Polarizing British Politics

...Whatever takes place, party officials continue to act as before...

...The Tory leader made it clear that if he were the occupant of No...

...In a frantic response, though, to Blair's call a few days earlier for disaffected Tories to join "New Labor," Hague resorted to personal abuse of the Prime Minister, calling him a liar, a fraud and a hypocrite...

...The speakers' platform was as tightly controlled as at Bournemouth...

...Despite having failed to deliver significantly as yet on his grandiose health care and education promises, he maintains unusually high approval ratings across the country as well as strong parliamentary support...

...The conferences, however, were of far greater significance than usual...

...Still, the Conservative conference this year will be remembered as a watershed in British politics...

...Sometimes things do not go according to plan...

...They are unlikely to follow the great numbers of ordinary Tory voters who switched to Labor in the last election and helped give Blair his huge parliamentary majority...

...Come with me," he told the delegates, "and I will give you back your country...

...The Labor Party used to be known as a "broad church," capable of embracing a spectrum of Left and Center views...

...The conventional wisdom was that if a party in power enjoyed as overwhelming a majority in the House of Commons as Blair does, it meant trouble for the Prime Minister...

...Which is not to say glitches never occur...

...It was evident that practically everything had been cleared with Blair or his key minions, who, like mandarins of the emperor, make certain everyone in the government is "on message...

...He has taken instruction to overcome his usual nasal drone from the podium...

...Although "Bolshie" gadflies like MPs Tony Benn and Dennis Skinner still spoke their minds, they sounded like political dinosaurs trudging toward extinction...

...There were also some mutterings about the Prime Minister's increasingly single-minded, almost presidential centralization of party and government: Health Secretary Frank Dobson, Education Secretary David Blunkett and other key government ministers said their pieces on cue from the conference platform...

...Extremist factions, no longer fearful of being ousted or hamstrung by the opposition, became active and increasingly unruly...

...Yet such gaffes, embarrassing as they were, could not shake the firmness of Tony Blair's leadership as he told the assembled delegates that British institutions and public services would be modernized by his government from top to bottom, that forces of conservatism "on the Left and Right" would be defeated, and that the battle for true equality in Britain has just begun...

...Hague has cast aside the Tories who share these now dissident views...

...This fall both the Labor and Conservative assemblies had their traditional pep talks to give the rank-and-file a sense of participation, theirrecitals of achievements and intentions, and their castigations of political adversaries...

...For the main issue Hague (and Thatcher) took up was suspicion of the European Union...

...Historian and London Evening Standard editor Max Hastings, long a Tory, wrote of the Blackpool conference, "This freak show has shunned the real world...

...Nor are they likely to be silenced, indicating that a serious split in the Conservative Party is only widening...

...That inflation is under control and unemployment is down has undoubtedly contributed substantially to making him seem unchallengeable...

...Putting in an appearance at Blackpool, she denounced continental Europe as the historic source of all Britain's problems, demanded freedom for former Chilean dictator and accused torturer Augusto Pinochet, and denied privately calling the Tory leader "Wee Willy...

...Delegates from local party branches and from interest groups gather for a few days at an out-of-season seaside resort to take part in more or less stage managed spectacles: Leaders report on the wonderful things they have done and are about to do, and of course on how shamelessly their political opponents are behaving...

...The mood and proceedings at the Labor Party gathering provided proof that it hadjust about completed a radical transformation begun a little over two years ago when Tony Blair scored an impressive electoral victory...

...It was mostly the usual stuff—spoken in the ringing tones of aman public opinion polls suggest will still be leading the country after the next national general election two years down the road, and perhaps beyond as well...

...10 Downing Street, he would insist on renegotiating Britain's agreement to further economic and political integration of the European Community...

...Tory leader William Hague sought to rally his languishing party with promises of tax cuts, health care reforms, a crackdown on crime, and a challenge to the European Union (EU...

...But this year it was obvious at the conference, held in Bournemouth in the south of England, that the once persistently rebellious Labor Left has been thoroughly marginalized...

...They are dismayed, too, by his having checked out George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" on a visit to the United States, and then returned home to surrender the middle ground of British politics to Labor without so much as a struggle...

...The country's business and financial communities—whose lobbyists were more evident at the Labor than the Tory conference this year—are aghast at the prospect of losing the considerable benefits European integration has already provided, not to mention the promises of more to come...

...Countless Britons who consider themselves natural conservatives have no wish to be painted into that corner...

...We stand firmly and confidently in the Center," the Prime Minister declares without fear of contradiction...

...Should his wishes be denied by its other members, he went on, Britain might consider withdrawing altogether...

...At times it seems, indeed, that Blair's background is in engineering rather than law...

...Discussion of the opposition Conservative Party's continuing inability to offer even the semblance of a threat to the Labor government was not on the agenda at the subsequent Tory conference, held in Blackpool in the north of England...

...The stance is a risky one...

...Many are reasonably prominent individuals who have devoted their political lives to the Conservative Party...

...Some say it would be an economic disaster for the nation...

...Former Prime Minister John Major, Hague's predecessor as Tory leader, has called such anti-Europeanism "politically crazy...

...By seizing the middle ground in British politics and almost effortlessly holding it, Blair has changed that...

...Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who is responsible for tackling Britain's horrendous traflfic problems, aroused much mirth and some outrage when he used one of his two Jaguars to drive a mere 250 yards from his hotel to the conference center to protect his wife's bouffant hairdo from the morning wind blowing off the sea...

...To be sure, there was some grousing in Bournemouth about discordant voices being muted by the tightly controlled sense of triumphal unity...

...A number of other prominent Tory figures, including former Cabinet members Kenneth Clark and Michael Heseltine, also find Hague's approach to Europe appalling...

...Norman Gelb reports regularly for The New Leader on British affairs...

...Even that shrillness could not keep the much touted Tory "new beginning," from being forced out of the main headlines throughout the conference by one of Britain's worst railroad disasters...

...That was the case several years back when the Labor Party's Left wing sought to commit a reluctant Labor government to abandoning NATO and nuclear weapons...

...His apparent determination to take the Conservative Party sharply to the Right, they believe, will make it unelectable for a long time...

...And Environment Minister Michael Meacher suggested at a peripheral conference meeting that people should not own second homes where local residents might be squeezed out by an increase in property values, though his own rural retreat is a very agreeable hideaway consisting of three cottages joined together...

...An example on the Conservative side was the eerie, unforeseen gloom that settled over the conclave after a majority of Tory members of Parliament decided they had enough of Margaret Thatcher's implacability and ousted her as party leader and Prime Minister...

...Ordinarily the yearly congregations don't matter very much...

...Neither gloom nor defeatism were to be allowed access, certainly not comments about the latest opinion poll giving the Tories only 25 per cent of the electorate's support...

...Moreover, whatever television and press coverage the party received was dominated part of the time by the irrelevant attention-grabbing of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher...