BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
Page 40
The hegemony of collectivist values that underpinned successful social
democracy in Nordic Europe was never to be achieved in Britain. Blair
and his New Labour project recognised that to win and retain political
power the Labour Party needed to capture southern England, the world
of the comfortable and respectable suburbs, the new industries and
the aspirational consumers of an increasingly affluent post-industrial
society. New Labour’s purpose was to ensure its association with those
realities where capital had to be accommodated and collective labour
made subordinate to the project’s grand narrative. In his 2007
Manchester lecture Blair spelt out with clarity and conviction what his
labour market and employment relations strategy had always been concerned to do – make the country’s workers and its employers fit for
purpose in an increasingly fragile and unpredictable world of globalisation, full of opportunities but also dangers. Blair turned out to be
Britain’s first postmodernist Prime Minister, as his attitude to capital and
labour was to illustrate. It should have come as no surprise that the results
were less than clear-cut, ambivalent and often disappointing. The onward
march of the Labour movement had long gone into disorderly retreat and
even rout. The institutions that its Labour socialist ideology had inspired
all but disappeared after the 1970s. Britain was returning to the values
that in part reflected an acquisitive worker individualism, which had
17 For a brilliant exposition of this theme see David Kynaston, Austerity Britain (London:
Bloomsbury, 2007).
emerged and been shaped in a much earlier period of its history. Blair
liked to pride himself on being young and modern. In truth, he came to
reflect in politics a British past that had once existed before the onset of
twentieth-century collectivism and whose underlying individualistic
attitudes of mind had not really gone away.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Geoff Norris from the Number 10 Policy Unit; John
Cridland from the Confederation of British Industry; John Monks,
general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation; Brendan
Barber, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress; David Coats
from the Work Foundation; and Alastair Hatchett of Incomes Data
Services for their help in writing this chapter. The outcome is entirely my
own responsibility.
12
Transport
Transport was not one of Tony Blair’s successes. This is illustrated by the
Brief he issued in May 2007 to the Parliamentary Labour Party, plainly
intended to trumpet achievements in over his ten years. There are twentytwo pages in standard format and ‘Transport’ is shorter than all the others
save ‘Arts’ and ‘Africa’.
The biggest single failure of transport policy was nicely summed up by
Blair himself on 1 March 2007. He had invited Richard Hammond of
TV’s Top Gear fame into No. 10 to give an interview about road pricing
which was published verbatim and as a podcast on the official website1
with the populist heading ‘ “Hamster” tackles PM on road pricing’.
During the course of this he said:
I can see a huge problem looming up ahead . . . the amazing thing is that
there are 6 million more cars on the road since we came to office, almost 7
million actually from 26 million to 33 million I think it was, someone was
telling me, and over the next 20 years there are going to be I don’t know
how many millions more.
Although this problem was obvious to many commentators ten years
earlier, Blair did not see it then. He showed little interest in transport
and delegated the topic to John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister and
then Secretary of State for the Department for Environment and
Transport. On 6 June 1997 The Guardian reported that Prescott had
said in a public speech, ‘I will have failed if in five years’ time there are
not . . . far fewer journeys by car. It’s a tall order but I urge you to hold
me to it.’2 A ‘tall order’ indeed, and one to which Blair and his government proved unwilling, or unable, to devote sufficient analysis or
resources.
11 www.number10.gov.uk/output/page11123.asp.
12 Although there were subsequent claims that Prescott had not said this, he confirmed the
essence of the remark in a House of Commons debate, 20 October 1998.
After the radical reforms by privatisation and deregulation of most of
the transport industry under the Tory regimes the ideology had seemed
straightforward to many supporters: to ‘integrate’, to replace new road
building with rejuvenated public transport and to re-establish the role of
the public sector.
But Blair initially underestimated the complexities. He delegated
transport to people who did not deliver. As a result, until 2000 transport
policy as implemented amounted to a continuation of Tory policies.
Throughout his premiership, in so far as there was any positive control, it
remained with the Chancellor and the Treasury who continued to determine crucial tax rates, rigidly constrained funds for transport operating
and capital purposes, fixed the rules for local authority borrowing, promoted private provision and private finance, laid down criteria for value
for money and fought for what they saw as essential national transport
policy.
Blair was drawn into transport when things went badly wrong: the fuel
price protests in 2000, the unresolved dispute over London Underground
PPP during the 2001 general election, the collapse of Railtrack in 2001,
the resignation of Stephen Byers in 2002, when one of his own ‘e-petitions’ on road pricing embarrassed the government, and when his wife
was caught in a traffic jam. As he came to the end of his final term it was
unclear who was in control of transport policy.
The importance of transport to the electorate
It took the whole of the first Blair parliament for Labour to respond to the
fact that the transport interests of the electorate had been transformed
over the previous three decades. Car ownership is now common. This has
been the result of increasing real incomes, demographic changes and the
generally falling real costs of motoring, and these trends will continue.
Meanwhile public transport has become much less relevant, with the
exception of some special markets such as the commute into London.
Nationally, the car now accounts for 85% of all passenger kilometres
(excluding walking).3 Half the population uses a train less than once a
year,4 bus and rail each account for 6% (much less outside the London
area). Rail now carries 8% of freight tonne-kilometres.
13 Department for Transport, Transport Statistics Great Britain, 2006 edn (London: TSO,
2007).
14 Strategic Rail Authority, Everyone’s Railway: The Wider Case for Rail (London: Strategic
Rail Authority, 2003).
In spite of the attention the national press gives to public transport,
opinion surveys consistently show it to be surprisingly unimportant to
voters. A MORI/ Evening Standard poll ahead of the 2005 general election5 found that healthcare (67%) and education (61%) were the leading
issues in helping respondents decide which party to vote for, while public
transport (26% nationally and 40% in London) was tenth. But a YouGov
poll in 2007 reported that 43% thought that traffic congestion was
serious on the roads near where they lived.6 In material appearing under
his own name Blair was aware of the importance of catering for
motorists. But in 1997 there was little evidence to suggest that he suspected how awkward transport could become.
The 1998 Transport White Paper
In 1997 Blair delegated the day-to-day business of transport, environment, land use planning and local government to his deputy, John
Prescott, and created an ‘integrated’, sprawling and ultimately unmanageable department for him: the Department of the Environment, Transport
and the Regions (DETR). Prescott proceeded to issue a consultation paper
in the summer of 1997 and, a year later, a major Transport White Paper.7
Prescott’s sentiment, illustrated in his foreword, caused concern in No. 10
in case it could be perceived as being ‘anti-car’:
we needed to improve public transport and reduce dependence on the
car . . . Better public transport will encourage more people to use it . . .
The priority will be maintaining existing roads rather than building new
ones and better management of the road network to improve reliability . . .
persuading people to use their cars a little less – and public transport a little
more.
The 1998 Transport White Paper was a large and glossy document but it
was generally considered to have failed to resolve many issues – it was
memorably dubbed ‘Carry on Consulting’. It was hopelessly unrealistic
in its aspirations to substitute bus and rail for the car. It presaged a major
review of the national roads programme, as a result of which many
schemes were withdrawn. The unintended but inevitable consequence
was that road congestion would get steadily worse. The White Paper did
15 Joe Murphy, ‘Voters Care Most about Health’, Evening Standard, 14 April 2005.
16 Daily Telegraph, 26 February 2007.
17 Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, A New Deal for Transport:
Better for Everyone, Cm. 3950 (London: TSO, 1998).
have the virtue of having a consistent approach on environmental policy,
the core of which was the commitment to continue a 6% per annum
increase in the duty on road fuels above inflation (a policy inherited, at
5% per annum, from the Conservative government). This was enough to
slow traffic growth – though not enough to reverse it. However, the ‘fuel
duty escalator’ contained the seeds of the first transport policy catastrophe for the Blair government. This only became apparent after the July
2000 publication of Prescott’s Ten-Year Transport Plan.
The 2000 Ten-Year Transport Plan
The Ten-Year Transport Plan8 was an important attempt to recognise
the long horizons involved, and Prescott was able to make the remarkable claim that he had a ten-year agreement with the Treasury on the
funding for the plan. Its main features were an increase in resources for
local authority transport purposes and a major shift of emphasis towards
both public and hoped-for private investment in railways. There was a
modest increase in budgets for investment in strategic roads which
returned the levels to what they had been in the mid-1990s, before the
Conservatives had cut spending, thus already marking a policy reversal
on roads.
More rigorous analysis was attempted in support of the Ten-Year Plan9
than predecessor documents with the result that the reality of the need to
cater for inevitable traffic growth was recognised explicitly. This may have
been due to the influence of Lord (Gus) Macdonald who had been
appointed by Blair as Transport Minister with responsibility for delivering the plan.
The plan was a good concept and a good document, with proper supporting analysis. It had flaws, such as an imbalance of investment in
favour of railways and against buses and roads, an unrealistic view of the
capacity of the railway to carry enormously increased traffic – especially
whilst it was being rebuilt – and its provision for new road capacity was
still inadequate. However, these things could have been adjusted if, as had
been intended, the plan had been revised every year or so as it was rolled
forward.
18 Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, Transport 2010 (London:
TSO, July 2000).
19 Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, Transport 2010. The
Background Analysis (London: TSO, 2000). Not surprisingly, given the novelty of the exercise, the results were mixed.
The fuel price crisis
But almost immediately things went seriously wrong. Civil protest broke
out in the autumn of 2000: a rise in the world oil price, a lead given by
lorry drivers in France, and the fuel duty escalator combined to cause the
public to rebel. Lorry drivers obstructed access to fuel supply depots. The
country suddenly came to a frightening halt. There was talk of food
stocks running out within days. Fuel for buses, trains and lorries (essential to food supply) had already become scarce. There could not have been
a clearer demonstration that outside London the country now depends
on roads, not railways. This was a major national crisis demanding the
immediate attention of the Prime Minister.
As Seldon observes, ‘Taking control of events at home, such as during
the fuel crisis in 2000 and the foot and mouth crisis in 2001, confirmed
Blair’s belief that he alone, assisted by his close team in Number 10, could
solve any problem.’10 One part of the solution was that the Chancellor
was persuaded to abandon the fuel duty escalator. Amazingly, the
Chancellor claimed on national radio that this change in policy would
have no effect on long-term traffic growth – contrary to all the objective
evidence. At a stroke this change destroyed such coherence as transport
and environment policy had had.
The fuel price crisis further alerted the Prime Minister to the electoral
consequences of neglecting the vast majority of transport users. Blair’s
‘Foreword’ in the 2001 election manifesto makes no mention of environment or transport. But in the main document transport comes before
health and education, under The Productivity Challenge:
Labour’s priority is to improve and expand railway and road travel. Our
ten-year Transport Plan – offers real hope to motorists and passengers
alike . . . Supertrams will transform transport in our big cities, with 25 new
light rail or tram schemes . . . Motorways will be upgraded: a hundred new
bypasses will reduce accidents and pollution. But environmentally damaging road schemes have been scrapped.
So there was a new balance, including p
rospects for further new road
capacity. ‘Integrated transport’, an eternal cliché which was pervasive in
the 1998 policy was demoted in this manifesto to the insipid ‘Good transport systems offer choices across transport modes. Transport Direct – a
phone and Internet system designed to plan journeys and sell tickets –
will put transport services at people’s finger tips.’
10 Anthony Seldon, Blair, 2nd edn (London: The Free Press, 2005), p. 694.
Blair’s experience with the fuel price protests was to have important
ramifications for his handling of road pricing in his last few months.
The withdrawal of Prescott from transport policy
and the death of the Ten-Year Plan
Seldon noted that ‘Number 10 became concerned about Prescott’s
agenda, and was especially worried about the perception that it was anticar, with damaging electoral consequences . . . Blair . . . worried Prescott
was becoming an “unguided missile” in his huge department.’11 The
change in tone between the 1998 Transport White Paper – Prescott’s document – and the Ten-Year Plan signalled a more active interest from No.
10 and the end of Prescott’s reign in transport policy.
Transport officials had recognised that the plan would need to be
revised and set up a continuing programme of work. Apart from faults in
the plan itself , ‘events’ quickly made revision urgent. These included the
fall-out from the fuel price crisis, from the collapse of Railtrack (see
below) and a steep increase in the cost of the railways.
Much work was done by officials, and the publication of revisions
to the plan was eagerly anticipated. But no revision was ever published.
The plan withered after 2001 with the appointment of Stephen Byers as
Secretary of State for Transport, one of several ‘favoured (and nonBrownite) ministers – perhaps the most conspicuously unsatisfactory
of all [Blair’s] favoured ministers: his antipathy to his civil servants and
his obsession with style over substance epitomised New Labour at its
worst’.12 This was well illustrated by Byers’ attitude to the Ten-Year
Plan. It is said that when, on his arrival, the civil service offered him a
briefing on the plan he declined, dismissing it as a creation of a previous
government.
So a major attempt to create a long-term transport policy and to secure