Letters from London (46 page)

Thus is the old left neutered with words. For the modernizers, musty, prelapsarian socialism is dead. And such is their confidence that they are now even reclaiming the very word
socialism
. It used to be a bogey term, and failed to appear in the 1992 Labour manifesto, presumably on the ground that it was deemed to induce projectile vomiting among the Don’t-Knows. It is now coming back into shy usage again, purged of its old associations like a paint-thickened door plunged into an acid bath and coming out all shiny new pine. In Tony Blair’s words, from a campaign speech in Cardiff: “The essential belief is that a strong united society is necessary to individual achievement. That is why we call it socialism.” Mr. Blair even published a Fabian Society pamphlet, timed to coincide with his election, boldly entitled “Socialism.” His socialism, or, to insert its occasional and diluting hyphen, socialism, is not that of the command economy, class warfare, and public ownership, but rather that of state partnership and gentle interventionism, fostered by those “notions associated with the left-social justice, cohesion, equality of opportunity, and community.”

Tony Blair’s acceptance speech was not one of those occasions on which you announce policy; rather, it was a time for showing yourself to the people and playing your theme song. Mr. Blair did this
very well. He is not a great orator, though in opposing Mr. Major he does not need to be: he is already Demosthenes to a speak-your-weight machine. And, in any case, orating simultaneously to a crowded hall and a television camera is probably an impossible job; like being a stage and TV actor at the same time. But he seemed seriously pleased, sufficiently moved to leave a tremor in his voice, and he spoke with the sort of zeal that makes average viewers slightly embarrassed if they do not feel quite the same zeal themselves. (This is no bad thing, since not every benefit brought into the world comes through virtue and probity; guilt and hypocrisy also get things done.) Mr. Blairs theme song, like all theme songs, consists not so much of sound bites as word bites, and his speech would not be greatly betrayed by simply playing the highlighted words in the order he used them: “Responsibility/trust/trust/service/dedication/dignity/pride/trust
/mission/renewal/mission/hope/change/responsibility/mission/
spirit/community/community/pride/pride/socialism/change/
wrong/right/wrong/right/wrong/right/communities/passion/
reason/change/change/change/solidarity/community/anew/
afresh/inspire/crusade/change/progress/faith/seive/serve/serve.”

A few days later, I found myself in the Shadow Cabinet room at the House of Commons awaiting an audience with the new leader. It is a high-ceilinged, rather gloomy office overlooking the north end of Westminster Bridge, and it was in end-of-term disarray: the conference table snapped apart at its join, the heavy green-leather chairs stacked higgledy-piggledy. Two things stood out in this somber space: the elegant brass door hinges by Pugin, and a volume bound in bright scarlet leather lying next to Mr. Blair’s abandoned jacket. Aha, I thought, let’s check out the browsing material he keeps for those quiet moments between interviews. It was a copy of the New Testament. A sea mist of agnostic dismay descended on me; I mean, I knew the fellow was a serious Christian and all that, but this was taking it a bit far. He’ll be turning the money changers out of Westminster next Then my thumb loosed the title page to disclose a pasted-in presentation slip, dated and signed by Tony Newton, Leader of the House of Commons. Mr. Blair, it appeared, had been to see the
Queen that afternoon, and this was his school prize for having been made a member of the Privy Council. I confess to a certain relief at this point.

“You’ll find him very charming,” people had said beforehand; and, yes, this was the case. During the campaign he had been stuck with the pretty-boy tag by various ill-wishers; he is not as good-looking as this suggests, though of course in the context of the House of Commons he is incredibly good-looking. There is a relaxed thoughtfulness about him, plus at times the wary air of one who has just had to cram for examinations in subjects he didn’t know he was going to be tested on for years to come. But then Smith’s death and his own sudden apotheosis had come in a dizzying rush.

Given that Mr. Blair is fluent, telegenic, and young, the first line of attack is to accuse him of lacking ideas. Anthony Howard once watched him address a meeting of the political pressure group Charter 88: “He absolutely charmed them, but he didn’t say a chipolata sausage.” Of course, it’s not essential for politicians to have ideas, and sometimes they may be liked specifically for not having any. This was certainly the case with John Major when he took over from Mrs. Thatcher: he was seen as a decent, middling chap whose decency would do service for positive thought. This is probably still part of Mr. Major’s dwindling allure, since on the only two occasions that he has visibly lapsed into having an idea, or a powerful belief, or at least a personal view that doesn’t come with the official limo, he has made himself look ridiculous. Early in his Premiership, he made an impassioned plea for more motorway toilets; for this cross-legged moan he was treated with wry compassion. More recently, however, Mr. Major came up with a second idea: that vagrancy should be denounced. Begging, he told a Bristol newspaper in May, was an “eyesore,” and maximum legal penalties should be enforced against those who extended the cupped paw: “It is an offensive thing to beg. It is unnecessary. So I think people should be very rigorous with it.” Even if Mr. Major was at the time trying to woo the Tory right for the European elections, this was a doubly inept piece of politics. First, because everyone who lives in a city knows that begging has greatly
increased during the lifetime of the present administration. Second, because Mr. Major’s sudden expertise in the matter of down-and-outs left him wide open to the obvious riposte: that it takes one to know one.

But in a wider context a Conservative attack on Mr. Blair for lacking ideas would have its ironic side. The Conservatives are still eking out the brainpan that they came in with fifteen years ago. And as the Thatcherite impetus dribbles away, Thatcherite “ideas” become ever wackier. In April, for instance, the Adam Smith Institute, a think tank of the Conservative right, produced its vision of Britain in the year 2020 (a vision predicated, it goes without saying, on the continuation of Tory rule until then). The institute has been going since 1977, and as its director, Dr. Madsen Pirie, said a few years ago, “We propose things which people regard as on the edge of lunacy. The next thing you know, they’re on the edge of policy.” Dr. Pirie has himself invented the Pirie knot, a cure for men whose bow ties humiliatingly detumesce to a level below the horizontal. “With the conventional knot,” he explains, “you don’t know until you’ve finished tying it how it’s going to come out. I tie a layered knot, constructed systematically so that you get it right every time.”

20–20 Vision: Targets for Britain’s Future
is the published attempt of Dr. Pirie and twenty-five co-thinkers to do for Britain what the director has already done for the bow tie. By the end of the next quarter century, a reknotted nation would, if all went well, be able to gaze out upon the following things: a basic rate of income tax at 10 percent, with a top rate at 20 percent; a growth rate which doubles the standard of living every twenty years (“this is very high by the standards of the Twentieth Century, but it was a century which taught us many mistakes to avoid”); elimination of most major illnesses; legitimation of the “black” economy; renovation of all housing stock; privatized motorways with electronic pricing, guided buses with regenerative braking systems, and the extinction of auto crime (a felony in which Britain is currently the European leader); nursery education for all at three, and foreign-language learning for all at five; an end to homelessness (“We should bear in mind the image which Britain presents
to foreign visitors when they see people sleeping in shop doorways and begging on the streets”—so that’s where John Major got his “idea”); life expectancy of a hundred; the restoration of English wild-flower meadows and the fresh glory of “prairie acres covered by exotic crops of lupins;” the reforestation of Britain, raising its wooded proportion from 5 percent to 65 percent; and finally, the reintroduction into this cheap, safe, healthy, newly fronded environment of bears, wolves, and beavers.

One of the key moments for those who endured, rather than en joyed, the Thatcher years came when the Prime Minister, late in her reign, explained to a women’s magazine that “there is no such thing as society.” It was like being in one of those dragging dreams of irrational persecution, from which you seem unable to wake, when your tormentor finally turns to you and says, “But can’t you see, it’s because you’re wearing a white shirt and carrying a newspaper.” Oh,
now
I understand, you reflect to yourself in your new unconscious wisdom. I thought you were persecuting me because you were mad, and of course you are still mad, indeed even madder than I thought before, but at least I can follow what it is you thought you might have been up to.

Most people, of course, tend to believe that there is such a thing as society, and Blairism is in part a direct riposte to that Thatcherian negative. His is an ethical socialism, out of R. H. Tawney and Archbishop Temple, based on the necessity of communal action if the individual life is to have its best chance of fulfillment. “The power of all… used for the good of each,” as Blair put it in his acceptance speech. “That is what socialism means to me.” It still, of course, means something different to the traditionalists in his party. As one left-wing MP privately put it, “If you tried supporting the 1945 Labour manifesto today, you’d be thrown out of the Party as a Trotskyist.”

Blairism, or Labour modernity, stands for, or believes in, or hopes to get elected on, the following: a dynamic market economy with a greater wealth-creating base; a strong and cohesive society that protects the individual from the vagaries and cruelties of the market; improved education, higher skills, better training; a rethought
welfare system, aimed at ending long-term dependency and getting people back to work; pro-Europeanism; a Bill of Rights, a Freedom of Information Act, and an elected second chamber; a Welsh Assembly and a Scottish Parliament.

Blairism also believes in keeping the trade unions at a distance. To Party modernizers, the folk memory of union barons turning up at No. 10 to discuss economic policy over beer and sandwiches is an embarrassment. Blair was Shadow Employment Secretary under Neil Kinnock, from 1989 to 1992. There, according to his fellow modernizer and fellow Durhamite MP Giles Radice, “he made the unions face up to a modernized system of individual rights for workers on the Continental model rather than collectivist rights. He also persuaded the trade unions that it was coercive and no longer appropriate to support the closed shop.” On top of this, Blair was a key supporter of a new system of electing the Labour leader by the individual votes of MPs, Party members, and unionists, thereby cutting out the traditional union bloc vote. For Anthony Howard, “the union bosses had their industrial strength destroyed by Mrs. Thatcher and their political strength destroyed by John Smith and Tony Blair.” Now Blair says things like “It is not the function of a Labour Government to come in and do particular favors for the trade union movement.” This may sound reasonable, even right, but it is historically heretical. Imagine a Tory leader promising that when his Government came in there would be no special favors for those who contribute to Conservative Party funds; for employers, businessmen, and the City; for big landowners, rich people, and posh people.

Blairism also accepts that the long postwar battle about public versus private ownership of industries and utilities is over—and lost. The program of “privatization” (or the selling off of national assets) was opposed with varying amounts of doggedness, resignation, and ferocity by Labour; now it is grudgingly accepted as economic force majeure. For instance, Labour supporters of varying ideological hues feel strongly about the sale in 1989 of the water industry. There is something almost totemic about water (this stuff that comes out of the ground, that falls from the sky, and which somehow ought to belong
to those upon whom it falls) and therefore something particularly offensive about the privatized industry’s quick lesson in monopoly capitalism: greatly increased prices, large profits, and highly paid executives enriching one another with nice rights issues. When I put all this to Blair, he replied, “Do I believe the water industry should be privatized? No, I don’t. Do I think that any serious Labour Government, certainly in the immediate term, is going to be sitting round the Cabinet table, and, let us say there is two billion pounds to be spent, that the hands are going to go up for it to be spent repurchasing the share capital in the water industry—well, it won’t happen, so you may as well not mislead people into thinking that it will.” Besides, “there is very little you can’t do by control and that you can only do by ownership.”

This is an honest reply, if dismaying to some. But then government is about not being able to do as much as you want to, or as much as you believe in; it is about the curdling of idealism. Even so, there are times when Mr. Blair seems to be pitching it a bit high. Take this lofty sentence from his election manifesto: “An education system which serves an elite and neglects the majority is an affront to our morality and a drain on our economy.” At any time in my political awareness, and on any normal constructions of the words, this ought to indicate an intention to abolish the public schools. But the words don’t mean that, do they? “No.” Why not? Isn’t it “an affront to morality” that the hazard of parental wealth dictates a child’s education? “It is an affront,” he agrees cautiously, “that the quality of your education is determined by the amount of wealth that you have. But the question is how you deal with it. Do you deal with it by abolishing the ability of people to educate their children privately, or do you concentrate on raising the standards of state education?” Why not do both at the same time? “I think not, either as a matter of principle or as a matter of political reality.” It seems almost unfair to press Mr. Blair on this, since he is committed to educating his own children in the public sector, and abolitionism hasn’t been on the Labour agenda for some while, but he in a way brought it up. “You’ve got to decide in politics where you want the dividing line to be,” he concludes.
Abolishing the public schools, he judges, “would be perceived as in principle wrong, and vindictive…. It would inevitably place the dividing line between ourselves and the Conservatives in the wrong place.”