Opinion - Editorials   

New Labour's time of troubles

On Saturday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair turned 53 but the mood in his party was far from celebratory. Despite those mandatory smiles got up for television cameras, a sense of doom and gloom was all too apparent. The birthday celebrant looked exhausted after a nightmarish week in which his Government tottered from one crisis to another — and the Labour Party got a drubbing in the May 4 local elections pushing it into third place behind the Tories and the Liberal Democrats in terms of share of the national vote. This was an all-time low for a party that once took pride in its grass-roots loyalties. The mocking headlines ("Nightmare on Downing Street," "The last stand," "Blair's bloody nose," "Is this the end?") that greeted Mr. Blair on his birthday were a far cry from the heady atmosphere nine years ago when he led New Labour to a historic victory, promising a "new dawn." Arguably, the last few weeks have been the worst of Mr. Blair's third term in office, with echoes of the final days of John Major's Conservative Government when it was hit by allegations of sleaze and incompetence. "This feels like the beginning of the end," noted The Guardian's columnist Jonathan Freedland arguing that, for the first time, Labour was beginning to see the "possibility of a defeat" in a general election.

Any talk of a Labour meltdown may be exaggerated but danger signals are clearly up. Disillusionment with Mr. Blair's agenda of creeping privatisation and his alliance with the U.S. President George Bush have been compounded by a deepening power struggle within the Government, leaving the field free for the Conservatives who did extremely well in last week's elections under their new and youthful leader, David Cameron. But rather than address the issues at the heart of Labour's troubles, Mr. Blair seems to be preoccupied with shoring up his own position as pressure grows on him to exit. The Cabinet reshuffle he announced on Friday, even as election results were still coming in, have been compared to "re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic." Indeed changes such as the removal of Jack Straw from the Foreign Office, apparently because of his softer line on Iran and Iraq, not to mention his proximity to Chancellor Gordon Brown — Mr. Blair's arch rival — are likely to send all the wrong signals. In normal circumstances, the appointment of Margaret Beckett as Britain's first-ever woman Foreign Secretary should have been a cause for celebration, but in the current febrile atmosphere it has been overshadowed by accusations that Ms. Beckett's promotion has less to do with a genuine desire to break the glass ceiling in the male-dominated Foreign Office than with Mr. Blair's determination to enlarge the circle of loyalists around him. We know what shuffling deckchairs did for the Titanic. Blairite New Labour is a house badly divided, and public confidence in a party that promised so much a decade ago seems to be slipping away.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

New Labour's time of troubles
BJP versus BJP
A government struggles to stay afloat
Blair's successor ends Mystery Cat role
Blair dares his foes to come and get him
A time to celebrate Freud
On a low key ... and some gaps
Plagiarism and modern publishing
Timely action
Raid on Chautala
Kargil war
Sign of the times
Not justified
Let him run
Immortal melodies

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu