LONDON -- It is possible that in some dark cavern by the River Thames, or wherever it is that Labor's inner circle does its thinking, party planners are already plotting who is going to do what in government for the next five years. Labor is confident of winning the election on June 7: Its lead in the opinion polls has never dropped below 10 percent, it is currently around 13 percent, and every time a Conservative opens his mouth, the potential Tory vote falls even further.

That's what the polls say. They are hard to believe, because Britain at the moment seems to be filled with a hundred disaffected voices. But maybe that's the point. There are a hundred different grumbles. But at the last election, which brought Labor to power in May 1997, there was really only one loud cry, and that was: "Get the Tories out."

Today, because there is no such single voice, the election is a very different beast -- a subdued and mutinous and fractious one. The frail enthusiasm for politics, for the workings of a democracy, has been submerged under the slow land-slip of cynicism and confusion. While Labor ministers zip round the country weighed down only by their sheaves of statistics showing that things have got better -- smaller classes, more nurses, shorter waiting time for medical treatment, better transport -- whoops, nothing good to be said about transport at all, but look, much less unemployment, low inflation, a national minimum wage. . . . While they briefly take on the burden of trying to prove to a cynical public that governments can and have made things better, the voters ungraciously withhold their enthusiasm.

Not since 1979, when Margaret Thatcher won her first election, had a government come to power with as much grandiose and inspiring rhetoric as Labor did in 1997. New Labor's mission of bringing in a new sort of government with a new relationship to the people gave shape to the national convulsion that pushed the Tories out of office.

It also gave shape to the long-frustrated hopes of the left. It was obvious before they took office that New Labor was not a socialist government with the necessary army of trade unions and campaign groups that socialism depends on. Even so, there was space in New Labor's rhetoric that the left to have room for hope. The hope of course soured.

If MPs and party centrists stayed "on message," the people didn't. The kernel of the leadership message was, "We are not Old Labor." As simple as that. Not being the Labor Party of old (which lost every election from 1979 for the next 18 years) has been the single guiding light, the most powerful message of New Labor.

Indeed, old Labor, with its defeats, its passions, its internal warfare, its pain, has become, in retrospect, a trauma, and New Labor often acts as though it is suffering from posttraumatic shock syndrome. Hence it is more doctrinaire about state services than the previous Conservative government. It seems to live in fear that if it ceases for one moment to scrutinize, measure, check and chivy public services then it will be pulled inexorably back into the swamp of the comfortable corporate state.

This is what all the pained recitals of achievement from government ministers is about: telling the people that they should appreciate what it is that the government is doing -- and will do more of if New Labor is elected again this week.

The statistics comprise all those measurements that New Labor has taken to prove that no one within the public services is allowed to rest on their laurels. And we the people should applaud them for their resilience and be grateful.

This relationship between government and governed is not tenable. If all that is required of the people is that they feel appreciative of government efforts, then that relationship cannot be sustained.

Government is asking for our applause and our gratitude, asks merely that we as citizens work hard, fill in our forms and shut up. A people that is not required to think or speak has been divested of its capacity to play a role in shaping communal affairs.

This, clearly, is a threat to democracy. The threat is not confined to Britain. Since the end of the antagonisms between communism and capitalism, and between owning class and working class, all government in Europe has subscribed to the view that capitalist liberal democracy is the only feasible form of life. Governments can only tweak the system. Here the difference between left and right is that the right sees these globalizing, standardizing forces as being the result of political power, of state conspiracies, coordinated from Brussels, the heart of the European Union, though possibly marching to the national interests of the French or German states. The left sees economic forces as working for the interests of capital owners, an economic phenomenon, in which political powers are reduced to clearing up a bit of the mess they leave behind and, through EU laws on the environment and minimum labor standards, holding in check the natural destructiveness of capitalism.

But as to capitalist liberal democracy as a whole, there is no alternative. This is the real killer for popular politics. The left fears that the only ones to gain from this subduing of popular politics are the unfettered capitalist firms and the far right, who are able to fire a distress rocket out of this confusion. The distress rocket signifies: "Help, we are being swamped by aliens, immigrants, foreigners and bureaucrats."

This is working in parts of Austria, the Czech Republic and Northern Italy. In Britain, the rocket has sputtered and fallen to the ground, because withdrawing from the EU and global markets doesn't seem to be an alternative either. That leaves us with New Labor and its measuring machines, but with very little political spirit.