This Messy Compromise
The prime minister has done little to inspire a cultural shift to the left - unlike his illustrious predecessor. Clement Attlee was in Tony Blair's mind in his speech yesterday: in a few weeks' time he will have outstayed his illustrious predecessor in Downing Street.
Clement Attlee was in Tony Blair's mind in his speech yesterday: in a few weeks' time he will have outstayed his illustrious predecessor in Downing Street. Compared with Attlee, what has been achieved, what monuments, what irreversible transformations?
It was with wry glee that the prime minister yesterday quoted a New Statesman epitaph for Attlee's government written in 1954, delivering the miserable verdict that it had "contributed almost nothing new or imaginative to the pool of ideas with which men seek to illuminate human nature and its environment". Ha! Plus ça change with the Staggers then! The left is never satisfied. So all doubters will in time find their harsh judgments on this government confounded. That was his implication in this vigorous rebuttal of his critics.
He has achieved much - he reeled off a goodly list - and it is difficult to persuade people how much better most things are getting. Ever since I wrote that this government is the best since Attlee's day - hardly a hyperbolic claim - I still fend off daily emails asking how I could possibly have a good word for a government that has ... (fill in whichever crimes of omission or commission you choose). True, the most radical reforms were all in his first term, while the second term is inexplicably directionless. Yet steeply rising improvements in health and education results are reliably predicted to go on getting better, as the money flows in. It is difficult to judge this government fairly, balancing its successes against what great opportunities it has missed had it only been bolder.
The important lesson Tony Blair draws from Clement Attlee was that he lost the election after six years. This Labour prime minister is going to win again. Why? Because Attlee's collectivist austerity misjudged what Blair believes he understands so well: the public's "big impulse for individualism", "their aspirational impulses" and their "soaring consumer demands including in public services". The 1945-style "one-size-fits-all" and "one supplier fits all" public services would cause the voters to rebel against paying higher taxes for services they don't like. Choice and consumer power, he averred, are the only way. On the day an opinion poll put the Tories just four points behind Labour, his heavy threats that the old enemy never went away added an extra frisson for this Fabian audience. He warned: "Never underestimate how much the centre of gravity of British politics shifted to the right in the 1980s. Never underestimate the cultural change needed to shift it back to centre left."
That is his single most effective defence against critics, and it's not bad. He mocks the old left's squeamishness about power - its instinct to prefer principles to electability, torn between following its own convictions and responding to voters' real anxieties. The price of power is messy compromise: he used that Wilsonian word, pragmatism. The left replies that he has gone too far to appease and done too little to lead and inspire that cultural shift leftwards. Some feel in their bones that he doesn't really want to, that he is not one of them, not a man of the left. He certainly lacks Mrs Thatcher's mighty ideological certainty when she handbagged the nation to the right. Yet no one can prove if his caution is wrong. How far left can you go in a country dominated by a ferocious rightwing press? If not now at this most opportune time, then never, say his critics.
This would have been a good time to warm the cockles of some Labour hearts. His audience deserved reward for not having deserted, along with the other half of Labour party members since 1997. Consider how sorely his party has been provoked recently. The Iraq war fallout looks worse by the day, with no WMD found. Robin Cook yesterday exposed a government using evidence selectively to bolster decisions already long taken. Most of the party is bewildered at how a Labour Britain has ended up in near-solo alliance with George Bush's White House. True, this was a slightly more emollient speech than usual, but Tony Blair doesn't bring his party many flowers any more.
It's always blood, sweat and toil against his own public services. He makes apparently harmless words like reform, modernise, choice and even equality sound like threats. He hammered on about his most inchoate and inequitable reforms - foundation hospitals, specialist schools, City academies. But these are irritants risking disruption to improving results. They may be clever politics, pre-empting Tory plans, but they also do some of the Tories' destructive job for them.
He presents himself as a man wrestling with a recalcitrant public sector dinosaur: he only once mentioned "superb" public service workers. It's an old trick to run against phantom enemies, those who would "defend the 1945 settlement in all it forms", "throw money at problems" and "champion public servants against change". This is now the government mantra - the "monolithic NHS" and the non-existent "uniform" secondary school system (if there was, results would be a deal better). How infuriatingly useful in creating that myth was the firefighters' 40% - and no-change - demand, while the serious critics of Blair's public service reforms are those most anxious to deliver improvement.
A foreigner might think this speech a good social democratic manifesto, missing its very British political code. Blair's verbal glossing of the difficult dilemmas between choice and equity might deceive the unwary. He might wish it were so but, alas, in the real world it is simply not true that "choice and consumer power are the route to greater social justice not social division". They may be the route to re-election, but rarely to social justice. Time and again, he evades inconvenient facts on the ground: it is the subtle selection of intake that improves the results of his specialist schools. His foundation hospitals will not be "truly accountable to their local communities". Instead, they have been guaranteed seven years' funding, so the primary care trusts supposed to buy the best for their patients will be obliged to buy from them, by edict. That's the trouble. High-sounding desirable words too often gloss over more awkward realities. Political imperatives endanger the good results already coming in.
The best hope is that public service success will be undeniable by the next election, and Tony Blair will stop needing to devise disruptive mini-markets, phoney localism and choice for the few. When it is clearer that the money has been well spent, Labour may throw up a second generation of leaders, less scarred by the Thatcherite 1980s, brave enough to say that taxes are not a burden, tax pounds buy the things people want most, and public services are a national treasure.
It was with wry glee that the prime minister yesterday quoted a New Statesman epitaph for Attlee's government written in 1954, delivering the miserable verdict that it had "contributed almost nothing new or imaginative to the pool of ideas with which men seek to illuminate human nature and its environment". Ha! Plus ça change with the Staggers then! The left is never satisfied. So all doubters will in time find their harsh judgments on this government confounded. That was his implication in this vigorous rebuttal of his critics.
He has achieved much - he reeled off a goodly list - and it is difficult to persuade people how much better most things are getting. Ever since I wrote that this government is the best since Attlee's day - hardly a hyperbolic claim - I still fend off daily emails asking how I could possibly have a good word for a government that has ... (fill in whichever crimes of omission or commission you choose). True, the most radical reforms were all in his first term, while the second term is inexplicably directionless. Yet steeply rising improvements in health and education results are reliably predicted to go on getting better, as the money flows in. It is difficult to judge this government fairly, balancing its successes against what great opportunities it has missed had it only been bolder.
The important lesson Tony Blair draws from Clement Attlee was that he lost the election after six years. This Labour prime minister is going to win again. Why? Because Attlee's collectivist austerity misjudged what Blair believes he understands so well: the public's "big impulse for individualism", "their aspirational impulses" and their "soaring consumer demands including in public services". The 1945-style "one-size-fits-all" and "one supplier fits all" public services would cause the voters to rebel against paying higher taxes for services they don't like. Choice and consumer power, he averred, are the only way. On the day an opinion poll put the Tories just four points behind Labour, his heavy threats that the old enemy never went away added an extra frisson for this Fabian audience. He warned: "Never underestimate how much the centre of gravity of British politics shifted to the right in the 1980s. Never underestimate the cultural change needed to shift it back to centre left."
That is his single most effective defence against critics, and it's not bad. He mocks the old left's squeamishness about power - its instinct to prefer principles to electability, torn between following its own convictions and responding to voters' real anxieties. The price of power is messy compromise: he used that Wilsonian word, pragmatism. The left replies that he has gone too far to appease and done too little to lead and inspire that cultural shift leftwards. Some feel in their bones that he doesn't really want to, that he is not one of them, not a man of the left. He certainly lacks Mrs Thatcher's mighty ideological certainty when she handbagged the nation to the right. Yet no one can prove if his caution is wrong. How far left can you go in a country dominated by a ferocious rightwing press? If not now at this most opportune time, then never, say his critics.
This would have been a good time to warm the cockles of some Labour hearts. His audience deserved reward for not having deserted, along with the other half of Labour party members since 1997. Consider how sorely his party has been provoked recently. The Iraq war fallout looks worse by the day, with no WMD found. Robin Cook yesterday exposed a government using evidence selectively to bolster decisions already long taken. Most of the party is bewildered at how a Labour Britain has ended up in near-solo alliance with George Bush's White House. True, this was a slightly more emollient speech than usual, but Tony Blair doesn't bring his party many flowers any more.
It's always blood, sweat and toil against his own public services. He makes apparently harmless words like reform, modernise, choice and even equality sound like threats. He hammered on about his most inchoate and inequitable reforms - foundation hospitals, specialist schools, City academies. But these are irritants risking disruption to improving results. They may be clever politics, pre-empting Tory plans, but they also do some of the Tories' destructive job for them.
He presents himself as a man wrestling with a recalcitrant public sector dinosaur: he only once mentioned "superb" public service workers. It's an old trick to run against phantom enemies, those who would "defend the 1945 settlement in all it forms", "throw money at problems" and "champion public servants against change". This is now the government mantra - the "monolithic NHS" and the non-existent "uniform" secondary school system (if there was, results would be a deal better). How infuriatingly useful in creating that myth was the firefighters' 40% - and no-change - demand, while the serious critics of Blair's public service reforms are those most anxious to deliver improvement.
A foreigner might think this speech a good social democratic manifesto, missing its very British political code. Blair's verbal glossing of the difficult dilemmas between choice and equity might deceive the unwary. He might wish it were so but, alas, in the real world it is simply not true that "choice and consumer power are the route to greater social justice not social division". They may be the route to re-election, but rarely to social justice. Time and again, he evades inconvenient facts on the ground: it is the subtle selection of intake that improves the results of his specialist schools. His foundation hospitals will not be "truly accountable to their local communities". Instead, they have been guaranteed seven years' funding, so the primary care trusts supposed to buy the best for their patients will be obliged to buy from them, by edict. That's the trouble. High-sounding desirable words too often gloss over more awkward realities. Political imperatives endanger the good results already coming in.
The best hope is that public service success will be undeniable by the next election, and Tony Blair will stop needing to devise disruptive mini-markets, phoney localism and choice for the few. When it is clearer that the money has been well spent, Labour may throw up a second generation of leaders, less scarred by the Thatcherite 1980s, brave enough to say that taxes are not a burden, tax pounds buy the things people want most, and public services are a national treasure.
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