Overseas readers may be aware that Gordon Brown's New Labour government appears to be in trouble. The depth and extent of the crisis may not be fully appreciated - nor how quickly it has arisen.

This summer, it appeared that the new Prime Minister could do no wrong, indeed that he was a blessed relief from an increasingly discredited predecessor. Three months later, the Tories have an 11% ‘landslide” lead over New Labour. The Government is mired in scandal, tales of incompetence and controversy. And the supporters of the 'discredited' predecessor are beginning to stir again ...

What The British People Want

New Labour's supporters may believe that all they have to do is 'hang on in there' and things will come right. After a 'time of troubles' that may last three months or eighteen months, the Government will recover and Gordon Brown will win his next election - much as Tony Blair surprised many by winning the 2005 Election (albeit on a very low turn-out) despite the Iraq imbroglio and a million on the streets in protest.

But the long term trends in polling indicate that such optimists, while not foolish, should take nothing for granted. Polling trends going back to 1987 and Thatcher's third term indicate that the low turnout in 2005 was more significant than many like to think. There is no easy victory for New Labour after 2008 and Gordon Brown is going to have to work extremely hard to reverse the growing opinion that New Labour is not up to the job of national governance.  

Polling trends, when set against what has actually happened in the real world, can only be properly understood if we make two sensible assumptions about the British people en masse. 

The first is that the British public is not very political at all. It seeks, when all the special interests have been squared and the 'wisdom of crowds' has taken over, strength and competence in the State - Russians would understand this. 

The second is that it expects political action to tend towards a general middle class interest where any interference in private lives is restricted to the necessary. The common denominator in both cases is that excesses derived from ideology that do not deliver the governance goods irritate and are eventually punished with a negative vote.

We can note a long term trend of disillusionment with New Labour ideology in a moment but the immediate crisis is one of perception of competence. There is no need to go through the detail of the lost tax discs, the mess surrounding Northern Rock, the failure to understand the law on political donations or the failure to supply troops adequately overseas - this has already been defined as systemic failure in an earlier posting.

BBC's Radio 4 picked up on the common 'coincidental' denominator that the first three of these had a North-Eastern political dimension. The North East is the quintessential Labour Heartland providing a bloc of solid Labour MPs with influence second only to Scotland in the formation of the ideology of New Labour.

We have already noted the link between the lost tax discs and a culture of managing on the cheap. This has nothing to do with the good business practice which New Labour managerialists purport to admire.

Overplaying The Fuhrerprinzip in British Politics

But the real problem for New Labour now is that Donorgate (and the strange unco-ordinated and indecisive responses from New Labour's political leadership) seems to demonstrate a degree of almost incomprehensible administrative incompetence within the ruling party itself. If it cannot run its own affairs, no wonder it cannot run the country (may be an instinctive reaction).

However, let us not get things out of proportion, the crisis could be temporary. This is the point at which we need to look at the long term trends and not allow ourselves to get bogged down in the hysteria of the Westminster Village and the political wars being fought out through the commentariat.

Deeper analysis of polling since 1987 indicates that Labour has been on a steady slow slide since its massive lead post-ERM during the last Major [Tory] Government. Brown’s arrival permitted a honeymoon blip that has almost certainly been overtaken by events. The chance to reverse a trend seems to have been lost, that is all. Blairites should certainly not be crowing that things would have been different if their Leader or one of his acolytes had been in charge.

The Tories, conversely, have also, on trend and much much more slowly, been improving their position regardless of their almost constant turnover of leaders. The re-emergence of a credible Tory Party owes less to David Cameron and more to shifts that might have taken place under any half-competent leadership candidate.

On the trends, the current ‘switch’ of public support from Labour to Tory lead now seems a bit more logical and inevitable and little less to do with the personal leadership qualities of respective Party leaders.

A growing disappointment with New Labour (similar to that which emerged against Toryism after the 'coup' against Thatcher in 1989) has led to a steady drift in which a change of leader could have made little difference.

Of course, the removal of a Leader may have some impact psychologically but coups against Thatcher and Blair may be better seen as signatures of disunity and incompetence rather than as moves against much-loved figure. It is the method of the coup or a mishandled transfer of power that disturbs more than the loss of the leader. Both transfers of power have in common that they were 'fixes' over the heads of the general public.

The Liberal Democrat Failure

A key factor in the last few months appears to have been the recent collapse in the Liberal Democrat vote and this needs looking at more closely.

Their role has always been to hold the disenchanted swing vote and they offer the theoretical possibility of a transformation of politics similar to that of the inter-war period by 'flipping' one of the major parties into their own subservient role.

The Liberal Democrat holy grail is a 'surge' of votes that re-establishes Liberal Democracy as one of the system's preferred managers against the claims of either traditionalism or communitarian socialism. To do this requires that Liberal Democrats get ahead of just one of the parties for a reasonable period and at the right time. 

Twice since 1987, the Liberal Democrats seemed on the very edge of the beginning of such a revolution.  The first occasion was around 1992 when disillusion with Toryism had not yet been replaced with illusion about New Labour. The second was for a few months in 2003 when they might have captured the mood on Iraq as both rival parties appeared to get it very, very wrong in the eyes of the wider public.

Until 1992, the Liberal Democrats took votes from the Tories as disillusion set in with the consequences of the coup against Margaret Thatcher. Throughout the Blair years, it attracted votes back from New Labour at about the same rate as the Tories, speeding up to the 'lost opportunity' of 2003.

This is not the place to review why the Liberal Democrats seem to be congenitally incapable of seizing the moment when it appears. They sometimes seem to exist only to provoke the adaptation of the carnivores in the political jungle rather than to join their ranks.

On both occasions, frightened opponents adapted to survive - the Labour Movement turned to the ideology of New Labour in the first case and the Tory Party re-acquired the virtues of national interest foreign policy realism in the second. Perhaps Liberal Democrat strategies should have gone for the socialist jugular of the Labour Movement and then for Tory complicity in American foreign policy - but they lacked the imagination and lost the moment.

After 2003, Liberal Democracy first steadied and then declined. Since New Labour was also declining in public appeal at a slow, steady rate, our assumption must be that we have seen a switch in the centre ground to a Cameronian Toryism, an adaptation to the liberal threat precisely designed to exploit disillusion with New Labour.

Given that Blair represented a very liberal form of centre-left challenge to conservatism, the Liberal Democrat failure would appear to be one of trying to challenge New Labour from the Left and not displacing the Tories from the Right. 

This is now the analysis of many Liberal Democrats who prefer Nick Clegg to Chris Huhne - but the moment has gone, the adaptation is taking place far too late and the public is wondering why the effective Vincent Cable is not confirmed in the job.

What An End To Hegemony Means

So, the trends suggest that the New Labour decline in public trust and the slow steady restoration of Tory fortunes are directing us towards the end of New Labour hegemony.The period in which New Labour could consider public opinion with statist disdain is now over.

This ending of hegemony is merely the restoration of traditional two-party politics in which there is everything to play for in mobilising mass (rather than heartland) voting and in pulling the remaining liberal votes into one or other camp. 

Let us recap. Labour’s reinvention as a centrist party in the mid-1990s was the necessary adaptation to take advantage of the real reason for its eventual success - the collapse of faith in Thatcherism (but not necessarily Thatcher) between 1989 and 1992. If Labour had not adapted, the Liberal Democrats might have filled the void or the Tories would have hung on to power until either Labour or Liberal Democrats evolved adequately.

The subsequent ERM and sleaze scandals merely made concrete the mood of the time - the rot had already started if the polling figures are right. This contains some interesting parallels for the present, although the politics of the matter are less intense now than then.

Northern Rock and Donorgate may not be vote losers in themselves but they may be consolidating the growing suspicion that the current Government is not up to the job, a mood (though very far from as intense as in 1989-1992) has been simmering under the surface since the beginning of Blair's second administration.

The trajectory of the Liberal Democrat vote should be seen as an expression of the desire for competence and for Government to stay firmly lodged in the centre ground more than as any public commitment to liberal ideology - a volatile protest vote that once had the potential to become something more.

Conclusions

Concern at Government competence is now reaching the same sort of 'boiling point' that it reached for the Tories after the ERM disaster

We may allow for some recovery in New Labour as current crises recede but it is almost certain that we are moving into a phase of a sustained Tory challenge to New Labour that, for the first time in a decade, gives Conservatism a serious chance of office after a decade and a half of national distrust. 

And the same result is likely as in the 1990s - either the Tories will adapt to take advantage of this air of distrust and disillusion in time for the next election or New Labour will scrape through, leaving an adaptive race between its rivals for the Election after that.

Or New Labour can adapt in office - though this seems scarcely likely from a Leader who was the other half of the Granita deal, is deeply implicated in the Project and whose response to the donations crisis indicates that he still does not understand what is at stake.

A Liberal Democrat challenge based on a move to the Right may still chip at Tory votes and give Gordon Brown a second term. The Liberal Democrats may equally act as home for disillusioned floating ‘Blairites’. Nothing is certain in politics but the betting on a Tory victory, though not necessarily a landslide, is now likely to increase.

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