LONDON: It was a race that could have been won. Should have been won. With a growing immigrant population, mixed income groups, blocks of public housing next to upscale new coffee shops and a location along the Thames as it snakes westward out of the city, the borough of Hammersmith & Fulham has been a Labour Party stronghold for much of the last 40 years.
Schools in its eclectic neighbourhoods cater to students who speak more than 130 languages. The British Broadcasting Corporation has its headquarters here, and the Labour-run local council has built public housing, slashed crime rates, cut fees for services to the elderly and helped foster improvements in school test scores.
To no avail. Lashed by the coattails of a national Labour Party government in freefall, the Labour councillors of Hammersmith & Fulham got trounced in this month’s local elections, retaining only 13 of 46 seats, and handed the Conservatives their first overall majority here since 1968.
Similar results across England, with a loss of 319 council seats, are an urgent warning bell for Tony Blair, who had been poised to become the longest-serving Labour prime minister in British history. The charismatic leader is fighting back a revolt within his party and, even more worrying, growing doubts across the country about his vision of a union between a nurturing state and private-sector-style management.
“Tony Blair has become like Margaret Thatcher was at the end of her reign,” said Kathy Hutchinson, a 58-year-old maternity nurse, who was having coffee one recent afternoon in the bustling north end of the borough. “He thinks he’s bigger than anyone else, and people are turning back to the Conservatives, because there’s not a lot else to vote for, really.”
It has been what some described as a ‘perfect storm’ month of scandals and political thunder bursts followed by the reshuffling of half of Blair’s government, and it only worsened the deep split in his party that opened up over the war in Iraq.
Now, Blair’s departure has become not a question of if, but when.
The British media reported over the weekend that Blair told members of his cabinet about his plans to step down by July 2007. Blair may be lucky to hang on that long before handing power to Gordon Brown, the ambitious chancellor of the exchequer, recognised for the moment as the obvious successor to the Labour throne.
Brown is popular among the London intelligentsia, but nationally he has worse poll numbers than Blair against the Conservatives — all the more reason, to many Labourites, that Blair must step aside and allow his onetime ally to build a sheen in the premiership before the next general election.
“We have a prime minister who says he will not fight the next election and everyone recognises has done a very, very good job,” Brown said recently. “He has also said that he wants a stable and orderly transition and that he wants the chance to be able to organise that.”
Brown so far has shunned an open challenge, but dozens of Labour members of Parliament have circulated a letter demanding a timetable for a new Labour leadership’s entrance into the spotlight. The sense that time is running out was fuelled by a pair of opinion polls that showed Labour with its lowest ratings since 1992. Blair’s own approval, in one Daily Telegraph poll, fell to 26 per cent.
The Conservatives have been having a field day. The party’s youthful new leader, David Cameron, recently launched a rollicking attack in the House of Commons that was so funny and relentless that even some of Blair’s allies couldn’t help smiling. Blair, never one to back off from a political dogfight, for once was caught without rejoinders. The Guardian called it ‘a turning point, the moment when the young pretender asserts his authority over the aging monarch’.
In Hammersmith & Fulham, longtime Blair loyalists such as Stephen Burke, the once-popular Labour council chairman who lost his seat in the recent elections after 10 years in office, are having doubts.
“I’ve always seen Tony Blair as an asset. He’s won three general elections,” Burke said. “But this election was the first time when I began to wonder whether that asset was beginning to wane.”
This small, densely populated borough on the western edge of inner London has slipped out of Labour’s grasp in part because of demographics and simple politics. The tightly clustered Victorian-era row houses are getting new hardwood floors, revamped lofts and selling for $1.5 million and up. Young professional couples are moving in with little appreciation for Labour’s spending on schools and elder care.
In the north-end neighbourhoods — a panorama of immigrant families, public housing blocks and second-hand shops — Labour didn’t do nearly as good a job of getting out the vote as the Tories did.
In part, analysts say, Blair is the victim of the popular malaise that sets in with any government that is approaching a decade in power.
“The British public will only tolerate a political leader for, absolute tops, seven or eight years. And after that, they become restless, tired, miserable and want a change,” said Tony Travers, a researcher at the London School of Economics. “Blair at nine years is well into extra time, as they say in British football.”
But there’s more to the story, and it has beset Blair’s government across Britain: a growing sense that government has failed to deliver on its pledge to turn around chronically ailing institutions such as the National Health Service and the schools through cash infusions and better management.
The crisis in health reform got so bad that Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt was heckled at a nurses conference last month as she tried to justify major spending cuts and as many as 100,000 layoffs that would accompany the government’s new market-oriented healthcare model.
In Hammersmith & Fulham, the Conservatives pointed out at every opportunity that residents of an adjoining Tory-led borough were paying a little more than half as much in local council taxes.
“We have a major teaching hospital in our borough under threat of closure or serious downsizing. They’ve hired hundreds of people in the last few years, and they’re running the second-highest deficit in the country,” said Stephen Greenhalgh, the Conservative Party’s new council leader in Hammersmith & Fulham.
“Our secondary schools, they’re officially failing,” he said. “People want to see that all this money they’re spending is resulting in either a visible improvement, or as they say, give us some of that money back.”—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service
