Word: labour
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Perhaps an awareness of how much remains to be done is responsible for Labour's surprisingly joyless campaign. The American-style machine that seemed so fearsome in 1997 is now trying too hard--even naming the three buses traveling with Blair "Strong Economy," "Strong Leadership" and "Strong Britain." Labour is overcompensating for its dirty little secret: an average government spending increase so far, despite all its can-do rhetoric, of a measly 1.3% a year, part of its obsession with reassuring the middle class that it wouldn't be profligate. Big money started to flow this year...
...Blair and the Labour Party certainly gave him reason to expect better when, in 1997, they swept away a Conservative Party exhausted after 18 years in power. Labour's promise to fix such things as the National Health Service was enough to win a huge parliamentary majority. Now, as Blair asks voters to give him another term in 10 Downing St. in this week's general election, he has a record to defend - and the euphoria that once greeted the earnest young man has dissipated...
...campaign uneasily straddles two Britains. One is the sunny, upbeat land shown in Labour's emotive TV broadcasts: unemployment, inflation and interest rates all at 25-year lows, real incomes and primary-school test scores rising, crime falling. But there is another Britain of shabby hospitals, underpaid teachers, overcrowded schools and 7 million adults who are functionally illiterate. The world's fourth-largest economy may be Cool Britannia, but it is also the sick man of Europe, trailing behind its Continental neighbors in many measures of quality of life...
...Strangely, it is on the stony ground of unfulfilled hopes that Labour has made its stand - like a builder who tells you six months into the job that renovating your house will take twice as long and cost twice as much as promised. "We have a long, long way to go," Blair says repeatedly. Stranger still, voters are buying his plea for patience, even if it makes them grimace. One week before election day, a MORI poll gives Labour an astonishing 18-point lead over the Conservatives, whose leader, William Hague, nevertheless maintains an almost otherworldly serenity...
...only do voters consider Blair more capable than Hague (50% to 16%), they also reject the Tories' key domestic pledge, an American-inspired plan to cut taxes by at least $12 billion a year, possibly up to $30 billion. According to an ICM poll, voters prefer Labour's tax policies to the Conservatives' by 31% to 18%. On the issues they rate most important - health, crime, education, the economy - voters decisively back Labour. And while they slightly prefer Hague's determination to keep out of the euro, which he has been stressing, over Blair's "wait and see" approach...