Tony Blair: The dream, the reality

We know what Tony Blair wants to be remembered for: reforms, especially to the public services, which the electorate accepts as effective and legitimate. New Labour had, in fact, few fixed policies when it came to office, but it does have a number of fundamental assumptions which have changed little over time.

The first is that there are certain facts about the modern world it is pointless to resist, of which ‘globalisation’ is the most important. But globalisation is not only irresistible; in the long-term, New Labour would argue, it works in Britain’s interests. Under Mr Blair, therefore, Britain has become one the few countries to be largely indifferent (except occasionally at election time) as to the ownership of its major industries and financial institutions — including the London Stock Exchange.

The prime minister has worked on the related principle that the Thatcher government’s belief that the private sector is almost invariably more efficient and flexible than the public sector is also largely irreversible, and this is a belief he has held with growing tencacity.

He also believes that certain areas of policy, particularly crime and, increasingly, security and immigration, are the preserve of the tabloid press. Public opinion is the opinion of a handful of newspaper proprietors and editors. Thus ‘liberal’ policies traditionally associated (not always correctly) with the Labour Party are irrelevant; they simply alienate the mass press and so favour the Conservative Party.

The prime minister and his advisers have further assumed that major social and demographic changes in Britain have real implications for domestic policies. The rapid decline of the industrial working class and the emergence of a huge and diverse middle class demand policies, it is argued, that provide variety and choice; the ‘bog-standard’ comprehensive school, for example, would no longer do.

As a result of such changes, New Labour believed, many of Britain’s social and political institutions had become dysfunctional or positively mischievous, created as they were by a different kind of society. An overcentralised and lumbering state itself demanded modernisation.

The ‘pre-New’ Labour Party was already committed to the devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and London, and Mr Blair accepted that commitment. In 1997 he was also genuinely interested in parliamentary and electoral reform as part of a wider programme of political modernisation. But attitudes also demanded modernisation. Mr Blair, for example, was more sympathetic to the EU and the single currency than the Conservative government. Equally, we should probably see Labour’s commitment to human rights legislation as a form of modernisation: a removal of anachronistic laws and prejudices.

Finally, not so much an assumption as another irremovable obstacle, there is the Labour Party itself. In the ten years of his premiership the Labour Party in parliament has been remarkably loyal to the prime minister, even though it has become increasingly clear that he has little ideological affinity with the Labour Party’s traditions or culture. Yet he is stuck with it; without the Party he has no political base.

He has had to recognise that most Labour MPs are significantly more ‘Old Labour’ than he is; they are more sympathetic to tax and spend, and the big rise in public expenditure under Labour has been partly designed to purchase their support. And he has had to deal with Gordon Brown.

In practice, he and Mr Blair have not disagreed on much, but the need to propitiate him has probably acted as a real constraint on policy choices. Domestic policy has thus been subject to many conflicting pressures, the effect of which has been to render it rather shapeless. Mr Blair, for example, believes the school system fails poorer children and that the creation of large numbers of academies, trust schools, faith schools and specialist schools (many independent of LEAs and substantially better funded than LEA schools) stands to their benefit.

Most Labour MPs probably believe that the effect of these schools is to increase social differentiation in English education. So the government has tried to square the circle by forbidding schools to ‘select’ their pupils (beyond a proportion who have ‘aptitudes’). But it is difficult to see how this can work, since selection seems inherent in the system.

Equally, the prime minister is an enthusiast for faith schools, but understands that many Labour MPs regard them as socially divisive. Another square-circling attempt was made to force such schools to admit 25 per cent of their pupils from other faiths — an attempt the churches predictably defeated.

What has been created is a patch-work which might do as the prime minister wants, but at the cost of much ill-will within the Labour Party and the almost inevitable creation of a hierarchic system of secondary schools, which the prime minister insists he does not want.

The same thing can be seen in the health system. Mr Blair knows that the NHS is ideologically untouchable as a system of universal free public health, but clearly believes the private sector should play a major part in service provision. Furthermore, Gordon Brown has forced the PFI system of hospital construction on health policy, which has influenced where and in what form hospitals should be built — not always for the better.

The result has been persistent structural fiddling with the system, but with no clear sense of direction. Although there has been a huge increase in health expenditure, which has rescued the NHS, few who work in it seem very satisfied by this.

The prime minister’s constant suggestions that much work remains to be done in face of obstruction from entrenched public-sector interests has robbed the reforms (and the increased spending) of the wider support they might deserve.

Constitutional and electoral reform has been marked by the same ambivalence. Scottish and Welsh devolution has been implemented, the London assembly was established with an elected mayor (whose powers were weakened when it became clear that the mayor would be Ken Livingston), human rights and anti-discriminatory legislation enacted. But electoral reform has effectively been abandoned and reform of the House of Lords has been messy and incomplete.

Little has been done to reform the rights and procedures of the House of Commons and, although attempts have been made to encourage a democratic interest in local government (by directly elected mayors for example), nothing has been done to significantly increase the power of local government or even restore those rights removed by the previous Conservative administration; indeed, the government’s education policies have further weakened it.

Mr Blair’s interest in such reforms has plainly faded over the last ten years, and for the usual reason: when it comes to the crunch, for all its modernising impulses, his government has been no more prepared to weaken the executive’s domination of the country’s political system than the previous one.

While in opposition, Mr Blair was famous for promising to be tough both on crime and on the causes of crime. His government, however, has simply become tough on crime. An acknowledgement that much crime is the result of deprivation has given way to his governing assumption that crime is the domain of the tabloid press, and the tabloid press has no interest in the social causes of crime. The result is the crisis in the contemporary prison system.

Immigration policy has become utterly confused, for very Blairite reasons. One part of the prime minister believes immigration is an aspect of globalisation, is determined by the labour market and is beneficial to the British economy. But the other part knows the tabloid press hates immigration, and such hatred is freely exploited by the Conservative Party.

As a result the Labour Party has had the worst of both worlds. It has not limited immigration as the press would like, because it cannot; but it has undertaken high profile deportations and ‘tough’ stances that have simply damaged the long-term reputation of both Mr Blair and his party.

Iraq, despite its ever-presence, has not dominated domestic policy but it has influenced it, occupying much of Mr Blair’s time and energy that could have been more profitably used. It has offered him what appears to be an escape.

The prime minister has obviously found himself frustrated in domestic policy, and his own casual ways of government and inattention to the details of policy have exacerbated this, but in foreign policy, as he imagined, things could be achieved. He has discovered, of course, that it was anything but an escape. One consequence of the alliance with the United States in Iraq has been the weakening of the prime minister’s interest in Europe and the Euro.

He had probably concluded that ‘Europe’ was too unpopular as an issue anyway, but he effectively gave up arguing its case while the degree of commitment to the United States marginalised Britain in Europe and made it even less attractive to himself.

Finally, Iraq has further tilted the government in the direction of ‘security’, extra- or at best quasi-judicial controls and inflammatory rhetoric at the expense of New Labour’s more libertarian impulses.

The historian is likely to conclude that conflicting pressures have rendered Mr Blair’s domestic policy rather incoherent and without overall design.

Nothing ever quite works, and because it never works as the prime minister would wish there has been endless legislation in all areas of policy, endless tinkering and targetting and a growing demoralisation within the Labour Party.

In the end, what will probably survive is the human rights legislation and the renewed legitimacy of high levels of public spending. These are real, though actually Old Labour, achievements, and in any case much less than Mr Blair intended.

Ross McKibbin is a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford and is the author of ‘Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951’ (1998).