A Decade of Blair

First the good news.  The ten years of Tony Blair have been the most successful for a left-of-center party in Britain ever.  Well, at least since W.E. Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister in the nineteenth century.  As Prime Minister Blair told his constituents today, according to George Jones:

He said expectations had probably been "too high" in 1997, but he insisted living standards had improved under Labour. "There is only one government since 1945 that can say all of the following: more jobs, fewer unemployed, better health and education results, lower crime and economic growth in every quarter. Only one government, this one."

So it might seem odd that the British people have recently voted heavily against the Labour Party.  And it’s not just about Iraq.

There are those who contest the idea that health, education and crime have improved on Blair’s watch.  In contrast to Blair’s sunny report:

• Education is a mess.  The government keeps dumbing down the high-stakes tests, the A-levels and GSCE tests, and violence is endemic in inner-city schools.  The vast underclass gets almost no education.
• The National Health Service is a mess.  The government has vastly ramped up spending in the last ten years but productivity has gone down, and the staff are demoralized.
• Vast numbers of workers on disability.  About 15 percent of the work force.
• Property crime may have gone down now that everyone has a home security system.  But gang violence and street intimidation is up.  Crime is up 2,300 percent in the last century.  And the murder rate is up.

And then there are the burgeoning problems of single-parent families, a growing feral underclass, and uncontrolled immigration, all of which are probably worse than in the United States.

The worsening social conditions are probably hitting the Labour Party’s natural supporters worse than anyone.  But the Conservative Party hasn’t been trying to attract their votes, instead trying to win back the social liberals who deserted to the LibDem Party in the mid 1990s.  The only party that is really going for the votes of the disaffected is the racist BNP.

Stay tuned.  The problems aren’t going to go away any time soon.