A log cabin by a frozen lake in the snowy fastness of central Sweden is a good place to contemplate the future of Blairite third-way politics. Scandinavia has some claim to be the spiritual home of social democracy and, though we on the Right have been predicting the Swedish model’s collision with the buffers for at least 40 years, the Swedes have remained inconveniently oblivious to our prophecies. They seem still to be trotting along quite nicely, driving their Volvos through the snow, taking their pleasures a little solemnly, but living life in an even, if unspectacular, way.
Our host, however, was no Swede, but a British friend who remains sympathetic to our Prime Minister’s aims and achievements, and not many years ago saw things from the inside. As the snowflakes drifted down we talked — he hopefully — about legacy and prospects: not of the man but of the ideas Tony Blair has come to represent in politics. Is there an heir ‘ism’ to Blairism?
Essentially this is the question which, on my return on Tuesday to England, I saw that Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn had invited fellow Labour MPs to discuss that night at Westminster. That (as they put it) there is ‘an enormous appetite’ for debate about the future direction of the party, and that a leadership challenge would open this debate up was more than a mischievous gesture towards Mr Brown (though it was at least that). It should resonate widely in the Parliamentary Labour party. Some of the Chancellor’s friends, too, think the answer to the question of what, post-Blair, ‘New Labour’ will come to mean remains hazy, and in need of frank discussion.
Let us take a stab at what the ‘new’ element in New Labour amounts to. First, discard some false trails. Foreign policy, for example. Rhetoric about a newly ‘ethical’ approach to foreign affairs remained just that: rhetoric. There is no evidence that New Labour in government tried any harder (or any less hard) than previous governments of either party to reconcile foreign policy with moral imperatives. Arms sales continued to be somewhat but not entirely undiscriminating; Britain dealt with unsavoury regimes, as before; and new laws on overseas corruption, though enacted, were overridden by Cabinet diktat.
The application, meanwhile, (to Iraq) of neocon theories of liberal interventionism has been very much Tony Blair’s own contribution, with no obvious linkage to New Labour ideology. These were Blair’s wars, not New Labour’s: bolted on, but not philosophically part of the ideology.
Which leaves us with domestic policy. Here we may disregard another false trail. In the early days there was much talk among those who framed the New Labour Project of communitarianism and decentralisation. But as Simon Jenkins demonstrates in Thatcher and Sons, there has been no sustained commitment to decentralise (sometimes the opposite), and no evidence that Labour-run central government likes or trusts local government any more than central government ever has.
So what is left? I doubt we can get much further than John Prescott, many years ago, when he spoke of ‘traditional values in a modern setting’. The traditional values are a fierce commitment to social justice: fairness, the relief of poverty, the pursuit of opportunity for the disadvantaged. The ‘modern setting’ is a new (for Labour) commitment to market economics. Until Blair, this had been grudging at best; but the enthusiasm modern Labour government now shows for private enterprise really is new. So is the jettisoning of Labour’s formerly forelock-touching attitude to organised labour; and the assumption that ‘social’ or welfarist benefits and services are usually best delivered by state-run institutions.
So out go the trade union barons, the public-sector monopoly of public provision, and the instinctive suspicion of capitalism. In comes a wholehearted embrace of the free market. And what stays is a commitment to make life fairer and better for all.
And now for the awkward question. Who contests any of this, these days? Is there enough here — enough that is distinctive — to form the focus of an entire political movement, in contention with other mainstream political movements?
My answer is that it depends. It depends on the other mainstream political movements. I realised during my log-cabin conversation that central to a New Labour believer’s theology is the assumption that Tory governments are inherently mean-minded. Of course, this is what Labour politicians always say and always have, I realise that. But for the first time it struck me that it is not just a pose: they really do believe it. They think the Tories secretly dislike all public provision.
This — I now see — must be the explanation for the biggest domestic blunder (disgracefully unchallenged by media or opposition at the time) that New Labour ever made. Suddenly to bulldoze great piles of new money into our health service with no grip retained on how it was spent or the reforms it could have bought looks crazy until you realise that Labour must honestly have believed what they claimed at the election: that their Tory predecessors had been trying to starve the NHS into collapse. Were that so, an emergency infusion of funds might well have been what was needed. But as the NHS was in fact ticking along reasonably satisfactorily, the money tended to fatten rather than energise the institution, just as extra calories down the throat of an already adequately nourished athlete end up on the buttocks, not the running track.
Interestingly, the Tories made a comparable mistake when we privatised British Rail. We had persuaded ourselves that because BR was (sort of) in the public sector, it must be being run wastefully — ergo privatisation would bring huge and immediate economies. But in fact BR was being run as a tight ship, and privatisation ended up costing, not saving, billions.
Old Labour believed the Tories hated the unions (we did), nationalised industries (we did), the weight of the public sector (we did), and social justice (we didn’t). Three out of four props to their raison d’être were therefore sound. New Labour has dropped the commitment to the unions, to nationalisation, and to in-house, public-sector provision. They are left with social justice. It is therefore desperately important to their own sense of identity and relevance that they see themselves as the one party that really cares about social justice. The underlying nastiness of the Conservative party, always part of Labour’s mythology, is now (and newly) indispensable to them philosophically: the only remaining prop.
‘What works’ is New Labour’s mantra: what works, that is, towards the achievement of a just society. The means by which they achieve their goal being no longer part of their dogma, they have to believe that the goal itself remains uniquely theirs. That is why David Cameron so unnerves (and fascinates) New Labour. By threatening Labour’s old image of their enemy, he threatens the very core of their self-belief. Cameron’s Conservatives represent not just an electoral but an existential threat to New Labour.
And, of course, vice versa.
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