Tony Blair in Brighton yesterday gave the best speech Baroness Thatcher never
made. Gone was the waffle of Opposition. Control of audience and occasion
was complete. So, too, was the deference paid to the -ism that still hovers
over British politics, the -ism that dare not speak its name.
Mr Blair is emerging as the political son Margaret Thatcher never had. He is
repackaging and relaunching the great enterprise. Yesterday's speech,
stripped of its clutter, was a call to a second crusade, a continuation of
the modernisation of Britain begun in the 1980s and as yet unfinished. Mr
Blair announced another era of "hard choices". Nobody, not the unions, not
the workshy, not students, not Europe, certainly not the Labour Party, can
be allowed to stand in its way. New Labour was an election-winning gimmick.
New Labour is really New Thatcher. There is not, and never was, any
alternative.
The question asked of the country by Mr Blair last May was simple. Would it
like him to do to Britain what he had done to the Labour Party? He had
brushed away its cobwebs and installed clear and sensible lines of
accountability. The public's reply was (I say it again) half-hearted. The
crazy arithmetic of the House of Commons should blind nobody to the fact
that Labour's popular vote, true indicator of public feeling, was little
different from John Major's in 1992. (It was the Tory vote that collapsed.)
Mr Blair is not, as he claimed yesterday, a majoritarian Prime Minister. His
much-lauded mandate rests on less than 50 per cent electoral support.
The more reason, he might have argued, for playing safe. After 18 years in
Opposition, the Labour Cabinet could well have rested. Mr Blair's ministers
could jog round the field, get used to their boots and learn the name of the
coach. In Opposition, his interest in policy seemed limited. His speeches
were so empty as to make even Paddy Ashdown's a model of precision. Asked to
tell of socialism's "language of priorities", Mr Blair replied that those in
Kenneth Clarke's last Budget seemed good enough for him. The electorate was
offered a pig in a poke. Having bought the poke, it could have been told by
Mr Blair that the pig would stay hidden for a year or two.
Yesterday there was no such complacency. The Government made two early
decisions of great significance. The first was to note and avoid the initial
mistakes made by the most recent "revolutionary" administrations, those of
Harold Wilson in 1964 and Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The last period of
Labour rule ended with James Callaghan pathetically lecturing his party that
governments could not get out of trouble by cutting taxes and increasing
spending. "I tell you in all candour that this option no longer exists," he
cried. He was right, but too late.
Mrs Thatcher preached the same message, yet promptly ignored it. In 1979 she
cut taxes and increased spending, buying off her old allies among farmers,
the police, the Armed Forces and even the civil servants. Public spending
soared and the Thatcher Cabinet tore itself apart for half a decade,
struggling to bring expenditure under control.
Mr Blair's decision to stick within the Tory spending targets was far more
than a device of convenient discipline. He made it seem unavoidable, and
then named his closest colleague and potential rival, Gordon Brown, as
custodian of this (Tory) discipline. By crudely freezing spending the
Cabinet saved itself a year of internecine strife. But the Chancellor must
soon join battle over the next public spending review, with loyalty to the
targets wearing thin. He, rather than Mr Blair, must then be their defender.
Mr Brown's speech on Monday was extraordinary, not just for his merciless
teasing of spending colleagues. He went back over the painful lessons of the
1970s. He told the party that "irresponsible" pay demands were out of the
question. "You cannot build a new Jerusalem on a mountain of debt," he said.
Mr Brown has bought lock, stock and barrel the old monetarist theorem, that
central bankers cause inflation and unions cause unemployment. For the first
time in memory a Chancellor has pinned not one but both these maxims firmly
on their subjects. If Labour wants full employment, he chided his audience,
only the unions stand in the way. This is 18-certificate politics.
Mr Blair, I noted, did not mention Mr Brown yesterday, despite accolades to
John Prescott, Mo Mowlem and David Blunkett. A shrewd leader always
distances himself from his Chancellor. If Mr Blair is to be President,
someone else has to be skinflint Prime Minister. Someone has to smash hopes,
shred morale, spill blood and hack compromise. Mr Blair may preach
neo-Thatcherism. He may sell the "hard choices" crusade like a New Age
religion. But he is the salesman. Mr Brown is the one who must practise in
the corridors what Mr Blair preaches in the pulpit. And if the crusade
founders...dear Gordon, a nice man, such a pity.
So far, so Machiavellian. But what was also clear yesterday is that Mr Blair
has no intention of putting his Government's reputation for radicalism in
hock to the Treasury. The two substantive reforms on which he has embarked,
to the constitution and to the welfare state, are now irrevocable. I doubt
if anyone in government has an inkling of what it may have unleashed in
Scotland or Wales, let alone when elected mayors are the norm in every city
in the land. This is not just the reversing of a decade of Tory centralism.
Britain is to get a dose of constitutional innovation that could mean
widespread political opposition to any government in London. For a new
administration, this shows confidence and courage.
More courageous must be the decisions soon to emerge from Labour's review of
the welfare state. Britain must have pinched itself hearing some of Mr
Blair's loaded asides yesterday. He ridiculed housing benefit as "designed
for fraud". He dismissed criticism of his plan for students' fees. His
phrase, "rights come with responsibilities", is familiar right-wing code. It
means workfare in some shape or form. As for the emphasis on teaching stan
dards, the criticism of hooliganism, the attack on Brussels bureaucracy,
this was vintage Thatcher. I was jolted from my seat when Mr Blair suddenly
began talking about "Labour values". What was the Labour Party doing here?
The modernisation of Britain, like Lenin's electrification of the Soviet
Union, was surely above party.
The modernisation crusade has now been firmly allied to "hard choices". Like
Lady Thatcher, Mr Blair knows he must win battles that will become harder
with each passing month. He, too, must confront his Arthur Scargill and his
Orgreave pickets. They may come in the form of battling students, single
mothers and the urban unemployed. The prospect for any Labour Government is
terrible. Mr Blair will need all the popularity he can muster. President
Clinton's overwhelming mandate was of little use when he tried to tamper
with health reform.
The present Government has made few errors as yet. There has been arrogance in
the handling of MPs, but they can take it. Mr Blair's first Honours List was
faintly malodorous, but who cares? The rubbishing of Clare Short and Frank
Field was not nice, but nor is any school of hard knocks. Last Thursday's
Treasury leak on the single currency was a disaster. Bigger rumblings can be
heard over the horizon, from Europe, from Northern Ireland and from the
public sector unions. Who knows what the gods of circumstance may soon visit
on those who at present seem to play as happy as Gray's schoolboys. "No
sense have they of ills to come/ Nor care beyond today " ?
Yet of all this, Mr Blair seems aware. In his speech he allowed himself one
wistful remark. He claimed that May 1 was a defeat not just for Toryism but
for cynicism. This was a time for the "enlightened patriot". Britain had a
chance to set the world an example of economic and political modernisation -
a modernisation, he failed to point out, that began more than a decade ago.
But setting examples is painful. They require a Government ready to draw
deep on its stock of political consent. Mr Blair has that consent at
present, but it will not last. He is impressively conscious of this
fragility. He has seen the flood tide in his Government's affairs. We should
be encouraged that he wants so urgently to exploit it.
