by Blair, Tony
There was another question that dogged my thoughts in those days – still relatively halcyon – in the summer of 1998, one to which I returned over time with increasing anxiety and impatience. It was about the quality of our social analysis. I could see that society was fracturing into elements that defied traditional centre-left theory. There was a middle class, to be sure. It was growing. It encompassed the solicitors and the bank managers and middle executives. It also drew in the higher-end skilled workers, the technicians, the new computer analysts, the creative industry middle-rankers.
But to talk of a ‘working class’ just seemed odd, correct but somehow uncomprehending. The term encompassed those on the minimum wage, the casual or temporary workers, the lower-paid nurse even, the shop floor. But it was also used to describe those at the bottom of the heap, the ‘non-working class’ if you like – in a phrase we coined for government, the ‘socially excluded’.
In time I began to realise you couldn’t and shouldn’t lump these two categories together. The right-wing phrase ‘the underclass’ was ugly, but it was accurate. These people at the bottom didn’t have dysfunctional working lives. They had dysfunctional lives, full stop. Their children were disruptive at school, if they attended at all. Their parents were often separated or abusive or just plain inadequate.
The consequence of this was felt also in crime and antisocial behaviour. As I said earlier, I had come to prominence around the time of the James Bulger murder in 1993, when I drew the easy but ultimately flawed conclusion that our society had broken down; but of course it hadn’t as a whole, only in part. I was to come to the right conclusion only at the very end of my premiership: instead of focusing general social policy on this class of people, they need specific, targeted action. In the summer of 1998 I could see the symptoms of such breakdown very clearly: in the schools, on the streets, in the statistics for law and order.
That wasn’t all. We had come to power with a fairly traditional but complacent view of immigration and asylum. Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, was greatly influenced by his own heavily Muslim constituency of Blackburn, where these issues were live and real. On the other hand, Jack was sensible and no softie on lawbreakers. We were unprepared for the explosion in asylum claims through 1998 and 1999. Within our first three years, the number of claims trebled, quadrupled even. I’d thought we had a pretty tight framework, but we sent a few placatory signals and this, together with a growing economy and the English language, set off an influx of claimants. Added to that, worldwide immigration flows were increasing. We weren’t the only ones with a problem, but we were virtually the only ones with a set of statistics that were even roughly accurate and so were quickly dubbed the asylum capital of Europe. Suddenly from a manageable 30,000 claims per year for asylum, we were looking at 100,000. Moreover, the backlog of claims was scary and getting scarier. The system was utterly incapable of processing the claims.
Essentially, Britain, like all European countries, had inherited the post-war, post-Holocaust system and sentiment on asylum. The painful stories of refugees fleeing from Hitler and the Nazis and being turned away produced a right and proper revulsion. The presumption was that someone who claimed asylum was persecuted and should be taken in, not cast out. It was an entirely understandable emotion in the aftermath of such horror.
Unfortunately it was completely unrealistic in the late twentieth century. The presumption was plainly false; most asylum claims were not genuine. Disproving them, however, was almost impossible. The combination of the courts, with their liberal instinct; the European Convention on Human Rights, with its absolutist attitude to the prospect of returning someone to an unsafe community; and the UN Convention of Refugees, with its context firmly that of 1930s Germany, meant that, in practice, once someone got into Britain and claimed asylum, it was the Devil’s own job to return them.
And, of course, many thought it was indeed the work of the Devil to try. The first attempt at tightening the law in 1998 produced a hysterical reaction and compromises had to be found to steer it through.
But the reality was that the system for asylum was broken, incapable, adrift in a sea of storms, and required far tougher action. The Civil Service machine charged with putting it right wasn’t greatly inclined to the radical action the system needed.
Here, too, there was a gap, which was between what we thought the Civil Service problem would be, and what it turned out to be. In Labour mythology, the Civil Service is made up of closet Tories, snakes in the governing grass, lying in wait for the naive Labour minister whose radical policy is strangled before it can perform. In this fantasy – and it is fantasy – they are the Establishment’s ideologues and the Establishment is the Tory Party, the true party of government, the fuddy-duddy repository of the old Britain of colonies, aristos and fox hunters. In this scenario, the senior mandarins are forever poised to strike down the progressive action a Labour government wants to take and propel forward the heinous plots of the right wing.
God, if only. The reality was not they were poised to strike, sabotage or act. The problem with them, as I indicated at the beginning, was inertia. They tended to surrender, whether to vested interests, to the status quo or to the safest way to manage things – which all meant: to do nothing.
Wholly contrary to the myth, they were not the least in thrall to the right-wing Establishment. They were every bit as much in thrall to the left-wing Establishment. Or, more accurately, to a time and a way and an order that had passed, a product of the last hundred years of history.
The Sir Humphrey character in the TV series Yes, Prime Minister was a parody and a fiction, but he was the closest parody could get to fact. Sir Humphrey wasn’t left or right; he just believed in managing, in keeping things upright, in the status quo, not so much because of the status but more because of the quo; a quo he knew and could understand and one that to move from was a risk. And risk must at all costs be avoided.
This Civil Service had and has great strengths. It was and is impartial. It is, properly directed, a formidable machine. At times of crisis, superb. Its people are intelligent, hard-working and dedicated to public service. It was simply, like so much else, out of date. Faced with big challenges, it thought small thoughts. It reckoned in increments when the systems required leaps and bounds.
They didn’t think New Labour too left wing – on the contrary, they thought us sometimes too right wing – but crucially they thought we were iconoclastic and recklessly so, when they were the keepers of the high places, the temples of inherited wisdom.
They also, along with the judiciary, bought the idea that New Labour’s and my preoccupation with antisocial behaviour, family breakdown, asylum, etc., was a preoccupation born of our driving desire for the right levels of populism to get and retain power. They didn’t see it as born of a genuine wish to improve lives in a world in which the old ways of doing so wouldn’t work.
So in 1998, I began with Sir Richard Wilson, the new Cabinet Secretary, the first stages of Civil Service reform. And to be fair, he got behind them thoroughly. But – and this is a criticism of me, not him or the Civil Service – they were like many of the other reforms: talking the right language but shying away from the really radical measures.
And this was what was making me uneasy. I started to worry that confronting the party with the need to change was the easy part; confronting these non-political interests and public opinion was the hard part – but also the necessary one.
I was learning rapidly, and what I learned was fascinating but also daunting. The problems were deep, and systemic. During the winter break in 1998, in between dealing with various crises, I got out the 1997 manifesto and reread its promises on public services and crime. I laughed at their modesty. The challenge wasn’t meeting them. The challenge was: so what? An increase in the numbers treated on waiting lists of 100,000 – not even a reduction overall in the list, just in numbers treated. Infant class sizes to be under thirty – not in all class sizes, just five-, six- and sev
en-year-olds. Halving the time it took juvenile offenders to come to court – not all offenders, just youngsters, and that reduction from historic highs. New Labour, New Britain? It was ridiculous.
But to go deeper, to start changing systems was a whole different order of political as well as practical task. Adjust a system and people hardly notice. Change it and out of every channel come the interests the system maintains.
As I write now, looking back, I sense in the speeches and meetings an anxiety that something was missing, some dimension barely glimpsed, let alone understood, but important, crucial even. Now, of course, I know what was wrong. But then I was seeing as through a cloud.
This was reflected in the conference speech for 1998. A couple of weeks before, we had had a Cabinet away day at Chequers. We had the usual presentation from Philip Gould about polling and the Tory Party’s complete incapacity. Worries on delivery were coming through. I remember telling them about a person who wrote to me back in May 1998 beginning the letter of complaint: ‘Now you’ve been in power for some years . . .’ The impatience was starting. The point was I shared it.
As Philip intoned about the Tories, I looked around the room. We were in the Great Parlour upstairs, a kind of huge drawing room with seventeenth-century Dutch wood panelling and a fine large mahogany dining table, though the room was never used for dining. Above the main chair where the prime minister sat was the same picture of Walpole that hangs in the same spot in the Cabinet Room in Downing Street. Walpole was the first and longest-serving prime minister (just under twenty-one years); he held office at the whim of the Crown, was often detested, but also very effective. The hint of a smile in his portrait always reminded me a little of John Smith. Benevolent, except when crossed; in which case, dangerous.
I thought of the history of the room. I thought of Chamberlain, who loved to tend the Chequers rose garden personally and whose private diaries are still on the shelves. Chamberlain: denounced by history. A comparison to Chamberlain is one of the worst British political insults. Yet what did he do? In a world still suffering from the trauma of the Great War, a war in which millions died including many of his close family and friends, he had grieved; and in his grief pledged to prevent another such war. Not a bad ambition; in fact, a noble one.
One day, meandering through the bookcases, I had picked up his diaries and begun to read the account of his famous meeting with Hitler prior to Munich, at the house in Berchtesgaden high up in the Bavarian mountains. Chamberlain described how, after greeting him, Hitler took him up to the top of the chalet. There was a room, bare except for three plain wooden chairs, one for each of them and the interpreter. He recounts how Hitler alternated between reason – complaining of the Versailles Treaty and its injustice – and angry ranting, almost screaming about the Czechs, the Poles, the Jews, the enemies of Germany. Chamberlain came away convinced that he had met a madman, someone who had real capacity to do evil. This is what intrigued me. We are taught that Chamberlain was a dupe; a fool, taken in by Hitler’s charm. He wasn’t. He was entirely alive to his badness.
I tried to imagine being him, thinking like him. He knows this man is wicked; but he cannot know how far it might extend. Provoked, think of the damage he will do. So, instead of provoking him, contain him. Germany will come to its senses, time will move on and, with luck, so will Herr Hitler.
Seen in this way, Munich was not the product of a leader gulled, but of a leader looking for a tactic to postpone, to push back in time, in hope of circumstances changing. Above all, it was the product of a leader with a paramount and overwhelming desire to avoid the blood, mourning and misery of war.
Probably after Munich, the relief was too great, and hubristically, he allowed it to be a moment that seemed strategic not tactical. But easy to do. As Chamberlain wound his way back from the airport after signing the Munich Agreement – the fateful paper brandished and (little did he realise) his place in history with it – crowds lined the street to welcome him as a hero. That night in Downing Street, in the era long before the security gates arrived and people could still go up and down as they pleased, the crowds thronged outside the window of Number 10, shouting his name, cheering him, until he was forced in the early hours of the morning to go out and speak to them in order that they disperse.
Chamberlain was a good man, driven by good motives. So what was the error? The mistake was in not recognising the fundamental question. And here is the difficulty of leadership: first you have to be able to identify that fundamental question. That sounds daft – surely it is obvious; but analyse the situation for a moment and it isn’t.
You might think the question was: can Hitler be contained? That’s what Chamberlain thought. And, on balance, he thought he could. And rationally, Chamberlain should have been right. Hitler had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. He was supreme in Germany. Why not be satisfied? How crazy to step over the line and make war inevitable.
But that wasn’t the fundamental question. The fundamental question was: does fascism represent a force that is so strong and rooted that it has to be uprooted and destroyed? Put like that, the confrontation was indeed inevitable. The only consequential question was when and how.
In other words, Chamberlain took a narrow and segmented view – Hitler was a leader, Germany a country, 1938 a moment in time: could he be contained?
Actually, Hitler was the product as well as the author of an ideology that gripped several countries, of which Germany was one. By 1938, fascism was culminating in a force that was not going to act according to Chamberlain’s canons of reason, but according to the emotions of the ideology. He misunderstood the question and so answered wrongly.
But, my God, how easy to do. By contrast, Churchill spotted the right question and answered it correctly. Churchill: loathed in many quarters, distrusted so much that the King didn’t want him in Baldwin’s government; accused of errors in the Dardanelles in the First World War and in the gold standard policy of the 1920s; very nearly not appointed prime minister in 1940 and only becoming so when Halifax refused.
There he had sat at the same table in Chequers, occasionally delivering his broadcasts. He loved Chequers. He sacked the cook for not making the soup properly; turned the Long Gallery into a cinema; often stayed in bed until midday as he barked instructions to his secretaries; began dinner around 10 p.m., all washed down with vast amounts of champagne and brandy, and finished work at 2 a.m. Loved his holidays!
So there I was at the away day, gazing at my colleagues round this famous memory-soaked table, a repository of so many words and meetings, and thinking not of war – not then – but of how the unease I felt was related to wondering if I was asking the right fundamental question. I knew the party had to continue to be led strongly and planted firmly in the centre. When I spoke, I focused not on polling or the Tories but almost entirely on the overriding need to modernise, and in particular how we couldn’t just be advocating more money in public services.
The unease was this: maybe the real problem wasn’t the party’s failure to embrace modernisation; or, at least, not only that. Maybe it was that the country didn’t really buy it. What if instead of taking on the party, I had to take on the public, my allies, the strong trunk holding up my branch? It was not a thought designed for repose.
We were riding high, the country, though impatient, was still essentially supportive; the Tories were nowhere, we were politically supreme. Why risk that? So, yes, we should drive through reform, but not to a depth or at a pace that overwhelmed people, that disorientated or destabilised them. Truth be told, we were also still learning. In March 1998, we had published a Welfare Reform Green Paper, had started tax credits, begun the Sure Start programme for children, introduced the minimum wage, the literacy and numeracy strategy, and the education action zones for the inner city. There was NHS Direct coming in and the first antisocial behaviour legislation. There was activity and there was impact.
But in each case, again I felt it was unsatisfactory. We now had som
e decent policy reform nuggets going beyond the very limited commitments we had made in the 1997 manifesto, but that is what they were – nuggets, no more. Literacy and numeracy hours were a step forward for primary schools, but what about failing comprehensives, particularly in the cities, which were the real Achilles heel of the state school system? And failing local education authorities? And the teaching profession? Tax credits, and the various measures in the Welfare Reform Green Paper – including new ‘stakeholder’ pensions above the existing state pension that would be offered at a low cost to employees by their employers, and new welfare-to-work incentives, new ‘employment zones’ to target extra help on the unemployed and a unified Employment Service and Benefits Agency – these were all very well; but what about the 1.7 million and rising on incapacity benefit, signed off work for life with precious little incentive even to start looking for employment? We talked of the dramatic reduction in the numbers unemployed, but this masked the huge rise in numbers on incapacity benefit that had taken place under the Tories and was continuing under us, and the Green Paper proposed only tinkering changes in this crucial area.
Similarly, NHS Direct was a concept for the future, and specific strategies for tackling cancer and other chronic conditions, alongside extra doctors and nurses, were making a difference in the health service, but they were partial responses to the chronic endemic problems of rising waiting lists, long waiting times, outdated working practices and nugatory patient choice within the NHS. So serious was the NHS situation that the annual nightmare of ‘winter pressures’ had us holding our breath and hoping that the NHS would not collapse entirely in the first winters after 1997. And the criminal justice system seemed impervious to any reform beyond the further entrenching of rights for offenders and ever more bureaucratic processes encumbering the police and the courts.