War: The Great Unknown
Among Election IssuesBy Jonathan Freedland
18 April, 2005
The GuardianOfficially, it's nowhere. Last week's Guardian poll showed a measly 3% of voters citing the Iraq conflict as the main factor in determining their choice. Neither the government nor the opposition talk about it much. In contrast with recent elections in Spain and the United States, the two main parties were on the same side over Iraq. So while José María Aznar and George Bush were pounded by their electoral challengers over the conflict, Tony Blair enjoys a free pass from his chief rival, Michael Howard. Iraq is not exactly the lead item in any of the main party manifestos.
And yet, take a look at the Conservatives' latest cinema ad. It shows a grainy shot of Mr Blair with Mr Bush, and there is no mistaking the memory that image is meant to evoke. Talk to the candidates themselves, of whatever stripe, and many will testify that Iraq is raised on the doorstep more often, and with greater intensity, than those headline poll figures would suggest.
Or talk to the voters themselves. You might meet a family like Huma Awan's. She's 28, Edinburgh born and bred, a mother and a part-time official of the Council of British Pakistanis. In 2001 she voted Labour, liking its record on education and health. "On the things that mattered to me, they seemed to be talking sense."But not this time. "I'm ashamed of this government," she said, sitting with her father in the spacious flat he bought - thanks to decades of round-the-clock work in a corner shop - in Edinburgh's smart Bruntsfield neighbourhood. "Blair was under pressure to present evidence to parliament and he made things up and I find that shocking."
This is not the kneejerk opposition many ascribe to Muslim voters. Ms Awan backed military action against Afghanistan, regarding it as legitimate self-defence.
At first, she was open-minded about Iraq, too. She was indifferent to the February 2003 demonstration against the war and remembers believing the now-discredited 45-minute claim. "I thought, 'They're not stupid. There must be a reason'."
Now though the disenchantment is complete. "I just don't trust Blair any more," she said. "He says something and then it comes out a few months later that he was lying through his teeth."
Her father, Mohsan Raza, became disillusioned much earlier. Aged 63 and retired, he made the journey from Pakistan in 1961: "I came to Edinburgh and it was a nice, clean city and it took my heart away: I thought, this is the place for me." He remembered the former Conservative prime minister Alec Douglas-Home saying he wanted immigrants to do well - but not too well - and that made Mr Raza a Labour man for life.
On May 5 that four-decade habit will be broken. "I'll go to the Liberal Democrats, to Charles Kennedy because he was against the war."
The Tories are not an option because, his daughter said, "they would have done the same" as Labour.
For Mr Raza, Iraq is just one part of a process that began on September 11 2001 and saw him feel newly uncomfortable, even rejected, in a country he had grown to love. He cited the sudden, post 9/11 fear and ostracism of Muslims; the war on Afghanistan and the anti-terrorism measures which, he believes, have identified all Muslims with violence in the British mind. But Iraq is the sorest point.
His old friend, Syed Kirmani, also 63, said he felt the same way. Since 9/11 he had taken to wearing traditional Pakistani dress (a reaction perhaps to the sentiment Ms Awan described: "The feeling that, no matter how integrated you are, you're still not going to be accepted as fully British.")
He likes Labour, likes his local Labour MP. But he wants to punish Mr Blair - for British rather than Muslim reasons. "He did what Bush told him to do. He forgot his position, which is to listen to the people of Britain."
He reckoned that "Saddam could have been removed like a hair on a buttock". War was unnecessary.
"Yes, Blair talks very nicely about Islam and reading the Qur'an. But there's no justice in killing innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq, which filters down into attitudes [to Muslims] on the streets."
There is a crumb of comfort for the government here. The animus is directed at the prime minister, rather than the party.
Similar discussions can be heard in constituencies across the country: from Brent East to Leicester South, seats where Muslim disaffection with Labour could have a direct impact. The Lib Dems report that 1,500 of the 8,000 people who joined the party in 2002-03 were Muslims - a shift officials directly attribute to the Iraq effect.
In Bethnal Green and Bow in east London, where Respect's George Galloway is challenging Labour's Oona King, who backed the war, Iraq is the decisive issue.
Student towns report high interest too. In Oxford East, Lib Dem leaflets feature a prominent picture of Mr Blair with Mr Bush, under the headline: "Do you want more of this?"
Others draw a distinction between traditional Labour seats, especially in the north, where Iraq is hardly mentioned, and "Guardian reading" constituencies, where it can dominate. Hornsey and Wood Green in north London, where former minister Barbara Roche faces a stiff Lib Dem challenge, is the prime example of the latter.
In the former, said one Labour candidate, the issue surfaces in a less direct form - cited as proof that Mr Blair is out of touch, off pursuing "a baseless diversion" when he should have been sorting out problems at home.
It is not just Labour supporters who are seeing 2005 as a khaki election. Tory Nicholas Boles, trying to overturn a Labour majority in Hove, has been struck by the number of elderly, "culturally conservative" voters who raise Iraq.
"It's mentioned to me much more than I expected," he said. "They talk of Blair's lies and Blair's deceit. Women say 'it could have been my son.' There's definitely real anger there."
Mr Boles's Labour opponent, Celia Barlow, is opposed to the war: if she wasn't, Mr Boles speculates that Hove's Labour activists would not be stretching too many sinews to get her elected.
Variations on that theme are heard across the country. It may not be the issue on which this election turns, but it is having a deep impact. Labour is feeling it most keenly - among its activists, but also among what party tacticians call its "intelligentsia" vote, among students and among Muslims.
Elsewhere it is symbolic of a much larger theme: trust in the prime minister.
How many Labour voters it will affect - by shifting them to other parties or keeping them at home - no one will dare predict. For the one topic on which polls are notoriously limited is turnout - and that is where the Iraq war may have its greatest effect. Having dominated politics for the last parliament, it may yet have a say in shaping the next. This drama is not over yet.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
