=?iso-8859-1?Q?NLR:_UK:_New_Labour's_Role_in_the_Neoliberal_Ord
Tim Murphy
New Left Review (UK)
http://www.newleftreview.net
A WEIGHTLESS HEGEMONY
New Labours Role in the Neoliberal Order
by
SUSAN WATKINS
Causes and consequences of Britains distinctive contribution to the
repertoire of latter-day neoliberalism.
The domestic and foreign record of the Blair regime, and its hybrid role in
a shifting Atlantic order.
---
The Centre Left governments that dominated the North Atlantic zone up to the
turn of the millennium have now all but disappeared. Within six months of
Bushs victory in the United States, the Olive Tree coalition had crumbled
before Berlusconis Forza Italia. The autumn of 2001 saw Social Democrats
driven from office in Norway and Denmark. In April 2002 Koks Labour-led
government resigned over a report pointing to Dutch troops complicity in
the Srebrenica massacre. The following month, Jospin came in a humiliating
third behind Chirac and Le Pen in the French presidential contest, and the
Right triumphed in the legislative elections. In Germany, the spdGreen
coalition clung on by a whisker, aided by providential floods. Though the
sap retains its historic grip on Sweden it now lacks an absolute majority,
and Persson was trounced in the 2003 campaign for euro entry. In Greece,
where pasok has only been out of power for three years since 1981, Simitis
squeaked back in 2000 with a 43.8 to 42.7 per cent lead.
Within this landscape, Britain has been the conspicuous exception. In the
United Kingdom alone a Centre Left government remains firmly in place, its
grip on power strengthened, if anything, in its second term of office, and
still enjoying a wide margin of electoral advantage. Both featuresNew
Labours survival against the general turn of the political wheel, and the
scale of its domestic predominanceset it apart within the oecd zone.
Elsewhere, although administrations have shifted from Centre Left to Centre
Right, party voting blocs have remained relatively stableonly a point or so
off 50:50 in the US, for example. In Britain, counter-cyclically, a much
more drastic shift in fortunes has occurred. Blairs successive
parliamentary landslides, in 1997 and 2001, have produced the largest
Commons majorities in postwar history, the second returning 413 Labour mps
to 166 Conservatives and 52 Liberal Democrats. Even with the UK bogged down
in the occupation of Iraq, New Labour looks set to win an unprecedented
third term of office in 2005.
The British exception poses three interconnected questions which need to be
considered within a comparative, international context. What are the reasons
for the stability of Blairs regime? How should the record of New Labour in
office be assessed? Where ought the logic of political opposition to it lie?
Blairs unprecedented parliamentary majorities need first to be decoded, for
the underlying electoral geography looks rather different. In absolute
terms, Labours popular vote of 10.7 million in 2001 was well down even on
the 11.5 million that saw Kinnock defeated in 1992. Fewer than one voter in
four (24 per cent of the total electorate) actually marked a cross for Blair
s government, while turnout fell from a (then) record low of 71 per cent in
1997 to a mere 59 per cent in 2001. [1] Unrepresented in parliament are the
2.8 million Labour abstentions in Britains former industrial heartlandsthe
metropolitan conurbations of Tyne and Wear, Manchester, Merseyside, the West
Midlands, Clydeside and South Wales. It was the hard-core Labour vote that
stayed at home: whites in the old colliery districts, Asians in the
Lancashire inner cities, under-25s in particular. Turnout fell below 44 per
cent in the blighted constituencies round the Tyneside shipyards, the bleak
Glaswegian council estates and the semi-derelict terraces of Salford and
central Leeds; below 35 per cent in the ruined zones of Liverpools
docklands. [2] Measured in terms of working-class disenfranchisement, the
Americanization of British politics has accelerated dramatically under New
Labour, to abstention levels worthy of the US itself.
Blairs massive majorities, then, have been the product not of voter
enthusiasm but of a winner-takes-all electoral system, which has luridly
distorted one of the most striking events in current British politicsthe
collapse of the Conservatives, the countrys historic party of government.
For if New Labours support has been weak, the Tory vote has crashed: from a
respectable 14 million in 1992, to 9.6 million in 1997, to a mere 8.3
million in 2001. In all the major urban centres, the new Middle England that
was Thatchers dreamnon-unionized, service-sector owner-occupiershas
abandoned her party, either voting Labour or staying at home. The
Conservatives retain only two seats out of 23 in Inner London; one of 25 in
Greater Manchester; none in the urban Merseyside or Tyne and Wear regions.
[3] They have been virtually banished from the Celtic periphery, with a
single seat in Scotland, none in Wales. Their current 166 mps are returned
largely from the Tory heartlands, the shires and southern suburbs. Nowhere
else in Europe has a governmental party of the Right undergone such a fall.
It is this debacle that has been the precondition for the past seven years
of New Labours uncontested ruleits weightless hegemony.
Decline and its solutions
Behind this role reversal in the political system lie the social and
economic changes wrought by two decades of full-tilt neoliberal reform.
Historically, the roots of Conservative dominance can be traced to the
peculiar configuration of English capital as it emerged in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, when a landed aristocracy, undergirded by a
wealthy, London-based merchant layer, became Europes premier capitalist
class and commander of an expanding overseas empire. The northern industrial
manufacturers, coming into their own during the very decades when
property-owning England froze at the spectre of revolution across the
Channel, sought not to challenge this landowner-led bloc but to join its
ranks. The capitalist-aristocracys statethe sovereign crown-in-parliament
at its corewas preserved in all its archaic essentials down to the end of
the nineteenth century, accumulating an increasingly powerful array of
hegemonic institutions: Crown and Dominions, Whitehall and Westminster, the
City, law courts and armed services, universities and public schools. It
proved fully capable of absorbing the impact of universal suffrage.
Consistent with the internal logic of this established order, it was the
Conservatives, with their resolutely imperial and landed background, rather
than the Liberals, more closely linked to towns and industry, that emerged
as the unitary party of capital necessitated by the first-past-the-post
system, once the working class had achieved its own representation with the
birth of Labour.
Masters of the national statecraft, the Conservatives were, for most of the
twentieth century, the natural political voice of the Establishment. By the
1960s this hegemonic bloc had presided, with brief Labour interludes, over
nearly a century of decline from Britains imperial zenith. The audit of
the Second World War had revealed a creaking and outmoded manufacturing
base, archaized through lack of investment, while the City, with Bank of
England and Treasury support, sought higher returns abroad. Lend-Lease
locked the UK into propitiatory debt dependence on Washington. For a decade
or more after 1945 the extent of the slippage was masked, as the slow
rebuilding of war-shattered economies in Europe and Japan allowed Britain to
bask in relative superiority, while Churchill fought to cling on to the
remains of empire. Elsewhere, old elites were destroyed and renewed in the
fires of war and US occupation; here the traditional order, propped up by
victory, continued to preside. Finally in the 1960s with the colonies all
but gone and the new challenge of the European Community on the horizon, the
symptoms of stagnation became impossible to ignore.
Four attempts at modernization followed over the next fifteen years, united
in their assault on organized labour. Politically limited compared to its
Continental equivalents, the British trade-union movement possessed a
toughness and cultural cohesion within the UKs entrenched industrial class
system that gave it a strong say in determining shop-floor working practice.
Wilsons In Place of Strifetrading a curtailment of union rights for a
say in white-heat technological and corporate developmentsfailed to win
the support of his own party. After 1970, Heaths Selsdon Park strategy
EEC entry, plus fiscal stimulus and a crackdown on organized labourran into
intransigent trade-union opposition. The Labour government returned in 1974
again targeted the unions as principal cause of unemployment and inflation,
and pioneeredin an advanced countrythe IMFs restructuring programme.
Callaghans spending cuts devastated the lowest-paid public-sector workers;
their defiance, and the backlash against it, restored the Tories to power.
Finally, with Thatcher, modernization was executed with a vengeance.
Unemployment was coldly held above three million for a decade while the
Conservatives pushed through a breakneck programme of social re-engineering
that crushed union resistance, deregulated financial services, and
privatized public utilities and council flats to create a new mass layer of
small investors and owner-occupiers. With the exception of the defence
industrywhere British jobs remained preciousmanufacturing was left to
twist in the wind. This was finance capitals solution.
Marketizing the establishment
But to effect such changes involved an ideological onslaught not only
against trade unionists and national utilities but the civil service,
universities, BBC in the end, against the whole Establishment ethos of
public service, class deference and cultural distinction upon which the
Conservatives political hegemony itself had for so long been based.
Thatcher preserved the traditional institutions of the ancien rigime but her
assault drained them of legitimacy. The logic inevitably made itself felt
within her own party. The grandees who, under the old class-command system,
held sway over strategic policy and leadership decisions, loyally supported
by a middle-class base, were now supplanted by more combative,
petty-bourgeois and nouveau riche layers, closer in ideological terms to
Poujadism than to the high Tory tradition. The Conservative Party fell
victim to its own success.
Given a battery-charging spell in opposition after Thatchers dispatch, a
pragmatic Conservative leadershipClarke, Patten, Heseltine, Hurdmight
conceivably have forged a working consensus over European monetary and
political union, though the Maastricht Treaty would inevitably have been a
traumatic moment for the party of empire. Counterfactually, Labour would
then have been left to manage the 1992 Black Wednesday fallout that resulted
from Lawson locking an overvalued pound into the Exchange Rate Mechanism.
But Labours fiasco under Kinnock in 1992 kept Major in power. The internal
crisis of Conservatism exploded with the party still in office, as
Eurosceptic Cabinet factions rebelled against Major over Maastricht.
The pragmatism of the traditional Conservative elite was largely eclipsed by
this new layer after the electoral defeat of 1997, divorcing the party from
the interests of the City and multinationals. The downward sociological
spiral was given a further twist in 1998 by a party constitution that gave
the hitherto powerless members of local Constituency Associationsaverage
age, 62; most are country dwellersthe right to elect the Conservative
leader. The result was the rejection of credible national politicians in
favour of Iain Duncan Smith, a strutting clown incapable of landing a single
parliamentary blow on Blair, despite the governments difficulties in Iraq.
Finally in October 2003, following humiliating defeat in a London
by-election, Central Office apparatchiks prompted a backbench coup, denying
the Party membership their lethal ballot. That today Michael Howardreviled
during his time as Home Secretary in the 1990sshould be hailed as a saviour
of the party, is itself a measure of the depths of the Conservative crisis.
The consolidators
Entering office in 1997, New Labour were heirs to a social landscape
transformed by Thatcherism. In the City, the industrial-scale architecture
of the deregulated financial companies dwarfed the toy-town remnants of
gentlemanly capitalism. Suburban infill had spread across southern England.
Silicon and pharmaceutical firms, funded by Japanese and American capital,
sprouted along the m4 corridor southwest from London and Reading. Terraced
streets in the old textile towns stood boarded up; iron and steelworks had
been ploughed to rubble. Eminently successful as a transfer of class wealth
and power, Thatcherite modernization had fallen manifestly short as a
solution to long-term problems of productivity and investment. Many of the
cash-starved utilities had foundered in private hands. Schools and hospitals
continued to deteriorate. Railway privatization proved a disaster.
From the start, however, New Labour was pledged to consolidate the
Thatcherite paradigm rather than create a new model. Its charter statement,
The Blair Revolution, displayed an awestruck respect for her achievements.
At the Treasury, Brown would aim for fiscal-surplus levels usually only
demanded of the Third World, to be ameliorated by a few low-cost
anti-poverty measures. On constitutional change, steady, piecemeal reform
was in order. The criminal-justice system would be toughened to increase the
likelihood of conviction. On Europe, disdaining Tory neoliberalism in one
country, New Labour would advance the free-market programme across the
Continent. Any moves towards an autonomous federal bloc, centred round
France and a reunified Germany, would be thwarted through unwieldy eu
enlargement and constitutional insistence on intergovernmental mechanisms. A
LondonParisBonn/Berlin axis would ensure that European military expansion
was locked, through nato, behind US leadership. [4] On defence Blair
pledged: Yes, I would push the nuclear button. The Shadow Cabinet was
whipped to produce unanimous support for Clinton and Majors September 1996
air strikes on Iraq. [5] Although New Labours social-democratic supporters
have not ceased to hope that the government will see the light and turn to
policies of social redistribution, the leadership has never given them
grounds for such illusions. The programme for the bellicose, vehemently
neoliberal entity that Blairite Britain would become was largely laid out in
advance. As New Labour enters its eighth year in office, what have been the
results?
Sustaining growth
On the economic front, Clarke and Major had already nursed recovery from the
two-year recession that ended the ThatcherLawson boom. From 1993, when
sterlings low valuation following ejection from the erm helped lift
exports, growth rates began to revive. By 1995, Major could boast the lowest
inflation and highest growth and employment figures in the eu. The finance
bubble initially pumped by the Federal Reserves interest rate rises that
year sent the London Stock Market soaring. In the City, brokerage fees and
commissions in foreign-exchange, insurance and financial markets rocketed.
Deregulation, low labour costs and a world language had made the UK the most
inviting port of entry for foreign capital to the European Single Market.
From 1996 the pound began to strengthen along with the rising dollar,
benefiting from uncertainties over the coming euro. Import prices fell, and
house values began to surge again. Employment rates rose, with the strong
growth of the service sectorhairdressers, coffee shops, garden centres,
retail outlets. Generous tax-breaks on equity-based accounts lured small
savers into the stock market. Household debt took off, and the UK began to
experience its own provincial version of the imperial bubble.
New Labour was thus presented with a consolidated four-year expansion. The
partys most substantial boast is that it has efficiently husbanded the same
trends forward. GDP growth averaged a respectable 2.4 per cent between 1997
and 2002, if somewhat down from the 3.2 per cent of the previous five years.
With poorer ICT investment in the 1990s, the UK has suffered less fallout
from the post-2000 collapse in that sector than the United States. Days lost
in strikes have fallen from 27 million in 1984, through an annual average of
620,000 under Major, to a record annual low of 368,000 during Labours first
term. The credit boom has taken employment rates to historic highs, even if
only 40 per cent of Britains workforce are in tenured, full-time jobs.
Crucially, for the regimes opinion-poll ratings, personal consumption has
grown at an average 5.7 per cent between 1998 and 2003albeit still based on
soaring household debt, shored up by rising house prices.
For some observers, Britain has now entered a new post-decline era of
economic buoyancy, with growth rates higher and unemployment lower than the
major Eurozone countries. [6] On this view, globalization plus neoliberal
policies have turned the UKs traditional financial and commercial bias to
advantage, making it the ideal offshore servicing platform for international
capital; deindustrialization will bring the final quietus to stagnant
manufacturing. But many of the underlying contours of British decline still
persist. gdp growth since 1997 has largely been dependent on an expanding
workforce, particularly in the low-skilled sector, and longer hours worked,
rather than rising output per worker hour. Across the economy as a whole,
productivity levels are still low by g7 standards. Investment has lagged,
especially in ict, where the paucity of funds has generally been attributed
to poor skill levels and depressed r&d spending. Overall, the UK ratio of
capital per hour worked ranks among the lowest in the eu. [7] Meanwhile, the
countrys historic infrastructural backlog has not been solved by
privatization. The railway network is plagued by breakdowns and fatalities,
with the same recipes poised to yield equally dire results on the London
Underground. The BlairBrown shibboleth of 30-year contracts for private
finance initiatives to fund capital developments in transport, energy,
hospitals and schools locks those services into huge repayments to
corporations for decades ahead.
Gross transfers to the rich from the poor have continued under New Labour.
Indirect taxes, though they have fallen slightly following the mass protests
against fuel prices in 2000, are still higher than in Thatchers day. Brown
s tax credits for low-paid parents and pensionersgarnering much praise from
left-liberal commentators for giving the poorest decile an extra #15 a
weekhave been offset by larger changes in underlying income distribution;
according to one recent analysis, the overall pattern of inequality is
little changed, remaining at historically high levels. [8] The minimum
wage, at #8,736 per year, is set below labour-market rates for most of the
country; the Tories are pledged to retain it. [9] Wage differentials and the
gender pay gap have widened during Labours second term, and the UK Gini
coefficient has continued on the upward trajectory it has followed since
1979.
Other social indicators are equally bleak. Literacy levels have now fallen
below those of the United Stateslet alone the EU. Pupilteacher ratios
still lag substantially behind eurozone levels. Since 1997, teachers pay
has slipped by 9 per cent (for men) and 11 per cent (for women) down their
respective relative-pay ladders. New Labours response to the ensuing
shortages has been the employment of still lower-paid, lower-skilled
classroom assistants. [10] Health spending, too, remains so far behind
European levels that even if projected increasescurrently under threatgo
through, British expenditure, at 8.7 per cent of gdp, will still be well
below the expected West European average of 10.7 per cent. Waiting times in
Accident and Emergency departments are now longer than when New Labour came
to power. The number of doctors per 1,000 of population is currently 1 in
the UK, compared to 2.7 in the United States, 3 in France and 3.4 in
Germany. New Labours per capita recruitment targets for doctors and nurses,
even if projected through to 2024, still fall below the average that the eu
achieved in 1997. Blairs private-finance programme for selected foundation
hospitals looks set to increase inequalityvia marketizationwithin the
overall dearth. [11]
New Labour statecraft
More than its economic and social policies, it was New Labours
constitutional proposals that caused most excitement among its well-wishers
before 1997. The hope was that the modest measures on offer might catalyse a
dynamic which, reinforced by European integration, could challenge the
fictions of Crown-in-Parliamenteven, in wilder imaginations, the monarchy
itself. Once again, the Blair Revolution has delivered its promise:
piecemeal reforms. Peripheral devolutionaffecting some 13.5 per cent of the
populationhas been made fact. The Callaghan government had been toppled for
reneging on its promise of a regional assembly in Edinburgh. From John Smith
s time, New Labour was pledged to be more canny. An element of proportional
representation has allowed the Scottish Parliament, established in 1999, to
represent a slightly wider span of opinion than permitted at Westminster,
with a handful of Socialists and Greens. But its limited powers and the
stranglehold of a LabourLib Dem pact keeps Holyrood a relay for English
policiesone reason for a 2003 turnout of under 50 per cent, the lowest
north of the border since 1852. [12] In Wales, where high unemployment
levels add bitterness to complaints about the multi-million pound new
Assembly building in Cardiff, turnout last year scraped 38 per cent to
return a scant Labour majority. In Northern Ireland, Blair has worked
assiduously for the success of the American-initiated peace process begun
under Major; one genuine, if limited, achievement has been the reduction of
sectarian killings there. [13]
But partial democratization at the periphery has been accompanied by an
unprecedented tightening of power at the centreof far greater moment for
the UK state as a whole. Thatcher may have stripped Establishment
institutions of much of their charisma but she took care to leave them
formally intact. For Blair too, ancien rigime flummery and patronagealbeit
reduced to pasticheplus sovereign-parliament freedom from checks and
balances, have proved the perfect shell for neoliberal statecraft. [14]
There was never any question of electingor even appointinga Constituent
Assembly. The mooted referendum on proportional representation was kicked
into the long grass, once the 1997 election results came in. The feudal
upper chamber has been cynically recast as a well-upholstered arena for
official appointees, head-hunted via an accountancy firm, Pricewaterhouse
Coopers. Mass royalist spectacles have been avidly seizedor stagedas photo
opportunities for the Prime Minister.
Meanwhile, the Blair government has institutionalized an authoritarian
concentration of control within Downing Street itself quite new to the UK
system. Thatchers governments always included substantial,
independent-minded figuresGilmour, Carrington, Heseltine, Lawson,
Howewhose clashes with her punctuated the 1980s; Majors were notoriously
fractious. Genuine Cabinet debate came to an abrupt end with New Labour. On
the very morrow of the 1997 victory, Brown and Blair scornfully dismissed
their top civil servants suggestion that the Cabinet should at least be
informed that interest rates would henceforth be set by the Bank of England.
Theyll agree, the Prime Minister is reported to have said. [15] Blair has
installed a private staff vastly bigger than Majors, not counting the seedy
new-age entourage of the First Lady. The Hutton inquiry permitted a glimpse
into this swarm of special advisers, pliant security heads and
tabloid-trained factotums in Downing Street, bustling feverishly to do their
leaders will in whatever murky operation is to hand. [16] The moral
atmospherereminiscent of Nixons Oval Officewas exemplified in Blairs
nervous-obsessive drive to force an unreliable underling out into the open,
without exposing himself: tb said he didnt want to push the system too far
. [17]
Toughness issues
At the Home Office, Blunkett has surpassed his Draconian Tory predecessors
in pandering to prejudice on criminal-justice and immigration issues, and
shifting power from the judiciary to the executive on sentencing policy. The
new Criminal Justice Bill will not only limit the right to trial by jury and
remove the rule against double jeopardy, but increase obstacles to the
admission of defence evidence, expand police powers to stop and search, and
extend possibilities of detention without charge. In its Asylum and
Immigration Acts of 1999 and 2002, New Labour has instituted crueltiesthe
voucher system; dispersal; total employment banfrom which even Howard
drew back. [18] Blairs own thoughts on these touchstone issues, revealed
in private memos leaked to The Times in July 2000, provide an insight into
the ambition, vanity and hypertension of the 1980s lawyer behind the mask
(described, even by his political uncle Roy Jenkins, as a second-rate mind).
In these hand-written documents, the Prime Minister expounds on the need to
combine:
on your side issues with toughness and standing up for Britain . . . We
need a thoroughly worked out strategy to regain the initiative in this area
. . . This should be done soon and I, personally, should be associated with
it.
Asylum and crime. These may appear unlinked to patriotism but they are:
partly because they are toughness issues; partly because they reach deep
into British instincts.
On crime, we need to highlight tough measures: compulsory tests for drugs
before bail; the piu report on confiscation of assets; the extra number of
burglars jailed under three strikes and youre out. On asylum, we need to
be highlighting removals. [19]
Party of war
In its essentials, New Labours diplomatic policy has been a continuation of
the UKs standard post-Suez stance: no longer a power, Britain could still
be an influence on Washington, most effectively by brokering interests
between Europe and the US. But the post-Cold War global context has added a
new twist, a ratcheting up of American demands. Under New Labour, London has
been pledged both to fight for neoliberal deregulation throughout the eu and
to keep Europe rallied behind the US, militarily and diplomatically, even
with the Soviet threat gone. The organic links between domestic and foreign
policy have been clear enough. If a globalized free market wasin the slack
Las Vegas-speak of Third Way theoriststhe only game in town, the US was its
only marshal. City and multinational interests had every reason to support a
superpower that carried a big stick, if it was used to reinforce the
unfettered freedom of finance capital and the marketization of public assets
around the globe.
Historically Labours leaders, less burdened by ideals of nation and empire,
have often proved more eagerly subservient to Washington than the
Conservatives. Attlee, informed by his ambassador that the Americans would
test the quality of the partnership by our attitude to the notion of a
token ground force, had no hesitation in splitting his Cabinet and
purloining nhs funds to rearm for Korea. [20] Eden, in contrast, defied the
White House with Suez. Wilson applauded Vietnam (though he baulked at the
token force) while Heathalone of postwar prime ministersnever went to
Washington and refused US demands for the use of British bases during the
Yom Kippur War. Even Thatcher, Atlanticist to the hilt, expressed her anger
over the invasion of Grenada. Major and Hurd were openly dubious about US
policy in Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s; Paris was much closer to Washington
than London was, at that point. Nonetheless, Blairs vow to ClintonWhither
thou goest, I will gohas given Labours thraldom a new twist.
Under Clinton, national-security doctrine had already evolved towards the
dramatic escalation of the use of military force to settle other countries
domestic conflicts, as a means to refashion the inherited international
order. [21] As Albright famously put it: Whats the point of having the
worlds greatest military force if you dont use it? Iraqalready
effectively partitioned, sanctioned, subject to intimidatory usaf
overflightswas the key Middle Eastern target. Clinton signed off on regime
change in 1998, providing New Labours first chance to prove its loyalty.
Between the onset of Operation Desert Fox in December 1998 and the summer of
2000, usaf and raf aircraft pounded Iraq with around 400 tons of ordnance,
firing over 1,100 missiles in the first eight months alone. The UK,
according to Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, was responsible for around one
fifth of these. [22] The bombing of Iraq continued throughout the final act
of the dismemberment of Yugoslavia.
Here New Labour once again proved more aggressive than its Conservative
predecessor and displayed far greater disregard for international law. nato
s 78-day aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia was in clear breach of the
doctrine of national sovereignty and coolly bypassed the un Security
Council. Blair now emerged as even more hawkish than the White House,
pressing for ground troops as well as air attacks. Downing Streets top pr
talents were dispatched to natohq in Brussels, where Campbell and Hoon
competed with Bernard Kouchner to elevate genocides into holocausts.
Blairs particular advantage over other middle-ranking world leaders, his
advisers believed, was his ability to reassure Americans about the nobility
of their imperial mission. His speech to Chicago bankers on the occasion of
natos fiftieth anniversaryjustifying pre-emptive military strikes and
long-term land occupations by US-led forcesassured his audience that, under
this newly minted doctrine of the international community, such actions
could be guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self-interest and moral
purpose. [23]
The transition from Clinton to Bush may have called for some psychological
adjustments in Downing Streetwhere aides had been boasting in October 2000
that Gores team was showing them how to win the next electionbut it
required no shift in diplomatic policy. Londons strategic rationale was
still that of influence with the White House. After September 11, Blair once
again pulled out every rhetorical stop for the war on terror. Britain was
Americas closest aide-de-camp as Operation Enduring Freedom rolled across
Afghanistan. By the spring of 2002, Brown had already set aside a war-chest
of #3 billion to prepare a 40,000 strong British invasion force for the
conquest of Iraq.
The confection of weapons intelligence had started even earlier, with the UK
once again taking pole position in circulating WMD evidence, with
ever-lower standards set. The faked faxes allegedly from Niger government
officials detailing sales of yellowcake uranium to Iraq were, according to
IAEA specialists, depressingly bad. [24] In September 2002, launching his
dossier Iraqs Weapons of Mass Destruction, Blair announced to the House
of Commons: The wmd programme is up and running . . . [Saddam Hussein] has
existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological
weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes. [25] A second UK
dossier, commended by Colin Powell to the un in February 2003I would call
my colleagues attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom
distributed yesterday which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception
activitiesfamously included material downloaded from the web that recycled
12-year-old evidence, with no reference to dates.
Had the invasion of Iraq met with no stronger response than sullen
passivity, Blairs trumped up casus belli and forged wmd dossiers would no
doubt have been forgotten. As it is, from May 2003 onwards the tough local
resistance to the occupation has begun to produce a reckoning in the UK,
although typically displaced from political realities. Little stress has
been put by the British media on the Blair governments responsibility for
the numberless Iraqis killed or injured during the heavy preliminary bombing
and land invasion; or for those shot at roadblocks, on demonstrations, or in
their homes; for the thousands of prisoners, held without trial, hooded and
handcuffed Israeli-fashion; for the shops and houses bulldozed in reprisal,
as in Jenin; for the inferno of social breakdown and destruction of material
infrastructure that has accompanied the Anglo-American occupation. Instead,
UK attention has centred almost entirely on the apparent suicide of a
British toxic-weapons specialist from UNSCOMthoroughly colonized, under
Rolf Ekeus, by the CIA and MI6. The Hutton Inquiry, however revealing, has
also served to keep thoughts focused on local backstabbing, so accounts can
be settled without calling into question the continuing neo-imperialist
occupation of Mesopotamia and the British role there. Such matters are for
Washington to decide.
Disputes in Europe
Part of New Labours initial appeal to liberal sentiment rested on its
promise to take Britain into the heart of Europe, breaking with Tory
xenophobia and chauvinism to pursue a more positive engagement with the
Continent. This is the one element in its original set of promises that has
been largely discarded. To the satisfaction of Murdoch and large sections of
the City, the UK remains outside the Eurozone. No referendum on the single
currency is in sight. Schengen rules do not apply. Brown has been leading a
hard fight for free-market nostrums within the economic provisions of the
draft European constitution; the UKs anti-federal demands are already
inscribed in the decision-making process. The eastward sprawl of the eu,
strongly backed by Washington, had always promised the fatal disablement of
any unified assertion of European power. In dividing New Europe from Old
over Iraq, the US has now cracked that project across the skull, with London
s help. Under Blair and Browns watch, Britain has quarrelled more bitterly
with France and Germany than at any time since the Second World War.
But, as predicted in these pages, now that Iraq has for the moment been
battened down, London is hastening to mend fences with Paris and Berlin, and
they with the White House. [26] Chirac and Schroeder lose no chance to
proclaim how much their respective armed forces are contributing to nato
operations in the Balkans and Afghanistan. Blair has gone as far as he dare
in support of a convincing European Defence Force. The heart flutter that
saw him briefly hospitalized in October 2003 came immediately after
Washington had banged the table over the necessity of nato leadership for
any such corps.
The Blair cult and its acolytes
The nature and extent of Thatchers hegemony was hotly debated during the
1980s but it was always clear that a majority of the intelligentsiawriters,
academics, artistic circles, tv programmers at Channel 4 and bbc2were
intransigently hostile to her government. Though it had powerful support
from the Murdoch, Black and Mail media conglomerates, the Conservative
regime was always opposed by the Guardian, Observer and Mirror, and had only
qualified approval from the Financial Times. The Independent and London
Review of Books, both launched in the 1980s, were antagonistic. Yet there
was no automatic pole of political attraction for these liberal or mildly
social-democratic layers. [27] Independence, even if it meant isolation,
was a declaration of virtue.
Blair, in contrast, has enjoyed the backing of virtually the entire media
lobby. [28] The blessings of the Murdoch empiremuch courted by New Labour
with tv-franchise promisesand of the financial press are logical enough.
The Economist has explained with particular clarity why Blair is the best
Conservative prime minister they could wish for. The adulation he has
received from former anti-Thatcheriteswhile implementing a domestic
programme virtually identical to that which they abhorred under her regime,
and an overseas one far bloodieris a more arresting phenomenon. In a
crowded market, critical front-page headlines will always sell more papers.
But inside, a swathe of centre-left opinion makers have toiled to articulate
a Blairite common sense over the last seven yearsswinging, sometimes within
the same column, from high-church pomposity to louche understanding, in
their attempts to square the normal expectations of left-liberal conscience
with a policy agenda that systematically overrides them; in the process,
saturating the political semiosphere with a fog of apologia.
No postwar prime minister has ever been hailed with the eulogies that
greeted Blair after the May 1997 elections. His principles and objectives,
a mix of hard-headed idealism, deserve the trust the country has so
massively placed in him, Hugo Young told Guardian readers; Blair had the
most personal vision, pursued with the most single-minded courage, that any
modern leader has shown. Polly Toynbee in the Independent described a
citizenry bowled over by Blairs speeches on tv: men and women said they
d wept. They believe in his humility, his emotion, his radical passion. For
Euan Ferguson in the Observer, Blair had pulled off a stunning, apocalyptic
victory; he was the only man with the courage, foresight and determination
to bring an end to the most venal and mendacious government this century . .
. No cynical opportunist he, no lover of soundbites for their own sake. New
Britain? Fairness not favours? These are Blairs own words, his own beliefs.
[29]
The Blair cult, replete with talk about grown-up politics and Britain
being comfortable with itself, has been a novel departure for Londons
liberal intelligentsia, which traditionally prided itself on a certain
dryness and distance of tone. From the outset worries about corruption, for
which Majors ministers had been pilloried, were waved aside. Disquiet when
Formula One motor racing was exempted from a tobacco-advertising
banfollowing a #1 million donation to New Labour from the sports chairman,
Bernie Ecclestone, over which both Brown and Blair lied to the presswas
assuaged the instant Blair declared on tv that he was a pretty straight
sort of guy. Peter Mandelsons six-figure loan from the offshore account of
the man about to be appointed Paymaster General evinced from Hugo Young the
comment: If moral perfection is the standard, soon there will be no leaders
left. Francis Wheen found it difficult to see what uniquely vile offence
Mandelson committed in intervening at the Home Office to speed a British
passport for Srichand Hindujaon the run from criminal corruption charges
over the Bofors arms deal in India, but nevertheless donor of #3 million to
the Millennium Domes Faith Zone. Polly Toynbee was driven to demand Who
lives without often economizing with the truth? as Cherie Blair overrode
ministerial regulations on investment, used Downing Street notepaper to
secure a property deal and put pressure on the Home Office over the
deportation of her personal style-gurus lover. [30]
Spellbound
The fervour of the Blair cult intensified with the drumbeat of war. In
Kosovo, It was a British Christian whom Albanian Muslims thanked for their
salvation, Andrew Rawnsley sermonized for the Observer. While in
Afghanistan: The last few weeks have been an opportunity to display many of
his best qualities as a man and leader. Theres little question that he has
risen to the challenge quite magnificently. The Economistconcurred: He is
grave, not grandiloquent. He is often sincerely moved. This emotional
fluency is a wonderful gift in politics, especially at times of war. [31]
Blairs undeviating allegiance to Washington is justified, wrote Young, as
cluster bombs and daisy-cutters rained down on Afghan villages. For David
Marquand, his conduct was impeccable, showing that a British prime
minister with the right mixture of courage, grace and forensic skill could
play a significant, outward-looking internationalist geopolitical role.
Neither the extension of American military bases across Central Asia nor the
blithe disregard of the un raised a scruple in this instance. In joining the
assault on Kabul, the Guardian assured its readers, Blair did something big
and right. [32]
It was only with the approach of a full-scale Anglo-American invasion of
Iraq that Blairs liberal following began to baulk. Many rediscovered their
admiration for the sanctions-and-bombing regime of Operation Desert Fox as
the countdown to war began, and peace demonstrations filled the streets of
Europe and the US. Neverthelesseven as she lamented his alliance with the
unsuitable BushToynbee in the Guardian could declare Blairs presentation
of the confected dossier on wmd to the House of Commons, in September 2002,
a bravura performance, spellbinding in its quiet solemnity, reasoning the
arguments one by one. In general, the more unconvinced liberal commentators
pronounced themselves by Blairs case, the more adulatory they became. An
impassioned and impressive speech which may give future generations an
inkling of how, when so many of his own party opposed his policy, Tony Blair
nevertheless managed to retain their respect and support, was the Guardian
s editorial opinion on 19 March 2003; adding, on 14 April, In ways that
Bush never could, he provided a high-minded tone to the drive to war.
Critics of his Iraq policy in the London Review of Bookscould still find
Blair the most successful politician of his generation, unusually and
sincerely devoted to international law, the democratic statesman par
excellence, endowed with a very attractive bonhomie, who had done the
right thing in Yugoslavia, and showed real passion on Iraq, performing
well in a plausible, even ifin the final resortwrong-headed cause: au
fond a good thing. [33] Even the Independent, by far the most critical of
the broadsheets on Iraq, swung round on the eve of invasion: Blair has
shown himself in the past few days to be at once the most formidable
politician in the country and the right national leader for these deeply
uncertain times. On his death-bed, Hugo Young, after bitterly reproaching
the leader he loved for a mistake in Iraqit was time for him to make way
for Brownstill saw the sub-contractor of Basra swathed in mists of
greatness:
Tony Blair had such potential. He was a strong leader, a visionary in his
way, a figure surpassing all around him. His rhetorical power was
unsurpassed, as was the readiness of people to listen to him. He had their
trust. He brought credibility back to the political art. [34]
Prospects
Blair faces more than one mauvais quart dheure at present, but it would
take an extreme miscalculation on his partor more serious health
problemsfor him not to survive them. Though the Prime Ministers
supervision of the decisions that led to Kellys death is perfectly clear,
he was carefully shielded from cross-examination at the Hutton Inquiry by
the presiding magistratewhom he had himself selected. The Hutton Report,
due in January 2004, is unlikely to do Blair any terminal damage, though it
may prove an enjoyable moment for Browns camp. The British judiciary are
not known for rocking the political boat. Nor, in all probability, is Blair
seriously at risk from discontent among Labour mps over the governments
latest obeisance to the market, the introduction of differential fees for
university education. A party incapable of halting its leaders plunge to
war would be quixotic to dismiss him for making one campus costlier than
another. After swallowing so many larger toads, why should the backbenches
gag at this one? In any case, Blairs eventual departure need not spell the
end of New Labour. Brown, his obvious successor, is in some ways more deeply
educated in the American ideology than Blair and more avowedly Atlanticist.
If his hands are less steeped in blood it is only because they have been so
busy at the till. A further lease of power under his redecoration is
eminently possible. Responsibility for excesses at home and abroad can be
conveniently swept away by a pseudo regime change.
In uniting around Howard, the Conservatives have regained some of the animal
spirits necessary for a political party to operate, but they start from an
abysmally low electoral base. In addition, they face a tough struggle
against increasingly unequal electoral representation. The population drain
from Scotland and the North into southern England, and the suburbanization
of the countryside, have swollen the number of voters in safe Conservative
seats; at the same time, deindustrialization has emptied the old Labour
regions. Had they won the same share of the vote as Labour in 2001, the
distribution of the Conservative electorate would nevertheless have left
them with 140 seats fewer under the first-past-the-post system. To gain an
overall majority (of one) in Parliament, the Tories would have to be 11.5
per cent ahead in votes, whereas Labour could be 3.7 behind in votes and
still retain control of the House of Commons. Boundary changes are due, but
will continue to lag some years behind the demographic tide. [35] The cards
are still stacked massively against any quick Tory comeback.
North Atlantic comparisons
How, then, should New Labour be seen in comparative perspective? It is
obvious enough that neo-labourism is a variant of neoliberalism. But the
neoliberal revolution has taken two different political routes over the last
twenty years. The high road pursued by the pioneers involved all-out class
warfare against organized labour, exemplified (in chronological order) by
Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan. In the ussr and Eastern Europe, the collapse
of communism allowed a local version of this route, in which social
demoralization was such that there was little resistance to crush. By
contrast, the low road, taken by perhaps the majority of capitalist
democracies, was to institute marketization almost by stealth, keeping
clashes with labour as limited, sectoral and de-ideologized as possible, but
slowly consolidating a mass social layer with a vocal interest in extending
the rights of private property and reducing social protection mechanisms.
This has been the route adopted in most of Western Europe, in the larger
countries of Latin AmericaArgentina under Menem and Brazil under
Cardosoand in India, first under Congress and now the bjp.
Over time, combinations of the two have also emerged. France offers an
illustration: Juppi attempting the high road in the mid-1990s and being
defeated by stiff popular resistance; Jospin taking the low road, with an
inconspicuous but steadily advancing programme of privatization; Raffarin
then discovering that there now existed a larger social base that would
support pension and other changes, against trade-union opposition. Sequences
of this kind, increasingly common, indicate a general transformation of the
political landscape since the end of the Cold War. Over the last decade,
long-standing overlaps between the policies of conservative and liberal, or
Christian Democrat and Social Democrat partiesalways compatible with quite
sharp ideological and political distinctions between themhave tended to
fuse into a qualitatively more homogeneous programme. Traditional contrasts
have counted for less and less, and conjunctural opportunitiesor
constraintsweighed more in determining which of the pair could carry the
standard of neoliberalism further.
It is still the case, of course, that the two broad fronts maintain
differentiated cultural palettes, designed to appeal to distinctive core
constituencies as well as attracting unaffiliated layers. The balance of
forces between them will typically be determined by the point that the
society in question has reached along the neoliberal spectrum. Viewed in
this light, New Labour in Britain occupies a peculiar position that explains
much of its success. Across Northern EuropeScandinavia, Germany, Austria,
the Low Countriestrade-union movements have not been defeated in head-on
confrontations, and survive as major institutions, if increasingly passive
ones. In part as a result, much of the welfare-state provision developed in
these countries in the postwar decades has yet to be seriously dismantled.
Neither Social Democratic parties nor their Christian Democratic or liberal
rivals have been able to do more than trim around the edges, although the
direction of change is unmistakeable. Here the Dutch have made more headway
along the low road than any of their neighbours.
Germanywhere the SPD is spearheading a determined attack on the countrys
traditional social protections of the labour market and retirementsuggests
the region may be entering a new stage. But although employers have welcomed
Schroeders Agenda 2010and his warmer relations with labour leaders may
give him a short-term advantage in pushing changes throughcapital has no
particular preference for Social Democratic parties, either in Germany or
throughout Northwest Europe. Their trade-union bases remain distinctly less
reassuring than their parliamentary leaderships. Nor, despite the best
intentions of their elites, have these parties been transformed
ideologically into explicitly pro-capitalist formations, along Anglo-Saxon
lines. They cannot yet offer themselves as the most reliable instruments for
neoliberal progress. Centre Right alternatives, of which the current Danish
regime is the most effective example, often remain a better option. In
Germany itself, Christian Democracybilked of victory in 2002has the whip
hand in the opinion polls.
In the United States, an opposite situation prevails. There organized labour
is so weak, the black and other movements of the oppressed so co-opted or
destroyed, the poor so defenceless, that the ideological terrainshared by
both Democrats and Republicansis well to the right of the scene in Europe.
By international standards, the Clinton Administration did sterling service
in advancing the neoliberal cause, with an attack on welfare and
deregulation of financial markets that Old World governments of the right
could only envy; not to mention breakthrough innovations in neo-imperial
policing abroad. But in domestic terms, Clinton simply cleared the road to
Bushs compassionate conservatism. Once the Democratic Party and organized
labour had been still further purged of New Deal residues, there was no
reason for US capital to content itself with Third Ways. The result is a
Republican Administration committed to a programme for the corporations and
the rich unseen since the days of McKinley.
The British synthesis
Britain, on the other hand, had possessed a strong, if defensive trade-union
movement with a relatively cohesive working-class culture. In breaking its
resistance to the cutting edge of neoliberalism in the North Atlantic zone,
Thatcher made possible cuts in social spending, and transformations of
labour and financial markets, without parallel in Europe. But her increasing
hostility to the EU, the deepening divisions within Tory ranks under her
successor, and evidence of electoral restlessness after nearly two decades
of the same regime, gradually diminished the attractions of Conservative
rule for the City and British multinational capital at large.
In these conditions, once Blair had completed the institutional
transformation of the party begun by Kinnocksubordinating both
constituencies and trade unions to the leadershipand turned it around
ideologically, New Labour could become a superior option. It could credibly
guarantee fresh momentum, uncompromised by the scandals of Majors time, to
press ahead with the programme of deregulation and privatizationabove all
in health, where booming US profits show what fortunes can be reaped; [36]
but also in university education. At the same time, it could sell all this
to its working-class voters, and the popular electorate at large, as a more
socially inclusive and concerned system of rule, mitigating the harshness of
Thatcherism. Unlike the Conservatives, New Labour also promised the
domestication, not just the repression, of a trade-union movement that in
numerical terms was still relatively large. It was because Blair had secured
the politico-institutional foundation for this formula that he could forge a
deal with Murdoch before his election and New Labour seal a pact with big
business that has lasted ever since. A precondition of its dominance has
been the ground-breaking work of Thatcherism, which has also given itwhen
requireda convenient foil to keep its voters and members in line. This has
been reinforced by the damage the Thatcherite pioneers wreaked on the
Conservative Party itself.
Structurally, it is this mid-way location between the American and North
European patterns that has produced the characteristically hybrid culture of
Blairism. Macroscopically, the oecd countries do not seem to be moving
towards a political re-synchronization of the sort that characterized the
1980s and 90s. [37] The war on terror carries little conviction for the
masses outside the United States. There seems small chance that the current
range of variegated and competing ideologies in the Atlantic zone will
suddenly align themselves either behind a neo-conservative model or in a
reversion to the Centre Left. Could New Labour, howeverespecially if handed
one ghoulish extension of office after anotherpoint the way to a third
possibility: a new hegemonic formula that would be a symbiosis of the two?
In December 2002 Rowan Williams, Blairs new Archbishop of Canterbury, laid
out a highly political agenda. Unstoppable processes of globalization had
installed a new, essentially consumerist political model: the market state,
as described by Philip Bobbitt in his Shield of Achilles. [38] The
government is now asking to be judged on its delivery of purchasing power
and maximal choice, the Archbishop explained. But if the market state is
here to stay, what of its legitimacy? What happens to the things that really
matter, to social awareness, cumulative experience, growth and learning, in
a marketized society? The UK fuel protests of 2000 were evoked as a
warning: work, relationships, schools, family, public life can do little
within the context of a rootless social environment. Williams concluded:
Without the perspective of religion, our whole politics is likely to be in
deep trouble.
Here the neoliberal agenda is reiterated in a soft and caring voice:
troubled for our future, for our environment, for our long-term
incarcerated; sensitive to the cruelties of social deprivation, to the need
for a shared world of values; gay-loving (up to a point); beseeching US to
speak to God as we wend our way through the market. Williams also called for
the active involvement of organized religion in state-sponsored education
and social services. Reprinting the piece, in tandem with an interview with
Blair on the marketization of the public sector (twin texts for modern
times), the Guardian editorialized: Read the interview. Read the lecture.
Each . . . is a powerful witness. We should be impressed that we have a
premier and a prelate in touch with the real world in which we all must
live. [39]
The real world that the synthesis of neo-labourism must negotiate includes,
of course, the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq. Blairs solidarity with
Bush still occasions surprise among his admirers, yet it follows logically
from the New Labour formula. It was, after all, the Centre Left in the late
1990s that first forged what could properly be called neoliberal militarism,
famously breaking with every previous diplomatic convention to establish the
Wests right to attack whatever country offended it, on humanitarian grounds
of its own choosinga frontal challenge to the basic precepts of the postwar
order never attempted by Reagan or Bush Senior.
Todays Republican Administration has widened the pretexts for preemptive
aggression, and wrapped them post 9.11 within a much more belligerent
nationalism. But current US policy in the Middle East, with its talk of
spreading democratization and womens rights, smells just as much of the
Third Way as of the Project for the New American Century. The Bush and Blair
regimes are by no means identical. But their alliance is naturalnot just
because of Londons traditions of external fealty to Washington, but because
of the internal positions of each within the neoliberal spectrum today. For
the same reason, New Labour can never really cold-shoulder the eu as its
predecessors did. Its intermediate location between American and European
patterns ensures, in a rather different sense from Blairs fond notion, that
it will continue to be a bridge between them.
Upshot
What political conclusions follow from this scene? A large section of left
opinion in Britain, if now repudiating Blair, still clings to the idea that,
whatever its record, New Labour remains a lesser evil which must, in the
last resort, be defended at the polls. There are two standard arguments for
doing so, each with its own constituency. In intellectual circleswhere
residual infatuation with Blair has persisted, much as it did with Kennedy
in the US, long after the mask of the hero had slippeda cultural
identification is at work. There is a sense that somehow, despite the
evidence, New Labour represents a better, more liberal vision of England
than that of the New Conservatism. Think of all the ways in which the
Tories made Britain seem mean-spirited, aggressively materialistic,
philistine, corrupt and xenophobic, a contributor to the LRB exhorted its
readers. [40] Seem is the key term. Under New Labour, single-parent
benefits can be cut, school buildings sold to private companies, cabinet
seats handed out in exchange for home loans, millions taken for passports or
advertising franchises, asylum seekers locked in country-of-origin detention
campsbut, to this sensibility, it all feels much better. Any remaining
doubts can be suppressed by invoking the ghost of Thatcher.
The alternative defence appeals to class rather than culture and is more
popular with Labour and trade-union activists. Here the belief is that the
soul of True Labour lies slumbering deep within New Labours brittle
carapace. The lived reality of Blairs policies is pushing public-sector
workers and others at the sharp edge of the neoliberal assault to rediscover
their class interests and move to more militant positions. Grass-roots
pressure will force trade-union leaders to stand up to the government,
demanding more labour-friendly policies, or that workers needs be listened
to, at least. The left should not abandon the party that trade-unionists
still claim. Activists should stick with New Labour and offer criticism from
within, while putting their shoulders to the electoral wheel.
But the New Labour party machine was definitively insulated against the left
by Kinnock, two decades ago. Its democratic capture is unimaginable today.
Furthermore, there is scant evidence of a new radical trade unionism on the
march in Britain. Although labour markets are tight, days lost in industrial
action remain at record lows. After twenty years of neoliberalism, the
British working class itself has been transformedabove all, through the
deindustrialization of its heartlands. Its capacities for collective action
have visibly waned. Disciplined stands against New Labour have been
increasingly minoritarian and defensive; if hard-fought, as with the
firemen. Other sectors have become more atomized, financializedas home
owners and future pensionersand relatively better off. Their potential for
concerted social action has yet to be revealed.
With very few exceptionsBob Crow, the railway workers leader, is oneunion
bosses have rallied to Downing Streets side every time it mattered. [41]
The Transport and General Workers played a crucial role in disarming the
potent but short-lived fuel protests of 2000the closest thing there has
been to a mass domestic movement against New Labour; though those involved
overlapped to a large extent with the embittered ranks of the Countryside
Alliance, which unites a service-starved rural populace with devotees of
fox-hunting. For their part, the Fire Brigades Union called off a strongly
supported strike in order to free up the troops standing in as black-legs,
so they could be despatched for the conquest of Iraq. At the Labour Party
Conference in September 2003, the bosses of the four big trade
unionsSimpson (Amicus), Woodley (t&g), Prentis (Unison) and Curran
(gmb)instead of mobilizing their members for an electoral college to send
Blair packing for his warmongering role, banded together to keep Iraq off
the agenda. As for constituency delegates, the Prime Ministers address
received a three-minute standing ovation from them. The shrinking party
membership continues its rightward march. According to opinion polls taken
before the invasion, two-thirds of Labour Party constituency chairs
supported the war on Iraqwell above the level of national backing for it.
There is no reason for any greater sentimentality towards Labourism than
Blair himself has shown. The Economists judgement that he is the best
right-wing prime minister Britain could have is perfectly accurate. For the
left, the logic should be clear: any other would be preferable. It is an
anachronism to think that the performance of rival parties competing within
the field of neoliberal politics can be distinguished, once in office, by
their ideological pedigrees or electoral bases. The policies they adopt
correspond to the balance of forces within that societytypically, the
legacy of antecedent regimesand of the world outside it. Just as Clinton
was far to the right domestically of Nixon, so Blair has been of Heath; let
alone Eden or Macmillan. Today, the UKs main opposition parties, Liberal
Democrats and Conservatives, are attacking the government from the left on
student fees and pensions, attracting the disapproval of the financial
press.
Judged against its immediate predecessors, an objective audit can only
conclude that New Labour has scattered a few crumbs to the poor, while
otherwise consolidating and extending Thatchers programme; externally, it
has a far more bloodstained record. The civilians killed in Blairs
successive aggressions abroadIraq, Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan,
Iraqoutnumber Thatchers tally by tens of thousands. Such domestic
pittances as the regime has distributed count for little beside the
destruction of international legality and loss of foreign lives that have
been its hallmark. Like any government, Britains can only be judged on its
record and on a rational assessment of its future trajectory. The sooner New
Labour exits the better.
--------
[1] Even in 1997, a scant 30.9 per cent of the total electorate voted New
Labour. The 13.5 million ballots that made up Blairs first landslide
compare poorly to the 14 million with which Major scraped back in 1992. See
David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 2001,
London 2002.
[2] Social realities hard to square with Ferdinand Mounts claim that the
electorate was too happy to vote: Times Literary Supplement, 15 June 2001.
[3] The only exception was the DagenhamBarking area of South Essex, which
saw a 5.9 swing to the Conservatives.
[4] Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle, The Blair Revolution, London 1996, pp.
823, 29, 210, 240, 164175; Britains role in bringing labour flexibility,
deregulation and downward tax competition to Europe is enthusiastically
reiterated in Gordon Brown, Economics vs Dogma, Wall Street Journal, 28
May 2003.
[5] John Kampfner, Blairs Wars, London 2003, pp. 5, 21.
[6] Andrew Gamble, Theories and Explanations of British Decline in Richard
English and Michael Kenny, eds, Rethinking British Decline, Basingstoke
2000. Such prognoses are not new. Around 1987, at the height of the Lawson
boom, the pages of the financial press and even learned journals rhapsodized
on the UK renaissance.
[7] Stephen Nickell, The Assessment: The Economic Record of the Labour
Government since 1997, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol. 18, no. 2,
2002 (henceforward oxrep, 2002); Mary OMahoney, Productivity and
Convergence in the eu, National Institute Economic Review, 180, April 2002.
[8] Tom Clark et al, Taxes and Transfers 19972001, oxrep, 2002, p. 198.
[9] The minimum wage is set at #4.20 per hour (August 2003) and inapplicable
to under-21s. Claims that over 1 million workers have benefited from its
introduction are overstated; rather, would be in a position to benefit if
they were able to take their employer to a tribunal. See National Minimum
Wage: Report of the Low Pay Commission, April 2003, pp. 14, 223.
[10] Statistics of Education: Class Sizes and Pupil Teacher Ratios, Dept for
Education and Skills, February 2003, pp. 12, 18. Literacy levels measured by
percentage of the population on the bottom two, of five, gradations of
reading and writing ability.
[11] Julian Le Grand, The Labour Government and the National Health Service
, oxrep, 2002; Audit Commission, Acute Hospital Portfolio, London 2001, p.
141. For a powerful critique of New Labours ppp and pfi programmes for the
nhs and beyond, see Colin Leys, Market-Driven Politics, London 2001, pp.
177202; Alysson Pollock et al, Public Services and the Private Sector,
Catalyst Working Paper, 2001.
[12] Guardian, 3 May 2003.
[13] Though the most striking victory over sectarianism was achieved,
according to one participant, on 15 February 2003, when tens of thousands
from both communities marched shoulder to shoulder, while banners proclaimed
ulster says noto war.
[14] See Tom Nairn, Pariah, London 2002, passim.
[15] Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People, p. 33. It was considered a
novelty worthy of front-page reports and approving editorials when, in May
2003, after six years of New Labour government, the Cabinet was summoned for
its first discussion on whether Britain should join the euro.
[16] Reinforced in June 2001 by a contingent brought in from the late-Cold
War British Embassy in Moscow, including David Manningstrongly backed by
Michael Levy, Blairs fundraiser and special envoy to the Middle Eastas de
facto national security adviser and opposite number to Condoleezza Rice;
Francis Richards at gchq; John Scarlett as head of the Joint Intelligence
Committee.
[17] From the diary of Blairs Director of Communications, Alastair
Campbell, as presented to the Inquiry. See www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk for
a bulging cache of Downing Street documents discussing how best to present
vague or unsubstantiated intelligence on Iraqi wmd as a case for war. The
Hutton Report on the events that led to the death of the former unscom
inspector, David Kelly, who spoke too openly about Number Tens manipulation
of the 45-minutes claim, is due to be published in January 2004.
[18] For an excellent account see John Upton, Feasting on Power, London
Review of Books, 10 July 2003. New Labour has also surpassed the
Conservatives in its support for reactionary local Hindu and Muslim currents
on education issues. The blend of multicultural piety and neo-imperial
ruthlessness was memorably encapsulated by a Blair aide in December 1998:
We were going to have real difficulties squeezing in enough bombing time
before Ramadan. Kampfner, Blairs Wars,p. 31.
[19] Touchstone Issues: memoranda from tb of December 1999 and April
2000, The Times, 16 and 27 July 2000. The shallowness of the Blair persona
was sharply exposed in the panic that erupted in July 2003 when, his key
advisorsin this instance, Alastair Campbell, Sally Morgan and Jonathan
Powellhaving judged him capable of managing a business-promotion tour of
the Far East on his own, the Prime Minister was stranded without his
entourage as news of Kellys death came through.
[20] Alex Danchev, Oliver Franks, Founding Father, Oxford 1993, p. 126.
[21] Changing Our Ways: Americas Role in the New World, Carnegie
Foundation, 1992.
[22] Hansard, 24 May 2000; New York Times, 13 August 1999; see also Tariq
Ali, Throttling Iraq, nlr 5, SeptemberOctober 2000.
[23] Doctrine of the International Community, speech to the Economic Club,
Chicago, 23 April 1999.
[24] Seymour Hersh, Prospect, June 2003.
[25] Hansard, 24 September 2002.
[26] See Tariq Ali, Recolonizing Iraq, nlr 21, MayJune 2003, p. 17.
[27] If anything, the majority were closest in outlook to the pro-Europe,
anti-union sdp, which split from the right of Labour in the early 1980s and
ended up in alliance with the Liberal Democrats.
[28] In the 2001 election this included the whole Murdoch stable: The Times,
Sun and their Sunday editions; the Economist and Financial Times (which had
switched, somewhat gingerly, as early as 1992); Independent, Guardian,
Express and Mirror. The Daily Mail stayed silent. Only the Telegraph
supported the Conservatives.
[29] Young, Guardian, 2 May 1997; Toynbee, Independent, 3 May 1997;
Ferguson, Observer, 4 May 1997. The ft confined itself to an editorial purr
over the rise of UK gilts and equities with the election results.
[30] Respectively: On the Record, bbc 1, 16 November 1997; Guardian, 29
December 1998; Guardian, 30 and 31 January 2001.
[31] Rawnsley, Servants of the People, p. 291; Rawnsley, Observer, 7 October
2001; Economist, 20 September 2001.
[32] Marquand, The Liberal Nation, Prospect, March 2002. Guardian, 30
October 2001; the Daily Telegraph hailed Blairs finest hour.
[33] Respectively, Conor Gearty, Blairs Folly, 20 February 2003; Ross
McKibbin, Why Did He Risk It?, 3 April 2003; John Lanchester,
Unbelievable Blair, 10 July 2003. For a tougher approach see Short Cuts
by the papers consulting editor, John Sturrock: 19 June 2003.
[34] Guardian, 16 September 2003. A striking exception to all the above was
Andreas Whittam Smith in the Independent: Iraq is Tony Blairs war. He
should now do the honourable thing and resign: 29 September 2003.
[35] Butler and Kavanagh, British General Election 2001, p. 332. The
Conservatives also face a political identity problem. The suggestion floated
before Howards assumption of the leadership, that Clarke might lead a group
of pro-Europe, anti-Iraq War Conservative mps into the Liberal Democrats,
would have created a formation clearly to the left of New Labour, though
still within the ambit of neoliberal politics.
[36] See Robert Brenner, New Boom or New Bubble?, nlr 25, JanuaryFebruary
2004.
[37] See the editorial, Testing Formula Two, nlr 8, MarchApril 2001.
[38] For an account of the book see Gopal Balakrishnan, Algorithms of War,
nlr 23, SeptemberOctober 2003.
[39] Rowan Williams, Dimbleby Lecture 2002 and Guardian, 20 December 2002.
Bobbitt responded in a letter to the Guardian the next day: If only the
great papers in my country had editorials of half such depth and clarity. At
a time when the media enjoy greater influence and thus must bear greater
responsibilities, it is really heartening to read such an essay. I am glad
you are proud of your prime minister and see clearly precisely what struggle
he is fightinglargely a struggle for intellectual and moral understanding.
I am glad you are proud of your new archbishop and that you dismiss the
caricature by which he is sometimes portrayed. At a time of deep confusion
and enormous temptation to pander or dismiss, you are trying to see things
as they are and describe them unflinchingly. I fear this will not make you
very popular, at least in the short run (say, a quarter of a century). Some
of your readers will feel betrayed. But you will also have your fans,
including, Philip Bobbitt.
[40] Lanchester, Unbelievable Blair.
[41] In other instances, fine speechesby Bill Hayes of the Communication
Workers Union, for examplefailed to mobilize a divided workforce against
privatization of the Post Office.
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New Left Review 25, January-February 2004
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http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25901.shtml
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