The End of Labour's Reign

LONDON — Adorned in a harsh, north London accent, the lorry driver starts in: "I'll tell you one thing — Cherie and Tony, they're dancing around in their nightgowns drinking champagne. They've left old Gordon Brown holding the bag, that's for sure."

"And if you had a beer with Blair, what would you ask him?"

"How it feels to be flying around in a private plane while this whole place goes to ash," the man says with a frown.

The palpable rage one feels here in the U.K. has been driven by two weeks of a gradually breaking scandal at Westminster. Members of Parliament have been slowly outed for extravagant expenses claimed from the body's Fees Office. Some of the most heavily lambasted include Douglas Hogg, a Tory, now planning to repay the 2,200 pounds claimed for charges associated with clearing a moat on his property.

Elliot Morley, a Labour MP for nine years under Blair, used a common allowance to claim mortgage reimbursements for a second home in London — as to be closer to the Parliament — but claimed 800 pounds per month for more than 18 months beyond the completion of payment on the mortgage.

And of course there's Jacqui Smith, Gordon Brown's Home Secretary — handling matters of policing, homeland security, etc. — whose portfolio included 100,000 pounds in write-offs for a room she rented from her sister, two pornos rented by her husband, and, ironically, a kitchen sink purportedly worth 550 pounds. Everything and the finest kitchen sink, many are laughing across the lake.

The pulse, some have noted, is oddly similar to the decline of the conservative Tories before Tony Blair's launch to power; the government, amid the recession and the Westminster scandal, feels both impotent and out of touch to the bloke on the street. It all feels a great deal like the recent bout of American populism ignited by reports of bank executives' compensations and lavishes as the Treasury dolled out billions in bailout bucks — but in this case, there's the capacity for restitution.

The complaints I've heard on street corners all over West London sound almost identical to the 1996 focus groups strategist Stan Greenberg recalls in his recent book, "Dispatches from the War Room." The anecdotes come from Greenberg's working as a pollster for Tony Blair's New Labour movement as it attempted to dethrone Prime Minister John Major and his conservative party.

It was also a period of recession, employment neared 14 percent and the National Health Service teetered on collapse.

The voters dismissed the Tories for their infighting, condemned John Major as a "prat," a "wimp," and charged that the Tories had "brought us down."

"Give those Labour boys a chance for a change." People felt left "on their own," and were united by the sense that things probably couldn't get much worse — Labour? "They can't make more of a hash of it, can they?"

Inevitably, the controversy here has embroiled leaders from across the political spectrum, but Michael Martin, the resigned speaker of the House of Commons who was charged with overseeing the Fees Office, certainly won’t be the only one to go if the public gets its will.

All of Labour, including the promising young Foreign Minister David Miliband — who claimed 30,000 pounds on repairs, decoration and furnishings for his home, including apparently exorbitant gardening expenses — will likely get the boot.

In mid-morning traffic, I passed by Buckingham Palace. "And these people, they've got seven mansions like this. They've been robbin' us blind for years," the cab driver offers.

"Have you considered a revolution? Like us?" I joke.

"You Americans think you had a proper revolt; you didn't, though. That was just British fighting British."

"Well, I guess it'd be about the same here, then."

"Ay," he offers with a smile.

The last time a speaker from the House of Commons was sacked, it was the 17th century; history seems afoot. The fall of the monarch might be centuries away, but new Labour has certainly gone gray, and nobody's quite sure how much longer the ventilator will last.

Brian Till, one of the nation's youngest syndicated columnists, is a research fellow for the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington. He can be contacted at till@newamerica.net. To find out more about the author and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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