Posts Tagged → Tony Blair
The long lament
Thirty years ago Mrs Thatcher came to power. She changed politics utterly: moving the centre ground over three general elections firmly to the right; radicalising the right and the left as she did so, almost making the term ‘moderate’ seem like a criticism rather than a compliment; introduced the concepts of monetarism, privatisation and even Britain as ‘a property owning democracy’ into the bloodstream of public policy; all but broke the Labour Party and the labour movement; and of course, put Labour out of office for almost two decades until Tony Blair and New Labour created the opportunity to win again.
Few if any believed she would be so radical, so right-wing, so revolutionary in 1979.
Labour failed in the late 1970s to deal with its own demons. It mishandled a global economic crisis. It gave in too readily to trade union demands and allowed the Left to control the party. It seemed to be part of the problem with how power was exercised in Britain rather than the means by which ordinary families could do well and get on. It looked like it was being battered by events – including militant trade unionism – rather than in control. Frankly, Labour looked under seige.
And yet, in Jim Callaghan we had a Prime Minister and leader who was more popular than the party. More popular than Mrs Thatcher.
So, whilst there are parallels with where we are today there are important differences too.
We may have a leader less popular than the Opposition’s but we are not mishandling the economy; we may be conceding too much to the Left and the unions in the party but Britain is not in the grip of an industrial relations crisis. We may be being battered by events but to coin a phrase Jim Callaghan didn’t actually say, when it comes to comparing Britain today with 1978-79, ‘crisis, what crisis?’
That isn’t to say Labour isn’t in deep trouble. And has to change.
Of course, it is regrettable that Charles Clarke and Hazel Blears have to sound off in the media. Some of the language – like the ‘YouTube if you want to’ comment – was unacceptable because it was so obvious the media would have a field day with it.
It was equally unacceptable for John Prescott to call for Clarke to leave the Party for feeling ashamed over the McBride affair when I don’t know a single Labour member who didn’t feel ashamed and embarrassed by it.
But Charles, David Blunket, Hazel and others are merely expressing a sense of frustration – even exasperation – that so many Labour people have today.
It isn’t a Blairite thing or even a New Labour thing. It is a Labour thing: after a dozen years are we throwing away our own triumph in shifting the centre ground of British politics to the centre-left from the centre-right where Mrs Thatcher left it?
We were promised that when Tony Blair resigned we would experience “renewal in office” but it never happened. Instead, we have nose-dived in the polls, appear to have stagnated on reform, emailed away our “moral compass” and generally look like we’ve lost our touch.
If Charles Clarke and others weren’t speaking out in these circumstances we could legitimately ask why not?
This is not a Gordon Brown problem. Clearly he has had some communications and connection issues. But the problem is more fundamental than that: it is how we govern that is the problem not who leads the government.
To restore our reputation the government has to return to being New Labour.
We have to end and repudiate the language of Leftism that is creeping into the Labour lexicon. Allowing ourselves to fall into the Budget elephant trap of being badged “the end of New Labour” was a tiny example. Better to have cut income tax to stimulate the economy than to have broken our promise and introduced a 50p rate on top earners. Better to change the Budget plans now than break that pledge.
Criticizing primary school academies as being dangerous because they threatened to bring “free markets” to schools is crazy – especially as academies are a sound policy which New Labour introduced.
Giving local councils more say over academies or creating a new national control mechanism over them plays to activists not to parents.
We should be being more radical on schools and hospitals not slipping back or going silent.
Where are the policies and programmes designed to bring more power to parents, patients and carers through choice and competition between providers?
What is the long term vision for creating more new home owners not just more council houses?
Why have we stopped articulating our approach on crime, anti-social behaviour and bad neighbours when it connects across social classes and between communities?
How will more and more regulation on businesses – even in the name of ‘equality’ – help to create new jobs for those who will lose theirs in this recession?
Where are the plans to bring about a genuine greening of the economy as part of the recovery?
What is our appeal to the instincts and incomes of middle class voters who were essential to our victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005?
Why have we stopped owning the future? Why do we look like we have stopped all legislation with any edge? Even the Royal Mail Bill now looks threatened.
The answer is radical policy not just improved presentation. It is to be controversial if necessary not conservative by nature.
In 1979 we looked like we have been driven from office as much by exhaustion as election. We have to recapture a sense of excited in office not exhausted by it.
Jim Callaghan said during the 1979 election that he had felt that the tide had changed. He was right. It is not too late to turn the tide back in our favour. It needs us to be as bold and radical today as we were when we made the Bank of England independent.
Thatcher’s anniversary must be New Labour’s warning from history. Otherwise, the lament – to use Hazel Blear’s word of the week – will be long and hard and deep. It will be a lament for the lost opportunities of radical social reform by future Labour governments. Perhaps even for the Labour Party itself.
The Blair doctrine
On Thursday morning UK time, Tony Blair delivered a speech in Chicago on his “doctrine of international community”. It is worth a read because it sets out precisely the basis for a genuine “ethical foreign policy” for the centre-Left: a policy based on the international community being prepared to intervene, including militarily, to defeat and remove regimes which attack and oppress their civilian population.
Too many on the traditional Left believe that it is better to excuse and explain away oppressive regimes that stand in opposition to the USA rather than to argue for intervention in the interests of their people. Their anti-Americanism outweighs their internationalism.
Too many on the traditional Right believe intervention should only be considered if it is in their own direct national interest or to safeguard a special interest with which they allign themselves.
So, for example, many on the British Conservative Right were lukewarm or hostile to intervention in Kosovo but are pretty John Bullish about intervention in Zimbabwe. 
Too many liberals believe that intervention can only be supported if international institutions like the UN sanction it. This fails to recognise that the Security Council veto means that countries which do not accept, as a matter of stated policy, the notion of international action to overcome oppressive regimes because it represents “interference” in internal politics of a nation state will wield that veto come what may.
Worse, many on the liberal Left argue that it is wrong even to countenance action to deliver democracy and freedom for the population of Muslim fundamentalist countries in the mistaken belief that democracy and Islam are somehow incompatible.
So, the traditional Left, the liberal establishment and the traditional Right, all coalesce around opposition to action to safeguard the human rights and freedoms of oppressed peoples.
The Blair Doctrine – which the former prime minister reprised in his speech a decade after he first set it out in Chicago – is distinctly different. It calls for action against oppressive regimes based on the values of international solidarity with the oppressed rather than isolationism. It recognises that where action is not taken in the apparent short term narrow ‘national interest’ often, as with Afghanistan, the medium to long term consequences can be at best unpredictable and at worst, disasterous. And it argues for siding with the majority of Muslims against the extremists and fundamentalists and helping them defeat those who would pervert Islam to justify terrrorism.
Today, we rarely hear the case for military action to safeguard freedom. Tony Blair makes that case. It is worth a read.
Can the G20 really relaunch Gordon Brown?
There are some international summits which have a long lasting impact and which almost define the most important moments and crises in the most difficult times. A few spring to mind: President Nixon and Chairman Mao in 1972; Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik in 1986; the Belfast meeting in 1998 which produced the Good Friday Agreement; the European summit at Maastricht.
Barack Obama even claimed during the presidential elections that the Kennedy/Khrushchev summit in Vienna in 1961 was an important milestone on the way to ending the Cold War – not even JFK would have claimed that though!
But I suspect the summit which key advisers in No 10 Downing Street – perhaps even Gordon Brown himself – have in mind at the moment, as they plan the G20 in London, is the G8 meeting in Gleneagles in 2005, chaired by Tony Blair, which made crucial agreements on aid to Africa and climate change. As John Kirton, the director of the Toronto University G8 research group said at the time, “this is the single most successful summit in the thirty year history of this event.”
One of the reasons for this is that a key adviser to Tony Blair who played a major personal role in helping to secure the success of Gleneagles for the then Prime Minister was Justin Forsyth who is now Director of Strategic Communications for Gordon Brown. If anyone can help to make the G20 a success for GB (in both senses) it will be Justin.
There is though another reason. There have been a number of stories – some just blather from commentators, some badly briefed from Downing Street – suggesting that the G20 meeting can somehow be a relaunch for Gordon Brown’s premiership.
Superficially, this might seem like a reasonable ambition. Afterall, there will be lots of pictures of Gordon welcoming World leaders to London (including President Obama) and chairing the conference. Surely, the smiles and the seriousness of the situation can help improve the prime minister’s standing in the country?
There will be those, some now disgracefully enjoying their ministerial cars, who plotted the September 2006 coup against Blair who will remember that their plans were knocked off course for a year earlier because of the success of the G8 summit.
There will be those who really do believe that the meeting can have a beneficial impact on the global economy and that GB will get some credit for it.
And then there are those who simply believe this is the last throw of the dice for this government and if they come up with snake-eyes rather than double-six well so be it.
I am sceptical about the extent to which summits change the perceptions of publics about their leaders. The massive backroom effort that will go into writing and agreeing the communique following the G20 (and there will be a ‘global deal’ of some sort because diplomacy is actually about being a bit diplomatic and it is bad form to slap the host’s political face whilst you are still enjoying his hospitality) will go un-noticed by most of the public. The glad-handing and smiles for the camera are water off a duck’s back to all but the political commentariat. Politicians meet, they talk, they smile and they stand in a group for a photo – that will probably be the most most members of the public see of the G20.
We can hope that the impact on the global economy is more profound and more long-lasting. That the G20 stands for something more than anti-market rhetoric and produces more than hot air and high hopes.
But the impact that will matter in the short term in the UK will be the media’s reaction to the G20. They have the power to make this make-or-break summit or to break it – and the prospects of Gordon Brown and the Labour Government with it.
If they are over-spun, over-hyped or over-looked at any point then their verdict will be harsh and they will write that the fate of the Prime Minister is sealed.
Personally, I do not believe that failure at the G20 can hurt Gordon Brown’s premiership any more than success can help him. It is not that the die is cast but that the failure to show real ambition for radical reforms in standards for schools and performance in hospitals daily hampers Labour’s ability to make the case for its own re-election. The public will look at the G20 summit and say to themselves, “that’s what politicians’ lives are about – meeting and talking” and then they will go back to their own lives lived as patients and parents, neighbours and carers and wonder just how relevant is the G20 afterall?
New Labour: not dead just sleep-walking
Tony Blair famously told the 1997 Labour Party conference that the Conservatives were “not dead. Just sleeping.” To make such a comment when the Conservatives had been so throroughly thrashed at the general election only four months previously was remarkable. Equally memorable though should be Blair’s next line in that speech: “Let their fate serve as a warning to us.”
Today, with Labour looking becalmed at around 30% in the polls, with the Parliamentary Labour Party looking ever more fearful of having to make bold and radical reforms necessary to improve the public services, with the economic crisis so crushing and with some Cabinet ministers – who should know better – preening themselves and posing in public like peacocks for a potential leadership position, it looks like Labour has failed to heed Blair’s warning. In this context, it is not surprising commentators are saying: ‘New Labour is dead’
I do not believe new Labour is dead but I do believe it is sleep walking to defeat. Incumbent governments win elections when they are capable of showing the electorate that they have more to offer than they have already delivered: that they can be both continuity and change; not just that they haven’t run out of ideas but that their ideas are right for the times.
The economy of course, is taking the lion’s share of the resources and the reporting at the moment. That is only right. Unfortunately, too much of the rhetoric continues to be anti-market and anti-city – both positions which will come back to haunt Labour in the future; partly, because Labour will need both the market economy and the City to recover and prosper if Britain is to grow our way out of recession and partly, because anti-free market sentiment will be used by those on the left to call for a re-allignment of Labour politics which is actually about trashing the government’s record and moving Labour leftwards.
I appreciate scope for action on the economy is limited but where are the ideas and radical reforms from elsewhere in government capable of making the case that Labour has more to offer in the future? Sadly, they currently appear absent.
Take the publication on Tuesday of the government’s ‘vision for the future shape of public services’. Much of what was in the paper was fine, harmless stuff. The fast-track teacher training is OK. But frankly, the idea that the way to make the radical leap required in public service provision is to ape TripAdvisor by having internet reviews would be laughable if it did not signal so surely that New Labour is sleep walking to defeat.
Or take the loss of David Freud, the welfare reformer, to the Conservatives. I do not believe Freud is a natural conservative. He believes in progressive reforms. He appears to have walked because, despite his excellent work, the government as a whole (probably not James Purnell himself) just does not look interested in pursuing them.
Or take the government’s overall legislative programme. Of course, the Marine and Coastal Access Bill is necessary but, with the exception of the Royal Mail Bill the government’s legislative programme seems to be rather empty. Watch the Parliament Channel any evening (as sadly I do) and there just doesn’t seem to be anything much going on.
Where are the policies to raise standards in schools, to drive choice and contestablility in healthcare, to reduce and remove our reliance on carbon power generation, to address anti-social behaviour and increase personal security, to show Labour are as radical after 12 years in office as they were after 18 years in Opposition?
I believe New Labour isn’t dead. Just sleepwalking to disaster. Labour has just months to put that right. To heed Tony’s warning.
Go for it Gordon
Gordon Brown will next week address a joint session of both houses of the US Congress. This is a tremendous honour for him and for Britain. When Tony Blair made a similar speech in 2003 it was a brilliant performance the impact of which was muted because of the death of Dr David Kelly the following day.
The Prime Minister should use his speech to make the case for continued intervention in Afghanistan; not just the social programmes and electoral registration but the tough, targetted military intervention that continues to benefit us all at home through tackling the Taliban who happliy hosted terrorist cells, the terrorists themselves who continue to plot ’spectaculars’ in our country and the narcotics industry that also deals in death.
He should argue for larger military commitments by NATO members – and a larger number of NATO members too.
Go for it Gordon. Don’t just make the easy speech about shared values but the tough one about shared military service, shared sacrifice and shared security.
I disown Bryan Gould
Those like me (and almost no-one else I know in the Labour Party) who voted for Bryan Gould to be both Leader and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in the same election against John Smith will have been disappointed to read his piece in the Guardian today entitled, ”I disown this Government’.
I helped organise some meetings in Newcastle and on Tyneside for Gould. As a result of being a supporter of his in Nick Brown’s East Newcastle CLP I had to spend a period of two years when I couldnt even get elected to be one of the two constituency auditors – including being beaten by no-one at one AGM!
The reason I supported Gould was that at the time has was a moderniser. He wanted to change the way power in the Labour Party was exercised and by whom. He wanted Labour to have an appeal to the English middle class and to break out of the traditional ghettos of Labour support which had condemned the Labour Party to years of opposition. To me, Bryan Gould was new Labour before it was fashionable. I backed him but he betrayed us. Today’s article is just the latest stage of his own personal betrayal of Labour’s modernisers.
When Gould lost both elections at the same time (to John Smith and Margaret Beckett) rather than stay and fight for what he believed in he flounced out of British politics altogether to live on the other side of the World. Today, Gould (whose experience actually serving in a government is nil) seems to think that his views about British politics from his ivory tower 12,000 miles away actually still count for something significant. He lost all legitimacy to be taken seriously when he couldn’t stand the heat and got out of the kitchen.
I disagree with the content and tone of Gould’s article: the language of ‘betrayal’, which so peppers his writing, is reminiscent of the ritual denunciations of the Trotskyite Left (he should remember because they accused him of precisely that in the 1980s when he called for wider share ownership in Britain and was all but booed off at Party conference); his analysis that the Labour government has rejected “any decent and civilised values” is simply hysterical.
Others no doubt will want to challenge his economic argument. I just want to comment on his international one. He denounces the Iraq War as a contravention of civilised norms, based on a lie, which undermined the UN and destroyed Iraq. Wrong, wrong and wrong again.
Firstly, the Iraq War was waged to remove weapons of mass destruction and, as a positive byproduct, end the fascistic regime of Saddam Hussein, his psychopathic sons and their henchmen. Would it have been more ’civilised’ to let the regime continue to torture, kills and commit genocide against its own people?
Second, the war was fought because Saddam refused to comply with UN resolutions. Governments across the World believed that he possessed WMD. Yes, there were differences of opinion on the actions that should follow. Yes, there were errors of intelligence, perhaps even of presentation. But no, the governments that were part of the Coalition of the Willing did not lie. And none of the (too) many inquiries have shown that they intended to.
Third, the UN was not undermined by the Iraq War. There was an effort – led by Tony Blair – to achieve a second resolution but it was vetoed by President Chirac who made clear he would oppose military action whatever. No-one knows if that resolution had been passed if Saddam would have woken up and smelled the coffee and started to properly comply with the UN resolutions. What is clear though is that what undermines the UN is the failure of its Security Council members to properly enforce its resolutions – and the failure of the UN to be able to resolve anything at all, as with Kosovo.
Fourthly, Iraq was not destroyed. Iraq today is a democracy where record numbers of people participate in peaceful elections. There have been challenges, failures in the initial period after the liberation to ensure security for all but, Iraq today is rebuilding itself and showing that democracy can flourish in a majority muslim country in the Middle East.
Those of us who stayed and fought for the creation of New Labour, the successful election victories of 1997, 2001 and 2005, who contributed to the success of Labour in government, who continue to support this government in the difficult economic times since Tony Blair left office do not need Bryan Gould to disown us. He was never part of us when it happened. He never owned it in the first place.
Hamas may have written to President Obama
There are suggestions that Hamas may have given a letter to Senator John Kerry to give to the President.
Let us hope this story is true. Let us hope too, that the letter contains an acceptance that Hamas will recognise the right of Israel to exist.
If so, negotiations with Hamas should start towards a two state solution.
And who better to lead those talks than Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell who together took risks for peace and secured it for future generations of Irish people?
All we can do is hope and pray that Hamas can make the leap necessary.
Hillary looks East
After all the focus on who would be the first overseas politician to receive the honour of being received first by President Obama (it was Tony Blair), the first overseas visit by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to have recieved less comment: she will visit Japan, China, South Korea and Indonesia. Secretary Clinton said the decision to go East “signals that the US is not just a transatlantic power but also a transpacific power”.
There is a dual significance in this decision. It is a sure sign, if any were even necessary, that the World is indeed moving East – and the USA increasingly sees more of its strategic interests in that region. In recent decades, and since the warming in sino-American relations following Nixon’s historic visit to Chairman Mao, these visits have been largely about economics; the recognition that China represented a massive market for foreign direct investment. This trip though, is about politics more than economics. It is a recognition that China is an emerging superpower every bit as much as an emerging market.
The second point of significance is contained in Hillary’s comment about being a ‘transpacific power’ as well as a transatlantic one. The West should take a warning from her words. With NATO increasingly unsure of its direction, incapable of committing troops in sufficient numbers to Afghanistan and unwilling to expand its membership for fear of Russian reaction, the glue that bound the USA to its transatlantic allies feel a little weaker. The total lack of direction in which the European Union finds itself, especially at a time of deep recession, simply serves to make matters worse.
Secretary of State Clinton, and the Obama Presidency, are signalling that they have choices about whether they look East or West from the USA. The old certainties that that choice is always and inevitably towards us is no more. Such a World view, places the USA no longer just as the leader of the ‘West’ but at the fulcrum of the world map; at the centre of globalisation.
There is a significance in everything this new administration does in these early days, and not just the comfortable gestures around Guantanemo. Western Europe should wake up and smell the coffee: the US is looking both left and right, East and West more than ever these days. NATO members please note.
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