, and up to a third of the "trusts" that run Britain's hospitals, ambulance services, outpatient treatment, and indeed almost everything other than primary physician care, were forecasting financial doom...

...Once again, the Conservatives tried to terrify the voters with old newsreel clips of the 1979 garbage mountains, but they failed...

...Roy Jenkins was an extremely good chancellor of the exchequer, who rescued the British economy during the late nineteensixties...

...Sometimes, they said it was £6 billion short and sometimes £12 billion...

...In terms of winning elections, the first always was the more important...

...That left two things untouched...

...The morning of May 2 saw the British population grinning from ear to ear...

...There is a sporting chance that the new Labour government will turn out to be a great reforming government almost in spite of itself...

...Of course, it turned out that the Conservatives had nothing in the armory...

...The public paid no attention...

...How much all this will do for Labour's traditional supporters is very hard to tell...

...The first was the party's relationship to the trade unions, the second its ideas on a whole range of constitutional and civil liberties issues...

...How it is to accomplish it is what nobody yet knows...

...Throw in the promise to abolish the voting rights of hereditary peers in the House of Lords and the promise of a referendum on proportional representation, and you have a government whose caution on the economic front is matched by something close to recklessness on the constitutional front...

...It does, for all that, place the onus on governments to prove that their restrictions are justified under fairly narrow headings...

...The electorate had mastered the art of tactical voting, and they made their votes count...

...After Kinnock lost the 1992 election and resigned the leadership, his successor, John Smith, worked to persuade the party that it could not win by being unsound on taxation, inflation, and public expenditure...

...Where a Liberal-Democrat had the best chance of unseating an incumbent Conservative, as in Oxford, the Labour vote shrank or barely rose, and the anti-Conservative vote went to the LiberalDemocrats...

...Still, this is the party that abolished the death penalty, liberalized the abortion laws, and decriminalized homosexual behavior between consenting adults...

...This was itself somewhat odd...

...What will emerge when the government offers the population of all of Britain the chance to say yes or no to some concrete proposal for a large measure of home rule is anybody's guess—but it marks the biggest constitutional change for some centuries...

...Even Conservative voters were sick of Conservative governments...

...Not always: they have been no braver than successive Conservative administrations on immigration and race relations...

...Labour party officials genuinely believed that they would win with a small majority...

...Utter incompetence had discredited the government...

...More interesting on this occasion was that the 43 percent was merely part of an anti-Tory vote...

...Incorporation is not quite the same thing as creating a British Bill of Rights, but it comes close...

...A blast of frigid air swept out of Labour headquarters: cooperation from the NUT would be welcome, but attempts to dictate policy would be stamped on...

...It was they who went in for self-destruction, with daily quarrels over the party's attitude towards monetary union in particular and the European Union (EU) in general...

...But the unions themselves had decided that it was better to have some influence on a Labour government they could not control than to be permanently excluded from Conservative governments they could not even influence...

...The youngest voters this year were born during the famous "winter of discontent," and this was an important milestone...

...Part of the sentiment was disgust at the dissension over Europe...

...One far left member of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) played into the hands of Tony Blair and the future minister of education, David Blunkett...

...It meant that much of the electorate had no memory of the famous scenes of militant grave diggers turning away grieving families who had come to bury their loved ones in the municipal cemetery or of the impressive mountains of black plastic trash-bags that piled up in the streets of London and other major cities...

...Something like two million fewer voters turned out than in 1992, and that was just about the losing margin...

...But until it all happened, nobody believed it would...

...What the party needs is a bracing spell on the opposition benches" became a sort of mantra in what until May 1 had been safe Tory seats...

...at the union's annual conference she made the sort of speech she might have made in 1968, demanding that a Labour government should sack the head of the schools inspection service—Blunkett having announced some weeks before that he would do no such thing...

...The first bold gesture, made by Gordon Brown as soon as he arrived at the Treasury, was to hand back to the Bank of England the power to set interest rates and so determine the level of economic activity...

...and that the answer had better not be "organized labor...

...The Labour leadership had been convinced that what undid Neil Kinnock in 1992 was a combination of a certain over-exuberance on his side SUMMER • 1997 13 Politics Abroad and the cleverness of the Conservatives in painting Labour as financially profligate...

...What it lacks is the absoluteness of the American Bill of Rights: like all European codes, it allows governments to breach its provisions for the sake of security and "public morality...

...Many disaffected Conservative voters stayed at home...

...Much like the Republicans faced with Clinton's opportunistic seizure of "their" issues, the Conservative campaign seemed to be saying that the Labour party had stolen the Tory party's policies—and they would not work...

...There would be no increase in the rates of personal income tax, even on incomes above the equivlent of $160,000...

...This was not a case of the Labour party sneaking through the middle between two anti-Labour parties in the way the Conservatives had sneaked between Labour and the Liberal-Democrats...

...Unsurprisingly, the British government has the worst record of any European state in cases taken to the Court in Strasbourg...

...but his claim to fame is his work as the home secretary who persuaded the British that they did not need to persecute gays or hang murderers to feel secure...

...Since everyone assumed that the Conservative government could not live within its own limits, and that it had massaged the figures ahead of the election, Brown's pledge was dramatic stuff...

...Much has been made of the fact that Tony Blair won a crushing victory with only 43 percent of the vote...

...The far left had been seen off a very long time ago...

...When that kind of comment comes from a Conservative politician or newspaper, one can decently laugh—since Margaret Thatcher never got more than 43 percent of the vote in any of her supposedly smashing victories, and rather little was heard of the fact then...

...But the new Labour government promises to give away more of its powers than that...

...is a powerful question...

...The truth was that the population was sick of Conservative governments...

...The Labour party's constitution had already changed in such a way as to limit the formal influence of the unions in such matters as electing the leader...

...Now, informally, the unions preserved an astonishing silence not only during the election but for months before...

...16 • DISSENT...

...For the Labour party campaign had been exceedingly efficient, but at the same time cautious to a fault...

...The Conservatives tried their best to argue that the Labour program did not add up...

...John Major allowed himself the longest campaign in history by setting polling date as late as he constitutionally could and ending the final session of Parliament three weeks sooner than he had to, and even the coolest heads wondered whether the Labour party would not find some new form of self-destruction in the longest (and most boring) six weeks in recent British politics...

...For a very long time, it has seemed clear that some degree of federalism is politically necessary...

...Since the winter of 1979, when a long string of strikes by public workers destroyed the Labour government of James Callaghan and let Margaret Thatcher start her eleven-year reign, it has been apparent that "Who rules Britain...

...So, everyone woke up after a long night waiting for the returns, astonished at having done what the electoral system seemed to make it impossible to do...

...The increase in inequality has slowed in the past couple of years, but Britain is now a member of the "forty, forty, twenty" club-40 percent of the population are securely employed and prosperous, 40 percent are employed but struggling, and the bottom 20 percent are only intermittently employed and utterly dependent on the welfare system...

...Major's victory in April 1992 was not the stunning upset that it has been portrayed as ever since...

...They wanted the Conservative government out...

...It provides for positive rights of privacy, respect for family integrity, freedom of movement, and much else...

...It was certainly true that the 1992 Labour party had been somewhat slapdash in setting out its tax policies and lax in costing its public expenditure commitments...

...Its proposals for changing social security deductions and increasing tax rates on higher incomes would have meant a 10 percent increase in taxes for people barely above the average wage, and 20 percent plus for people earning no more than the equivalent of $60,000 or $70,000 a year...

...more of it was disgust at the number of Tory members of Parliament who were involved in one form of scandal or another—being found in bed with teenage "hostesses" and "models" or turning out to have accepted substantial sums of money from insalubrious businessmen in return for political favors...

...This time, they would not do it...

...He is as happy as his Conservative predecessor Michael Howard to see children tried in adult courts and as ready as any Republican mayor to impose curfews on teenagers...

...it was as though they had meant to be shot of the Conservatives in 1992, had failed, had wondered if it could be done, and now saw they had done it in spades...

...Indeed, many Conservative voters appeared to be more sick of their own party's over-long monopoly of power than were their nominal opponents...

...Most observers were surprised...

...moreover, any new Labour government was going to live within the expenditure limits already set by the existing Conservative administration...

...Even as the unemployment rate has dropped to a little over 5 percent, the proportion of households with nobody working has risen nearer to one in five...

...But they also woke up to a government that was deeply committed to being "New Labour" as distinct from "Unrecon14 • DISSENT Politics Abroad structed Old Left," or whatever such slogans have in mind...

...It is about to "incorporate" the European Convention on Human Rights, which is to say that the convention will now become British law, and will govern the decisions of British judges...

...This time, soon-to-be Chancellor of the ExchequerGordon Brown tied his own hands, ostentatiously and publicly, and months ahead of the election...

...Neil Kinnock had patiently destroyed the Trotskyites of the Militant Tendency in the late eighties...

...Kenneth Clarke, the genial, beer-drinking, cosmopolitan chancellor of the exchequer, seemed genuinely surprised at the absence of the "feel-good" factor on which he and John Major were banking...

...The conventional wisdom used to be that any British government that could manufacture falling unemployment, rising wages, and reasonably stable prices for about six months before the election would see itself safely back in power...

...Their share of the popular vote hardly rose from what they had got in 1992, but it gave them forty-six seats rather than eighteen...

...The electorate at large never quite believed themselves capable of causing an earthquake...