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May 06, 2005

TONY BLAIR'S BLACK EYE

With pre-election opinion polls showing British support for the war in Iraq at its lowest point ever -- a little more than a third, a swing of some 25 points (depending on the poll) away from the majority support the Anglo-American invasion once enjoyed -- Tony Blair got bitch-slapped by the voters in Thursdy's parliamentary elections. As the elder statesman of the Labour left, Tony Benn, remarked on the BBC during its election-night coverage, if the alternative to Blair as prime minister had been anyone other than the reactionary, race-baiting Tory Michael Howard, Blair would have been out on his ear. In the end, fear of a Conservative return to power saved Blair from eviction -- for the moment. Benn thinks the drubbing Labor took means Blair won't last the year.

Iraq had dominated the final weeks of the campaign, and the last straw for many voters was the revelation of a memo by Blair's own attorney general warning the prime minister that the war was, indeed, illegal --  memo which became public as voters were making their final choices. Iraq crystallized voter discontent with Blair's lies, arrogance, and increasing centralization of power. Even in Blair's own constituency, an independent, single-issue anti-war candidate against him harvested only a thousand votes less than the Conservative candidate against the prime minister.

One Labour defeat that was making headlines --- the BBC labeling it a "shocker" -- was the defeat of a Blairite stalwart and war supporter by George Galloway, an expelled ex-Labour MP who was the candidate of the recently formed, anti-war Respect party. Galloway won despite having received a sustained drubbing from the press for the last couple of years as an apologist for Saddam Hussein (a not inaccurate chraracterization). I doubt, however, that Respect has much of an electoral future. The party is basically the creature of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party, with Galloway as their front man. And Galloway's victory was only possible because the constituency in which he ran had a huge Muslim population (with whom the attacks on Galloway undoubtedly helped him). Respect poured all its resources into a competent street campaign in that district, and it paid off -- Galloway turned a 10,000-plus vote Labour margin at the last election into a winning victory by some 800 votes for himself. But Galloway has already announced he'll stand down before the next election, and there is little support for Respect anywhere else in the country -- the sectarian haze that floats over the party makes it rather unappetizing to too many voters.

And what of the anti-war Liberal Democrats? Their leader, Charles Kennedy, was bleating post-election about a "return of third-party politics," but this is just whistling past the graveyard. The Lib Dems picked up just seven seats and increased their popular vote by only a couple of percentage points yesterday. If the Lib Dems can't do better than this in an optimum situation for them -- in which they could surf on the massive discontent with Labour and portray themselves as an alternative to the unappetizing Tory, Howard -- it's difficult to see how they can improve their performance in the future. Some of the younger Lib Dem MPs are among the most intelligent, creative, and progressive in Parliament, and many of the party's positions are substantially to the left of Labour's. For example, the Lib Dems appear to have done rather well among gay voters because of their aggressive defense of gay rights against the temporizing and sellouts by New Labour (notably, Blair's cave-in to the Church of England on sex education in the schools --  a rather lethal act, given the rising infection rates for HIV and other STDs among the young). But the Lib Dems have a habit of choosing unattractive Irish bullshitters as their party's leader: the last one, Paddy Ashdown, reminded one of a race-track tout (and dressed the part), while Charles Kennedy -- the current leader -- strikes one as an uncharismatic fellow who's trying to sell you a used car that won't get many miles to the gallon. Neither man had any intellectual depth.The Lib Dems seem destined to stagnate, rather than playing the balance-of-power roll of which they dream.

However, Blair's new majority will make it much more difficult -- if not impossible -- to follow Washington into new military adventures. For example, t is hard to see this new parliament swallowing military action against Iran, either by the U.S., or by its proxy, Israel. And certain national security state measures unpopular with the country -- like Blair's proposal for a national I.D. card -- will also now have very tough sledding. So, too, may some of Blair's plans for more privatization of government services.

And Blair will undoubtedly have a tough time selling the new European Constitution to the country -- especially if the French reject it in a referendum at the end of this month (although the latest public opinion polls show a Yes vote on the Constitution winning -- albeit quite narrowly -- for the first time in months, the result of a massive Yes campaign by the political and media establishments and the overwhelming exclusion of No advocates from television coverage. However, No sentiment is still majoritarian in both the Neterlands -- which votes a week after France -- and the Czech Republic).

Labour, then, is in a quandary. Blair's New Labour has adopted Thatcher-lite economics, and  emphasized law-and-order over civil liberties (Blair repeated the phrase "law-and-order" three times in his brief post-election victory speech). And, as Norman Birnbaum wrote in the chapter on Labour in his excellent book, "After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the 20th Century", even "more striking is Labour's acceptance of narrow limits on state action, its general eschewal of experimentalism....while the final difficulty with Blair's Third Way is its casualness about democracy itself." Like the U.S. Democratic Party, Blair's Labour is intellectually and programatically bankrupt, having jettisoned the remnants of its historic attempts to claim to be the vehicle of the have-nots to court the middle classes. (The intellectually challenging blog Lenin's Tomb has an accurate, capsule history of Labour's evolution over the last hundred years. What's past is prologue, after all. The Tomb is, however, a Respect supporter, and his review of Labour's origins nd evolution fails to address the question of why the more principled leaders of the Labour left  have chosen to remain in the party rather than bolt to create a new one. Thursday's elections, one may say, provide part of the answer: many progressive voters are too afraid of the reactionary Conservatives to risk deserting Labour entirely, and thus provide a substantial base for a new party. Socialist politics in Britain -- always of a different stripe and depth than those of socialist parties on the Continent, as both Birnbaum and Lenin's Tomb's history remind us -- are nearly dead as an electoral force.)

Still, voters yesterday did administer enough of a rebuff to Tony Blair to diminish considerably his ability to do even more damage to British democracy and the world's peace. And his days as Labour's leader appear to be numbered....

ABSTINENCE ONLY: Okay, so you're curious about sex and go to Google.  You search for "abstinence only".  This is what you find. (Check this out for a chuckle...)

THE STUDENT IN TEXAS ARRESTED FOR HECKLING ANN COULTER has an amusing account of the incident in a letter which appears on Daily Kos. You can read it by clicking here.

AFL-CIO: With the labor federation's International Affairs Department being slashed into nothingness by budget cuts, its useful to remember to what degree the AFL-CIO has long been a handmaiden of Wshington in foreign affairs. The latest issue of Monthly Review has a useful article on all this by Kim Scipes, "Labor Imperialism Redux? The AFL-CIO's Foreign Policy Since 1995."

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