Other Columns by Paul M. Weyrich
Paul M. Weyrich Bio

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After a mercifully short campaign Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party was re-elected for an historic third term. Its margin in Parliament appears to have been reduced by about half but he still enjoys a good majority, twice that of John Major when he was elected to the third Tory term which had begun with Margaret Thatcher's first election in 1979. Blair is now the third major figure to face the voters following the Iraq War.

In Australia the war was the issue in Prime Minister John Howard's upset victory, whereupon he actually gained seats in his unprecedented third-term attempt.

Then there was George W. Bush, who did far better at the polls in 2004 then he did in 2000. So while Blair did lose seats in this election he did not lose enough to endanger his majority.

The Labour Party was returned to office with only 37% of the vote, its lowest percentage in modern times. Labour dropped five percentage points. The Liberals, once a major party in British politics but now clearly a third party, apparently gained four of those percentage points, to bring it to 22% of the national vote, while increasing only a handful of Parliamentary seats. The hapless Conservatives, or Tories as they are called in much of Great Britain, remained at around 33% of the vote, about where they were in the last election. They did pick up enough seats to cause the Prime Minister a few more problems than he had before but not enough to endanger his governing majority.

While Blair is disappointed in the outcome he should not be. Winston Churchill saved Great Britain. He helped to persuade FDR to begin to help the British as early as 1939, even though isolationist sentiment was running at a fever pitch.

FDR, in the 1940 election against Wendell L. Willkie, said he hated war and so did Eleanor, and he would not involve the USA in a European war. Then came Pearl Harbor. Sentiment in the country turned around instantly. That is why to this day some historians contend that FDR knew that an attack was coming from Japan but he let it happen so as to involve us in the war. Led by Charles A. Lindbergh, of solo trans-Atlantic Flight fame, the country had been overwhelmingly against our intervention in what appeared to be a war in which we had no stake. Lindbergh was almost the first to volunteer to fight the Nazis and isolationist sentiment never had reached the fever pitch it had in 1940-1941.

So without our help the British would today be speaking with a German accent and Churchill was responsible for persuading the British people to hang on. Yet as soon as VE Day and VJ Day had passed and the war officially was over Great Britain held an election and Clement R. Atlee of the Labour Party was elected Prime Minister. The man who was more than anyone else responsible for winning the war for the British was tossed out.

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