EDITORIAL BOARD
The Un-Blairs
After Tony Blair: Who's left? Who's right? Who knows?
LONDON--In Month One of the Gordon Brown era, British politics has taken a few surprising turns.
Just by moving out of 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair carried with him much of the fatigue voters felt about the Labour Party. His sidekick, longtime rival and successor, Mr. Brown, made good use of the opportunity, showing himself to be a wily and tough operator. The opposition Tories and their fresh-faced leader, David Cameron, who had underestimated him, watched their political honeymoon come to a jarring halt.
The new prime minister agenda's is a familiar Blair-like hodgepodge, the kind of post-ideological politics that blurs distinctions between left and right. As incumbents who have overseen one of the most enduring economic booms in British history, Labour doesn't have to make the case for changing course or look distinct from its opponents. The Tories do.
While sticking broadly to the status quo, Mr. Brown has been free to adjust at the edges. The fresh faces in his cabinet give the impression of a new start. As a sop to the Labour left that was never comfortable with Mr. Blair's activist foreign policy, the new prime minister brought in opponents of the Iraq war and critics of America, while not changing his government's policy on the conflict. He decreed that no British minister utter the phrase "war on terror" or modify terrorism as "Muslim" or "Islamic." ("Car bombs are going off--we just need to find non-threatening ways to describe them," writes the historian Andrew Roberts.)
To outflank the Tories on the right, Mr. Brown has embraced "British identity." He abolished an old rule that let government buildings fly the Union Jack only 18 days a year; in his first speech as Labour leader he repeatedly pledged to defend "the British way of life"; and he claimed the immigration issue for Labour by promising to safeguard "British jobs for British people." He opposes tax hikes on the rich.
Mr. Brown is also able to strike a contrast on personal style with his predecessor and Mr. Cameron. The Conservative leader, the so-called Tory Blair, is polished, charismatic and a smooth talker. Often dour and disheveled, on a good day Mr. Brown comes off as principled, substantive and brainy. For a month now, the days have been good. The Spectator, a Tory-leaning weekly, grouses that Mr. Brown, who was the second most powerful man in Britain since Labour took power in 1997, has pulled off the neat trick of looking like "the 'change candidate' and Mr. Cameron the inheritor of all that was least attractive about the Blair era."
For the first time since April 2006, Labour has reclaimed and widened a lead--now seven percentage points--in opinion polls. Speculation is growing that Mr. Brown will call elections, perhaps as early as next spring, to use his momentum to win a fresh five-year mandate. But a snap poll also carries risks, and this Prime Minister is a notoriously cautious man.
This caution may just buy Mr. Cameron time to find substance, his glaring weakness. According to a Populus poll, roughly half of British voters believe the Tory leader is superficial and lacks clear convictions. Half also say they don't know what the Conservatives under David Cameron stand for.
Until recently, Mr. Cameron was able to point to a Tory comeback in polls to defend an approach focused on changing the party's stodgy image. He won green points for cycling to work--until it turned out that his car and chauffeur followed closely behind, somewhat offsetting (in the parlance of our times) the environmental benefit. He has sounded tepid on broadening choice in schools and health, on tax cuts and on relations with America, old Tory bread-and-butter issues out of favor with the Cameroons.
"I think that when some people talk about substance, what they mean is they want the old policies back," he said at last fall's party conference. "Well they're not coming back. We're not going back." No wonder Labour has taken and held the free-market policy ground, in spite of Mr. Brown's stealth taxes, big government instincts and spotty record on reforming public services.
At the same time the new Tories hark back to ancient Tory elitism. Mr. Cameron is an Etonian and has surrounded himself with fellow Old Boys. "Margaret Thatcher made the Tories a truly national party," the chairman of a publicly traded British company and a longtime Conservative supporter told me. "That's no longer true."
The most remarkable aspect of Britain's confused politics, however, is that neither party is prepared to take a tough and principled stand on the issue that's foremost on many minds, terrorism. Just after Mr. Brown took over, hundreds of people escaped unharmed when Muslim (sorry, Prime Minister) terrorists failed to set off car bombs in London and Glasgow. He was able to look strong in a crisis without having any blood on his hands.
But Mr. Brown's almost Orwellian refusal not to call a spade a spade--done out of PC opportunism, an effort to curry Muslim votes in swing districts, a play to anti-Americanism or some combination of all of the above--could end up hurting him if there is another attack. An opposition party might see an opening here, as on much else in a Brown record. Though perhaps not these new Tories.
Mr. Kaminski is editor of the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
