BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
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back from many confrontations with the government. But once the hereditaries had largely gone, those peers that remained saw themselves as more
39 Philip Cowley and Sarah Childs, ‘Too Spineless to Rebel? New Labour’s Women MPs’,
British Journal of Political Science, 33, 2003: 345–65.
40 There were also other much less glamorous but important changes to the internal proceedings of the Lords, including a compulsory register of interests and the introduction of
a Lords Speaker.
legitimate and became more assertive than before. If the government
hoped it had created a poodle of an upper chamber, then it was very much
mistaken.
The full consequences of reform became increasingly clear during the
second Blair term. The 2001–5 parliament saw the government defeated
on 245 separate occasions, more than double the number of defeats in the
first Blair term (108). The first session of the 2005 parliament brought
another sixty-two defeats, with more than thirty in the second session.
The comparison with the preceding Conservative governments was particularly stark. The (mean) average number of Lords defeats per session
during the extended period of Conservative government between 1979
and 1997 was just over thirteen. The (mean) average for the 2001 parliament was just over sixty-one. In other words, the Lords were defeating the
Labour government of 2001–5 more than four times as often as they
defeated the Thatcher and Major governments.
These defeats ranged across almost every major piece of government
legislation, and as the Blair era went on, and the partly-reformed Lords
became more confident, so they became more intransigent and less
willing to give way, with the result that the sight of a Bill pinging back
and forth between Commons and Lords became commonplace at the end
of a parliamentary session.41 This was most obvious during the passage
of the Prevention of Terrorism Bill, just before the 2005 election, when
the Lords resisted several clauses in the Bill, and it shuttled back and forth
between the Lords and the Commons for almost twenty-nine hours
before a compromise was worked out between the two Houses.42 This,
however, was merely the most high-profile of a number of stand-offs
throughout the parliament, such as over foundation hospitals, jury
trials and the Pensions Bill. As research from the Constitution Unit at
University College London showed, these defeats were not just on minor
matters, nor were they all simply overturned. In around 40% of defeats,
the Lords had a significant impact on the final policy outcome.43
Of the two Houses of parliament, therefore, it was the Lords that was
more of a block on the government throughout the Blair era. Government
41 Richard Whitaker, ‘Ping-Pong and Policy Influence: Relations Between the Lords and
Commons, 2005–06’, Parliamentary Affairs, 59, 2006: 536–45.
42 Meg Russell and Maria Sciara, ‘Parliament: The House of Lords – A More Representative
and Assertive Chamber?’, in Rush and Giddings, Palgrave Review of British Politics 2005,
pp. 128 –30.
43 See, for example, Meg Russell and Maria Sciara, ‘The Policy Impact of Defeats in the
House of Lords’, paper presented to the Political Studies Association Conference,
University of Bath, April 2007.
ministers preparing legislation for its passage through parliament knew
that they faced a more serious test in the Lords than they did in the
Commons, and ministers routinely resisted giving too many compromises
whilst a Bill was passing through the Commons in order to be able to offer
placatory gestures to their Lordships.
The extra problems which the government faced in the Lords were
sometimes ascribed to the greater sagacity of peers, their great wisdom,
and their increased independence of thought. In fact, the parliamentary
parties in the Lords are no less cohesive than those in the Commons.44
The difference – and it is a crucial one – is that after the reform of 1999 no
one party held a majority in the Lords. Despite Labour increasing its
membership in the Lords throughout the Blair years (its supposed
‘packing’ of the Lords with ‘cronies’) the government remained permanently in a minority position, with fewer than one-third of the votes of
peers. It was sometimes erroneously reported as being the majority party;
it was, in fact, merely the plurality party. In order to win votes in such a
‘hung’ chamber, the government needed to persuade at least one of the
other party groupings to support them. Indeed, in an irony not lost on
members of the upper chamber, after the 2005 election, the composition
of the Lords better reflected the pattern of votes cast than did the
Commons.45 The process of Lords reform since 1999 thus created a more
representative second chamber, one which was permanently hung, and
one which was willing to stand up to, and regularly defeat, the government of the day.
The real significance of this will become clear when the Conservatives
next enjoy a majority in the Commons; it too will face this permanently hung, and increasingly assertive, second chamber. No future
Conservative government will inherit the overwhelmingly Conservative
upper chamber of the past. Shortly after the 2005 election, the Liberal
Democrats announced that they would no longer be abiding by the
Salisbury Convention, the convention dating back to 1947 which guaranteed that the Lords would not block legislation promised in a government’s election manifesto. The Liberal Democrats argued that when the
Lords better represented the electorate than did the Commons, there was
no longer any justification for the Commons automatically getting its
way; Lord McNally, the Liberal Democrat leader in the Lords described
44 See for example, Philip Norton, ‘Cohesion Without Discipline: Party Voting in the House
of Lords’, Journal of Legislative Studies, 9, 2003: 57–72.
45 Russell and Sciara, ‘Parliament: The House of Lords’, pp. 125–7.
the ‘continual plea to the Salisbury convention’ as ‘the last refuge of legislative scoundrels’. Given that the Liberal Democrats frequently act as
the swing voters in the Lords, determining government victory or defeat,
this means that any government will face even more difficulties getting its
legislation through the Lords in future.
There is still a legitimate debate about the extent to which the Lords
should be elected, and whether (as a result) the Lords should be yet more
powerful. That debate should not obscure the fact that the Lords in recent
years has become increasingly powerful and assertive, not less.
Conclusion
One of the most misunderstood parts of the Blair premiership was its
effect on parliament. Whilst many of the criticisms made of the Blair government’s actions and intentions are valid, critics often misunderstand
their effect on parliament. Rather than simply being a period of increased
marginalisation, in several areas the Blair era saw at least a partial revitalisation of the institution.
Almost non
e of this was intentional on the part of Blair or his immediate circle. Blair can take credit for his decision to appear before the
Liaison Committee, but his involvement in most other areas of parliamentary reform was marginal at best. The government’s record in terms
of reform of the House of Commons was extremely patchy – and, for the
most part, compared poorly with Labour’s stated intentions before 1997.
Although there was a significant amount of parliamentary reform
between 1997 and 2007, too little of it helped strengthen the House of
Commons. It was not that the Blair government invented the executive’s
dominance of the legislature – and certainly too much of the criticism of
parliament under New Labour harked back to a golden age that had never
existed – but not enough of the reform helped limit or reverse that dominance. Some of it – most notably the over-use of programming motions –
almost certainly had a deleterious effect on parliamentary scrutiny of
legislation. The positive reforms – such as the changes to both select and
standing committees – were reliant on reform-minded Leaders of the
House driving them through, often against resistance from others within
government.
Other positives from the Blair era were merely fortuitous accidents.
The House of Lords Act 1999, for example, was not intended to result
in the far more assertive body that it created – but it did. Similarly, it
was not the wish of the government that its backbenchers, routinely
dismissed as weak and feeble when they were first elected to government,
should became increasingly rebellious during the second Blair term
and after – but they did, with real consequences for the government’s
programme.
The verdict on parliament under Blair may be more positive than most
people realise, but Tony Blair himself gets very little of the credit.
3
Elections and public opinion
Tony Blair is guaranteed a favourable place in the history books so far as
his electoral record is concerned. He was the first Labour leader to lead his
party to three electoral victories in a row. On the first occasion, in 1997,
he secured an overall majority of 179, the biggest Labour majority ever. If
the twentieth century had been predominantly a Conservative one, Blair
apparently gave his party a head start in making the twenty-first century a
period of Labour dominance.
This success was achieved following a transformation of the party that
was instigated by Blair in the early years of his leadership. Ideologically,
the party moved to the right, symbolised by the abolition in 1995 of
Clause 4 of its constitution, which committed the party to ‘the common
ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. The
party rejected the ‘socialist’ position that the state should own and run
the country’s major industries and instead embraced the market. As well
as being repositioned ideologically, the party was ‘rebranded’ as ‘New
Labour’, a description that was designed to symbolise the degree to which
it had cast off its ideological past.1
For many of Blair’s followers the two events are not unconnected.
Labour’s unprecedented success in 1997 and thereafter only came about,
they believe, because the repositioning and rebranding of the party
enabled it to reach parts of the electorate amongst whom hitherto it had
been relatively weak. Equally, as Blair’s tenure in office gradually came to
an end in 2006–7, ‘Blairites’ argued that it would be electorally disastrous
if the party were to abandon the programme of ‘reform’ undertaken
during Blair’s tenure. In short, Blairites believe that Labour would never
have won power but for its reformulation as ‘New Labour’, and that it is
bound to lose power should the New Labour ‘project’ ever be abandoned.
11 P. Gould, The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party,
(London: Little, Brown, 1998).
This chapter examines these claims. First, we consider Labour’s electoral record under Tony Blair’s leadership. How well does the argument
that Blair’s New Labour project turned his party’s fortunes around stand
up to scrutiny? And how impressive in fact is Blair’s electoral record?
Second, we ask how far people’s perceptions of the Labour Party changed
under Blair’s leadership and assess whether the rebranding of the party
did help to change the kind of person who was willing to vote for it.
Third, we examine what impact the repositioning of the Labour Party
had on public opinion. While Blair’s principal aim might have been to
ensure that his party stood on the centre ground of public opinion,
perhaps in practice it simply changed where the centre ground was
located – and in a manner that may not be to the party’s advantage in
future.
The electoral record
In 1983 the Labour Party hit rock bottom. It won just 28% of the vote, its
lowest share since 1918. This disaster occurred in the wake of a distinct
movement to the left in reaction to an unhappy period in office that
ended in defeat in 1979. But the road back to recovery proved to be a slow
and rocky one. In 1987 the party only achieved a modest increase in its
support to just over 31%. Then, in 1992, high hopes that the party would
at least deny the Conservatives an overall majority were dashed when the
opinion polls proved to be erroneous. Instead Labour still trailed the
Conservatives by as many as eight percentage points. It is perhaps little
wonder that after this fourth crushing defeat in a row many people in the
party felt that it was in need of root-and-branch reform.
Yet the party had not stood still since 1983. Although once regarded as
being on the left of the party, on becoming leader following the 1983
debacle, Neil Kinnock steered it back towards the centre, and especially so
after the 1987 defeat. Two totemic policies of the left, unilateral nuclear
disarmament and withdrawal from the European Union, were jettisoned
as part of a systematic review of party policy in the late 1980s. By 1990 the
party appeared competitive once more. Nevertheless it had fought the
1992 election on a platform of higher taxation for the better-off, a platform that enabled the Conservatives to claim that taxes in general would
go up under Labour and one that rightly or wrongly many in the party
blamed for its unexpected defeat in that election.
Meanwhile, after the 1992 election events did not stand still either.
In 1990 the then Chancellor, John Major, finally persuaded his deeply
reluctant Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, that the pound should join
the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). Under this mechanism
the values of the member currencies only varied within relatively narrow
bands, a move made in anticipation of the creation of a single European
months after its election victory, the Conservative government, now
headed by Prime Minister Major, proved unable to defend this value on
the foreign exchange markets, despite at one stage raising interest rates to
as high as 15%. It was compelled to withdraw the pound from the ERM.
In effect the government was forced by a ‘currency crisis’ to ‘devalue’ the
pound.
This was a novel experience for a Conservative government. But it had
been an all too familiar one for Labour administrations. Every previous
post-war Labour government had suffered a similar ‘currency crisis’ –
and had lost popularity immediately thereafter. ‘Black Wednesday’ had
an equally corrosive impact on the reputation of the Conservative Party
as an effective manager of the economy. By Christmas 1992 Labour
already enjoyed a double-digit lead in the polls. Neil Kinnock’s successor as Labour leader, John Smith, whose taxation policy (as Shadow
Chancellor) it was that had been targeted by the Conservatives in the
1992 election earlier, appeared to calculate that his party did not need
further radical reform. All that it needed to do was to ensure that it profited from the Conservatives’ misfortunes.
And profit it did. In May 1994, the month that John Smith suddenly
died, the party was no fewer than twenty-three points ahead of the
Conservatives in the opinion polls. In the local elections that month the
party put in its best performance since 1979. Meanwhile in the European
elections in June, the party secured 44% of the vote, its best performance
yet in a European election and putting it as many as sixteen points ahead
of the Conservatives. There was no doubt that the party’s position was
now far stronger than it had been during the mid-term of any of the previous three parliaments.
In short, although Labour may still have been bearing the psychological scars of electoral defeat, by the time Blair became leader in July 2004
the party was already enjoying considerable electoral success. Not only
was Labour enjoying unprecedented opinion poll leads, it was also securing victories at the ballot box. Tony Blair’s task was to maintain the
favourable legacy he had inherited. He did not need to create his own