Left for Dead?: The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party. Lewis Goodall
speech, read any pamphlet written by Blair or Brown at the time, and the idea of securing that objective drips off the page; that, in their view, required fundamental political accommodations. In the 1940s, after the Labour government enacted some truly socialist policies, socialists were dismayed not just at losing office in the 1950s but because the scales fell from their eyes. Part of the ideological makeup of prewar socialism was that once the working class had had a taste of the truly transformative powers of the ideology, it would usher in a golden age in which Labour would rarely be dislodged. History had not turned out that way and Blair’s generation held no such illusions; they assumed they must act accordingly.
But there’s another reason why it’s easy to ridicule the Blair big tent, why it seems almost quaint as a political notion: because, for good or ill, it was precisely that – a big tent. Blair genuinely believed his was a new approach, a new conception of politics, and that much of the population could be brought into the tent’s shelter. His politics was not one based on antagonism but on unity. The contrast with what came before him, of Margaret Thatcher’s constant quest for enemies to slay, of her rhetoric of ‘our people’ and ‘one of us’, was a million miles away from Blair’s soft and conciliatory tones, of ‘one people’, transcending left, right and all the old dogmas. Francis Urquhart would not have approved. In as much as anything, this was rooted in Blair’s personality, in a tremendous self-belief in his own persuasive abilities and capacity to bring people together. As Professor David Marquand argued years later: ‘the central premise of his statecraft was that society was naturally harmonious: that apparent differences of interest or belief could always be compromised or transcended’.3
That contrast is not only striking for what came before Blair but for what has come since. New Labour’s big tent partly seems so kitsch because its open and pluralist approach seems so foreign to the politics of our own age. Today’s politics, of remain and leave, of heroes and villains, of identity politics, of authenticity and virtue and vice, is a politics that fundamentally rests on enmity just as much as did that which characterised the 1980s. It relies on showing who you are for and who you are against and in so doing revealing your truly authentic self. In this regard, the bonhomie of the settled politics of Blair’s 1990s seems as distant as Baldwin’s 1930s or Macmillan’s 1950s – indeed our own politics has manifested itself to some extent as a counter-reaction to it. Consequently, Blairism can appear unprincipled or rootless. The ‘authenticity’ of big characters like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn and the rest must surely arise as a counter-reaction to the 1990s era of spin, PR politics and the idea of politicians trying to please all of the people all of the time. Better, it is said, to have politicians who really say what they think, even at the risk of being divisive, rather than those who try to be all things to all people. Today, as Britain is ravaged by new political and cultural schisms, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard friends or colleagues or columnists yearn aloud for a unifier, a politics less coarse, less bellicose, someone or something that can bring people together. Yet it was exactly that sort of openness, and its accompanying rootlessness, which so many came to revile and which now makes Blair’s approach seem so antiquated and his political personality dismissed as a libertine.
Of course, Blair and Brown said the big tent couldn’t be constructed on a foundation of presentational changes alone; they believed deep policy shifts would be necessary as well. In the same way that the hunt for new voters and appeal is sometimes today considered a unique and grubby affliction of the New Labour years, so likewise the abandonment of certain policies and adoption of others is considered to be a distinct piece of New Labour treachery. Rather, it makes more sense to think of New Labour as the party’s latest attempt to respond to the changing material world around it, in a way that Labour hadn’t done in a comprehensive fashion for a very long time, probably since the revisionist Anthony Crosland attempted to update the Attlee settlement for the 1960s in his seminal work, The Future of Socialism. Blair’s and Brown’s thinking, nursed through the 1980s and ’90s, resulted in the so-called ‘Third Way’, in which the dynamism of the free market was combined with traditional social democratic goals of social justice and fairness.¶ As Blair was himself to say in 1999: ‘It was important for me to try and explain to people what the nature of my political project was about, this idea you could get beyond left and right but have a pro-business, pro-enterprise but also pro-fairness party.’ Decades after it had fallen out of favour, Blair was to reanimate that sentiment to me, saying that the Third Way and New Labour are just rhetorical vehicles ‘to describe an attitude, a way of looking at politics, the label is insignificant. What’s significant is the idea that social democracy has to keep renewing its policy applications and principles.’
This didn’t come out of a vacuum and it was a theme Blair spoke about often, throughout his leadership and after. When I asked him why he thought New Labour was successful he returned to the idea: ‘I think the reason is that we broke this stranglehold that elements of the progressive left had over associating policies which were appropriate at one time with principles for all time. It’s not complicated but it is essential; if you don’t break that stranglehold you have the world changing but you are in the same place over policy.’ In other words, he challenged the view that Labour policy had to be constant, that it would always look the same, and that to deviate from it was heresy, that there was only one road to socialism.
Blair won that argument for only a short time, and perhaps he never could win it in the end, because for most of his party the only road to socialism still runs to and from 1945 and hasn’t changed much since.
1945 AND ALL THAT
Clement Attlee’s 1945–51 government remains the party’s most important administration, one of the three most significant governments of the twentieth century. Its achievements are ones of which the party can be justly proud. Its ability to stir hearts in members of the party is unparalleled, despite the fact that no one even elected to that Parliament remains alive, much less anyone who held ministerial office. In the summer of 2015, I made a film about the seventieth anniversary of that government’s coming to power. As part of that I interviewed Margaret Beckett. She described an occasion when, in 1994, not long after John Smith’s death, she attended the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, as leader of the opposition:
‘We had a ceremony at the cemetery at Bayeux. The Queen was there, President Clinton, the Prime Minister and so on and so on. After the ceremony, the people broke and there was an opportunity for people to mix informally. And I was mobbed … by veterans and their families. I remember looking around and there were lots of people around the Prime Minister of course but I was mobbed. And it’s not just me who thinks that I was, because the Defence Secretary [Malcolm Rifkind] was there and said to everyone a few days later, did Margaret tell you, that she was mobbed by the D-Day veterans? And I thought … that was for Attlee’s government.’ As she told the story, she became quite overcome with tears.
It’s hard to compete with that, and every government before and since hasn’t. It is the only Labour government of the half-dozen or so there have been that has emerged with its reputation intact. Perhaps because of this and because of the strength of its achievement, it has acted as a sort of eternal litmus test against which each and every government since is judged within the Labour movement. It has become Labour lore.**
But just as subsequent Labour governments and prime ministers struggle to compete with its emotional pull, so they struggled to compete with Attlee’s greatest gift: the moment in which he lived, a moment primed for socialism. The total-war strategy articulated by Churchill entailed doing all the things that the Conservatives under Chamberlain and Baldwin had told the country were not possible: nationalising swathes of industry, huge government intervention in every sphere of existence, taking profound stakes in not only the economy but the day-to-day affairs of life. It controlled what you ate, what you did, whether or not your children lived with you, how much you paid for consumer goods, where you worked, whether or not you fought in the war, whether you lived or died. Public expenditure as a proportion of overall national spending