Who is Tony Blair? This may seem an odd question to ask about someone who has been a United Kingdom prime minister for eight years, but it remains the crucial dividing line of British politics as it enters the election campaign. The answers will do more to explain how Britain votes than anything else.
To the editorialists of the London Times and the Economist magazine, he is the thinking Conservative’s prime minister: the person best placed to preserve the Thatcherite legacy by giving it a human face. Many Conservatives privately agree, even though they portray him as the champion of big government by stealth.
To his critics on the left, Blair is a market fundamentalist with a coherent, if only partially declared, agenda to privatise as much as possible: a neoliberal cuckoo in the social democratic nest. The Blairite counter-argument states the opposite. He is the ultimate Fabian gradualist, busily transforming Britain in a thousand ways so subtle as to be invisible to the human eye.
There is evidence to support each of these propositions, but none provides a satisfactory and consistent template for explaining Blair’s actions. Someone wishing to privatise public services would have run them down through sustained underfunding, as the Conservatives did, instead of investing billions more in health and education. Conversely, no one seriously concerned with equality would have kept such a low top rate of income tax (40% for incomes more than £32 400) or introduced a policy as socially regressive as top-up fees for higher education.
To judge Blair against traditional ideological benchmarks is impossible. The confusion arises because he is driven not, as many suppose, by the desire to realise any specific political vision, but by his own peculiar calculus of power. By this I don’t mean the power of office so much as the power of those he fears might deny it to him.
Blair’s experience of opposition led him to conclude that Labour could only govern by making a binding accommodation with power. But what others saw as a necessary expedient of opposition, Blair has transformed into a permanent logic of government.
It explains why the government has cosied up to big business (strong) and marginalised the trade unions (weak). It explains Blair’s determination to keep Rupert Murdoch onside, even when it means watering down media ownership rules or backsliding on Europe. It explains his approach to public services. The good is the extra investment that comes from the realisation that the UK’s electoral pivot — generally conservative middle-class — does not want to pay for private health and education. The bad is reform designed to replicate in the public sector the advantages the aspirant middle classes enjoy in the marketplace.
Most of all, it explains Iraq. There is no power quite like a superpower, and Blair’s decision to go to war reflected a fear that any deviation from the United States position would provoke the vengeful wrath of transatlantic conservatism.
The political consequences of this are profound. Just as surely as you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, you can’t build a fairer society without challenging wealth and power. That is something Blair is psychologically incapable of. In the battle against what George Orwell once described as “the lords of property and their hired liars and bumsuckers”, Blair will always be with the liars and bumsuckers — not because he agrees with them, but because he is mesmerised by their power.
So the short answer to the question “who is Tony Blair?” is that he is a weak man who bends to power. The mystery is why so few on the left have realised this. London mayor Ken Livingstone is one. Faced with a rigged selection that denied him the Labour candidacy for mayor of London, he stepped outside the tent, drubbed Blair at the polls and negotiated his readmission from a position of strength. The trade unions appear to have cottoned on, too. A few sharp tugs of the purse strings were enough to secure the “Warwick agreement” to include a clutch of new employment rights.
How widely this realisation is shared will have a significant impact on the election. Behind Labour’s panic signals is the assumption that voters who threaten to rebel are bluffing.
Labour supporters are tired of being taken for granted, and increasingly coming to the conclusion that the ballot box is the only place where they have the power to make themselves count. This is why many of them will wake up on May 5 with the solemn intention of hurting Blair. It’s the only language he understands. — Â