Feature Article

Look to the future

There are some certainties about the coming year - a general election in Britain, further tensions in Iraq and Israel. Here, we present a guide to 2005 - including some suprises, especially for the Church and its influence.

IT DOES not take much of a gaze into the crystal ball to detect that the major political event in Britain in 2005 will be the return of a Blair-led government for a third term, helped by an unprecedented low turn-out. But apart from fatalism among the electorate, who only turn out massively when they think they can change things, it is not so easy to see what that outcome signifies. Labour claims a renewed mandate for public-sector reform. It would be more accurate to talk of public absolution for past misdeeds: chief among them, of course, being Iraq.

Absolution without contrition, what is more, though a firm purpose of amendment may be implied. Clearly there will be no more pre-emptive adventures alongside George Bush. But restoration and restitution? Nobody suggests handing Iraq back to Saddam Hussein, although the alienation of Muslim opinion across the world may be eased as Tony Blair persists with his own private version of the roadmap for a Middle East peace settlement. Connected or not, the threat of terrorism is felt to decline as the year passes. The long anticipated attack on prestige targets in Britain fails to materialise once more.

So immune to security threats, the crystal ball says Blair has his third successive landslide. Needless to say, it won?t be a landslide of love. He loses seats to the Liberal Democrats; perhaps as many as 10. He picks up two or three from the Conservatives, however, who lose rather more to the Liberal Democrats, such is the nature of the political arithmetic. But unhappy Labour supporters have nowhere else to go, and while the anti-war middle classes (and Muslim working classes) may want to reward Charles Kennedy for his principles, there are not enough of them in the right places to make a strategic difference.

What happens to the Tories is more interesting. How much more of a hammering can they take? The Tory leadership crisis will rumble on in 2005 ? Michael Howard?s appointment bringing only a brief pause in it ? with panicky talk of bringing back William Hague, with or without Iain Duncan Smith as his deputy. This is a party in need of a saviour if ever there was one.

It does not take much tweaking of our crystal ball?s prophetic powers to predict that Blair may confirm Gordon Brown as his chosen heir shortly after the election, so the Tories can look forward not only to four more years of misery in opposition but to yet another defeat at the end of it. The fact that they originated most of the policies with which Labour stormed to victory is scant consolation for a party whose very raison d??tre is to govern, not to be a think-tank.

Despite the efforts of various outsiders such as the Churches to make the election about principles, it is also fairly predictable that the campaign will be fought on a narrow agenda of law and order (counting against Labour) and economic growth (counting in Labour?s favour). On both issues, it is safe to say, the arguments will be heavily spun by the parties and distorted by the media.

The absence of a pre-election apology for the Government?s misinformation, mistakes and misjudgements over Iraq is made more tolerable by Jack Straw?s declaration that reform of the United Nations will guarantee that no such situation could ever arise again. That is another way of promising never again to trust intelligence reports of hidden WMDs, nor to accept America?s right to label as terrorist threats any regime it happens to dislike. More significantly, however, Blair?s 2005 international agenda opens clear water between himself and Bush, on global warming, on international development and on the Middle East. As a result the neo-con formula will begin to look tired and irrelevant even among Republicans ? a programme not for ?the new American century? but for losing America any sort of world leadership for ever. As a result, that large part of the anti-war feeling in Britain that was really disguised anti-Americanism (or anti-Bushism) will begin to dissipate.

The Iraq quagmire, meanwhile, changes its character from resistance to American occupation to being a real civil war, as disempowered Sunnis fight to destabilise the Shia-Kurd alliance that has taken away their power. Nevertheless, the Iraq election still scheduled for late January is set to hand the government of the country to parties supported by the majority. The Sunni minority may grumble about flaws in the election process, with only a 20- per-cent turn-out in some areas. But the insurgents may at last begin to look weary. Their greatest asset in 2004, the use of suicide bombers, becomes their greatest weakness in 2005. A suicide bomber is one less enemy to chase, capture or kill the next day.

It is not idle speculation to predict that the question will soon arise whether the Americans and the British have any useful role left in Iraq. American backing for the Shias and Kurds in power actually increases short-term support for Sunni insurrectionists and drives ordinary Sunni Muslims into the arms of the Wahhabis ? the name by which Islamic fundamentalists will increasingly be known as the year goes on. But a Washington still dominated by neo-cons cannot read the runes correctly, for trying to understand someone else?s point of view is to them a sign of unmanly weakness.

What will surprise commentators in 2005, the crystal ball predicts, is Blair?s increasing independence of action regardless of Washington, verging on rashness. It is as though he is determined to bury the ?Bush?s poodle? tag before he quits. He is keen to use Britain?s presidency both of the G8 and of the European Union to give the Americans a lesson in how to lead world opinion ? rather than upset and annoy it.

Even Jacques Chirac may be pleasantly surprised by Blair?s performance, likely to lead to renewed talk of a Blair ?presidency? of the EU if and when the new constitution is adopted. A narrow victory for this in the French referendum would begin to influence British opinion in its favour ? a British referendum is likely in spring 2006 ? not least after French attacks on the draft constitution for being too ?Anglo-Saxon?.

Not that our crystal ball predicts that Blair will have 2005 all his own way. At a prophetic level of speculation, it even foresees the possibility of him being wrong-footed in the most unexpected way. There is one area where he is wide open to challenge: are Britain?s Churches bold enough to put him to the test over it? What if there was concerted questioning about Britain?s billion-pound nuclear weapons programme? It would be initiated by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O?Connor, who has hinted more than once at these concerns; it would make sense for him to raise it before the general election and pursue it afterwards, perhaps in concert with Dr Rowan Williams. Breaking one of the firmest taboos in British politics as only a churchman can ? for everyone in politics knows that Britain?s nuclear policy makes no sense ? the cardinal has only to ask what is the military and political point of weapons designed to obliterate targets in a Soviet Union that ceased to exist 15 years ago, and what conceivable moral case can there be for owning them?

Pope John Paul II, who ends 2005 as he began it, frail in speech and body but alert in mind, can easily add his weight with a welltimed summer call for a ?nuclear-free-world?. This would bring despondency in Washington, which thinks it owns the papacy. But if Tony Blair, tempted by the prospect of redeeming himself in the eyes of the Labour left, raises the issue with Chirac, he is likely to reply that France will never leave the United States as the only Western nuclear power. Recognising that they have not yet won the argument, the Archbishops of Westminster and Canterbury would do well to announce an international disarmament conference in 2006 (with Blair?s tacit support) to keep up the pressure.

Such a high profile for the Churches would do nothing to correct falling weekly attendance in either denomination, but may move the issue of Church of England establishment higher up the agenda. Jewish and Muslim leaders will resist this trend, saying as they have before that they value the indirect protection for religion that comes from establishment. Prince Charles will exude his support. The Chief Rabbi could even announce that he will send out real Christmas cards this year, with ?Happy Christmas? as the motto inside.

But the real target of Jewish wrath in 2005 will be his support for some withdrawal of Israeli settlements on the West Bank, on top of the programme of withdrawals from Gaza. At the same time the new Palestinian Government, launched by a successful conference in London in the spring, will begin to wind down the intifada, of which the majority of Palestinians have at last grown tired because it is going nowhere. As a result 2005 is likely to be the first year for decades in which the situation in the Middle East looks better at the end of it than at the beginning.

Even the anti-Blair press in Britain will have to give the Prime Minister a modicum of grudging credit for this progress ? as it may do for his campaign against poverty in Africa. Though commentators may recite how many times it has said this before, the G8 will promise debt relief for the poorest nations and a new international bank to finance development in Africa. New debt for old, the cry will inevitably go up from the more radical parts of the overseas aid lobby. But, generally speaking, Blair gets a better press in 2005 than any time since 1998.

So at last, says the crystal ball, a de-mob happy Tony Blair can go to Washington to collect the Gold Medal that Congress awarded him in 2003, but giving the impression that it was for his work for peace in 2005, not for joining in the attack on Iraq. A clever piece of media manipulation, very Blair ? but nobody noticed. Whatever happened to spin, or rather the fuss about it? The public has grown tolerant of it, says the crystal ball. Time to grow up and move on.