Welcome to this Forum. It has been set up so that supporters of the Lower Fuel Tax campaign can discuss the ridiculous levels on Fuel tax in this country.
Tuesday 8 May 2001
TONY BLAIR launched his campaign for a second term in power last night with an admission that New Labour had not lived up to all the ambitious promises that secured him a landslide majority four years ago.
He told a special Bank Holiday meeting of the Cabinet that they would have to show a sense of "humility" when they went to the polls on June 7. Mr Blair is expected to end the pre-election "phoney war" today with a formal confirmation of the election date after asking the Queen to dissolve Parliament at the end of this week.
BY tonight, we may finally have had the announcement. Then again, we may not. Either way, it will add - when it finally comes - little to the sum of existing knowledge. The general election will be held on June 7. It will follow one of the nastiest government campaigns in living memory, in which dirty tricks, personal vanity and outright lies will have played an even larger part than is usual in the process.
As a consequence of this unedifying performance, and the general vacuity of current political discourse, the result will be regarded with little joy or confidence by the country at large. The greatest losers will be the institution of Parliament and the news media. After June 7, Parliament will be seen, even more clearly than it is now, as simply providing a stage army for an executive government that is, bizarrely, as obsessed with retaining power as it is lacking in any strong belief about what to do with it.
Then there are the media. Few of the people that I meet in current affairs broadcasting seem to have any idea how deeply distrusted they are by the public. This election may be one of the last opportunities that the BBC, in particular, has to reclaim some of its reputation for straight dealing, although I suspect that it is already too late for that.
During the 1980s, when the Tories were in serial triumph and Labour was on its knees, the media appointed themselves the unofficial Opposition. Remember that? So useless and absurd were the politicians who should have been providing a critique of the government that it was necessary for the commentators to rise to the occasion for the sake of democracy.
Where Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock failed, every Today and Newsnight interviewer had to step into the breach. Now it seems that it was not the interests of democracy that were being defended all that time, but the interests of a diffuse (but none the less passionate) anti-Conservatism. And it is not just the integrity of the broadcasters that has suffered during this four-year election campaign, of which the final weeks will be only an accelerated denouement.
Those newspapers that are still believed to be vaguely Conservative or grandly neutral - but are, in fact, violently partisan for Labour - will have proved so manipulable and complicit with this travesty that they will devalue their own reputations.
I predict now that, whenever the Conservatives begin to look as if they are getting it together, whenever Labour feels the slightest bit threatened, one of our more influential newspapers (broadsheet or tabloid, whichever suits) will, as we say in the business, "splash" on a story of major embarrassment to the Tory leadership. Maybe it will be yet another leadership challenge rumour, or a trumped-up foreign donor story, or that old favourite, a shadow cabinet split; just wait for the carefully deployed headlines.
I am sorry to sound so relentlessly gloomy, but I am in genuine fear that this election, far from being tedious and inconsequential, could be one of the most momentous in modern history. It could result in the undermining of public faith in the democratic project itself: in the ascendancy of a cynicism that encompasses not just politicians, who have always been regarded with benign contempt, but also the entire political class.
Then, of course, there is another possibility. That is - and I am not sure whether I would be happy about this or not - that the whole country has learnt to play the game of "virtual politics". Having absorbed the lesson from New Labour that appearance and reality are utterly different things and that, so long as you maintain the former, you can do what you like in the real world, the electorate may be having a cynical little joke of its own.
We know that there has been, over the lifetime of this Government, a pronounced discrepancy between the way people have actually voted and what they have told the pollsters about their intentions. It happened in the local government elections and again, very dramatically, in the European elections.
The conventional wisdom is that this divergence is a result of "shy Tory" syndrome: people having been bullied out of admitting that they are Conservative voters because they believe Conservatism to be associated with greed, selfishness, or just being generally old-fashioned.
However much of a factor this caricature was in those previous elections, it must have increased over the past few months. Now, if you are a Tory, you are not just depicted as an avaricious, self-serving throwback, but also as a racist, a braying saloon-bar xenophobe and a misanthropic ignoramus who has missed the point of most of the social progress of the 20th century.
Which, of course, you know that you are not. All that you want is lower taxes so that you can - under your own steam and without becoming one of Gordon Brown's welfare basket cases - do more for your own family. You would also like your country's political institutions to remain democratically accessible, and its economic policy to be accountable to its own voters. On the whole, you believe that the state should control less rather than more, and that public services are generally better when they are run by people other than politicians. That is why you vote Conservative.
But with the help of their friends in the media, New Labour's leaders have made it virtually impossible for you to say any of that. They want you to be ashamed - to be very ashamed - of even contemplating the possibility of voting Conservative. So they lay it on with a trowel: the smears and the character assassination, the wilful misrepresentation and the over-publicised traps.
But are they persuading you not to vote Tory, which is what they want? Or just making it even less feasible for you to admit it, in which case they may become victims of their own illusion?