Who should British voters opposed to privatisation and the Iraq war vote for?
British voters opposed to the occupation of Iraq, the privatisation of public services and the shameful inequality of Britain in 2005 — a majority of the British people, according to opinion polls — face a problem at next month’s election.
In most constituencies, they will have no one to vote for because none of the three main parties will be offering a meaningful alternative on what are central issues in political and social life. But, of course, it’s not only the voters who have a problem. So does the government — because the majority of those who are most angry have in the past been committed Labour voters. And polling evidence suggests that millions of them could stay at home or switch to the Liberal Democrats or a protest party as a result.
New Labour has itself to blame. The political boil of the war could have been lanced if Prime Minister Tony Blair had been induced to step down last year, when the scale of the disaster in Iraq and the deception used to sell it had become fully apparent. The ousting of Blair would have demonstrated that the government had been held to account and allowed a shift of policy.
Government supporters who insist that the dominating political controversy of the past four years can be safely ignored for the purposes of the election are dreaming.
Of course, the war does not affect British people’s daily lives. But awareness of the crime that has been carried out, the scale of the slaughter, the falsehoods peddled to justify it and the contempt for public opinion it involved runs deep in Britain.
So does revulsion for the craven relationship with the United States that underpinned it. But New Labour has little clue as to how to defuse visceral public hostility over the debacle.
Income inequality has increased during Labour’s period in office — mainly because of the government’s refusal to raise tax for the highest earners — while wealth inequality has ballooned.
But in all these cases there is no clear way for voters to make their views felt because the main opposition party either agrees with the government or is more extreme.
Many disillusioned Labour voters seem bound to be drawn to the obvious alternative, the Liberal Democrats. But although the party originally opposed going to war and backs a 50% tax rate for high earners, it has supported the occupation of Iraq and moved sharply to the right on the economy and public services, backing privatisation of health provision and the private finance initiative — while opposing trade union rights and a national minimum wage. In any case, in the large majority of seats likely to change hands, votes for the Liberal Democrats risk delivering them to the Tories.
The only possible outcome of the election is a Labour or Tory government, and it would be absurd to discount either Labour’s achievements or the domestic policy differences between them. But there is also no avoiding the fact that hostility to New Labour is at such a pitch that many voters will not support the party again while Blair is leader and will instead look for points of pressure and protest.
There is no ”correct” answer to the problem of how to punish New Labour without punishing the British people, let alone how to elect a Labour government with a small enough majority to encourage pressure for change. The fact that vast swathes of public opinion effectively now have no voice inside the main parties demonstrates that the political system isn’t working. A two-party system can only function if both main parties are broad coalitions. By moving Labour so far to the right while silencing those on his left, Blair has made that impossible.
The battle inside Labour for a change of direction will have to begin the day after the election — or the current process of political and electoral disintegration may become unstoppable. — Â