Politics by Another Means

David Lodge is the author, most recently, of the novel “Author, Author.” (The New York Times, 04/05/05):

I was in America at the time of the presidential election last November, on a short book tour. It wasn't the ideal time to promote a novel about Henry James, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to observe at first hand the climax of the campaign, which had been reported with intense interest in the British news media.

I was in Cambridge, Mass., on election night, and went to give a reading at Harvard Book Store the next evening. My escort warned me that there might not be anybody there. She, like almost everyone I knew or met on John Kerry's home turf, was devastated by the result, and was seriously thinking of emigrating. The bookstore, happily, was full, but I have never seen such a collection of glum faces. I read to them about Henry James's feelings of despair after he was booed on stage at the first night of his play "Guy Domville." It seemed to strike a chord.

It's hard to imagine two elections more different in character than that one and tomorrow's British general election. Americans faced a choice between two starkly opposed sets of fundamental values and priorities, and the narrow margin of George W. Bush's victory revealed a nation deeply divided. The British picture is much more confused and confusing, partly because there are three major parties instead of two, and partly because these parties have shifted their ideological positions in recent times.

The Labor Party under Tony Blair has occupied much of the center-right territory formerly held by the Conservatives, while the Liberal Democrats, who used to offer a wishy-washy compromise between those two, have moved to the left of Labor. So, as the columnist Simon Jenkins put it in The Times of London the other day, if you want a Conservative government vote Labor, if you want a Labor government vote Liberal Democrat, and if you want a Liberal government vote Conservative. Got that?

Most polls have predicted that Labor will be returned with a comfortable majority, but polls that count only respondents who say they are certain to vote make the gap much narrower. There is widespread dissatisfaction, mainly related to the war in Iraq, among people who supported Labor in the last two elections, but nobody really knows what proportion of them will reluctantly vote Labor, or register a protest vote for one of the other parties, or abstain.

A curious game of bluff and double bluff is being played. Many disaffected Labor supporters would like to see Prime Minister Tony Blair punished by having his parliamentary majority drastically reduced, but would be appalled if a Conservative government were actually elected. The Labor Party is deliberately exaggerating that risk in its campaigning to scare the hesitant into voting Labor. The Conservatives are urging dissatisfied voters to "send Tony Blair a message" rather than to vote for their own leader, Michael Howard. And the Liberal Democrats are saying, in effect, Labor is bound to win, but we would provide a more progressive opposition than the Tories.

Even in the era of sophisticated polling, the British electorate retains the capacity to surprise. Labor lost to the Conservatives in 1970 in spite of being ahead in the polls to the very end; John Major won comfortably for the Conservatives in 1992 in what was supposed to be a neck-and-neck race; nobody, including Tony Blair, predicted the scale of Labor's landslide victory in 1997.

The British are by and large very reticent about their political allegiances and this makes electoral prediction difficult. I was astonished when I first went to America, in the mid-1960's, by the way people (these were mostly academic people) discussed politics eagerly and knowledgeably in casual conversation, and made their views very clear. I hardly ever discussed politics with my colleagues at the University of Birmingham, and I had no idea how most of them voted.

Many say that is because there are fixed dates for elections in America, so campaigning in effect never stops; whereas under the British system, with the prime minister able to call a general election at any time he likes, the campaign lasts only a few weeks. But I think it goes deeper, into national temperament and cultural conditioning.

In polite society, religion and politics were traditionally taboo topics of conversation in England, considered too personal and potentially divisive for open discussion. This code of etiquette lingers throughout the social scale. For instance, a woman named Barbara has cleaned for my family one morning a week for the last 25 years. In the interests of research for this article, I asked her the other day how she was going to vote and she said, with only half-simulated indignation, "I'm not going to tell you!" - as if I had enquired about the most intimate details of her married life. She then confided that she and her husband never told each other how they voted. Now that's what I call a secret ballot.

The only friends with whom I have regular and animated political conversations are an American-Canadian couple who are near neighbors. They have settled here and are registered voters. On the American political spectrum they would be firm Democrats. They are only too glad to tell me how they are going to vote tomorrow: Liberal Democrat, to express their disillusionment with, and indeed outrage at, Tony Blair's government.

There is no chance that their candidate will be elected, but they hope that if enough people in the country make the same choice we will end up with a Labor government that has a much reduced majority and might even have to make a deal with the Liberal Democrats. If Britain had proportional representation that is what probably would happen, but like the United States, we have a first-past-the-post system, which makes the results in marginal constituencies crucial.

I live in the constituency of Edgbaston, in Birmingham, which happens to be an interesting one, as well as a nice place to live. It's that rare thing, a green and leafy inner-city suburb only 5 or 10 minutes' drive from downtown. The entrepreneurs of the industrial revolution built their villas here, to windward of their factory chimneys, and today's affluent middle class have inherited these amenities, together with the University of Birmingham.

The constituency also encompasses significant numbers of voters in the lower income groups, but it was always a safe Tory seat until 1997, when it went to Labor on a huge swing of 11 percent. It was one of the first results to be announced on election night - it always is - and was the first indication of the scale of the Labor landslide.

The successful candidate was Gisela Stuart, one of many youngish women in the new Parliament sometimes referred to in the news media as Blair's Babes. In 2001, by which time the nation's honeymoon with New Labor was well over, there was a small swing in favor of the Tories, but Ms. Stuart held on to the seat.

IT would need a swing of about 6 percent for the Tories to unseat her tomorrow, so it is not quite a "marginal," but the local Labor Party is running scared. Gisela Stuart went out of her way to support the government's policy on Iraq, and so has not endeared herself to progressive middle-class voters like my American-Canadian friends. But nobody knows how many of them there are, or how determined they are to hurt Labor - and that is true of the country at large.

The election has for many people narrowed down to a simple choice - between rewarding a government that has managed the economy successfully and achieved a modest redistribution of income and improvement in health and education, or punishing them for leading the country into a war of dubious legality and still dauntingly uncertain consequences. I opposed the war, but I did not find it an easy or obvious judgment to make, and I would have found it even more difficult in Tony Blair's shoes, so I did not condemn him out of hand. I assumed he was a more reluctant participant in the war than recent evidence has shown him to be, and although I do not think he lied about the case for war, he was certainly economical with the truth in advocating it.

Even if Labor wins, he will never recover the broad-based respect and admiration he enjoyed in his first term, and many members of his own party hope that he will step down sooner rather than later as leader in favor of the chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. When you consider Mr. Blair's success in reshaping the Labor Party so that it occupied the vital middle ground of British politics and routed a Tory party that had been in power for nearly two decades, this fall from grace seems to me punishment enough for his failings.

I am basically a supporter of New Labor's domestic policies and that's why I will cast my vote for the party. My hunch is that there are enough people who feel the same way to return a Labor government with a workable majority. Look out for that early result from Edgbaston - it will indicate whether I was right.

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