The Tories should support Tony Blair’s magnificent defiance of his own party

The intelligent case for voting for Tony Blair in 1997 and 2001 was simple and very compelling. Only New Labour could bring about deep-seated reform of British public services. The argument went as follows: the Tories would never be trusted to tamper with the NHS or the social security system. Their motives were suspect. The voters were easily convinced that their real agenda was privatisation. Just as Richard Nixon, a Republican president, was the only political leader who could restore relations with communist China, so Labour’s Tony Blair was the only man who could take on the public-sector workers.

All the brightest and best people around the Prime Minister ‘ Geoff Mulgan, Frank Field, David Simon, Andrew Adonis, Peter Mandelson, Roy Jenkins, David Miliband ‘ passionately believed this. So did Tony Blair himself. The bitterest disappointment of the last seven years has been the slow, agonising discovery that this belief was unfounded. The modern Labour party may no longer represent the old industrial working class. It is made up instead of state employees of one kind or another: teachers, council workers, civil servants. With a few heartwarming exceptions, these are churlishly protective of their narrow self-interest, and as sentimentally attached to Spanish practices as any Coventry car-worker in the 1970s. Through the unions, the constituency parties and, to a steadily increasing extent, Labour MPs, public-sector workers represent a formidable power bloc for any ambitious politician on the make, and are eager to do damage to the Prime Minister.

Gordon Brown spotted this point very early on and has made ruthless use of it ever since. He contemptuously smashed Frank Field’s audacious plans for welfare reform within six months of the 1997 election victory, and last summer made a mockery of Downing Street’s scheme for foundation hospitals. There is a great contradiction at the heart of the Chancellor.