17.06.1999

Euro bolt from blue

The Tories’ staggering victory in last week’s European Union elections hit New Labour like a bolt from the blue. The Conservative Party’s 36% of the vote earned it 36 out of the 84 seats, while Labour’s support fell to a remarkable 28%, and its number of seats was slashed from 62 in 1994 to just 29.

Despite last month’s local elections, when the Tories were running Labour close, Sunday night’s results were completely unexpected. Blair’s party is still running high in the opinion polls, with his own rating way above William Hague’s. But the very low turnout of 24% was a significant factor. Britain’s first national election under proportional representation also saw the UK Independence Party pick up three seats; the Green Party two.

Like the Tories, they were campaigning against the euro - the theme which dominated an otherwise low-key contest. Clearly Blair was more than a little distracted by the Balkans war, but what cost him was Labour’s virtual silence on the single currency, which Hague had ensured was the central question.

With opposition to Britain’s membership of European monetary union at 61%, according to a recent Guardian/ICM poll, Blair’s gamble on waiting for gradual acceptance of the euro in Britain to come through its successful adoption by the ‘first wave’ countries is now seen to have failed. Not wanting to speak out openly in favour of membership of Emu for fear of losing out electorally, Blair has been biding his time, hoping to eventually take advantage of a change in public opinion before launching a referendum campaign.

Big business has been banking on Blair being able to pull it off. It knows of no other strategy than backing closer European convergence. The Tories’ Euroscepticism is viewed as a dead end by British capital’s most dynamic sections, which have mostly switched its support away from the traditional party of the bourgeoisie to a suitably ‘modernised’ New Labour.

But Blair’s grand plan of first fashioning an acceptable replacement for the Tories and then introducing a totally new politics through wholesale constitutional reform has at last hit a snag. The EU election results have not only thrown into question his ‘softly, softly’ approach to the euro, but called into doubt his ability to implement PR for Westminster elections. Both are vital for his scheme of repositioning Labour in a dominant centre coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

So Blair’s honeymoon has suddenly come to an end. Not in the way the left has been stubbornly predicting for more than two years - through a “crisis of expectations” amongst the working class, giving rise to a mass upsurge of discontent from below - but through the strengthening of an anti-working class narrow chauvinism which Hague now intends to wield for all it is worth. Such a turn of events reflects the left’s dismal failure even more than Blair’s own change of fortunes.

All this could mean a rapid return from the wilderness for Peter Mandelson, whose sure-handed spin-doctoring had previously served Blair so well.

Alan Fox