A Journey (17 page)

For me, I was absolutely clear: if the change was rejected, I was off. As we approached the twenty-first century, five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with even Communist China embracing the ‘socialist market’ economy, if the British Labour Party was going to assert that it believed in state ownership of ‘the means of production, distribution and exchange’, it meant we weren’t serious. Such a position would confirm all the public’s worst fears.

Of course opponents quickly shifted to asking: why have the internal row? This put opposition on a tactical, lower-ground basis. I retorted: there is a row only because you oppose the change. Either say you really do agree with the existing constitution, or accept the change.

The debate took six months. John Prescott finally came fully on board and that helped settle down the traditional wing of the party enormously. The Scottish Conference – which might have been tricky – passed a resolution in support of change, the first really big victory inside the party, setting the tone for the other swing voters to follow. If we could win in the heartland of the party, in Scotland where traditional thought was strong and where we might have anticipated resistance to such ‘middle-class’ thinking, then we could win in most places, and even in the unions. The opponents tried to rally and rail, but they were hamstrung by the overwhelming support for change among the public, who didn’t follow the detail but, as I anticipated, knew that it was really about whether the old Labour Party had changed or not.

The actual drafting was the product of an unusual collaboration between myself, Derry and Peter Hyman, with others providing commentary and suggestions. The initial draft was done sitting alone in Inverness in the family house of an old friend of mine, Mairi Stuart, just before the Scottish Conference. The final touches were put in place in our house in Islington, sitting in the bedroom with Peter Hyman, as downstairs our daughter Kathryn was having a birthday party. So I would go between games of pass-the-parcel and rewriting British social democracy.

The words mattered, to both party and public. For the party they had to convey genuine conviction. For the public, they couldn’t be a fudge. They had to represent a clear move into the modern world.

So, we kept at the beginning the phrase ‘democratic socialism’, but what came after was a plain statement of values which rejected any association of those values with the state as the principal economic actor:

The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour, we achieve more than we achieve alone so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect.

In the strange telepathic way they do things, the public had ranked in order of preference the outcome for my leadership: the best result was that I was in control of a party that agreed with me; the worst was that I was not in control of a party which disagreed with me; the acceptable outcome was that the party was prepared to go along with me. In the end we settled somewhere between the best and the acceptable. Although we were only a small group of co-conspirators, as time went on we drew significant numbers of people to us. A new generation of young supporters bought fully into the change. They were the true believers and are the only hope for the party’s future today.

The battle over Clause IV more or less set the scene for the style and content of leadership in the years up to 1997. We hadn’t anything like a fully formed corpus of policy. We were much less prepared for government than we should have been, given the eighteen years of Opposition, though actually it can be dangerous to formulate precise policy in Opposition that is uninformed by the experience and expertise that comes with government. How we would overcome the many obstacles, diversions, treacherous shoals and unknown terrain was not known. On the other hand, our compass was set in a firm direction, and the manner and attitude with which we would approach the challenges was clear. New Labour was not just a slogan. It was an attitude of mind. It would serve us well when we were tested in the next two years, allowing us to develop the harder-edged policy and make the tough decisions.

Sometimes the tests arose as the issues arose. In January 1995, we had to knock back any suggestion of taxing private schools. Indeed, schools were a constant object of controversy in those early days as I tried to wean the party off its old prejudices (though I think they may have called them beliefs). Ironically, in the light of her later defection from my supporters, it was over Harriet Harman that the issue got hottest in January 1996.

When I had chosen to send my own children to the Oratory – a Catholic state school that had been grant-maintained – it was a difficult enough moment. Alastair and I had a real set-to over it since he, and most especially his partner Fiona, who was a campaigner for comprehensive schools, really disapproved. But I was determined that I couldn’t let the kids down. Their education was important. They had enough to put up with as it was. To send them to a bad or average state school, when under the then rules governing admissions to Catholic schools we could have sent them to a good one, would be really quite wickedly irresponsible. As I said to Alastair: you and Fiona took hold of your children’s secondary school, and changed it; I don’t have that option. Also, there was always this somewhat absurd charge that we should have chosen Islington secondary schools for our children (they had been to primary school there) because that’s where we lived. Without seeming complacent or taking things for granted, I couldn’t point out the reality, which was that come the election we might well be living in Westminster. And, to be frank, with the state of Islington schools at that time, it is something that we would have tried to avoid anyway.

However, our situation paled into insignificance when Harriet, having sent one child also to the Oratory, decided to send the other to a grammar school. This really was something. The whole of the Labour Party programme since the 1960s had been to abolish academic selection and bring in comprehensive, non-selective schooling. Grammar schools were by and large cordially detested by the party. Harriet’s decision was therefore a real shocker.

Alastair wanted to send her a letter denouncing her decision. Bruce Grocott, my PPS, was appalled. Even my nearest and dearest in the office thought it pretty indefensible. Only Cherie came close to sticking up for her, since she always put the family first. As the news leaked, the party went into turmoil – after all, Harriet was a member of the Shadow Cabinet. Major slaughtered me on it at PMQs, finally having something he could really twist the knife on.

Alastair, as ever, held the line despite his own opinion, which was loudly communicated with much vigour. My view was absolutely crystal clear: it was her choice as a parent. On this, I was in a minority of one. The press smelt blood. It seems strange now but people really did tell me my leadership was on the line. No one could quite understand why I felt the need to defend her so vigorously.

To be honest, at first I wasn’t sure why either, but as I licked my wounds over PMQs and reflected, I realised why the instinct was so strong: although Labour people would understand why Harriet might have to resign over this, no ordinary person would. Some woman politician decides to send her kid to a grammar school. She thinks it gives him the best chance of a good education. Her party forces her to resign. What do you think? You think that’s a bit extreme; and not very nice; and a bit worrying; and is that what still makes me a bit anxious about those Labour people? Before we know where we are, we’ve really unsettled sensible middle-ground opinion.

I dug in. I went to the PLP the day after the Tuesday PMQs and defended her passionately. I also learned a great lesson: the row passed. Yes, it had been ugly for a while and as ever in the Westminster bubble everything seems so extraordinarily hyper, but in reality the world kept turning and the news moved on.

We were continuing to develop the orientation for policy across a range of issues. In May 1995, we had had the first of a series of discussions, internally in the office, about Bank of England independence. I was already firmly of the view we should do it. It was also part of the bigger analysis for business, unions, public service and welfare policy that I wanted to develop which would be plainly New Labour, and even if the most we could do was establish a direction, the direction should be clear.

In part this was about attitude; in part about policy; in part about reconstructing a different link between the party and the people. The attitude was clear: no compromise on the essentials, and making New Labour an indisputable fact of the political landscape; in policy, to figure out not the granular details but the guiding principles of policy positions; in the link between party and people, getting the former to behave like normal people and the latter to feel that, thus normalised, Labour people were their type of people.

All of this today sounds almost comically obvious, but not back then. We had become separated from ‘normal’ people. For several decades, even before the eighteen years in the wilderness, Labour was more like a cult than a party. If you were to progress in it, you had to speak the language and press the right buttons. It went on so long it became natural to those in the party. Even I had to learn to do it – not that well, I may say – but without doing some of it, you got nowhere.

The SDP had been formed mainly for policy reasons, but they also masked a cultural disjunction between them and traditional Labour. I always remember in 1981 seeing on TV the Limehouse Declaration by the ‘Gang of Four’ – Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers – in which they spoke of their intention to leave the Labour Party. The actual declaration was important, of course, but what intrigued me was the photograph of the meeting. On the table was a bottle of wine. You may think this ridiculous, but I remember being shocked that they allowed themselves to be pictured with a bottle of claret. Then I became shocked at my shocked reaction. Didn’t I have a bottle of wine on my table? Didn’t many people? Yet I kid you not, at that time Labour members would have been aghast at such a picture. Beer, possibly; wine, no.

There was, in a sense, a cultural as well as a political divide between the party and the people. Normal young people went out on a Saturday night, had a few drinks and partied. Labour young people sat and talked seriously about the iniquities of the Tory government and the inevitable long-term decline of capitalism. I wanted us to reconnect completely at the cultural level. I wanted us to take the good bits of the Labour Party in the 1970s and 80s – proper progressive attitudes such as equality for women, gays, blacks and Asians – and ally them to normality, bring them into the mainstream and out of the suffocating strictures of political correctness. So a woman should be able to be a woman and still be political. She didn’t have to behave or seem like a man. That sense of ourselves as individuals has a very important political spirit attached to it.

The essential problem of Labour in the post-war period was that it had lost touch with its basic purpose. That purpose was always, at heart, about the individual. A more powerful state, unions, social action, collective bargaining – all of these were means to an end: to help the individual gain opportunity, to let him or her overcome limitations unfairly imposed by poverty, poor education, poor health, housing and welfare. It was all about opportunity not in general but in particular: for you, as an individual. That echoed and captured something deep within human nature: the desire to be free, to be the best you can be.

The problem for all progressive parties was that by the 1960s, the first generation of those helped in such a way had been liberated. Thus on the ladder of opportunity, they didn’t want more state help; they wanted choice, freedom to earn more money and spend it. They fractured the homogeneous class base. They started to resent the freeloaders they paid for. Above all, they wanted a different relationship with the state: as partners or citizens, not as beneficiaries or clients. The private sector, driven by the market, shifted fast under such social pressures. The public sector got stuck. This is why by the end of the 1970s, Thatcher and Reagan were able to push forward major change.

For me, New Labour was all about understanding this social evolution. It wasn’t at all about changing the basic values or purpose of progressive politics; on the contrary, it was about retrieving them from the deadweight of political and cultural dogma that didn’t merely obscure those values and that purpose, but also defeated them.

What is more, it wasn’t about ‘coming to terms’ with such an evolution. It was about rejoicing in it, recognising that this was not an unfortunate reality that we had to learn to acknowledge in order to make progress; it
was
progress.

All of this may seem a long way back from Clause IV, policy changes and manifestos, but it was a critical part of orientation. I wanted Labour people to be ambitious and compassionate at the same time, and feel neither guilty about the first nor anxious about the second. We were normal human beings. We should be motivated and fascinated by the prospect of being agents of political change. We should be striving for happiness and fulfilment also in our chosen careers, in our personal life, in our enjoyment of art and culture.

Again I know it sounds a little bizarre, but back in the late 1980s there was a group of rock musicians called Red Wedge, fronted by people like Paul Weller and Billy Bragg, who came out and campaigned for us. It was great. But I remember saying after one of their gigs – and, by the way, Billy Bragg was someone I got to know later and really liked – ‘We need to reach the people listening to Duran Duran and Madonna’ (a comment which went down like a cup of sick). I felt, in art and culture, we should represent all strands, avant-garde through to basic popular art that our voters might go to watch or listen to.