Dialogue: Lessons for our politicians from Blair's landslide win

Even if Tony Blair won easily, the British general election contained substantial lessons for New Zealand political parties of all sizes and persuasions, writes TIM BALE.

Which Labour MP was the first to defect from the Tories and not only get re-elected but also keep his butler?

Just the sort of question guaranteed to keep pub quizzes in business for years to come. But only in Britain, of course, unless there's something else about one of Helen Clark's side we haven't yet found out.

But although last week's election in Britain was over before it really began, it still raised some substantive issues. Not just in Britain but here, where, rightly or wrongly, we still draw many political parallels. Did anything happen there that might be worth thinking about here?

The most obvious lesson from Labour's landslide - apart from the fact that despite the millions of dollars spent on campaigning, things hardly seemed to shift - is for its sister party here.

If, after the generally lukewarm response to last month's Budget, Helen Clark and Michael Cullen were wondering whether they had made the right choice by putting fiscal prudence and market rectitude before generosity and social justice, their doubts have probably disappeared.

Tony Blair learned from Bill Clinton, and his own party's less-than-impressive past in government, that "it's the economy, stupid" and that left-of-centre-governments win only when they show their heads, as well as their hearts, are in the right place.

On the other hand, the unprecedented loss of a reasonably safe Labour seat held by a (now former) junior minister to a retired hospital consultant fighting on a defend-the-public-health-system ticket should be a warning to Blair (and Clark) that you can prioritise "economic transformation" only for so long.

The much-worked-for second term will have to be about delivering on public services, because in the end that is what distinguishes the centre-left from its opponents.

There are also some lessons for National. First and foremost, the Conservatives' abysmal performance is a warning to those tempted to think that the best way to fight the Left's move on to the centre ground is to shift to the right.

Secondly, it shows the dangers of playing down bread-and-butter matters, such as the state of public services, in favour of issues which, while they may appear to resonate with most of the public, don't make a difference to the way they vote.

There may be a few votes in boosting the prison population, bashing beneficiaries and banging on about the tax burden. There may be some sympathy for saving if not the pound, then at least the Skyhawks. But these strategies won't deliver enough seats to get you into government - not as the largest party anyway.

Of course, that's more true under first past the post than under proportional representation, which would have ensured that the third of the popular vote the Tories captured would have netted them rather more than the quarter of the seats they were eventually awarded. But on the other hand, under proportional representation you have to deal with parties to the right of you who eat into your vote by being equally as good, if not better, at attracting the rednecks and the rogernomes.

All the more reason, one would think, for National finally to reconcile itself to MMP instead of giving the impression they would be rid of it like a shot given half the chance.

There were also some lessons for those parties here whose survival depends upon not going back to a Westminster system capable of delivering, as it did to Mr Blair, 63 per cent of the parliamentary seats with only 41 per cent of the popular vote.

Apart from Labour, the other big election winners were the Liberal Democrats. Although they managed to convert their vote share of 18 per cent into only 8 per cent of the seats, they showed that there is a constituency which responds to being treated like adults.

These are the people who warm to the argument that to get quality public services, you have to be prepared to pay for them, that government is best done locally rather than nationally wherever possible, and that the differences between the squabbling old parties are often as illusory as the solutions they offer.

Although this has something to say to the Alliance, it should also resonate with the Greens, whose ideas and whose plan to translate a local body presence into slow-burning national success give them quite a lot in common with the environmentally tinged Liberal Democrats.

But one thing that neither the Liberals nor any other party in Britain managed to do was arrest the descent into apathy of a worryingly large number of potential voters, especially the young and those at the bottom of the socio-economic pile, whom government seems to have lost either the will or the capacity to help.

Tony Blair truly made history, but for the wrong as well as the right reasons. The Labour Party may have earned a second full term in government and beaten the Tories out of sight. But it, too, was beaten - by the apathy party.

Some 41 per cent of eligible voters did not vote. Sure, there is a fine line between apathy and contentment, and why waste your time voting for (or against) a surefire winner in a rock-solid seat in the Labour heartland?

But the drop in turnout - if it continues - could see politics in Britain begin to resemble the United States in a way that is much more worrying than (though it may have something to do with) its adoption of stateside sound bites and spin doctors.

New Zealand has less to worry about in this respect - but less is not nothing. Work by Jack Vowles' New Zealand election study team shows that while turnout of registered voters held reasonably steady at 85 per cent at the 1999 election, adding in those not registered put the figure 10 per cent lower. This makes it the lowest since it first became possible to make that estimate in 1928.

To suggest that in matters political New Zealand simply follows Britain is clearly wrong in some ways. Proportional representation made it here first, for instance.

But dedicated supporters of MMP are fooling themselves if they think, like many in Britain who advocate electoral system change, that it will save politics-as-usual from the crisis it may be slipping into without our really noticing.

The system is only as good as the parties that operate within it. Are they any more up to the task here than in Britain?

* Dr Tim Bale is a lecturer in political science at Victoria University.