Blair must now show he stands for something more than Bush's war

[struggle4progress]

Forget the figures. The tally of seats won and councils lost can be interpreted to mean anything from "no Tory breakthrough" (John Reid) to "Blair must go" (Clare Short).

Only remember that in the local elections Labour was even more unpopular than the votes suggested and that the dismal result in the European ballot was better than the party deserved. Then turn your attention to the problem that the prime minister must solve during the next 12 months. How does he resurrect the idea that he actually stands for something besides justifying the war in Iraq and at the same time being re-elected?

The growing band of Labour MPs who think that the whole dilemma can be resolved by a palace revolution are fantasists. They should put out of their minds all thought of what they would tell a good fairy who landed on the terrace of the House of Commons and offered to grant their dearest wish. A year sighing for a new leader is a year wasted. Hope lies in a change (albeit marginal) in policy and philosophy and the realisation that the government has to begin playing it straight.
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Redemption for the government lies in respecting the hopes and fears of its traditional supporters. Drawing a line under Iraq would help. But the disastrous decision to follow George Bush to war - and to justify the folly with fake evidence about WMD - is now regarded as no more than an example of Blair's shortcomings. He has to prove that he stands for something - something with which families earning less than £50,000 a year can identify.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1238219,00.html


Translation: Blair has really screwed Labor over.

[struggle4progress]

1. Can This Man Beat Blair?

We had excellent results," British Conservative leader Michael Howard said at a postelection rally last week, and he had reason to declare victory: his Tories picked up 38% of the total vote in last week's local elections across England and Wales, according to BBC post-election projections. With the perennial also-ran Liberal Democrats grabbing 29% of the vote, it was Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party that came in third, with just 26% — the first time a British ruling party had fared so poorly. Blair's support for the Iraq war made him so radioactive that he barely campaigned, and Home Secretary David Blunkett declared himself "mortified" by the battering Labour took. But the Tories' happy days looked likely to be here and gone by Sunday, when the European Parliament results were due. British voters remain so deeply divided about what place they want for their country within the European Union that they were expected to hand more than 10% of the parliamentary vote to an anti-E.U. splinter group called the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP). And the UKIP was likely to pull votes from the famously (but more moderately) Euro-skeptical Tories — who stood to lose as many as a third of their M.E.P. seats, bringing Howard's celebration to a quick end.

UKIP's brand of fire-breathing Euro- hatred — they want Britain out of the E.U., period — was projected to show up in results from other countries too, including Belgium, Sweden and Poland, where the Samoobrona Party, which wants to renegotiate Poland's terms of entry into the E.U., was expected to take as many as 13 seats. According to one poll conducted for the European Parliament, Euro-skeptic M.E.P.s will constitute about a tenth of its membership, and possibly hold the balance of power on some issues. As E.U. leaders assemble in Brussels this week in hopes of finally agreeing on a long-delayed constitution that is anathema to these newly invigorated skeptics, this election was one more crack in the plaster of the European project.

Despite its poor showing, Labour avoided a total meltdown, allowing Blair to once again scrape through with his political skin more or less intact. The newspapers have left him for dead countless times, and last week was no different. His political capital is running very low, and backbenchers made the usual calls for him to go, but Blair — fresh from playing statesman at the G-8 meeting in Georgia — was having none of it. "It's a question of holding our nerve and seeing it through," he said. Which may have been one way of asking: Who's going to make me go?
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But that demographic may not be enough to get the Tories back to Downing Street. A distinguished lawyer with a precise manner and a long public career, including four years as John Major's hard-line Home Secretary, Howard is not a natural pick for young, multicultural Britons or those who want sweeping change. Frustration with politics as usual was a big factor in the protest vote that flowed to UKIP, which ran a brilliant insurgent campaign centered on the charismatic, perma-tanned Robert Kilroy-Silk, a former Labour M.P. who hosted a TV talk show for 17 years until he had to give it up in January after calling Islam a religion of "limb amputators." No one expects UKIP to make much of a dent in the general election, expected next spring, but the problem for Tories is UKIP's hypnotic effect on much of its own right wing. Howard is trying to position his party as responsibly Euro-skeptic, saying Britain should stay inside the E.U. but work to reform it. This is smart territory to inhabit. A majority of British voters oppose joining the euro and the European constitution — but they still want to stay in the E.U.
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http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/article/0,13005,901040621-650685-2,00.html