by Blair, Tony
However, even with this, I took a kind of perverse pleasure in just ploughing on, doing what I thought was sensible and catering very little for the waves of public opinion that ebbed and flowed unless I thought they had a permanent case that should be listened to.
In February 2007, we had the avian flu scare. This was potentially serious. The H5N1 virus was confirmed on a turkey farm in Holton in Suffolk. There were constant meetings and preparations in case it should turn into a fully-fledged crisis. As with the flu pandemic, you had to steer an ever-so-careful line between overreacting and underreacting. There is always a torrid deluge of bureaucracy for those caught up in an overreaction.
We agreed to the renewal of the independent nuclear deterrent. You might think I would have been certain of that decision, but I hesitated over it. I could see clearly the force of the common sense and practical argument against Trident, yet in the final analysis I thought giving it up too big a downgrading of our status as a nation, and in an uncertain world, too big a risk for our defence. I did not think this was a ‘tough on defence’ versus ‘weak or pacifist’ issue at all. On simple, pragmatic grounds, there was a case either way. The expense is huge, and the utility in a post-Cold War world is less in terms of deterrence, and non-existent in terms of military use. Spend the money on more helicopters, airlift and anti-terror equipment? Not a daft notion. In the situations in which British forces would likely be called upon to fight, it was pretty clear what mattered most. It is true that it is frankly inconceivable we would use our nuclear deterrent alone, without the US – and let us hope a situation in which the US is even threatening use never arises – but it’s a big step to put that beyond your capability as a country.
So, after some genuine consideration and reconsideration, I opted to renew it. But the contrary decision would not have been stupid. I had a perfectly good and sensible discussion about it with Gordon, who was similarly torn. In the end, we both agreed, as I said to him: imagine standing up in the House of Commons and saying I’ve decided to scrap it. We’re not going to say that, are we? In this instance, caution, costly as it was, won the day.
We had agreed the forward policy process shortly after conference at Cabinet in late October. Rather grandiosely it was called ‘Pathways to the Future’. The purpose was to use the remaining nine months to give a sense of unity, to meld together the Blair and Brown teams, and to allow Gordon’s assumption of leadership to be defined as continuity as well as change, and above all as New Labour.
Naturally, I suppose, he always thought it was designed to constrain and corral him; but by putting Pat McFadden, my person, and Ed Miliband, his, to handle it in tandem right at the outset, I sought to reassure him. The truth was I still hoped it might be possible to convince him. I understood that at least some of the opposition to the reform programme had been for political reasons; but once in office, once he actually had to deal with the issues, I thought it might be different, that he might see I wasn’t pushing the programme for effect but because experience as well as intuition had persuaded me that there were no better solutions to the challenges the country faced. As opposed to 2004, we now had clear empirical evidence that the reforms worked: the longest period of economic growth for over two hundred years, with over 2.5 million more in work; in health, no one waiting over six months for treatment; in schools, standards up across the board and spending on education per pupil doubled; and in criminal justice, crime down by 35 per cent.
Also, there was now no longer a competition between us: he had won, he would take over. The only thing that mattered, and it should matter to both of us, was that he succeeded and the New Labour project was established in an enduring way, so that the party never went back to its old routine of short bursts of power and long periods of Opposition; so that Britain escaped the curse of twentieth-century politics; and so that progressive thinking should claim equal if not superior purchase on popular opinion as conservative thinking.
I knew, with every fibre of political instinct, that only through holding to the New Labour course, and with passionate not tactical engagement, could we hope to succeed. As I said earlier, I believed that if he deviated, he would be lost.
But I’m afraid he couldn’t see it. He played along with the policy part of ‘Pathways to the Future’ and intermittently he switched on, yet I knew that behind the scenes his folk – with the exception of Ed Miliband – were denigrating it as a vanity project and treating it with scorn. The problem was I also knew that they didn’t have an alternative. Frequently I would say to him and to them: OK, I understand you don’t agree with my analysis; give me yours. What I got was, on the one hand, a confusion of attempts to avoid the hard choices and questions which lay, like it or not, at the heart of the policy issues; and on the other, a resistance to disclosing their thoughts. They ended up convincing themselves that the reason for this was that they should unfurl their radical ideas at the moment of the takeover. As I began to say to him, that’s fine as a concept so long as you know what it is you wish to unfurl, but why not at least discuss it with me and test the propositions out?
As for the party reforms, again with much justification, he wanted to keep those to himself. I had, for my part, two goals. The first was simply to put the party funding business to bed. I thought it possible to reach an agreement with the Tories that would allow us to make sensible reforms. The former senior civil servant Sir Hayden Phillips had been appointed to chair a committee on the subject in 2006, and had approached it in a typically pragmatic and intelligent way. His 2007 report proposed caps on personal donations and campaign spends, together with an increase in the amount and reach of state funding. I thought it was a good compromise package.
Jack Straw was the minister in charge of it. We took the discussions quite a long way but I couldn’t really get Gordon to agree a compromise. I think he thought he could get a better deal when he was prime minister, but he lost the opportunity to limit Tory spending and I had a hunch that for election number four, and without Michael Levy’s and my participation, we were going to raise a lot less money. This was ultimately a housekeeping issue, but one with clear implications for fighting the election.
The second party issue was for me far more fundamental. For some time I had believed Labour faced a choice in its conduct of politics, in the way the party worked, interacted with the public and campaigned. Essentially, I had come to the view that the traditional method of politics was out of date, i.e. parties with defined members, activists, general committees, executive committees and all the infrastructure of twentieth-century political campaigns. There are some obvious truths about mainstream political parties in Britain and elsewhere that are worth analysing. We have fewer members than grass-roots, single-issue NGOs like those for protection of birds, aid, conservation and environmental groups. The ways in which we communicate with the public who support us would be regarded by the average supermarket chain as antediluvian. Our use of new technology is lamentable – the Obama campaign was an obvious breakthrough, but actually even in the Kerry campaign in 2004, the Democrats were streets ahead of most progressive parties in Europe. The Bush campaign, the infrastructure of which I used to discuss with George and which was devised by his key politicos like Karl Rove, broke new ground in reaching out to sympathisers.
All successful modern campaigns, including the Sarkozy campaign in France in 2007, utilised modern methods and – this to me being the crucial point – blurred the distinction between the inner core – the activists – and the broader public support.
I used to say to my people: after ten years in government, we are now at our lowest point politically. We’ve lost a certain amount of support – it’s inevitable. Some of those who rushed to us in enthusiasm in the run-up to May 1997 have fallen away. But think of 2005: a really tough campaign, a huge onslaught on us, yet many New Labour voters stuck with us and in some seats we increased our majority. What this means is that out there, yes there are those who hate us, but we also have our adhe
rents. What’s more, this latter group have not come to us in a rush of enthusiasm, quickly swelling but just as quickly subsiding; they are believers. They’re not unaware of all the problems and mistakes, but they have taken a decision to stick with us nonetheless.
Let’s say some voters, perhaps many, backed us because they didn’t want the Tories. Fair enough. But even supposing only one in ten are true believers (and it’s probably more like four or five in ten), that’s over a million people. Now that’s a political base.
We can identify them. Some of these people are the new stakeholders in New Labour. They may be from entirely new categories of people who, due to our policies, are in jobs – sports coordinators, teaching assistants, small business and professional people in the new industries who buy into the vision of a new economy – people who are pro-Europe, those who support the interventionist foreign policy (and there are a few . . .), people involved in local community campaigns on antisocial behaviour, and so on.
In other words, along with the detractors, I could see a potentially enormous body of supporters, people not there on the bandwagon but with us due to a belief in a modern and different type of progressive politics. These were the people we needed inside our tent, not for their sake but for ours. Long-term, the health of party policymaking, the selection of good candidates, pressures for change coming from below – all depend on the quality, the sentiment, the instinct and the attitude of those involved in the party. In Opposition, even more so. Restrict ourselves to the old-fashioned or the union base and you’ve got one sort of party; open it up and let it breathe the fresh air provided by real believers and you have a different sort of party, one capable of governing for long periods of time, one with a coalition of support that would sustain a government, one that would prevent any recrudescence of the errors that had given us eighteen years of Tory rule and only nineteen years of Labour government up to 1997 in the whole of our history (for five of which we had to survive in a rickety alliance with the Liberals).
In a way, such a party had always been what I was groping towards all those years ago when I expanded the membership of my constituency party and when we made the reforms to the way candidates and leader were selected. New technology and new forms of campaigning now gave us tools to do it. My vision was to discard the conventional notions of party membership and structure, to treat supporters as members for key decisions and to use the new technology not merely to build out into new support but also to interact with supporters and to campaign in a different manner.
It was clear to me that, today, people in the party would not be supporters for the same reason, or have the same interests or be as passionate about the same subjects. Someone might support us because of aid to Africa, another because of health service changes and another because of antisocial behaviour policies. Young people would have different interests from old people. The fact they lived in the same geographical area was important come the election or in very specific local campaigns, but otherwise geography meant little.
We had a huge opportunity to rebuild the party along modern lines. Also, some change was surely inevitable. Unions were merging. In particular, the amalgamation of the TGWU with Amicus in May 2007 created a new behemoth called Unite. On present going, they would have half the votes at party conference along with Unison, the public service union. The union structures remained deeply in the past. They were still activist-dominated. There was no way it would be healthy for the party to become dependent on them again. So for a multitude of reasons – some external, some internal, but all to do with the consequences of a changing world – reform was not just sensible, it was essential if we were to preserve the enormous gains the New Labour project had delivered.
I could see where the current party debate was heading. Both Jon Cruddas and Douglas Alexander had written pamphlets. Jon made quite a name for himself. It was clever political positioning. To his overall political analysis – New Labour had deserted the working class and thus our base – he had added a programme for the party. It was clothed in some modernist language, but was ultimately an attempt to build a left coalition out of Guardian intellectuals and trade union activists. However beguiling – and he was smart enough to make it beguiling – it was, in effect, reheated and updated Bennism from the 1980s. It was not without its public appeal, by the way, but had no serious prospect of reaching the aspiring middle ground once the policy implications were exposed.
Douglas was and is a very clever guy indeed. I had tried to wean him off membership of Gordon’s inner circle; but to no avail. It was a real shame. He and his sister Wendy, who is a lovely and also very smart person with great integrity, were a classic product of a decent Scottish Presbyterian background. Their father was a vicar and himself very accomplished. Douglas came to Gordon’s attention before Douglas was an MP and had been rightly snapped up. He had a great way with words, a really first-class intellect and could have been (and maybe still can be) an outstanding leader.
But the Gordon curse was to make these people co-conspirators, not free-range thinkers. He and Ed Balls and others were like I had been back in the 1980s, until slowly the scales fell from my eyes and I realised it was more like a cult than a kirk.
Douglas had written this pamphlet that had a brilliant analysis of what was wrong, but the solutions all seemed to me to avoid the hard questions and lapse into woolliness.
I put Hazel Blears, as party chair, in charge of a commission for renewal of the party. I knew Hazel was a strong supporter of mine. She was a great campaigner, an activist with an understanding of the limits of activism. However, though she struggled with great application, the truth is Gordon was strongly opposed to the outgoing leadership deciding the future of the incoming one. This was all totally understandable except for the fact, as I kept saying to him, there was no alternative vision; and in the absence of a clear vision, the party organisation will just go backwards.
All those years ago we thought we had precisely the same perspectives on politics, party and life, whereas in fact we had somewhat different perspectives, shared at points but not an indivisible confluence. There was sufficient cohesion to allow us both to indulge; and by the time we realised it was an indulgence, it had become part of the party’s unique selling point and it was too damaging to ditch it. But myth it was.
The policy process fared better and, in the end, produced some not bad conclusions and analysis. On security, crime and justice, ‘Pathways to the Future’ outlined the progress in tackling crime and its causes, but highlighted the rapid changes affecting society which impact on crime, security and cohesion. The paper argued that the continued reform needed was based on three main elements: more effective prevention; better detection and enforcement; and reform of the criminal justice system by applying the principles of public service reform.
The paper also set out the challenges that Britain faces in a rapidly globalised world, and how Britain’s interests can be best served working together with shared progressive values and in a world where governments work peacefully within international law. It set out how Britain still has influence and power, but now has to use both hard and soft power. Be prepared to intervene where necessary – using military action where appropriate – but also take global action on issues such as poverty and climate change; recognise that Britain’s foreign policy is driven by values – justice and democracy – in a world which is increasingly interdependent. Ensure that everyone has access to an equal standard of life and has certain shared global values, and recognise that climate change is increasingly important and tackling it will only be successful by working on a wider global level.
On families, the paper recognised the important role they have to play in society, whatever their structure. The government also recognised that the success of families is not about their make-up but about the commitment of those who live within them, and that the government still has a role to play in ensuring all families are treated fairly and have access to the same choices others
do. The vision that was set out was to: support families to exercise their rights to manage their own affairs while living up to the responsibilities they have; enable a work–family balance, by helping people move from welfare to work, improving childcare and supporting family commitments; and address the hardest to reach families, by tackling the causes and consequences of deep-seated social exclusion.
On the role of the state, the paper introduced the idea of the strategic and enabling state, as a response to the continuing evolution of global and domestic trends. The paper set out the six key features of this state: a strong focus on outcomes; tackling insecurity; empowering citizens; rights and responsibilities; building trust; and a smaller strategic centre.
Finally, the paper drew together the twin challenges of energy security and climate change, outlining a comprehensive policy framework for achieving our goals, including: promoting competitive energy markets; working towards a robust post-2012 international framework; putting a price on carbon that reflects its damage costs; driving the transition to new technologies through standards, incentives and support; removing the barriers to change in behaviours, choice and investment; and ensuring that the UK and others are able to adapt to the impacts of climate change.
Indeed, had we simply taken all these elements and pushed them forward, I think they would have evolved to a pretty strong future agenda, in policy and in legislation.
I also decided to make a series of speeches called ‘Our Nation’s Future’, trying to summarise the philosophy behind the New Labour project, what we had done well, what we hadn’t and the underlying rationale for it all. There had always been this notion that it was all a bit of clever marketing and I wanted to set it out as a piece of political thinking. I have to say that, unsurprisingly really, the media were disinclined to report them much, except the one on defence. Their problem was not simply that I was leaving; it was unclear whether my departure was solely a change of personnel, or whether it was also a change of policy. So a series of policy speeches was of insufficient interest unless pitched against someone or something. Of course, you might think it was their job to discover this, but the GB crew had hit on a brilliant device for not exposing any flanks, which was to say that it would plainly be wrong and disrespectful to set out their views while I was still prime minister. To my amusement, this was generally bought hook, line and sinker.