Blairism, or Labour modernity, stands for, or believes in, or hopes to get elected on, the following: a dynamic market economy with a greater wealth-creating base; a strong and cohesive society that protects the individual from the vagaries and cruelties of the market; improved education, higher skills, better training; a rethought welfare system, aimed at ending long-term dependency and getting people back to work; pro-Europeanism; a Bill of Rights, a Freedom of Information Act, and an elected second chamber; a Welsh Assembly and a Scottish Parliament.
Blairism also believes in keeping the trade unions at a distance. To Party modernizers, the folk memory of union barons turning up at No. 10 to discuss economic policy over beer and sandwiches is an embarrassment. Blair was Shadow Employment Secretary under Neil Kinnock, from 1989 to 1992. There, according to his fellow modernizer and fellow Durhamite MP Giles Radice, “he made the unions face up to a modernized system of individual rights for workers on the Continental model rather than collectivist rights. He also persuaded the trade unions that it was coercive and no longer appropriate to support the closed shop.” On top of this, Blair was a key supporter of a new system of electing the Labour leader by the individual votes of MPs, Party members, and unionists, thereby cutting out the traditional union bloc vote. For Anthony Howard, “the union bosses had their industrial strength destroyed by Mrs. Thatcher and their political strength destroyed by John Smith and Tony Blair.” Now Blair says things like “It is not the function of a Labour Government to come in and do particular favors for the trade union movement.” This may sound reasonable, even right, but it is historically heretical. Imagine a Tory leader promising that when his Government came in there would be no special favors for those who contribute to Conservative Party funds; for employers, businessmen, and the City; for big landowners, rich people, and posh people.
Blairism also accepts that the long postwar battle about public versus private ownership of industries and utilities is over—and lost. The program of “privatization” (or the selling off of national assets) was opposed with varying amounts of doggedness, resignation, and ferocity by Labour; now it is grudgingly accepted as economic force majeure. For instance, Labour supporters of varying ideological hues feel strongly about the sale in 1989 of the water industry. There is something almost totemic about water (this stuff that comes out of the ground, that falls from the sky, and which somehow ought to belong to those upon whom it falls) and therefore something particularly offensive about the privatized industry’s quick lesson in monopoly capitalism: greatly increased prices, large profits, and highly paid executives enriching one another with nice rights issues. When I put all this to Blair, he replied, “Do I believe the water industry should be privatized? No, I don’t. Do I think that any serious Labour Government, certainly in the immediate term, is going to be sitting round the Cabinet table, and, let us say there is two billion pounds to be spent, that the hands are going to go up for it to be spent repurchasing the share capital in the water industry—well, it won’t happen, so you may as well not mislead people into thinking that it will.” Besides, “there is very little you can’t do by control and that you can only do by ownership.”
This is an honest reply, if dismaying to some. But then government is about not being able to do as much as you want to, or as much as you believe in; it is about the curdling of idealism. Even so, there are times when Mr. Blair seems to be pitching it a bit high. Take this lofty sentence from his election manifesto: “An education system which serves an elite and neglects the majority is an affront to our morality and a drain on our economy.” At any time in my political awareness, and on any normal constructions of the words, this ought to indicate an intention to abolish the public schools. But the words don’t mean that, do they? “No.” Why not? Isn’t it “an affront to morality” that the hazard of parental wealth dictates a child’s education? “It is an affront,” he agrees cautiously, “that the quality of your education is determined by the amount of wealth that you have. But the question is how you deal with it. Do you deal with it by abolishing the ability of people to educate their children privately, or do you concentrate on raising the standards of state education?” Why not do both at the same time? “I think not, either as a matter of principle or as a matter of political reality.” It seems almost unfair to press Mr. Blair on this, since he is committed to educating his own children in the public sector, and abolitionism hasn’t been on the Labour agenda for some while, but he in a way brought it up. “You’ve got to decide in politics where you want the dividing line to be,” he concludes. Abolishing the public schools, he judges, “would be perceived as in principle wrong, and vindictive…. It would inevitably place the dividing line between ourselves and the Conservatives in the wrong place.”
Mr. Blair is already, and will continue to be, a most practical politician. The scrap, he knows, is over the middle ground (that is why his party elected him), and there is no point fighting over that distant hill, even if it does have a fine view. Someone once said that there was only half an inch of difference between Labour and the Conservatives, yet it was the half inch within which we all live. Mr. Blair is idealistic without being ideological, which naturally makes him an object of suspicion to his left wing. Anthony Howard, who is still awaiting delivery of chipolata sausages, saucily refers to Blair as “Little Boy Blue,” for his rightist leanings. On the other hand, Howard acknowledges the atypical strength of the current leader’s position. He has arrived at his present eminence carrying little baggage and few debts. He owes the unions nothing. He is less of a machine politician than his two predecessors, Kinnock and Smith. “That’s his asset,” says Howard. “He can cut the painter with the past.”
Certainly Mr. Blair offers the Labour Party its likeliest chance since 1979 of a return to power. (And, as a further modernizing footnote, his success would put the first working wife into No. 10.) You would have to be cruel—or Conservative—not to wish him well: few countries benefit from extended periods of single-party rule. Labour is at present comparatively united, the electorate comparatively pissed off with the Tories, and the Tories themselves comparatively rattled. As one unnamed Tory minister brazenly said of Blair, “We still don’t know whether to argue that he has no policies or to argue his policies are bad ones.” For the moment, it is Labour who is setting the agenda and the Tories who are fretfully responding. Thus, no sooner had the words full employment been bandied around for the few weeks of the Labour election campaign than the Employment Secretary, David Hunt, addressed a Trades Union Congress meeting and committed the Government to such a policy as well. This was an incredibly conciliatory, or wet, thing for a Tory Minister to do, and suggested seismic rumblings of panic. It is unlikely to have been a coincidence that a mere fortnight later, in Mr. Major’s Cabinet reshuffle, Mr. Hunt found himself suddenly without employment at Employment.
Blair sees the main danger between now and the general election (which may not come until 1996 or 1997) as “a sense of complacency on the part of the Party.” There are others: that he has longer to run than is ideal, that his face might not seem quite so fresh in a couple of years, that his evangelical language might begin to sound preachy, his talk of crusades and missions a bit too happy-clappy for our jaundiced times. There is also the danger that Labour’s long-term strategy—actively modeled on Mrs. Thatcher’s 1979 game plan—of enunciating principles and general themes rather than detailed, priceable policy may come to seem evasive. And what is there to fear from the Tories? “Their election strategy is no great mystery,” he replies. “They will go for some large-scale tax cut. They will probably back themselves into a fairly anti-European position. And they will throw as much at the Labour Party as it is humanly possible or inhumanly possible to dredge up.”
At Westminster Abbey, the Grimethorpe Colliery Band’s plaintive presence had made a fitting prelude to a service that, like Tony Blair’s manifesto, might have been titled “Change and National Renewal.” There was the reading from the Book of Isa
iah (“And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations”). There was the hymn by R. B. Y. Scott which seemed full of Blairist principles (“Bring justice to our land,/that all may dwell secure,/and finely build for days to come/foundations that endure”) and aptly short on policy specifics. There was even the Archbishop of Canterbury quoting Václav Havel: “I am deeply convinced that politics is not essentially a disreputable business, and in so far as it is, it is politicians who have made it so.”
The Archbishop also quoted John Smith’s belief that “politics ought to be a moral activity.” As the Tory Party seems increasingly weary at the center and increasingly sleazy at the edges, as its thinkers and dreamers go yelping off into the reforested landscape babbling over the return of bears, income tax at 10 percent, and prairie acres covered with exotic crops of lupins, it’s not surprising that Labour is currently in the political and moral ascendancy. Now one publicly avowed Christian has replaced another as leader of the Party. “Cleanse the body of this nation through the glory of the Lord,” sang many if not all of the congregation at Westminster Abbey.
Tony Blair won the leadership with uplifting rhetoric which starred the word radical; like his rival candidates, he deliberately invoked the famous year of 1945, when Clement Attlee’s Labour Government instituted a fundamental shift in the national structure. I asked Giles Radice about Mr. Blair’s hot selling line. He replied, “He said something rather clever. He said, ‘I’m not a revisionist, I’m a radical.’ That’s balls, actually. He’s trying to be Harold Wilson. And he needs to be a mixture of Gaitskell and Wilson.” One of the constant fascinations—and rhythmical deceptions—of politics lies in the disparity between the Onward Christian Soldiers rhetoric and the subsequent announcement that, sorry, folks, we can’t afford the lance and the breastplate, and by the way, the horse has been downsized to a mule. The name of Hugh Gaitskell (John Smith’s predecessor as official lost leader and recipient of transferred hope) is safe enough to invoke; that of Harold Wilson—remembered now less for the libertarian legislation of his first years in office than for the pragmatic divagations of his later ones—does not lift the heart. Tony Blair releases optimism in many for his youth, his intelligence, his expressions of idealism, his promise to cleanse, and his electability. He may very well be the British Prime Minister as the century turns. But millenarians would be premature in renting space on mountaintops.
August 1994
A Vintage International Original, July 1995
Copyright 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995 by Julian Barnes
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
All of the material in this work was originally published
in The New Yorker, in slightly different form.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnes, Julian.
Letters from London / by Julian Barnes.
p. cm.
“A Vintage original”–T.p. verso.
I. London (England)–Social life and customs-20th century.
I. Title
DA688.B28 1995
942.1′2082-dc20 95-3172
eISBN: 978-0-307-55737-7
v3.0
Letters From London Page 36