How bad was the last Labour government? Pretty much as bad as you can imagine says my old friend Peter Oborne. Which leads me to ask if my old friend has gone mad? According to Peter:
It is now widely accepted that the years of New Labour government were an almost unalloyed national disaster. Whichever measure you take – moral, social, economic, or the respect in which Britain is held in the world – we went into reverse.
Nevertheless, historians may come to judge that these 13 years of Labour misrule served a vital purpose. In retrospect, the Brown/Blair period may be seen as a prolonged experiment which taught the liberal Left that its ideas cannot work, do not work, and have no chance of ever working.
Just as well then, Peter says, that the “facts of life are Conservative”. As polemics go this is grand, breezy stuff; as political analysis it is hogwash. One of the weaknesses of the punditry business is this thirst for seeing grand realignments or tipping points or hinge moments or whatever you want to call it. History is played on a broad board, don’t you know, and the serried ranks of slippered armchair generals are the keenest strategists of ’em all. Of course they are.It takes time to ruin a country. Four years, the average period between elections, was never going to be enough.
But it rarely works lke that. Decisive breaks with the past are rare. Indeed, in post-war British politics perhaps only the 1945 and 1979 elections pass that test and I rather doubt that 2010 will be seen in that light. Peter, making his case that David Cameron be a transformational or consequential Prime Minister chooses to ignore the continuity between this government’s policies and those advocated by its predecessor. The difference between George Osborne’s spending plans and those put forward by Alistair Darling is one of degree, not kind.
Indeed, Peter implicitly acknowledges this when he writes that “In all essentials, Ed Miliband’s Labour Party now accepts the fundamental economic insights of the Cameron Coalition.” (This might, of course, make one wonder about Team Cameron’s insights: if they really are accepted by Team Miliband can they possibly be persuasive?) But then before the crash of 2008 (without which the fiscal hole the UK is in would be rather less deep) Osborne and Cameron accepted Labour’s spending plans just as Blair and Brown had accepted those they inherited from Ken Clarke.
Peter claims that the “liberal left” has been proved wrong on everything and that Tony Blair became “a Conservative in all but name” which rather makes one wonder how a Prime Minister who was “a Conservative in all but name” could have been wrong about everything and leader of a government that proved an “unalloyed disaster”. But, hey, never mind the detail, feel the grand sweep, eh?
For that matter, Peter’s reference to “the respect in which Britain is held in the world” is, I think, code for the Iraq War. Does anyone doubt that a Conservative government would have also taken Britain to war in 2003? As I recall, the Tory party, though in opposition, was largely in favour of the enterprise. With the (admittedly important) exception of europe, there are few foreign policy differences between the parties.
It is true Blair regrets not moving faster on public sector reform it is also the case that the present government is building upon the work done by its predecessor. Nowhere is this more plainly true than in (English) education: Michael Gove’s reforms are an extension of Andrew Adonis’s academy programme (and it was a Labour government that introduced fees for university education). Elsewhere, Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms are not the preserve of one party while, though few people speak of it now, the Prime Minister’s “Big Society” project is something that draws on intellectual traditions found in all three major parties.
As for winning the arguments, well, the liberal left has won on the National Health Service and the environment. Conservatives have, generally speaking, accepted a large part of the left’s analysis here and resolved only to tinker with the details, not the underlying philosophy.
The same might be said of attitudes towards homosexuality, race and opportunities for women. In these non-trivial areas the liberal left has prevailed and Britain is a better, more tolerant, open place as a result. There has been, if you like, a settlement and by these measures Britain is a better place than it was in 1997 and vastly better than it was in 1970.
If this is Britain “ruined” then, my, our ruins must be the envy of most of the world. Despite its shortcomings – of which there were plenty – this remains one of the wealthiest, most open countries on earth. If this is failure then it’s not, by international standards, too dreadful, even if the years ahead will be leaner than anyone might wish. There are serious problems but they are not obviously graver than those other countries must confront.
Cameron’s government, quite properly, will roll back some of Labour’s excesses and, hopefully, correct some of its mistakes. But it is a sillyness to presume, far less argue in public, that one party has a monopoly on wisdom or that its opponents’ are not just mistaken but actually motivated by malice.
It is regrettable, in some respects, that we live in a managerial age but we do and as long as that remains the case it will remain evident that the two major parties are more alike than they are different. In some areas the present political settlement owes a good deal to conservatism; in other areas the left has made the weather. That’s as it should be: governments tack into the wind, each movement correcting course and making a little headway but always, of course, constrained by conditions and past decisions.
As it happens, I doubt 1997 will be seen as an election like 1945 or 1979 either. The Blair/Brown years were scarcely unalloyed successes but nor were they the kind of unmitigated disaster some on the right now pretend. Similarly, the Cameron-Clegg years are not as frightening as some on the unhinged left presently pretend. This is not a venal government motivated by malice either. It is instead an often modest reaction to its predecessor that seeks, like sensible governments, to retain the best while improving the worst.
But, again, Labour and the Tories are more alike than either like to admit. If there has been a failure of the elites it is a failure shared by both parties and this may be why so many people seem so enraged or disconnected from public life. If so then that too is a shared problem and responsibility.
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