IT HAS LONG BEEN ARGUED that Tony Blair was Mrs Thatcher’s real heir. And certainly his current favourite slogan was hers: “There is no alternative.”

Faced with a genuine groundswell of opinion in the parliamentary Labour Party that it might be in its best interests if Blair went sooner rather than later, his acolytes resort to screaming about a left conspiracy and accusing blameless figures like Estelle Morris of being secret admirers of Arthur Scargill. And they refuse to accept that there might be a middle way between the 1970s left-wing bogeymen (that they talk about with increasing desperation) and the excesses of the new Labour project. Their response to electoral setbacks seems to be that the party should continue to move further to the right — more peerages sold to ever more dodgy millionaires, more ill-thought-out and poorly managed “initiatives” in the public sector and an even tighter embrace of George Bush and his neo-conservative foreign policy.

When Mr Blair emerged as leader of the Labour Party in the mid-1980s, his unique selling point was that he was the man to win us the next general election. At the height of the excitement about the SDP, knowledgeable commentators had written off the Labour Party. Blair led us to our biggest parliamentary majority of the 20th century and a historic three successive election victories. No one can ever take that away from him.

But one of the things that is undermining him now is the view, on all wings of the party, that he presiding over a fatal haemorrhaging of members and an erosion of our local authority base. In the Westminster Village local councils are seen as tedious and unglamorous but, as the Tories can vouch, once you lose that nationwide base of local councillors it is incredibly difficult to rebuild. Last week Labour MPs saw good London local councils like Camden swept away on the anti-Blair tide. They know it could happen to their local councillors, friends and colleagues next. This is one of the reasons why hitherto loyal MPs are willing to speak out.

In recent decades the Labour Party has drawn its activist base disproportionately from the public sector. Yet it is among public sector workers that scepticism about new Labour’s market-based reforms is strongest. No one is against change, as Blair’s acolytes like to claim. But people are entitled to be sceptical about the fact that there are so many poorly managed private sector-style initiatives (in health, for instance) at the same time. Particularly when they are promoted by politicians who have never actually worked in the private sector and are consequently overawed by every overpaid consultant and purveyor of dodgy IT systems that happens along.

And one example of an area of social policy where new Labour has failed spectacularly is housing. Since the 1980s, housing prices in London have spiralled out of the reach of anyone on an average wage. The pressure from overseas investors in places such as Hong Kong, together with big City of London wage packets, had a ripple effect all over the capital. But under new Labour (for purely ideological reasons) council house building has dropped to the lowest level since the Second World War.

Harold Macmillan built more council houses than Tony Blair. Gimmicky “key worker” schemes have been just a drop in the ocean of housing need. London’s chronic shortage of affordable housing affects recruitment across the public sector; it creates unstable inner-city communities where middle-income earners have been driven out and you either have to be very rich or very poor to live there; but, above all, it has pushed some white working-class voters into the arms of the British National Party. But No 10 insists that there is no middle way between the council house barracks of the 1970s that gave social housing a bad name and their failed market-based policy.

Mrs Thatcher, even at her most controversial, thought, acted and governed with the grain of her ordinary party members. But Tony Blair has tested to destruction the idea that you can run the Labour Party in total opposition to its dearest-held beliefs and values.

Gordon Brown’s attraction to ordinary Labour Party supporters is not that anyone seriously believes that he is a closet leftwinger. New Labour was, after all, Mr Blair and Mr Brown’s joint project. Yet Mr Blair’s acolytes insist on joining with the right-wing press as depicting Brown as the “roadblock to reform”. Labour Party people, on the other hand, think that Gordon Brown actually likes the Labour Party. No one has thought that about Tony Blair for a long time.

Of course no one wants to go back to the 1970s — and everybody acknowledges Mr Blair’s tremendous electoral achievements. All ordinary Labour Party members have been asking is that he stops fighting the internal Labour party battles of 20 years ago; that he weans himself off his addiction to “initiatives”; that he realises that the market is not the answer to every social issue; and that he accepts that Britain’s foreign policy interests are not always synonymous with those of President Bush.

Our deepest fear is the one that surfaced in the parliamentary Labour Party this week — in his headlong dash for his “legacy” Tony Blair may be sacrificing the long-term interests of the party itself.

Diane Abbott is Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington

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