If we had had an argument in a pub about new Labour when it came to power – and for all I know we may have done – I would have been adamant on three points.
First, new Labour represented the final triumph of the right. Or as I wrote at the time: “For the aristocracy of wealth, which mattered more than the aristocracy of birth, Blair was everything it could have desired. Its wiser members knew that the Tories couldn’t stay in power forever. By changing the Labour Party, Blair had removed the possibility that the Labour Party might change the country.”
Second, it would use headline-grabbing stunts on crime and immigration to con the masses that it was on their side, while all the time allowing big business to carry on as usual. Whenever I was challenged, I loved citing the Prime Minister’s attack across the despatch box on William Hague, then the Tory leader, and Ann Widdecombe, the shadow home secretary. “What is the alternative?” he shouted. “What does the right honourable gentleman offer? Why was it that he made a policy-free speech, apart from a load of nonsense from the shadow home secretary, most of which we are doing in any event?”
Third, what happened was a disgrace to the best traditions of the British left. A modern Labour Party might have prospered without doing what Blair had done.
I still believe in my first and second points. No society can be happy with the vast inequalities of wealth Britain tolerates, while from “eye-catching initiatives” on crime through to clampdowns on asylum-seekers new Labour has followed the Clintonian tactic of outflanking its rivals on the right and using every imaginable stratagem to secure partisan advantage. I don’t think that even now Blair realises that one reason he is hated is that he has tarnished the benign self- image of the British liberal left. Tories might play to the tabloids, but we were better than that; we didn’t do that kind of thing. That David Cameron has brought success to the Conservatives by imitating Blair strikes me as the most depressing fact about modern politics.
It is the third point I can no longer defend and must recant. The idea that Blair was an aberrant cuckoo in the cosy nest of the left, and that all will be well once he has flown away, no longer makes sense to me (and that is not just because of my view that the left’s indifference to the victims of fascism in Iraq and elsewhere has shown that the nest is not so cosy after all).
Let’s go back and imagine what honest eavesdroppers would have made of the arguments of a decade ago. The first thing they would have noticed was how negative most on the liberal left were. Anyone who criticised new Labour was met by the point that we had to remove the Tories from power at any price. Hatred of the Conservatives was overwhelming and blinding. If the pitched battles of the Thatcher years were like being defeated by an enemy invader, the tedious sleaziness of the Major era was, if anything, worse: like being stuck in a railway carriage with a party of bent accountants. For seven years. They just had to go. There was even a pressure group called Get Rid of Them (Grot) which informed the readers of liberal papers how to remove Tory MPs by voting tactically.
For all the success the anti-Tory anger had in consigning the Conservatives to oblivion, it was not good for new Labour. Historians are now saying that Blair never reshaped Britain in the way that Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher did. Of course he didn’t; how could he have? Politicians can’t just impose their ideas on the population. Their governments are creatures of their time and place. The Thatcher and Attlee administrations were at the head of great coalitions which supplied them with a purpose. You may deplore everything Thatcher did, but you can’t deny that she represented millions of people who had reached the end of their tethers with the trade unions and had specific ideas about how to curb them. By contrast, the British left didn’t have a huge positive programme in the mid-1990s. The fact that many people were prepared to Grot the Tories by voting for any other candidate, regardless of policy, proved the point. With the collapse of socialism as a practical programme for government, we knew what we were against but not what we were for.
What is striking in retrospect is that, by the standard of what few positive leftish ideas were around in 1997, the Blair government hasn’t been all bad or all right-wing. The middle-class left of the day went on about constitutional reform, and they got it in Scotland and Wales. Everyone on the left said the answer to whatever social question was raised was more money. There aren’t enough good teachers: pay them more. Waiting lists are too long: spend more on the NHS. There is too much poverty: increase benefits. All this has happened. Between 1997 and 2005, Britain had the second-largest overall increase in public spending of any advanced country. At Blair’s insistence, spending on health was raised to the European Union average.
The edginess of much conversation on the left today may be explained by the fact that, far from being new Labour, this administration’s tax-and-spend policies have tested old Labour ideas to the point of destruction. All the justified complaints about management consultants and the wasteful private finance initiative, and all the undoubted improvements in, say, healthcare, can’t hide a gnawing doubt that the public has not got a big enough bang for its buck. The next generation of politicians, from whatever party, will look at this and be less inclined than ever to pour resources into state monopolies.
The opprobrium that followed Iraq may have finished Blair off, but it misses the point that here, too, he was behaving like a man of the left. The idea that you should confront dictatorial and genocidal regimes was a reaction against John Major’s Tories. Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind made me and many others ashamed of our country as they manoeuvred through the foreign ministries of Europe to stop effective action being taken against the Serb ethnic cleansers in Bosnia. Sometimes by accident and sometimes design, Blair has been the standard-bearer of the ideas of post-cold war humanitarian intervention that developed at the time. British troops were used not only in the checking of Slobodan Milosevic’s armies in Kosovo, but in the ending of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor (a good old cause of the left), the overthrow of the psych opathic religious right in Afghanistan and the removal of an Iraqi regime that was responsible for one of the last genocides of the 20th century (and whose overthrow was also once a good old cause of the left). You may not like the consequences, but my point is simply that Blair’s behaviour is not necessarily as aberrant as it seems.
Just as I’m sure his successor is going to be less willing to put money into public services, so I’m certain he will be less willing to commit troops to battle. Harder to change, I guess, is the expansion in liberty of the Blair years. This may seem an odd compliment to pay a government noted for its intolerance of everyone from fox-hunters to hecklers, but the Human Rights Act has had its effect, and the best memorials to this strange time are the gay couples kissing in the register offices, the shop girls who can’t be fired for asking to spend more time with their children and the prisoners who can’t be given punishment beatings in the cells.
When someone was foolish enough to say to J K Galbraith that “there’s a little bit of Richard Nixon in all of us”, the great liberal economist spat back: “I say, the hell there is.” The British liberal left can’t say the same about the Prime Minister. For all his peculiarities, he wasn’t an anomaly, and it is wishful thinking to pretend that all will be well when the cuckoo has flown the nest. We have to admit that there is a little bit of Tony Blair in all of us, if only because it makes the hard thinking about what on earth to do next easier to confront.
So, how was it for you?
A S Byatt
I did admire him and I still do in many ways. The real disaster for Blair was, of course, Bush. When I was in Philadelphia before the Iraq war, people were actually saying that flowers would be thrown at the feet of the troops. But Iraq was a total disaster, as I always said it would be. I used to think Blair was cunning and that he was acting as a drag-anchor to Bush. But the moment he began to be evangelical about the war I began to hope he would go. Not before. I suppose I feel partly that Blair is, in a way, tragic. Bush ruined his prime ministership. That and too much repeated interference in things that need time, such as education.
George Monbiot
Blair was the barrister who would take any brief, and he took his from Rupert Murdoch and the CBI. He was so keen to please that he reversed the lobbying relationship: HE begged political favours from THEM. A pliant Labour Party was far more valuable to the corporations than a pliant Tory party: it meant they had no political opposition.
Michael Winner
I think he’s done far better than he’s given credit for. He’s a lovely human being, and he laughs at my jokes.
Maureen Lipman
People might well think that Tony Blair has held up rather well in his nine years, personally, physically and morally. Whatever people find to criticise about his actorly persona, it goes with the age we live in, and come the day, come the man. It will be a pity if all he is remembered for is the Iraq war because I think we have made progress in education and hospital waiting lists. And in leaving Gordon Brown alone, for whatever reason, he has ensured economic growth. So whatever people say or howl – which they would do anyway after nine years of one man – Blair will go down in history as a good PM.
Imran Khan
Blair’s legacy will be identical to that of Thatcher: marked by brutality, bully-boy tactics and big business. Put another way: Thatcherism was Blairism in drag.
Andrew Roberts
Tony Blair will go down in history as one of the greatest premiers of the postwar period. His destruction of British socialism and his principled, tough and timely prosecution of the war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism make him a giant comparable to Churchill, Attlee and Thatcher. Britain will have cause to thank Tony Blair for decades to come.
Alison Jackson
Blair came to power in 1997 on a ticket of cleaning up sleazy politics. From the beginning, he showed himself no less sleazy than the people he had ousted – Archer, Aitken, Hamilton and the rest. Tony, however, had a new technique up his sleeve: to lie convincingly about himself. The age of the spin-doctor has let him get away, for ten years, with what we know to be bare-faced lies.
Eric Hobsbawm
Not time yet for a reflection on the Blair years. They are not yet over.
More reflections next week
Content from our partners
Related
