That was sensible of his hosts – they were dealing with the person who will probably be Britain’s prime minister within a year. Blair’s “New” Labor Party has a huge lead in the polls over John Major’s Conservatives, and a general election must be held by next spring. Blair and Clinton have followed similar political paths. Both have made deliberate pitches to middle-class, tax-wary voters (the theme of Blair’s speech in New York last week); both emphasize the perils and potential of economic “change” and talk tough about crime and welfare. Clinton in ‘92 and Blair in ‘96 sound eerily alike.
It’s easy to make too much of those parallels. There’s a difference between governing a crowded island, with a centralized, parliamentary system; and an empty continent with a federal form of government. The intriguing thing about Blair is not that he is engaged in a pointless search in America for policy models. It is that his appeal is partly based on something that is commonplace in America but not at all common in Britain. And that is religion.
Though Blair says that he hates sounding “preachy,” he is a committed Christian, and – in a country where any display of faith is regarded as bad form – doesn’t mind who knows it. On Easter Sunday, he gave a long interview in the London Sunday Telegraph on his religious beliefs and the significance of Easter. It was pretty unexceptionable stuff. But the Tories went ballistic, accusing Blair of everything from sanctimony to hypocrisy.
Conservatives had good reason to be disturbed. For by including an appeal to ““values’’ in his offer to the electorate, Blair can win back some middle-class voters who were appalled by the left-wing idiocies of his party in the 1980s. “People are looking for some rules for conduct and a moral purpose for society that is relevant to today” Blair explained to American reporters last week.
Conventional wisdom in Britain is that religion is an insignificant element in social and political life. People vote with their wallets, it is said. But then the British media have been aggressively secular for years; they may be missing the point. There’s some evidence that Britain is going through a bit of religious revival, led by evangelical churches whose members almost certainly disproportionately vote Labor. At the very least, it’s fair to ask if British voters don’t associate religious belief with an innate decency and probity. In America, politicians of all stripes – not just those on the conservative right – have long assumed that voters do. It would be interesting if that was the real lesson that Blair has learned from his trips to America.
