Maria Margaronis | The Nation

Trying to divine the political future from the results of European Parliamentary elections always involves an element of entrail-gazing. Across the continent, people take the opportunity to register protest votes; this year, the turnout (43 percent) was at a historic low. But as the final results come in, two things are becoming clear: the center-right has gained at the expense of social democrats, even in France, Italy and Germany where voters might have been expected to give ruling conservatives a kicking; and the collapse of the left vote has let in an unprecedented number of far-right and neo-fascist candidates.

Far-right parties made gains in the Netherlands, where the anti-Islam campaigner Geert Wilders came second with 17 percent of the vote; in Hungary, where the anti-Roma party Jobbik took three out of 22 seats; in Austria, where the Freedom Party polled 18 percent; in Slovakia, where extreme nationalists won their first seats; and in Britain, which elected not one but two candidates from the British National Party--a racist, neo-Nazi group committed to white supremacy and to "reversing the tide of non-white immigration."

What explains this ugly result? Obviously, it's partly the economy: hungry creatures tend to turn against their neighbors. But it's also a loss of faith: in the idea of Europe; in mainstream politics (seen as disconnected and corrupt); and particularly in the center left's ability to come up with any alternatives. (A sliver of silver lining: in France, former sixty-eighter Daniel Cohn-Bendit's green coalition, Europe Ecologie, outpolled the Socialists in greater Paris and in the south-east.) In Britain, BNP leader Nick Griffin actually won fewer votes than he did five years ago; the reason he is now an MEP is that the Labour vote spectacularly collapsed. Because of the expenses scandal and Labour's recent implosion, Britain might be seen as something of a special case, but the pattern in Europe is similar. In Germany, France and Italy the center-left has been on the defensive, offering no alternative routes out of the recession.

For Britain's Labour Party, following on from last week's local elections, the European vote is one more nail in an already bristling coffin. Relegated to third place after the Tories and the UK Independence Party--a right-wing anti-EU group that used to be seen as marginal--Labour did worse than it has in any election since 1918. It lost Scotland to the Scottish Nationalists and Wales to the Tories; it lost acres of heartland which may never be recovered, leaving hard-working local activists and community politicians who've given their lives to the cause abandoned and betrayed. Whether or not Gordon Brown stays on as leader--and he is now being held in place by Scotch tape and Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair's old familiar--Labour is finished, possibly for decades.

While the media focus on Westminster plots and counter-plots, the real rot goes far deeper. Like an overdose of chemotherapy, the New Labour project appears to have killed the patient it was meant to cure. Back in the 1990s, faced with a political consensus moved to the right by Thatcherism and a decimated industrial base, New Labour had no choice but to go after middle class voters--so-called "Mondeo Man." The Spartan discipline imposed by Blair and his minions to keep MPs "on message" and silence the Labour left went hand in hand with a pernicious centralization that starved the party's roots--and allowed Blair to take the country into a hated war.

The dysfunctional marriage of Blair and Brown that festered for years at the administration's heart paradoxically may have contributed to its longevity. For those of us who couldn't bear to turn our backs on Labour altogether, Brown's brooding silence made it possible to project all sorts of hopes: perhaps he wasn't in favour of the Iraq war, perhaps he really was to the left of Tony Blair, perhaps his community roots would reassert themselves and put an end to the glibness and the glitz in favor of old Labour values.

Well, we were wrong, on all those counts. As prime minister, Brown has been a disaster; he has also turned out to be a brutal political operator, issuing threats by proxy and leaking negative stories about his own ministers to the press. Some of those ministers have behaved even worse, notably former Communities Secretary Hazel Blears who quit the cabinet on the eve of the local elections wearing a Cheshire cat grin and a badge that read "Rocking the Boat," so pulling the rug from under scores of local councilors standing for re-election. The party is at its own throat as it has never been before, even in the wilderness years of the Thatcherite 1980s.

Barring some unprecedented event, a year from now we will have a Conservative government. Which brings us back to the European elections. To please his own Eurosceptic wing, David Cameron has pledged to take the Conservatives out of the center-right EPP-ED alliance in the European parliament, which includes the parties led by Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Nicolas Sarkozy. Instead, he plans to form a new Eurosceptic caucus. To that end, he has been making common cause with far-right parties from the former Eastern Europe, such as Poland's fundamentalist Catholic Law and Justice Party, which considers homosexuality a "pathology" and climate change a hoax, and the Czech Republic's Civic Democratic Party, whose founder, Vaclav Klaus, sees Brussels as the new Moscow.

UKIP's success in Britain will put wind in Cameron's sails; Europe's new far-right MEPs will no doubt support his project. And even if their election has no direct effect on European policy, it will be that much more acceptable for mainstream politicians to blame their countries' ills on immigrants and minorities. On June 6th, D-Day's 65th anniversary, Brown and Obama met on the beaches of Normandy with some of the last veterans of Europe's fight against fascism. As the last memories of that struggle fade, the racism skulking in corners of this crowded continent is finding a space in which to assert itself once more.

"Dr. Sikora, do you feel there is a need to expand competition and choice for people in this country?" asks the interviewer. "Absolutely," says Dr. Karol Sikora, a senior British oncologist and former head of the World Health Organization's cancer program. "There's no incentive to offer people services in a state monopoly."

Dr. Sikora's interview is part of a TV ad campaign that's using the tragic stories of patients failed by Britain's National Health Service to block Obama's health care reforms. The ads are made by a group called Conservatives for Patients Rights, set up this year by the medical entrepreneur Richard Scott, who ran the $23 billion Columbia/HCA hospital chain until it was charged with massive Medicare fraud in 1997; the PR firm is CRC Public Relations, which masterminded the Swift boat attacks against John Kerry in 2004. Other segments feature a young woman whose cervical cancer went undiagnosed because NHS cervical screening starts at age 25 and who now may not make it, and another whose mother had to wait too long for kidney cancer surgery and subsequently died. This, they claim is the kind of thing that will happen to Americans if the medical business is made to contain its costs and open its doors to the poor.

While watching the ads on the web this morning I was also taking care of a piece of domestic business, trying to get through to our GP's office on the phone. Our ten-year-old son may need minor surgery; the appointment letter from the surgeon I chose with our doctor three or four weeks ago hasn't yet arrived. I had to call a couple of times before someone picked up, and I began to get irritated and read some of the endless news stories on the internet about the failings of the NHS. Then I spoke to the practice secretary. Ten minutes later, I got a call from the surgeon's office, offering us an appointment for next week. Sorted.

Like most British people, I have a love-hate relationship with the NHS, which definitely has its problems. There can be long waiting times for diagnosis and surgery; there is the so-called "post-code lottery," which means that treatment (especially cancer treatment) varies a lot depending on where you live. The bureaucracy's complexity is legendary. Expensive and potentially life saving or life extending drugs are not available to everyone who needs them. Hospitals are understaffed; MRSA infections are an ongoing issue.

But in the 14 years we've lived in London, members of my family have had, without a single bill: two hospital births, one attended by midwives in a birthing pool, the other requiring weekly scans by a top fetal medicine specialist; child development checks and vaccinations; lithotripsy for kidney stones; a tonsillectomy; physiotherapy for a broken arm; annual consultations for a chronic chest condition; and countless GP appointments for minor ailments in and out of hours, as well as free medicines and eye exams for the children. The practitioners and staff we have dealt with have been, almost without exception, professional, dedicated, overworked, and very kind. (I'll never forget the vigilant theatre nurse who watched our daughter wake up from a general anaesthetic.) The doctors we see often roll their eyes at the frustrations of the system, but they also know how to get the best from it for their patients. I have never once felt that cost was a factor in the treatments we were offered--though I know this might be different in some cases. Given the choice between an NHS teaching hospital and one that's run for profit, I know which I'd choose every time.

British politicians and commentators endlessly debate the future of the health service, which celebrated its 60th birthday last year: how to finance and manage it, how to make it more responsive to patients, how to pay for new generation medicines and techniques and meet the needs of an aging population. But even the Tory leader (and probable next prime minister) David Cameron has pledged to keep it free at the point of use. (His severely disabled son, who died earlier this year, was cared for by the service.) The right to healthcare is as fundamental as the right to education; the question is not whether but how that right is respected. When I talk to American friends about what we have here--especially those who live without decent insurance--they stare in disbelief. Don't be put off by the horror stories. Yes, the NHS sometimes fails people. It needs reform, and money. But most of the time it does a fantastic job--and it does it for everyone.

Correction: An earlier version of this post said that Richard Scott "founded and ran the $23 billion Columbia/HCA hospital chain." In fact he founded Columbia Healthcare, which merged with the Hospital Corporation of America to form Columbia/HCA.

In London today, Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev agreed to make cuts in their nuclear arsenals; Obama and Gordon Brown announced that the G20 were "within a few hours" of agreeing a global plan for economic recovery; and Nicholas Sarkozy, in cahoots with Angela Merkel, threatened to scupper the whole show if his calls for tighter financial regulation are not met. But at 11 am, outside the Bank of England, we waited under an eggshell sky for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: red against war, green against climate chaos, silver against financial crime and black (the website said) against borders and land enclosures, in memory of the Diggers.

War got there first, escorted by a small crowd offering the usual British cocktail of whimsy ("Queers against capitalism and other nasty things" "Eat the bankers") and testosterone ("We are fucking angry"). There were fists in the air, and singing, to the tune of "Clementine": "Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, Put the bankers on the top…" Small knots of anarchists in black drummed up a rapid rhythm; police in day-glo green formed equally rapid cordons; the last red double-deckers tried to nose through the crowd. Everyone was taking pictures, with cameras and mobile phones: if it isn't mediated, it isn't happening. "Jump! Jump!" people shouted up at the windowless bank, and "Where's our money?" and "Shame!"

The protest seemed a broad bricolage of causes: a young man waving a red flag allowed that we're not in a revolutionary situation yet, "but I think we might be soon"; three feet away, a woman holding one end of a banner ("Capitalism isn't working") said she was furious with Gordon Brown for saddling her children with debt and may well vote for the Tories in the next election. But Mary--retired, with a "Wage Slave" label on--rebuked my cynicism. "I refute the idea that we're all talking about different things," she said. "The kind of world we want to see is the same world---a world where money is used to help people. We're all just talking about different bits of it."

Within the hour all four horses had arrived, and several thousand of us found ourselves penned (or "kettled") by the police in the broad plaza at the end of Threadneedle Street. A woman in business clothes, down for a meeting, had to get home to pick up her baby son from nursery; no dice, the officer said. No one was getting out. Back in February the Met issued dire warnings of an impending "summer of rage". Today they seemed determined to fulfil that prophecy. There's nothing like being hemmed in to make you want to push back; a panicky anger wells even if you don't want it to. When the cordon briefly parted, the crowd surged forward, and I saw the first scuffle between a policeman and a protester--no political content there, just two guys losing it.

Once I'd escaped I walked a few blocks to the European Climate Exchange (which trades in carbon credits), where a very different, "fluffier" protest was taking root. A tent city had sprung up between the office buildings, complete with bunting and colourful posters: "Welcome to the Bright Side." Instead of red and black, hot pink and brilliant green; instead of shouting, cake and daffodils--because "Nature doesn't do bailouts." The police stood around, bemused, with their arms folded.

This was Climate Camp, a network (mostly young and mostly white) of people who've gathered regularly since 2006 to talk and to protest--earlier camps were held at Heathrow Airport and at Kingsnorth, where there are plans to build a coal-fired power plant. Dave, a post-doc doing research on carbon dating at Oxford University, sat in the doorway of his tent dressed in a business suit "so the police won't stop and search me and take all my belongings." This feels to him like the birth of a new movement. "With most protests, people turn up for the day and then go home; this is an ongoing thing. It's the only thing that makes me feel optimistic, though I don't know if we can actually stop climate change."

There was a definite buzz here, a purposeful party atmosphere. People talked about reclaiming something that was lost, a sense of ownership of the streets and of the land, about building communities. Young men wandered about offering gingerbread. There were workshops on carbon trading and Copenhagen, Samba and self-defense. Two mermaids in green wigs and long blue sparkly dresses worried about sea levels; a land-based woman wore a T-shirt reading "I heart ethical investment." Apparently there are factions here, as everywhere--"some people want capitalism to end, while others simply want it to take note of science"--but the core ethic is non-violence and consensus building. What made the camp so different from the protests round the corner, which felt, from here, a million miles away? It's not so simple, they insisted. We're the same people; it's just a different style, a different tactic.

Back at the Bank, the police were putting on riot gear; there had been a few things thrown, a few heads cracked. Someone had smashed the window of the Royal Bank of Scotland (whose former director, Sir Fred Goodwin, was rewarded for his failures with a million dollar pension); but as this picture shows, the cameras' black snouts outnumbered the missiles. The whole thing felt like a painful tempest in a teapot: the simulacrum of a riot, dreamed up by the police and a handful of protesters.

There have been three different demonstrations in London today, in three very different styles: a traditional march to Trafalgar Square let by the Stop the War Coalition, with speeches by the big beasts of the left; the Climate Camp; and the "meltdown" at the Bank. No prizes for guessing which one made the most headlines. On my way home I passed an Evening Standard billboard: "Anarchists battle for City," the big black letters read, as if we were on the verge of civil war.

Update, April 2nd: Yesterday evening the police encircled the Climate Camp and began to crush the entirely peaceful demonstrators gathered there with riot shields and strike them with batons: see this film posted on Indymedia. The campers put their hands in the air and chanted "This is not a riot," but the police continued to shove. They were then kept penned without food or water for five hours before being searched and allowed out one by one. It was also reported this morning that a man died, apparently of a heart attack, during the protest at the Bank of England.