Britain turns.(THE STRAGGLER)(2005 general election)

ON the whole, the recent election results from Britain make glum reading for conservatives, those with and those without a capital "C." Of a 60 percent turnout, the victorious Labour party got 36 percent, the Conservatives 33 percent, the Liberal Democrats 22.5 percent, and "other" (Scottish, Welsh, and Irish parties) 9.5 percent. Since the LibDems are well to the left of Labour ("Naderite" would be a fair U.S. equivalent) and most of the little nationalist parties are well to the left of them, you could sum up the British electorate of 2005 as being 20 percent in favor of the Tories' diluted post-Thatcherite conservatism, 40 percent to the left of that, and 40 percent indifferent.

For me, this was the occasion of melancholy reflections on the political passions of the early 1980s, the last point at which I was active in British politics. As a foot soldier in Margaret Thatcher's Conservative party, my duty was to tramp the streets of Holborn and St. Pancras (the district of north-central London I was living in), ringing doorbells and handing out leaflets to spread the good news of national redemption through conservatism. Secondary activities included attending meetings of the local party faithful, and taking occasional trips to Parliament with other activists to be briefed by government ministers of the junior sort. Of the constituency meetings I recall only an angry man who stood up at every one of them to deliver a bitter harangue about the need for a bill to ban incitement of class hatred. Of the parliamentary briefings, my sole remaining impression is of the bored incivility of the people who had been elevated, by our efforts as much as by their own, to ministerial office.

The street work was mostly thankless and fruitless. Holborn St. Panc. is a safe Labour seat, populated by young singles, welfare cases, "alternative lifestyles" of various kinds, and performing-arts types (the West End is just a short sashay down the road), these categories all overlapping considerably. The local council actually had a "Sex Workers Support Group"-there were quite a lot of sex workers in the constituency, toiling away in rented rooms to swell the Gross National Product. They used to advertise their manifold wares by means of little coded stickers in public telephone booths: SWEDISH AND KARATE LESSONS ... LARGE CHEST FOR SALE ... STRICT GOVERNESS WILL DISCIPLINE NAUGHTY BOYS, etc., etc., each one with a phone number.

Thankless as my political drudge work was, though, I was glad to do it. British politics at that time was a matter of sharp contrasts. The Labour party was frankly socialist, its constitution calling for "common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange." It drew much of its energy from characters like the openly Marxist, pro-Soviet union organizer Arthur Scargill (hard "g") and Tony Benn, formerly Lord Stansgate, a typical guilt-crazed upper-class lefty whose principal contributions to the national life, during a spell of office in the 1960s, were the late not-much-lamented Concorde and the incomprehensible, un-writeable, and un-memorizable British postcode system. (The latter since imported by Canada, I notice. Serves them right for not rising up against the Crown when they had the chance.)

Margaret Thatcher stood in contrast to these ideology-addled nation-wreckers as day to night, as steam ...