‘New, new, new,’ Tony Blair told a meeting of European socialist leaders shortly after becoming Prime Minister, ‘everything is new.’ Embarrassing at the time, that declaration now seems merely a distant and risible memory. For, after nine years, the one thing this administration cannot possibly claim to be is ‘new’.
In his original campaign for office between 1994 and 1997, Mr Blair presented novelty as a good in itself. By relabelling Labour as ‘New’, he signalled not only that the party of old-fashioned socialism had changed, but that it offered a fresh and vernal alternative to the Conservative winter. Underpinning this was the false implication that mere novelty would translate into change for the national good: a radical improvement in the lives of the electorate would follow the ‘dawn’ of 2 May 1997.
In myriad ways, that claim has now been tested to destruction. The latest OECD figures show that Britain now faces a heavier tax burden than Germany. The value for money offered to the taxpayer is appalling: productivity in the NHS has fallen, though spending on health has doubled since 1997. Grade inflation has placed intolerable pressure on a generation of teenagers to take ever more GCSEs and A-levels in order to distinguish themselves from their peers, while the repeatedly promised flourishing of diversity and ‘post-comprehensive’ excellence in state schools has conspicuously failed to materialise. So too has the revolution in the welfare system that was central to Mr Blair’s pitch for office in 1997.
Violent crime and antisocial behaviour are rising. As recent statistics have shown, the government has no idea how its own immigration system is operating. It resorts, then, to lecturing us about fitness, deputing the health minister Caroline Flint to be a sort of national personal trainer.
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