Politics June/July 2005

POLITICS
Downfall in Downing Street: echoes on the Dimbovita

by Tom Gallagher
June/July 2005

The British parliamentary election of 5 May offered some similarities with last year’s elections in Romania despite the contrasting electoral system and indeed the very different electoral issues at the centre of the contest.

Tony Blair’s second government had a record of economic achievement. Working-class families and poor neighbourhoods had benefited from its policies of redistribution. But economic issues did not dominate the campaign. Instead it was Blair’s character and trustworthiness that were central themes. His decision to join with the United States in invading Iraq returned to haunt him. His charm and ease of manner which made it seem that he could walk on water in 1997, the year of his first landslide victory, have been replaced by suspicion of his slipperiness. John Gray, the political philosopher wrote in April that “Blair’s peculiar mix of cynicism, bad judgment and messianic zeal has left Labour demoralised and the government deeply distrusted.”

His unpopularity even among many Labour supporters meant that Blair was kept away from the electorate. He spoke at televised private rallies (not public meetings) in which the audience were handpicked party loyalists. He refused to debate on television with the opposition party leaders. His appearances were carefully stage-managed in case he collided with real voters who had a grievance for which they blamed him personally. Campaign tours to arouse the faithful were scrapped in favour of the prime minister strolling in suburbia and appearing to casually buy two ice creams, handing one to his great rival Gordon Brown in a synthetic display of unity for the television cameras. “Tony at ease in his bubble,” as one astute news editor remarked.

Adrian Nastase’s government was not without its economic successes either, but they had not been spread widely enough for it to enjoy enthusiastic support. In his race for the presidency, Nastase also appeared inaccessible. His character, wealth, and intentions if he became president were major issues that overshadowed policy matters. He appeared friendless even inside his own party because of his aloof managerial style. His stormy relationship with Iliescu was a father-son conflict which mirrored the fratricidal one between Blair and Gordon Brown, his finance minister and former close ally who had turned into a bitter rival. Like Blair, Nastase tried to avoid having real debates with his key rivals. But absolute control of the election campaign on television was beyond even him. And the last television confrontation with Traian Basescu proved to be his nemesis.

A very narrow range of issues was pushed by the apparatchiks in charge of the party campaigns. Europe, road charging, pension reforms, the banning of fox hunting, and most foreign policy issues were hardly discussed. The Conservative Party – the Tories – actually agreed with much of Tony Blair’s New Labour agenda of offering greater choice and diversity in education and health care. But many hated him for stealing some of their ideological clothes and their voters in prosperous, suburban “Middle England.”

Immigration was the one issue where Michael Howard, the Tory leader made a sharp distinction with Labour. If elected, he promised that Parliament would set an annual limit on the number of immigrants, be more efficient in ensuring that asylum seekers were genuinely fleeing persecution, and pull out of those treaties which prevented Britain having full control of its borders. Howard’s charge that Labour actually wanted to increase immigration and did not have the means to regulate who entered the country drew blood. British society is changing at bewildering speed, the country being unrecognisable for people who have returned after an absence of ten years. There is some evidence that his arguments struck a chord with ethnic minorities and even recent immigrants who, according to the outspoken journalist Melanie Phillips “understand that illegal scams and unlimited numbers threaten the national values that they found attractive in the first place.”

Labour’s vote fell six per cent because it lost the support of the liberal-minded middle-classes not just over Iraq but also over a range of other mainly non-economic issues. Blair survived because of the loyalty of working-class supporters in the north of the island, the equivalent of the peasantry and small-town dwellers of southern and eastern Romania. Like Nastase, his image and lifestyle were far removed from these people but without them, he had no hope of going on.

Labour won an historic third term with only 36.2 per cent of the vote but 55 per cent of the seats. Hardly more than 20 per cent of the entire electorate supported the party. Indeed only 60 per cent of voters participated in the election. An electoral system based on 646 constituencies which elect the candidate who comes first, enormously benefited him. It is a system that rewards parties like Labour whose support is concentrated in regional strongholds. It currently penalises the centre-right parties whose support is spread more evenly across the country.

But this system has important democratic safeguards even though it usually disproportionately rewards the party that comes first. It is the party branches in the constituency which select the candidate not the headquarters in London. If London dares to impose a candidate there can be trouble. In Wales, a woman lawyer from London was imposed on the seat with the biggest Labour majority in Britain under the system of trying to ensure a minimum number of women MPs by having all-women selection contests. She lost in a swing of 49 per cent to a respected local activist. The main contenders have to pay attention to local concerns and the successful candidate must continue to do so after being elected.

The contrast with the dismal reality in Romania is obvious where deputies often become ghosts in the judets which elected them (if they were even known there to begin with). But in Britain the real electoral campaign centres only on 20 per cent of the seats which are seen as unpredictable and where the opposition has a real chance of victory. The party machines direct lavish attention at perhaps no more than half a million voters in these seats whose loyalties to a single party are known to be weak.

Blair dearly wanted to see the political demise of his most exacting critic over the Iraq war, George Galloway, expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 after urging British troops in Iraq to mutiny. Galloway is an eloquent political troublemaker who, like Vadim Tudor, attracts the discontented and even some idealists to whatever is his cause but then often strains their loyalty to breaking point by his egotistical behaviour. He co-wrote an account of the 1989-90 events in Romania, Downfall, which still reads well 14 years later. He was in Bucharest at the time of the coal miners onslaught on the city in June 1990. Iliescu emerges as a figure with some justice on his side even though Galloway had a hair-raising encounter with miners intent on beating up anyone who resembled their image of what an intellectual looked like: “Caught out wearing jeans and a camera, I had to do a lot of negotiating at the point of a stick to avoid a re-arrangement of my features,” Galloway says in the book.

His electoral target was a hitherto popular Labour MP, Oona King who had stayed loyal to Blair over Iraq. But her constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow in London’s East End had a large Muslim population. They were mainly Bangladeshis, poorer and more culturally conservative than Muslims from India and Pakistan. Galloway attracted enormous hostility from much of the media which reminded viewers and readers that in 1994 he had told Saddam Hussein: “Sir, I salute your courage, strength, and indefatigability.” Before the election the constituency had witnessed a tasteless and disturbing racist outburst at a remembrance ceremony to commemorate the deaths of 134 people in one block of flats – of whom the vast majority were Jews – in the last attack of V2 missiles in the second world war, the weapon Hitler hoped would turn the war in his favour. Young Muslims threw vegetables and eggs at those attending the ceremony, including King who is part-Jewish (though known as a black MP). Galloway went on to defeat her narrowly but he claimed that he had to flee for his life when threatened by some 30 Islamists. They denounced him as a false prophet and claimed that voting was un-Islamic. Dangerous passions have been whipped up in this hitherto placid constituency which could have alarming consequences.

The election result has created a healthier picture. Blair will have to listen more to Parliament where Labour deputies who distrust his presidential style are well represented. There is a great paradox here as the right-wing columnist Bruce Anderson has recounted: “From the late Middle Ages to the late 19th century, the Commons regularly made trouble for monarchs and prime ministers. Then with democracy and the growth of the party system it was gradually neutered.”

But the next parliament is likely to be the most independent one in living memory. Blair has lost control of much of his own party. It might be too much, to claim as one commentator has, that “politically, Tony Blair is nothing more than an unburied corpse. His continuing decomposition will be the main theme of the next few months.” At least 30 of his MPs now openly call for him to quit, some being former close colleagues in government. He was almost the only senior world figure not to be in Moscow for the celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war. This was because he found it impossible to make the key appointments that he wanted for his government and had to spend several days trying to salvage his authority. The parallels with Romania now, where Iliescu, unable to stand again for president and likely to be rejected even if he could, has been discarded by his own party, are only too obvious.

Controversial policies dreamt up by shadowy advisers which lack widespread support, such as super-casinos, top-up fees for university students, and identity cards may have to be rethought or dropped. Power will swing back from the prime minister’s office to the civil service. Blair’s policy of surrounding himself with ideologically-driven and ambitious advisors who seize the business of policy-making from civil-servants is discredited, but it is hard to see his rival Brown treating top civil-servants as partners. Mo Mowlam, a former cabinet colleague has written that in “his management style he is even more arrogant and exclusive than Tony.”

Like Bunicuta Nelu (Iliescu), Blair is overwhelmed by the aphrodisiac of power. He is unlikely to go quietly unless there is some kind of palace coup – or Iraq tests his credibility to destruction. Brown may not want to seize the crown too quickly as there is a referendum on Europe due which many say it will be impossible for Labour to win. But as followers of the Nastase and indeed Geoana sagas know, behind many a strong man there is an even stronger woman. Cherie Blair is a top defence lawyer in the London courts who it is thought is preparing to enter politics for the safe seat of Knowsley in Liverpool, her home city. The current holder Eddie O’Hara will be known to Romanians and others trying to prevent the Rosia Montana gold mine project going ahead as the politician sent by the Council of Europe to write a report on the controversy. It was one which stated that those who wanted to send in the bulldozers and the dynamiters to this unspoilt part of Romania had the best arguments on their side.

The general election in Britain offers food for thought for the various Romanian contenders. Mircea Geoana who uneasily wears the PSD crown might reflect that the Tories, once the natural party of government, have lost for the third time in a row because they failed to carry out any real modernisation. The ghosts of the divisive Mrs Thatcher and the ineffectual John Major (Tory prime ministers from 1979 to 1997) still haunt the party just as the legacy of Nastase and Iliescu shapes today’s PSD.

There are lessons here also for Traian Basescu. He enjoys some of the popularity Blair used to have. But remote, centralised decision-making could cause it to vanish unless he carries out real institutional reforms that ensure political progress in Romania is not dependent on the actions of one man. The British system of government, with a strong centralised executive allows decisions to be made in a hurry. It contrasts with coalition-based governments across most of the EU states where it is less easy to carry out radical reforms. Currently, with four ill-matched bedfellows in government Romania resembles the continental model. But as Blair’s Britain and Nastase’s Romania have recently shown, majority government is no panacea, especially if it results in autocratic or remote government that further builds up distrust between the citizen and the political class.

Tom Gallagher is Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University, England.