Muddling through? Blair's improvisation isn't enough.

IT is the new conventional wisdom of British politics: Tony Blair has been strengthened and energized by the London bombings. Widely depicted only months ago as a lame-duck prime minister limping slowly to retirement, he seized the challenge represented by the menace of home-grown Islamist terrorism and presented himself as the only political leader capable of responding effectively to it. He has now presented a twelve-point plan (old habits die hard) to defeat the terrorists by closing down their websites, deporting them from Britain, and generally making laws to control their activities more closely. That done, he left for vacation. A Nick Garland cartoon shows him using his post-bombing upturn in the polls as a sort of ski-jump, to rise effortlessly above his rivals in Labour and other parties.

Even in its own terms, this picture has one glaring defect: Blair had actually been energized and strengthened five weeks before the bombings, by the defeat of the European constitution in the French and Dutch referendums. Blair had been a zealous supporter of the constitution right up to polling day. Defeat changed all that. He arrived three weeks later at the European parliament as the man who would solve the crisis by making the European "social model" more flexible and competitive. He proposed no specific policies that would achieve this wonder; nor has he done so since. On his return to Britain, however, he was generally credited with having converted Europe to longstanding British models of economic and constitutional flexibility. He was enjoying this return to popularity when the bombs went off--and made him even more popular.

On both occasions, Blair had done something similar: He had seemed to respond to the crisis with bold moves and eloquent language, while others were dithering. By the time people figured out that there was actually very little solid policy substance in what he had said, Blair was moving on to the next topic. And when the bold policies he had announced began to fall apart, run into obstacles, or gradually evaporate under criticism, it was his subordinates who were left explaining away the difficulties.

Two examples of this occurred very recently. Hazel Blears, a nice but dim junior minister covering community relations, was asked to launch a "charm offensive" on the Muslim community to soothe away its objections to Blair's new security crackdown. She therefore suggested that since multiculturalism had run into trouble, maybe new names should be invented to stress the "British" nature of immigrant communities--for instance, "Asian-British" (on the "African-American" model). This prompted a rash of Asian protests on the grounds that it was patronizing and absurd. The suggestion was withdrawn.

At about the same time, a government leak suggested that maybe radical Muslim clerics who had praised terrorism would be prosecuted for treason. One such cleric promptly left Britain. His spokesman explained that Blair had declared war on Muslims and the sheik had gone to where he could practice his religion without harassment. Whereupon, the Lord Chancellor declared it "highly unlikely" that treason charges would

be initiated against anyone or that the government would introduce anything like internment. The sheik promptly announced that he was in Lebanon on vacation and would be returning to London in a few weeks.

These flip-flops invited derision. Not unreasonably, John Denham, a hardheaded former homeland-security minister in Blair's government who now heads the Commons committee investigating the bombings, accused ministers of galloping off in all directions: "The last few days really give the sense that the Government has got into a real state of nerves about the whole thing, displaying a lack of confidence in its own strategy. They have got to get a grip on it very, very quickly, stop floating half-baked ideas and get back to proper cross-party consensus on the serious measures that need to be taken." From a senior New Labour figure, this was very tough criticism. Opposition spokesmen chimed in with criticisms of "confusion" and "government by press release." And the general impression left was one of disarray, incomprehension, and befuddled improvisation at the top.

This public impression is almost certainly accurate. One senses that Blair, underneath his public mask of self-confident leadership, is baffled by the scope and nature of the problems of domestic and imported radical Islamism facing him. The scope is certainly much larger than anyone had supposed until recently. According to a news report in London's Independent, British intelligence has warned Blair that "tens of thousands" of young Muslim men with military training are now in Britain and that terrorism amounting to a domestic "insurgency" cannot be ruled out. Many of these young men are immigrants and asylum seekers from Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. Their numbers dwarf those native-born British Muslims who went to fight for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq. And though they may have come to Britain to escape strife in their native countries, they might be drawn into terrorism if a religious war seemed ready to break out in British cities.

That is a terrifying prospect--even if, as it seems to me, an exaggerated one. But the nature of radical Islamism may baffle and frighten Blair even more than its extent. Nothing in Blair's history or thinking leads one to believe that he has any intuitive grasp of such phenomena. Indeed, all his major think-pieces--his famous Labour-conference speech denouncing "the forces of conservatism," for instance--exhibit a shallow confidence that the world is moving away from old loyalties and beliefs towards some ill-defined post-national and modernized future. What Britain had to do in his view was to respond to this reality by shedding its traditions and distinctive values in order to compete in a high-tech world economy and to welcome the immigrants that a modern economy "needed." It did not occur to him that these traditions might have played a part in unifying the country or in making it impressive and admirable to newcomers. As for concepts such as jihad and movements such as al-Qaeda, these were foreign to him in every sense. He could hardly imagine that they might grow and flourish in British soil--"forces of conservatism" that had grown radical in response to the official multiculturalism that was supposed to accommodate, tame, and transform them. So, in a thousand small ways, he set about deconstructing the British state and society.

Blair's own policies--on immigration, multiculturalism, asylum, and constitutional change--having helped to create the current crisis, now hobble his attempts to deal with it. The Human Rights Act is a particularly intractable problem for him and New Labour. It was the centerpiece of their program of modernizing Britain that included abolishing the House of Lords, establishing Welsh and Scottish parliaments, creating (unwanted) regional assemblies for England, and transferring power from Westminster to the European Union. The European Convention on Human Rights was incorporated in English law under the Human Rights Act--and if Parliament passes other laws in conflict with these provisions, judges are entitled to declare them unconstitutional.

Already frisky before Blair was elected, the judges have used their new powers to overturn immigration rules, release terrorists from prison, extend the rights of citizens to non-citizens, forbid the deportation or house arrest of terrorist subjects, and much else. There is a chance the courts will proclaim that some of the new rules Blair is proposing--for instance, making it illegal to condone terrorism, or deporting terrorists to police states if the states promise not to torture them--are in conflict with the HRA. Blair has quietly suggested that he might amend the HRA (and perhaps withdraw from some international conventions) if that were to happen. That would be a vast political embarrassment--an admission that Blair's main constitutional approach was misconceived. It probably won't happen, in part because the judges, in the atmosphere following the bombs, will not want to challenge ministers for a while. Blair will thus get most of his criminal-law reforms through. But the HRA will have to be repealed at some point--not only to fight terrorism but also to rescue Britain's own democratic traditions from ambitious judges keen to get a favorable reference in the Guardian.

In the meantime, will Blair's criminal-law reforms make a difference? Some of them might--for instance, deporting terrorists and closing down Londonistan. Others are largely displacement activities, more for show than for utility, such as identity cards (to which the four successful bombers would have been entitled). But the deeper problem is that many young Muslim men, whether British-born or immigrants, regard their principal political allegiance to be to Islam. Blair and the government have finally grasped this problem and signaled a retreat from the multiculturalism they now think fostered it.

But a retreat to what? New Labour is ambivalent, at best, about Britain's national identity and institutions. When ministers had to devise a "Britishness test" for citizenship, they came up with questions on the national minimum wage, youth culture, and working rights. There was little or no history, literature, or science, nothing about the nation's remarkable achievements--nothing, in short, to stir the blood or stiffen the sinews. Insofar as anything general could be deduced from the test, the applicant was presumably seeking to join a social-welfare organization of universalist bent.

And that's the problem both for Blair and about Blair. If even the prime minister can't give voice to patriotism, why on earth should a Muslim immigrant or a Muslim kid from a Leeds housing estate feel patriotism, loyalty, and allegiance when the Union Jack is raised--or when a Royal Navy crew rescues Russian sailors from a trapped submarine?