JessTheDog,
I think we do have a crisis in our democracy but I don’t think it has a damn thing to so with the numbers of people who voted for the victorious party.
Our system since its very beginning has always been an adversarial first past the post majority system, thus by its very nature you will have more people NOT voting for the party that is returned to power than actually did vote for the winners.
Blair and the Labour party are not unique here by any means. Take a look at Thatcher’s victory in 1979 for example, seventeen and a half million people voted for parties other than the Tories as compared to thirteen and a half million who voted Tory, thus, just as you say in your post about Blair, most people voted for someone other than Thatcher.
If you look at virtually any other election you will see a similar outcome, it is the nature of our system.
I think our crisis is a combination of the public lacking any trust or confidence in politicians, of ANY hue, and a general lack of interest in politics per se.
Now I have a real problem with the general thrust of your mail and the thread as a whole, I thought the war was wrong at the time and I still do, I thought the reasons presented for going to war were weak and woolly and I believe that I, along with the rest of the population, was hoodwinked.
I cannot though accept that this marks Blair out from any other Prime Minister though, if Howard had been in power in March 2003 I think he would have also taken us to war.
The Iraq war is also not the ground breaking example of political dishonesty it is presented as, take Suez in 1956 as a for instance. Very similar circumstances, we colluded with another major power, this time the French, to present a set of totally false circumstances to justify our attack on Egypt, we had a similar problem with Nasser as the US had with Saddam, international lawyers all agreed that Nassers nationalisation of the Canal was legal, we too wanted to have regime change. Eden claimed that Nassers had violated the UK-Egyptian treaty and when the US point blank refused to become involved or support an attack we turned to Israel and supported an Israeli attack on Egypt by claiming that we were “intervening to keep the peace” when we knew of the Israeli plans all along.
There’s nothing new under the sun…………………………………..