“The idea that you are a moderniser just because you can appear on television without a tie is wrong. It is not just about not wearing ties.”
So said a man called Tim Yeo, a British Conservative Party MP who, along with what seems to be every man and his dog, is a contender to succeed Michael Howard as Tory leader.
It is depressing to see how low British politics has stooped. It is this wonderful phrase — it is not just about not wearing ties — that captures the inanity. Or, at least, what you get on the surface. Beneath it there are still good, serious people trying to do good, serious work. But it is all done by stealth. The recent election was fought by three parties with barely a distinctive or new policy thought between them. The Tories instinctively wanted to return to the Thatcherite war cry of radical tax cuts, but didn’t want to be seen to be going back to Thatcherism. Their so-called ‘dog-whistle” campaign strategy — picking isolated issues, such as immigration, that appeal to narrowly defined categories of voters, but are not heard by others — failed; their campaign slogan asked ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”
Apparently not.
In turn, Labour in essence said ‘you’re all pretty affluent under us; don’t fix it if it ain’t broke (oh, and don’t mention the war)”. ‘Forwards not backwards” was its slogan. It chose not to fight its campaign on the solid achievements of the eight years since it regained power in 1997. Among Labour’s traditional supporters there is a raging debate about whether Labour has sold its soul. For me, the conclusion is nowhere near as obvious as hardened anti-New Labourites would have it.
In office, New Labour has accomplished some important things. The minimum wage. A cohesive package of policies that have reduced child poverty. International development aid basically doubled; the Department for International Development is now a major player in global development debates, and largely a force for good.
Not only has Labour proved itself to be a competent manager of a stable, growing economy, underpinned by the bold decision to grant independence to the Bank of England within 48 hours of coming into office in 1997, but it has secured an unprecedented three terms in office.
Given the perennial boom-bust cycles of British economic history, which hurt the least well-off more than any other group, and in the context of the economic travails of Germany and France, this is no mean achievement. Nor is the historic third-term victory to be sneezed at. Labour has never come close to developing a cohesive, progressive policy programme since its advent as a serious political force almost 100 years ago. Every time it has won power and gathered momentum, an election has interceded and returned the Tories to power. Now, Labour is ‘the natural party of government”; though it won only 36% of the popular vote (barely 22% of those eligible to vote), taking the Liberal Democrats’s 22% into account, the British political mainstream is broadly centre and centre-left; Conservative politics are in a clear minority.
There is an obvious resonance in all this with New African National Congress. The angry exchanges between the hard and soft left of the alliance, and the ‘can’t decide inbetweenies”, mirrors the differences of ideology, strategy and perspective of Labour’s broad social alliance.
As with the ANC, its closest, oldest friends may well ask: ‘What does it stand for now? What is its ideology? Does it have an ideology?”
Writing this column in Stockholm, the spiritual home of modern social democracy, it is easy to see both the benefits of, and the global crisis of confidence in, this tradition of progressive politics and begs the question: Is it in the ascendant or descendent, or merely treading water?
Despite Tony Blair’s irritating conviction that ‘modernisation” of public services must necessarily entail a much bigger role for the private sector, there is enough in Labour’s track record so far to make the argument that it remains a social democratic party at heart, like the ANC. It is just that Blair does not say so; the case remains largely implicit and not explicit.
Rather, it is social democracy by stealth. The psychosis caused by repeated defeat to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s made New Labour petrified of Middle England’s reaction to anything remotely redolent of Old Labour’s tax and spend days of the 1960s and 1970s.
Thus, the New Labour project can only claim true victory if, beyond the controlled environment of modern spin and electoral strategy, it can say that it has persuaded the majority of the innate rightness as well as the rectitude of progressive politics.
Ironically, Blair swept to power partly because of his nimble powers of communication. Yet, in this fundamental regard he has shirked the challenge of persuasion.
Perhaps, simply, he does not really believe in it himself; after all, much of social democracy by stealth comes from the hand of his Minister of Finance, and great rival, Gordon Brown.
If he does believe in it, Blair’s great challenge in the coming years before he finally hands over to Brown is whether he can muster the will to do so before the electoral pendulum swings back to the Tories.
The problem is that no one trusts him anymore. Blair is a serial liar. His people know he is a serial liar. He lied to Parliament, as well as to the world over Iraq, bending and then breaking international law in the process, and betraying the noble internationalist traditions of Labour.
Unfit to be a Labour prime minister for this reason alone, Blair should now have the guts to step aside immediately. In every generation there is a great Labour politician denied the opportunity to be prime minister. Hugh Gaitskell and Denis Healey, to name but two. I hope I am wrong, but I fear a similar fate for Brown. Anxious to secure a ‘legacy”, Blair may blunder on.
Yet securing a legacy while in office is notoriously difficult to achieve — ask Thabo Mbeki — hindsight and generous historians offer a more plausible route. But as his first international development minister Clare Short wrote the other day: ‘There is a real danger that time will run out and soon it will all end in tears, with Iraq emblazoned across the chapters that explain the failure of Blair’s new Labour project.”