BIRMINGHAN, England, April 28 (UPI) -- This has not been one of Britain's great election campaigns. There has been no surging national mood for change of the kind that unleashed the Labor landslides of 1945 and 1997, or that first brought Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979. Despite the success of British arms in Iraq, there has been little patriotism and no military vainglory of the kind that kept Thatcher in power after her Falklands victory, now almost a quarter-century ago.
This has been an election of spin and manipulation and preying shamelessly on the gullibility of voters. Prime Minister Tony Blair has tried to convince the voters he and his dour Scottish finance minister Gordon Brown are solid allies, locked in mutual admiration, even as their respective aides intrigue and leak and backbite against one another.
Whenever the two men are together, and the mechanics of an election campaign require this quite often, the body language shrieks of Brown's impatience to claim his long-promised inheritance. Blair, having at last pledged to step down at some point in the next three or four years, is clearly in no great hurry to pass on the reins of power and seems at time to relish the fretting ambition that even Brown's Scottish self-discipline cannot contain.
There is little secret about this. Books and television programs and memoirs and endless media reports have made their mutual animosity, Blair's jealousy of Brown's reputation for trustworthy solidity, and Brown's hunger for Blair's job, into one of the best-known facts of public life in Britain. It would take real effort for a voter not to know of this tension at the top of government. But for public consumption, the voters are to be gulled into assuming they are comrades in arms, good friends and loyal allies, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
The Conservatives have been equally guilty of trying to con the voters into denying the evidence of their own eyes. For public consumption, the Conservatives are a civilized, tolerant and gentlemanly party, who are just as committed as Blair to keeping the National Health Services and the welfare state, but are so much better managers of money that they do so and still cut taxes. Moreover, the Conservatives like to assert they are so much better diplomats that they could renegotiate Britain's terms of adhesion to the European Union, get on even closer terms with the American allies and still play a leading role on the world stage, as befits the world's fourth-largest economy.
But the voters know that the last time they were in power, the Tories made such a hash of their relations with Europe that they were barely on speaking terms with half the neighbors. The Tories presided over a disastrous policy in the Balkans that saw British troops being killed on support of a feckless policy that neither protected the Bosnian Muslims nor brought peace nor satisfied the Serbs. And the voters also know perfectly well that the Conservative leader Michael Howard is currently banned from President George W. Bush's White House for having the nerve to criticize Blair's own stance on the Iraq war.
This is understandable. Politicians always stretch the truth during an election campaign. But the Conservatives have plumbed new depths. Under the influence of their Australian strategist Linton Crosbie, the Conservatives have learned to send out subliminal signals of their hostility to immigration and to refugees and asylum-seekers, to Europe and to abortion, in the expectation of collecting prejudiced votes without ever publicly admitting to any prejudice of their own. Indeed, so determined are the Conservatives to promote the image rather than the reality that they swiftly fired one of their ministers-in-waiting for suggesting that once in power, they would cut taxes much more than they dared publicly admit. This was a rare case of a politician losing his career for being caught telling the truth.
The latest deliberate falsehood is that the Labor strategists have been shocked, shocked, shocked by a leak of their internal opinion polls that suggested that they could yet lose the election, despite enjoying a 5-10 percent lead in the opinion polls. The internal polls suggest the battle is very much closer, indeed almost even, in the 100 most closely fought constituencies, known in English jargon as the marginal seats where Labor's majority is most easily overturned. The internal polls also suggest the two parties are neck and neck when it comes to voters who are determined to vote.
What this means is that Blair could lose the election if his lukewarm supporters do not bother to vote. Labor must motivate its apathetic base to get out and vote next week -- and the best way to do that is to leak opinion polls suggesting the Tories could win after all. The Conservatives are thus said to be going around the country and stirring up apathy to suppress the vote, and give themselves a chance. Or as Labor's campaign strategist Alan Milburn put it, "they are just playing dead."
Labor campaign staffers, speaking on condition of anonymity, say the only question is whether Blair keeps a majority in the House of Commons of more than a hundred seats. His current majority is 161 seats. The more seats he gets, the longer Blair can fend off Brown. But the style of election being fought by both sides, in its cynical manipulation of truth by shameless spin-doctors, seems to be irritating the voters almost as much as it bores them. For an election that will be decided on turnout, both parties seem currently best at turning the voters off.
