It looks like an unhistoric landslide
Published 04 December 2000
Who would have thought it? Ministers can barely raise their voices above a whisper when they admit it. But suddenly all the talk is of another landslide. People had assumed that Tony Blair would get back in the spring, but with a big dent in Labour's majority - maybe 40 or 50 seats down. For a few wobbly weeks this autumn, it looked as though it could be a gigantic gash - maybe even 100 down.
However, the mood has changed. Like a man who just knows he's going to win the pools, Labour is daring to think of what it will do with the winnings. Is this supreme overconfidence? Perhaps. Part of the exhilaration of politics is the knowledge that "events" can pop up from nowhere and destroy every certainty. But for now, even the Tory press is writing off the Conservatives: the Mail describes their future as "irredeemably bleak"; the Telegraph wrings its carefully manicured hands; William Hague's own advisers have been telling him he has no chance.
Europe - the one issue that people expected would cause problems for Labour - looks, after recent events, like a slain dragon. Look at what the Conservatives have had to crow about: Blair's enthusiasm for the European rapid reaction force, a European army by any other name. The Tories thought it was Christmas dinner handed to them on a golden plate - defence and Europe, their two favourite topics, all wrapped up together. Yet the public didn't agree: recent polls by both MORI and Gallup have found a majority backing the idea of the Euro-force. True, Labour will face unpopular headlines during the forthcoming summit in Nice, but the Conservatives' isolationist position on Europe is not popular enough to help the party in the polls.
On more central issues, the government clearly has a story to tell: the 250,000 New Deal jobs target for youngsters met; the decent package for pensioners; serious progress in education; the beginnings of reform in the NHS; the minimum wage; a sound economy. It has been suggested that Blair is now a full-hearted convert to higher public spending. I have my doubts; but he is certainly the author of the "clear choices" strategy, including the decisive break with Baroness Thatcher.
So let us go, at least some way, with the private thoughts of senior ministers. What would this landslide mean? It does not necessarily make things easier for risk-averse politicians. First, and most importantly, it would remove the best answer for not being more radical. Labour ministers have always argued that they needed two full parliaments to implement their programme of reform. Well, they would have it. The second term would be assured; even the problems of long-term underinvestment can be tackled in two parliamentary lifetimes.
There would be no further need to trim and tack to appease the Daily Mail. Gordon Brown has made clear that there will be no high jinks with the economy as long as he's in control, but he will be able to claim an overwhelming round of applause from the electorate for his slow but steady programme of investing in public services. Expect yet more money to improve schools, hospitals and transport, coupled with demands for better value for the public's money in the form of higher performance. And maybe the Fabians' thoughts on how to raise higher taxes without a revolt would be looked at seriously.
But then there's the euro. Many people around the Cabinet table want Blair to admit reality, announce that the economic and political hurdles to entry are too high for the lifetime of the next parliament, and concentrate on other, less domestically controversial things - political reform, enlargement of the EU, defending the rights of nations. That way, he avoids a referendum, which it is hard to see him winning, keeps the Tories floundering for an identity, and prevents any split with his Chancellor. Could Blair, however, justify giving up on this long-cherished ambition? How would he explain it, with a second landslide under his belt, to his European partners? They would assume that all his pro-Europeanism was bad faith all along. What would he say to Peter Mandelson? What would he say to his shaving mirror? This is the great test, the moral challenge. A landslide makes it much harder.
Third, a landslide will affect the style of government. For a start, it offers Blair the opportunity to serve two full terms and go down in history as the first ever Labour prime minister to do so. Whatever promises he has made to Brown about gliding out gracefully, not even the Chancellor's most optimistic supporters expect them to be kept. And once it becomes clear that Blair is there to stay, much of the infighting, which is essentially about post-Blair positioning, could abate, or at least shift down a generation, to the likes of Charles Clarke, Peter Hain, Patricia Hewitt and Yvette Cooper.
Then there is "the project", the prospect of a formal anti-Tory coalition with the Lib Dems. With Charles Kennedy less eagerly energetic about the whole idea, a big Labour majority would finish it off for the duration. Electoral reform? Hardly.
However, there is a downside to all this. Those of us who worry about the over-mightiness of the executive and the decay of parliament would have even more to agonise over. There would be more arrogance, less fastidious constitutionalism.
In sum, then, a landslide victory might well be good for Britain's old-fashioned social-democratic agenda - "cautiously redistribute and invest", rather than "tax and spend" - but less good for the bigger vision of a reshaped, wholly European, reformed state of the kind that the new Labourites always wanted. It would secure the Brownite agenda, even though it would probably also scupper Brown's hopes of succeeding. Now there's a paradox to chew on: the bigger the majority, the less historic the outcome.
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