The British Voter, Adrift

For voters, at least, the broadly centrist New Labour vision — of an ever-better life for an upwardly mobile middle class in an ever-expanding market economy — has gone lost in the economic storm of the last two years, and none of the political parties seems to offer one to replace it.

In the 13 years since voters put New Labour in power, Britain was first lofted, and then sharply let down, by what seemed a new kind of politics. Tony Blair began the era by identifying and captivating a kind of post-ideological, post-Thatcherite voter — someone aspiring to social and economic mobility, and anxious to realize finally a promise made to an earlier generation by a postwar Conservative, Harold Macmillan; he is forever identified in Britain with the slogan: “You’ve never had it so good.”

The 1990s, indeed, seemed a new decade, with Mr. Blair and his successor, Mr. Brown, surfing a towering economic wave. Together, they promised boom without bust in a market-driven utopia — an ideal far from the Socialist theology that gave rise to the old Labour Party, but which most voters now deemed stale.

Then the economic bust of 2008 arrived with the global financial crisis. And now, not far behind it, the political bust.

By the time Mr. Brown took over in 2007, Labour had already taken one bruising from Mr. Blair’s alliance with the White House in Iraq; its promises to improve schools and hospitals had produced ambiguous results; and, most of all, trust in the political elite had become a scarce commodity (only to be further eroded in the last year by a scandal over lawmakers’ expenses that seemed to show the grand visions of 1997 dissolving in the sleaze of politicians unable to understand the people).

And then, abruptly, the wealth that had sustained many Britons during the good years was displaced by the threat of an austerity not entirely unlike the brand whose consequences, in a different land, were on display just last week on the riotous streets of Athens.

That specter, of utter financial chaos, was perhaps the last straw for the old vision in Britain. Whatever their differences, all three main contenders went into Thursday’s election with one common premise: the economy could not be rescued without deep cuts in public spending to escape a burden of debt left by the years in which Mr. Brown was chief steward of the economy. Hard times, in one way or another, were looming.

But there was more to it than that, from the point of view of pure politics. Mr. Brown was struggling to cling to power, to give himself more time to build a legacy other than political failure and economic decline. Meanwhile, his opponents, David Cameron of the Conservatives and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats, were vying to assume the mantle of renewal that Mr. Blair paraded so elegantly and eloquently in 1997. Like Mr. Blair, they cast themselves as leaders of a new, adventurous kind of Briton and promised a return to hope.

In the end, all three fell short, and the voters could not make a clear choice. Mr. Brown discovered that, once the economic visions of Labour’s new, non-ideological supporters were replaced by gloomier prospects, many of those new supporters defected.

But if they became swing voters, what they wanted remained unclear. They deprived Labour of its parliamentary majority for the first time in 13 years, but the Conservatives didn’t win a parliamentary majority. The Liberal Democrats’ representation actually declined, but they emerged with some prospects of becoming kingmakers.

As Peter Mandelson, Mr. Brown’s chief strategist, remarked, voters had turned a page but had not shown the politicians which chapter they now wished to peruse. The voting ended, as Paddy Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader, said, in a “muddle.”

And that muddle was not the model for a new Britain — or a new Briton — that the politicians had promised.