Opinion: The end of Cool Britannia
LONDON, U.K. — Ruling parties in Western democracies have a limited shelf life and in Britain it’s rarely more than a decade. The reinvented Labour Party that swept Tony Blair into power more than a dozen years ago is clearly way beyond its "sell by" date. Sometime in the next few months voters will throw it out in a general election, ending an era that turned stodgy old England into Cool Britannia.
Tony Blair’s Britain was a feel-good place. Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had made the country more efficient and prosperous in the 1980s. It had less unemployment and more job opportunities than continental Europe. Blair continued the Thatcher revolution, but called it "New Labour" and sweetened it by throwing lots of money at schools, hospitals and social services.
Much of the spending was off the books. It’s now obvious that Cool Britannia was living beyond its means.
On top of those huge debts, New Labour encouraged the country’s booming banks to take foolish risks in a no-holds-barred race to become the financial capital of the world. That was a bet that cost the taxpayers billions when the great recession of 2008-2009 shook world financial markets. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who stepped into Blair’s shoes in 2007, was forced to nationalize leading banks to keep the financial system from collapsing. So much for his vaunted economic acumen.
In some ways, Britain is now worse off than when New Labour came to power in 1997. It’s flat broke, discontented and in far worse fiscal shape than Germany, France or the United States. As a dreadful year draws to a wintry close, angry labor unions are threatening to make life even more difficult for the government.
Tony Blair, whose winning smile and way with words made him seem invulnerable, is now reviled by much of the British media and the country at large.
At one point in his last term, the police suspected Blair and his political bagman Lord Levy of handing out peerages and knighthoods in return for donations to the party. Although illegal, it has been a longstanding practice in British politics and there were reports in the press that Blair & Co. were milking it for all it was worth. Blair became the first British prime minister to be interrogated by police while in office, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to pursue the case.
Despite the Labour Party’s socialist origins, Blair clearly loves money and since stepping down has made sure he is not short of it. Although he does some unpaid humanitarian work, he is believed to have racked up more than $20 million by giving speeches and advising corporate clients. He responds to criticism by pointing out that there is nothing wrong with making money.
It’s widely agreed here that his biggest mistake was to drag Britain into the war in Iraq. The population was reluctant to get into the war in the first place, and is now overhelmingly against it. The British army, one of the best in the world, is overstretched and underfunded. America shouldn’t count on Britain being its closest ally the next time Washington decides to go to war.
Polls show that the public believes the country will be better off in the hands of the Tories, even though the Conservative Party party is run by Old Etonians and other upper class stereotypes. David Cameron and George Osborne, who are destined to be the next prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer, even look alike.
But the sad fact is that it may not make much difference who is in office for the next decade. Britain will spend years digging itself out of a mountain of debt. The next government will have to cut public services and squeeze the taxpayer.
All those wealthy foreigners and hip financial whiz kids who made London their happy hunting ground are now considering their options. Some are heading for Switzerland and other tax havens. There is already a trickle of Americans going back home. Eventually the trickle may become a flood if Cool Britannia becomes just a damp, chilly, high tax island.