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COMMENTARY
May 7, 2005
A nice election
It often takes reduction to a soundbite to bring out the full fatuity in a politician's remark. Take for example Tony Blair's, "I have listened and I have learned," spoken after leading his party to a third consecutive majority in the British general election, Thursday. (He was the first Labour leader ever to achieve this.) Though the majority was much diminished, it remains quite safe, which made his show of contrition poignant. Soon, some colleague, probably his dear old friend the chancellor, Gordon Brown, will succeed in fitting the knife into his back. But the pretension that between the close of polls and a victory speech, a party leader has an opportunity for profound meditation upon the meaning of it all, has got to be a glib one. (Journalists, of course, enjoy watching politicians trying to play pundit: they are even worse at it than we are.) Mr. Blair's full remark was not quite so ludicrous. He said, "The great thing about an election is that you get out and talk to people for week upon week and I have listened and I have learned. I think I have a very clear idea of what the British people now expect from this government for a third term." That is one of the valid purposes of general elections: to force politicians out of their hidey holes, not for a constituency pit-stop, or a quick photo-op, but for a long, gruelling drag over the hot pavement of public opinion. It is what keeps them humble; that, and the embarrassment of the poses they must strike in all media confrontations. I am not without compassion for the politician's life, though as a hack political junkie I am not overly demonstrative about it, either. There is something admirably quixotic in the politician's calling, and I would say, the ambition of performing some real public service is often nobly mixed into his motives. This is especially true of opposition politicians, who have yet to be subjected to the temptations of office. Conversely, a long period of comfort on the government side of any chamber can reduce human beings to the moral and spiritual conditions we have detected within the Liberal Party of Canada. As for mere political junkies, let me confess, gentle reader, I was up half Thursday night and mesmerized through most of Friday morning by the British returns. There was no particular point to this idleness: the final results are eventually posted. But in my case, nostalgia was driving me along, constituency by constituency over the remembered British landscape. I lived in that country as a younger man, watched with delight the rise of Margaret Thatcher, and regardless who was winning now, it was like old times watching the results stream in. And being reminded, for all the things that change, the many things that stay the same. Rural England, for instance, has been economically transformed, but as one looks through the rich Tory harvest of votes in the South-East, East Anglia, even the rural Midlands, and stretching over the Cotswolds into the West Country, one still has the glimmering there will always be an England. Ditto the huge undefeatable Labour margins in the intense industrial and post-industrial districts of the North -- a reminder of how deeply the class system is imprinted on the landscape. This is something missing from Canadian politics, for which I feel a pang. Our rivalries were traditionally the Ulster ones, the divisions between orange and catholic, and between urban and rural, expressed in a more mechanical way. I miss the rich, organic dimension of pure social snobbery that still lightly puffs over "England's mountains green". If we may continue to leave Scotland out of the account, there is through England and Wales a nearly direct correlation between the physical beauty of a location, and the propensity of its inhabitants to vote Tory. Conversely, the uglier the place gets, the more reliably it votes Labour. Like most North American "conservative" pundits, I had nothing to lose in watching the election. Of course we instinctively back the Conservative Party, no matter how decayed and dysfunctional it may have become. But Tony Blair is a kind of hero, for the stomach and spine with which he faced down short-sighted public opinion, and sent the soldiers to Iraq. We could hardly wish to see him punished. It was a nice election. The Tories gained, and Mr. Blair remained in power. I had nothing intelligent to say about the result, actually. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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