An extraordinary and unexpected reversal of the fortunes of the Labour Government was the backdrop to this year?s party conference season. A Guardian commentator analyses how each party reacted to the ?psychic cataclysm?. THE autumn season in British politics began with an eruption. The whole premise of the party conferences, with which the political year opens, appeared to be rejected. The premise is that parties matter, that their role as the mediators of democracy is cardinal, and therefore that what they say at their gatherings by the seaside, especially in a pre-election year, will be of decisive importance. That?s the way we do things in Britain. But this year it wasn?t. In early September, the country was brought close to a halt by a handful of petrol-depot blockaders. For a week, the mode of democracy was shifted from deliberative debate to brutal direct action as 2,000 enraged farmers and hauliers found, in high duties on diesel and petrol, a cause that naturally attracted the agreement of several million car drivers. What followed became the key event of autumnal politics, and it looks set to have a lengthy after-life. 
It was deeply disturbing to the Prime Minister. Tony Blair never saw it coming, and it had instant consequences for his perceived political strength. For the first time in eight years, Labour?s poll ratings plunged into deficit and his personal credibility as a leader of competence plummeted. A rattled party gathered in Brighton. Nobody in any segment of politics had, until that moment, operated on any other assumption than that there would be a comfortable Labour victory in 2001. It was part of the mind-set, a given in all political conversations. The only interesting issue was the size of the majority, and the effects this might have on Mr Blair?s chances of holding and winning a referendum on the euro. Now, at the crude level of conventional party politics, the leader had to come to terms with a terrible shock.
But his personal alarm was more complicated. He worried about what this meant for the system. Were all leaders now facing rejection by a peaceful and numerically minor, but operationally potent, version of the mob? He had never, it is true, been liked. Respected, accepted, but not warmed to. For a leader who had won a huge victory, he was strangely distant from public affection. Faced by the eruption, the worst thing he looked was bewildered. Though accused of arrogance, he seemed more guilty of impotence. He seemed confused, because he was confused. Nothing like this had happened since the poll tax riots of 1989. He was aware that he might be riding a tide he could not control.
The other parties were less disturbed. But oppositions have to seize their moment, and the fuel blockades were a catalyst. The Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives revealed themselves. We learned more about their attitudes both to the taxpayers? revolt and to the breakdown of normal life, verging on civil disorder, that disfigured Britain for a few days in September.
The Liberal Democrats should be the natural beneficiaries of such rejectionism, for historically they have gathered discontented votes from all over the spectrum. But this was not their response. Although they did not have much to say about civil disorder, they showed a striking lack of sympathy for its causes. Faced by an apparent rejection of high taxes, they reiterated a long-standing commitment to raising income tax. Invited to abandon the environmental priority, which is part of the reason petrol costs so much in Britain, they declined to do so.
Their anti-populist clarity went wider. Lurking inside the hauliers? and farmers? rebellion is a strong undercurrent of anti-Europeanism. The right-wing press, smartly springing to the support of direct action it had condemned only days before in France, folded its own anti-EU prejudices into the lessons it sought to draw from what had happened. The Liberal Democrats were unmoved. They remain the only party that speaks with an undivided mind in favour of the euro, as well as proclaiming with impressive comfort their general European affiliations. Despite refusing to ride with the mob, they came out of the conferences looking good in the polls. They have a leader, Charles Kennedy, whose downbeat presence positions him well to profit from the scorn, even loathing, that now seems to surround his more prominent, aggressive, power-playing, image-massaging counterparts.
The Conservatives? approach was very different. They leaped to profit from the September events. They could hardly move fast enough to appease the hauliers? demands and approve their methods of pressing them. William Hague called the people who had brought the country to a halt fine upstanding citizens. From the party that is supposed to uphold order as well as law, this was a revealing message. What happened may not have been illegal, but it was certainly a case of mass disorder, yet the Tories thought nothing of solemnly encouraging it. They also announced in short order that they would cut fuel duty, irrespective both of possible future falls in the oil price and of their own claim to be assembling an orderly economic programme, which should presumably not be amenable to sudden revenue cuts to meet populist demands.
The same short-term urgency was carried into their Bournemouth conference hall. There was another instant pledge, this time to outdo whatever new package Labour decided to offer pensioners. The rise in the Tories? polling fortunes, after the great eruption, prompted not greater sobriety but more extravagance. William Hague seemed to read the events as expressing simple fury with the Labour Government rather than anything more complex, and evidently thought he could take advantage of this by spattering a range of vague but alluring pledges from the platform. A different interpretation would be to say that there is a pervasive undertow of total scepticism at large among the voters, which is crying out for two adjustments in political behaviour by all parties: first, a return to principled consistency irrespective of what focus groups are saying, and secondly, a pledge of modesty in the making of all promises. Mr Hague proved unable to take a self-denying ordinance on either count.
LABOUR?S reaction was different again. Aside from Mr Blair?s private alarm at the erosion of normal politics, the party had to work through a quite profound psychological adjustment from the certainty of victory to the possibility of defeat. It left Brighton in better shape than it went there, having worked through the pain. Its way of doing this was to return closer to its roots than it has done for six years, rediscovering its own inner character as a party which believes in the enabling state. When it comes to the provision of education and public transport ? though less so, in the medium to long term, of health ? even Mr Blair, the arch-moderniser, believes there is no substitute for massive public spending, and the party gathered warmly round his vision. On the other hand, facing the psychic cataclysm, the leadership was as interested in finding scapegoats as solutions. It?s as hard as it ever was, perhaps harder, for the relationship at the core of government, between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, to work smoothly to the party?s and country?s best advantage.
Contending with the new fluidities is, naturally, hardest for the Government. They make life more interesting for people like me, since commentators have more to do in a world of change. Though volatile voters make punditry more risky, I?m still confident that Mr Blair will win the next election quite handsomely. Faced with actual choice, voters stop messing about. When they get serious, they look at the economy, at their own state of life, and at the rival men and women on offer. But how many of them can then be relied on to act? My most confident prediction is that turn-out will be lower than the 71.5 per cent last time, which was itself the lowest since the war. The seepage away from engagement in indirect democracy is steady and alarming. When the time comes, it will be a sullen and disbelieving people that goes to the polls, their mood quite different from the exultation of May 1997.