Rarely has the Atlantic seemed wider than it does today for anyone interested in political ideas. While in America, the Right has won a stunning victory against the odds, in Britain, the Conservative Party appears to be in its death-throes. Never in British history has a governing party or a Prime Minister been as utterly dominant as Labour and Tony Blair are today. The only big question that still seems worth asking is whether the Left will dominate Britain for a generation or a century.
But can Blairite “new” Labour really be described as “the Left”? As Labour increases its mastery over British politics, it is becoming increasingly clear that the answer is “yes”. While conventional wisdom focuses on new Labour’s apparent fiscal discipline and Mr Blair’s personal stand against higher taxes, the reality is that government spending is now growing at the fastest rate on record and that tax and welfare policy has been more redistributive under this Government than it was when Denis Healey was “squeezing the rich until the pips squeak”.
More telling than the gradual return of Labour economic policy to the traditional socialist agenda of big government and redistribution, has been the radical shift in policy towards the farther reaches of egalitarian social engineering. The increasingly strident attacks on “privilege” and “elitism” — which began with gestures of marginal interest to most voters, such as the abolition of the House of Lords, the dumbing-down of the BBC and the campaign against foxhunting — is turning into a traditional Leftist class war.
Last week, there was the Chancellor’s attack on the private practices of hospital consultants. This week saw an open declaration of war on private education. How else could one describe the revelation that universities would “crack down on middle-class parents” who try to evade the Government’s supposedly unofficial quotas by moving their children from private to state schools?
The totalitarian idea that a child should be penalised throughout life for a parent’s ideological sins was much too radical for the old Labour party. In the good old days of Jim Callaghan and Neil Kinnock, militants agitating for this kind of vindictive cultural revolution were coralled in the Left’s Maoist and Trotskyite extremes — and eventually drummed out of the Labour Party. Yet today, the most powerful and respected members of the Cabinet are vying over who can come up with the most “anti-elitist” measures for the new hospital contracts and the forthcoming universities Bill.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the politicians at the heart of the university and NHS contract rows are also the two most plausible contenders for the succession to Tony Blair. Gordon Brown and Charles Clarke, the new Education Secretary, are now so confident of Labour’s permanent hegemony in Britain, that their perspective is gradually shifting. As the months go by and general election victory is increasingly taken for granted, the key priority for top Labour politicians will be to appeal to the party faithful who must elect the next leader, instead of clinging to the Blairite centre-ground.
But in taking the Left’s hegemony for granted, the new generation of Labour leaders are playing with fire. Some of the concepts with which they are toying — the abolition of private practice for hospital doctors or the punitive treatment of elitist educational institutions — go beyond anything attempted by successful left of centre parties in continental Europe. They also defy old Labour’s traditions of reluctantly conciliating and co-opting large parts of the British middle and upper middle class.
New Labour has tried to cement its friendship with Britain’s middle classes by refusing to raise income taxes. By doing this, Mr Brown believes he has gained himself the political cover to pursue a redistributive welfare policy and now an aggressively egalitarian social agenda. But Britain’s affluent classes will not be mollified for long by Labour’s apparent tolerance of personal wealth, and its commitment to moderate income taxes, if the Government then tries to prevent the affluent from using their money to give their children an elitist education or to buy themselves better healthcare.
Indeed, buying health, comfort, security and the best possible education for one’s children are the main objectives in acquiring wealth, especially among the midddle class. Thus Labour’s increasingly punitive egalitarianism will sooner or later produce a fierce backlash from the middle-class voters who have thus far been reassured or bamboozled by Labour’s apparent commitments to lower tax. This seems more or less inevitable. The only uncertainties are when the backlash will occur, which politicians or parties will emerge to lead it and whether the forces of privilege or equality will eventually win.
The first two questions are impossible to answer, but history suggests a clear answer to the third. In an all-out war between privilege and equality, privilege will almost surely win. History shows that greater equality has been achieved in democracies only when privilege has been co-opted and the moral zeal of egalitarianism has been restrained by such conservative principles as economic freedom, inheritance, social tradition and respect for property rights.
To put the matter more bluntly, the affluent middle class may only be a small minority, but in every successful democracy it has exercised influence and power beyond its numbers. Middle- class voters have gone along with egalitarian policies and accepted restraints on their privileges as part of a social contract. They have paid a vastly disproportionate share of every advanced economy’s tax burden in return for the understanding that they and their children would derive some benefit from public spending and would be treated with consideration by the State they support.
If, however, the Government launches an explicit war against the affluent — or, even worse, against their children — they will fight back. In Britain, for example, the top 1 per cent of taxpayers contribute 23 per cent of total income tax revenues, while the top 10 per cent contribute no less than 53 per cent. These are the same people who send their children to private schools and use private medicine, since 7 per cent of families send their children to private schools (rising to around 15 per cent in London) and 14 per cent of Britons are covered by private health insurance.
What will happen if Labour now identifies these paymasters of the welfare state as the new class enemy in its “anti-elitist” war? What will happen if the affluent decide they are getting nothing from the State — or, even worse, that their taxes are being used to punish them and handicap their children?
A glance across the Atlantic provides the most plausible answer. The affluent will turn against the principle of progressive taxation and persuade a majority of voters that their interests lie in low taxes and a Reagan-style minimalist state.
America has just given an almost unprecedented vote of confidence to the most conservative ruling party in living memory, a party explicitly dedicated to redistributing money and power from the poor to the rich through enormous tax cuts and aggressive welfare reforms.
In sum, President Bush and the Republicans have won a mandate to take the conservative revolution far to the right of the boundaries drawn even by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In winning this breathtaking victory, they have overcome some of the biggest electoral impediments ever to have faced an incumbent party: an economy perceived by the voters and media to be in recession; an imminent threat of war; a stockmarket collapse which has decimated middle-class savings and pensions; a populist revulsion against the greed of corporate America; and a trail of financial scandals leading directly the White House.
The right-wing revolution in America began in 1978 with Proposition 13, a measure which imposed a constitutional limit on taxes and forced swingeing cuts in government services. Proposition 13 resulted from a grass-roots revolt by the middle classes of California, who judged that they were paying intolerable levels of taxes, while they and their families were receiving little in return from the State. To judge by yesterday’s US election, this anti-tax, anti-government movement is still stronger than ever.
If Labour tries to exploit its political hegemony to wage war against the affluent middle class, a similar revolt against the State in Britain will be only a matter of time.
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