Britain’s Labor Party Trounces the Tories

LONDON —  Promising a just and dynamic new Britain, political modernizer Tony Blair led his restructured Labor Party to a landslide election victory of historic proportions here today.

Five days short of his 44th birthday, Blair and his newly middle-of-the-road party dealt ruling Conservatives under Prime Minister John Major their worst defeat in more than a century.

“You have put your trust in me, and I want to repay that trust. I will not let you down,” Blair told cheering supporters as the magnitude of his victory echoed across a stunned nation where incumbent Conservatives, including senior Cabinet ministers, fell in long procession.

Blair, who becomes the youngest prime minister this century, has enough votes to serve a full five-year term and lead Britain into the new millennium.

A billboard in Piccadilly Circus flashed news of Labor’s victory as the party passed the 330 seats needed for control in the new 659-seat Parliament.

Based on more than 80% of the vote, the British Broadcasting Corp. projected 423 seats for Labor and a staggering majority of more than 180 seats--exceeding the party’s most optimistic private forecasts. The Conservatives were projected for 163 seats--their lowest parliamentary representation since 1906.

The Liberal Democrats, who ran extremely well, looked set for 44 seats, the highest number of third-party seats since 1923.

In Blair’s home district in northern England, the incoming prime minister called the election “a vote for the future, not for outdated dogma or ideology.”

Needing a swing in the national vote of 4.5% to win, Blair led Labor to more than twice that--10.3%.

“We are a great country. The British are a great people. There is no greater honor than to serve them--and serve them we will,” said Blair, his lawyer wife, Cherie, and their three children at his side.

There is no transition period in Britain, and no elaborate inauguration, so Blair assumes the premiership today--around breakfast time in Los Angeles.

After 18 years in power with sweeping social and economic achievements to boast about, Conservatives were stunned by the magnitude of their defeat. In the last election in 1992, the Conservatives won 336 seats to Labor’s 271 seats and the Liberal Democrats’ 20.

“We have been comprehensively defeated,” Major said in a concession speech early this morning before submitting his resignation to Queen Elizabeth II. “I congratulate Tony Blair and have telephoned him to wish him every good fortune.”

Potential future Conservative leader Michael Portillo, the defense minister, and Malcolm Rifkind, the foreign minister, were among the Tory heavyweights who lost their seats.

The party did not win a single seat in either Scotland or Wales, and most commentators now expect a quick and nasty succession battle among Conservatives to replace Major.

Voting went off smoothly as the Irish Republican Army stayed off the phone after causing repeated major disruptions through telephoned bomb threats in recent weeks. There were some minor alarms in London and some major ones in Belfast, the provincial capital, that police attributed to Protestant guerrillas.

BBC war correspondent Martin Bell, running as an anti-corruption candidate supported by Labor and the Liberal Democrats against a Conservative tarred for accepting money to table questions in Parliament, won hands down to become one of about 30 successful minor-party candidates.

Of small comfort to a party repeatedly scarred by the financial and sexual improprieties of some of its members was the Tory victory in London’s tony Kensington and Chelsea. There, in the world’s safest Conservative seat, voters elected infamous serial seducer Alan Clark, who once had affairs with the wife of a judge and both her daughters.

In Torbay, a town on the southern coast of England known as “the Cornish Riviera,” it took a record four recounts to confirm the victory by 12 votes of a Liberal Democrat over a Conservative.

Labor icon Neil Kinnock, the party leader defeated by the Conservatives five years ago, called the result “sensational. . . . We’re in for a spectacular evening.”

“If there had been more focus on the economy and less on sleaze, we might have done better. Now we must compose ourselves, lose with dignity,” said Kenneth Clarke, the departing Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Turnout was encouraged by a spectacular spring day when cautions against the IRA were replaced by warnings against overexposure to the sun.

By midafternoon on the hottest day of the year, election-day London was positively subtropical, with temperatures in the mid-70s under a cloudless sky.

Many dithering Conservatives apparently stayed home Thursday, and so, for other reasons, did Queen Elizabeth and her heir, Prince Charles: In Britain, neither the monarch nor members of the House of Lords like Charles have the right to vote. The prime minister and all members of the Cabinet--who are among Britain’s 44 million eligible voters--must be elected members of the House of Commons before they can assume government posts.

Labor’s last victory came in 1974, when Tony Blair was a shaggy-haired, rock-music-singing law student at college.

Not since Lord Liverpool, who was 42 when he took office in 1812, has Britain had a leader as young as Blair. Major was 47 when he became prime minister in 1990.

Thursday’s election was presidential in the sense that it was simplified in saturation coverage to a showdown between Major and Blair.

But, in fact, the two never faced off on any ballot. Each appeared only on the ballots in the constituencies they represent in Parliament--Blair in Sedgefield near the Scottish border, Major in Huntingdon, an hour north of London. Both appeared to win handily.

Another American-like feature of the campaign was the absence of visceral differences between the two parties. That was a big change for a country where, over the decades, Tories versus Labor meant Us versus Them, Right versus Left shootouts.

And there was plenty of mud-slinging this time, but overall the atmosphere journeyed down the middle of the political road.

The six-week campaign was long by British standards, and by the time the end neared, people clearly had had enough: The BBC doubled its prime evening newscast to an hour to accommodate all the politicking and wound up losing half its audience.

From the outset there was a pervasive sense that after 18 Conservative years, it was time for a change.

But there were no can’t-wait emergencies, no profound choices pressing. Neither were there any big ideas to dazzle or alarm voters.

With both parties now near the center and both agreeing on the wisdom of the free market, the campaign was reduced to the sorts of issues that afflict advanced societies everywhere: jobs, schools, crime, health care, pensions, the environment, probity in office and morality in general.

Labor, born a century ago with a sharp ideological edge as a mass movement of workers, began edging toward the political center in the 1980s. But Blair went for the jugular as soon as he became leader in 1994.

Before long, there was a vote to scrap a key article in the party constitution declaring Labor to be aggressively socialist.

Under Blair, Labor has become assertively social democratic. It maintains a strong commitment to the welfare state but welcomes a free-market economy and has no thought of reversing privatization or waging tax war against the rich.

Blair--like Major--believes that the best way to improve the lot of 10% of Britons who have not shared in the economic boom is by drawing them into the making of an even bigger pie.

Faced with stunning economic success under Margaret Thatcher and then, since 1990, successor Major, the reformer Blair made trust the foundation of his campaign.

He promised not to abandon the pro-business, low-tax policies that Conservatives had used with such good success, making Britain the fastest-growing major country in Europe.

In the end, Britain bought Blair’s case, deciding that he represented a safe pair of hands.

It was clear as soon as the polls closed Thursday night that the longest stretch of single-party government in Britain this century was over.

Today begins a new chapter under a party whose rule is unknown to the 25% of Britons born since the last time Labor won an election.

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In 18 Years of Rule . . .

The impact of 18 years of Conservative Party rule in Britain since 1979:

* Wealth: During 1979-94, the wealthiest 10% of Britons enjoyed a 60% increase in net income, middle incomes grew by about a third and the poorest 10% were 1% better off, according to the independent Institute of Fiscal Studies.

* Privatization: Conservative governments sold British Steel; British Airways; the telephone system; water, electric and gas companies; coal mines; and railroads--$100 billion in sales privatizing dozens of businesses. Prime Minister John Major considers selling the post office and pledges to sell London subway system.

* Unions: Margaret Thatcher, prime minister from 1979 to 1990, crushed labor unions’ power, forcing secret pre-strike ballots, outlawing mass picketing and sympathy strikes and making unions liable to employer lawsuits.

Source: Reuters