Britain: Blair lurches right, dismissing calls for resignation

All those political analysts who predicted that Labour’s haemorrhaging of support would force Blair to make concessions to popular anger over the Iraq war, or even to announce an early retirement and give way to Chancellor Gordon Brown, were deluding themselves.

When Blair declared, “I think I have a very clear idea of what the British people now expect from this government for a third term,” the people he was thinking about were the representatives of big business, press barons such as Rupert Murdoch, and a narrow layer of the upper-middle class that switched back to voting Conservative in the southeast.

The election saw an unprecedented decline in support for Labour and near universal hostility towards Blair himself. Labour was re-elected with a much-reduced majority of 67 seats, with only 36 percent of the ballot, and the support of just 22 percent of the electorate. Abstentions remained at 38 percent, despite postal votes trebling to 6 million.

Though the results were troubling for Blair, he will not countenance the re-adoption of “Old Labour” style social reforms. Rather, he will press ahead more determinedly with his right-wing, pro-business agenda.

A Labour victory was endorsed by Murdoch’s publishing empire, the Financial Times and the Economist, which speak for the financial oligarchy that is Blair’s primary constituency. Their continued support for Labour is the essential reason that Blair must face down any demands for retreat from his New Labour agenda. Moreover, the right-wing media was extremely critical of Labour. It accepted that Blair was the best thing on offer, but complained that he had not made sufficient cuts in public spending, had not gone far enough in privatising social services and had failed to cut taxes on business and wealth.

The Liberal Democrats’ success in winning support in former Labour heartlands dominated the thinking of Blair’s critics within the party. They insisted that the central lesson of the election was to recognise that Iraq had lost the party support, and that Blair was no longer trusted and had become an electoral liability.

For Blair, however, the major concern was the swing back to the Tories in marginal seats such as Putney and Enfield. Labour’s election in 1997 was due to winning over prosperous middle class areas, rather than an increase in support amongst the working class. Blair calculates that Labour’s standing in working class areas cannot fall much further than it has. What would prevent the party from securing a fourth term in office is a failure to win back the vote of “Middle England.”

That is why Blair regards the Liberal Democrats’ ability to make gain almost exclusively at Labour’s expense, while they fared badly against the Tories, as a vindication of his line. In a May 11 meeting of the parliamentary Labour Party, Blair mocked the Liberal Democrats for choosing the “extremist” option of claiming to be “left of Labour.” He dismissed them as “the party of Gladstone, Lloyd George and Sedgemore”—a reference to the retired Labour left MP Brian Sedgemore, who defected to the Liberal Democrats on the eve of the general election.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/may2005/blai-m14.shtml