Clarke declares Blairism dead

Charles Clarke has written what appears to be an extended obituary of Blairism:

We should recognise that Tony Blair was an outstanding Labour prime minister who has now departed the British political scene and has no future part to play. His legacy, on the basis of what we inherited in 1997, is historically important, but it does not define the way forward from 2008 onwards. It is worth summarising his approach to government.

In international affairs, Blair stood for a liberal interventionist strategy in our increasingly interdependent world. This attracted fierce criticism in relation to Iraq, but general support on the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. It led him to work with the power of the United States rather than join the anti-American claque, even when George W Bush demonstrated crippling incompetence or opposed British policy. And in the European Union, Blair’s good intentions turned to dust, so that Britain is now more remote from the centre of European power than ever.

Liberal interventionism must be underpinned by military force, but its moral authority was undermined by the glacial progress in preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the ill-considered determination to renew Trident. The rise of terrorist atrocities, including London in 2005, identified Tony Blair with tough efforts to strengthen security, sometimes at a perceived cost to liberty. In some circles, this damaged his reputation, despite the series of progressive constitutional reforms that modernised Britain. As for the economy, the achievement of the Blair-Brown leadership was to demonstrate, for the first time ever, that Labour could run the economy well and promote general prosperity. The contrast with their crisis - encircled Labour predecessors is stark.

This enormous success was accomplished by insulating economic decisions of long-term significance from short-term political pressures. In monetary policy, the institutional means was Bank of England independence. The fiscal method was creation of, and adherence to, the various “golden rules”.

Tony Blair saw this achievement as central, the foundation of his political success. Indeed, he wanted to reinforce this long-term economic rigour by locking the British exchange rate in to the euro, though disagreement with his chancellor made this impossible when joining would have been feasible.

Economic “Blairism” was also defined by opposition to increasing taxes. This reflected the Reagan/Thatcher economic consensus, reinforced by Labour’s 1992 shadow Budget, that tax-raising political parties lost elections. This belief underpinned the disastrous and unfair basic-rate cut, financed by abolition of the 10p rate, of Gordon Brown’s 2007 Budget.

Social policy is the area in which the adjective “Blairite” is most widely and pejoratively used - often inaccurately linked to the word “privatise”. In fact, Blair believed that divisive private alternatives would spread within education and health unless the quality of public services and public life was significantly improved.

This meant prioritising the interests of public-service users and strengthening the state in some areas (for instance, antisocial behaviour). Empowering schools and hospitals, and extending user choice, would maximise public-service efficiency and help prevent the incursion of profit-driven alternatives.

This approach challenged some vested interests and it certainly created political tensions, not least with his deputy prime minister and chancellor. In the end, social change did not come quickly or consistently enough and, despite very major successes, reform in some areas was patchy.

This past week, Alistair Darling rightly said that the “coming 12 months will be the most difficult 12 months the Labour Party has had in a generation”. Blairism as a concept offers little by way of rescue. It is certainly not a guide to action. Equally, however, it is inaccurate and misleading to dismiss as some kind of Blairite rump those who fear that Labour’s current course will lead to utter destruction at the next general election.

There is no coherent Blairite ideology. Many of us who were proud to be members of Tony Blair’s government had differing approaches even then, and certainly propose differing prescriptions now.

This is, in general, a fair summary of Tony Blair’s approach to government and his achievements. Unsurprisingly, some of it is viewed through rose tinted spectacles: we are only now paying the price of New Labour’s “long-term economic rigour”, even if (as Clarke hints, none too subtly) much of the blame for this lies with Chancellor Brown. Furthermore, there are downsides which Clarke doesn’t even appear to recognise: the decidedly mixed benefits of the Human Rights Act; we now have Freedom of Information but Freedom of Speech is more circumscribed than it has been for generations; the damage to social cohesion wrought by increasingly ghettoised communities, some elements of which are now seeking to declare effective autonomy from the British state, notably through increasing demands for the recognition of Shari’a law, even from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

On the other hand, Blair clearly did have a coherent ideology. It was not perfect - indeed in terms of domestic policy the failures were in some cases marked - but it was driven by clear principles, even if many of these principles were not readily perceived at the time. Blairism was such a radical departure from traditional Labourism that it is hardly surprising that many of us were slow to perceive the features, positive and negative of the new ideological landscape.

The most radical change of all for a Labour Party whose defence policy throughout the 1980s was based principally around the replacement of Britain’s nuclear deterrent with a white flag, was the adoption of a liberal interventionist foreign policy based on ethical principles. Quite what those ethical principles turned out to be would have been a surprise to most Labour Party members in 1997 - not excluding Blair’s first foreign secretary, the late Robin Cook, who resigned from Blair’s cabinet over the invasion of Iraq.

Can we therefore view this apparent recantation from an arch-Blairite as the end of the Blair doctrine? Clearly not - there are those in the Labour Party and elsewhere who are more than happy to espouse what are, effectively, classical liberal, neoconservative or “progressive” principles. Charles Clarke has a different end in view: the necessity of averting electoral disaster for Labour requires new leadership. By eschewing Blairism he is recognising that the Labour Party which toiled under a Blair regime which it simultaneously admired and despised will not travel down the same road again. Blairite principles may live on, but the Blairite ascendancy within the Labour Party is over - at least for now.