Tribune – news, features and comment from Britain's left-wing magazine

The British political outlook looks uncertain seen from abroad. Terry Moore reports from Brussels

Following Britain’s annual conference season, the political outlook for 2010 appears to be a little more opaque than before.

The Labour conference was not the depressing experience many had anticipated. The mood was more upbeat and united than expected and has given some short-term encouragement to Labour activists.

The Liberal Democrats shot themselves in the foot with talk of cutting even more savagely than the Tories, while the Tories themselves treated champagne as if it was cocaine – not to be consumed in front of the servants.

A recent opinion poll showed that the Tory lead over Labour has narrowed slightly. This does not necessarily mean the public perception of the Government has changed and that Tory lead has an air of permanence about it.

The Government has been helped by the absence of a leadership challenge to Gordon Brown. A united front is presented in public and the approaching general election should serve to make Labour more disciplined and focused.

Comparisons between the Government and the opposition parties should become more searching and the Conservatives in particular should come under increasing media scrutiny.

It is clear that Labour will highlight a few key themes as part of its campaign. The party will contrast its stewardship of the economy with the Conservatives’ wrong call on the financial crisis and question both their experience and competence. Tory cuts might jeopardise the recovery. As one commentator put it, you don’t cut spending while you’re fighting a war. You wait until you’ve won it. Labour will stress that the Conservatives cannot be trusted to deliver high-quality public services, particularly if levels of public expenditure do have to be reduced.

Labour will point to the Conservatives’ negative attitude to the European Union and their unsavoury alliance with some far right parties to demonstrate that the Tories are still the nasty party and just as reactionary as they were under Margaret Thatcher.

But Labour must sell itself, too. It must persuade voters that it still has the right and relevant policies – for example, the proposals for a national care service. Sadly,  Brown’s leadership has failed to convince over the past two years and time is running out for that to change.

The Sun has switched its allegiance to the Tories – Rupert Murdoch prides himself on picking winners – and other newspapers will also become increasingly partisan as the election looms. However, other parts of the media will be more neutral and Labour will have a greater opportunity to get its message across.

As a matter of urgency, it needs to win back voters from the nationalists in Wales and Scotland. We can be sure they will be told that a vote for Plaid Cymru or the SNP risks letting in a Conservative government at Westminster.

Labour’s finance are in a parlous state. In contrast, the Conservatives have access to large funds, courtesy of deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft. The largesse of the controversial peer has enabled the party to target money and resources at the crucial constituencies where the outcome of the next election will be decided.

Labour may have been abandoned by its fair-weather rich friends, but at least the trade unions can still be relied on to cough up. Labour still won’t be fighting on a level playing field, however.

While the Conservative Party is the strong favourite to win, the next election result is not yet set in stone. The situation is not the same as in 1997. Then the Tory Government was widely loathed, while the Labour Party was widely popular. Remember the huge crowds who cheered Tony Blair into Number Downing Street? Now disillusion with the political process is widespread and all the parties have been damaged by the MPs’ expenses scandal. The Labour Government is hugely unpopular, but there is no great enthusiasm for the Tories to replace it. The Conservatives have still to persuade the electorate that they are a credible alternative.

David Cameron has had some success in changing the image of his party and painting the Conservatives as unreconstructed free-market fanatics who will slash all areas of public expenditure too much and too soon may not be as easy as one or two in Labour’s high command seem to think.

The Tory leader has already pledged to ring-fence spending for health and international development. Labour should ask him to spell out what, exactly, he does intend to cut. And the Prime Minister could do worse than elaborate on his own spending and cutting plans.

Support for incumbent administrations tends to increase as polling day approaches and something similar will probably happen in 2010. That doesn’t mean Labour will win, but if the party can be revitalised, the result might be a lot closer than many commentators are currently predicting.

Cameron has been keen to stress that the Conservatives have an electoral mountain to climb. The reality is somewhat different. The Tories made some notable advances at the 2005 election and a significant number of sitting Labour MPs have wafer-thin majorities. With the help of Michael Ashcroft’s millions, that mountain is really more of a hill.

Have the Lib Dems done any better under Nick Clegg than they did under Menzies Campbell? Their damp squib of a conference is unlikely to have won them many new converts. However, if the Lib Dems do worse than they did in 2005, that may be a double-edged sword for Labour. Disillusioned Lib Dems supporters might just as easily switch to the Conservatives as Labour. At previous elections, Conservatives switching to the Lib Dems helped Labour to achieve comfortable parliamentary majorities that were not necessarily reflected in its percentage share of the vote.

Now Labour needs to worry about its own erstwhile supporters defecting to the Lib Dems – and to the nationalists in Scotland and Wales.

If the Lib Dems held the balance of power in the House of Commons, some sort of deal with the Conservatives could not be ruled out. However, while their leader may feel differently, the majority of Lib Dem MPs are more likely to be sympathetic towards Labour – not least since has the Prime Minister has promised to hold a referendum on electoral reform, with voters being invited to choose between the present first past the post and the alternative vote system.

Brown might have been wiser to have actually held this referendum on the same day as the general election. The Lib Dems’ preferred voting system is the single transferable vote, which Brown has ruled out. However, the prospect of their long-desired voting referendum finally becoming a reality ought to be enough to encourage them to prop up Labour rather the Tories – given the choice.

If Labour wins, which is unlikely, or forms a coalition with the Lib Dems, which is a possibility, then British policy towards the EU will remain one of constructive engagement. However, if the Conservatives win an outright majority, which is currently the most likely outcome of the next election, things could change dramatically.

It could be that the Tories are much more belligerent in public than they would be around a negotiating table. However, the Conservative Party has become far more Eurosceptic than it was under Margaret Thatcher or John Major. The number of Europhiles among its leading lights is much diminished. William Hague and those who agree with him have the upper hand. In fact, Euroscepticism is one of the few defining political positions shared by a large majority in the Conservative Party.

However, while pandering to anti-EU prejudices at home, a Conservative government would still have to do business with Britain’s European partners and try to reach an accommodation on most issues with other member states in the Council of Ministers.

We should still prepare for bellicose nationalism for domestic purposes and for the British national interest to be sacrificed to appease a scarcely concealed xenophobia towards Europe. Cameron and Hague are so pro-Atlanticist, it is almost as if they think George W Bush still in the White House.

What they fail to realise is that Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, wants Britain to be fully engaged in the EU, so it can function as a respected partner rather than become a marginalised and angry island on the periphery of the continent and reduced to little more than George Orwell’s Airstrip One.