What is Blairism?
This is posted in order to add to the debate on The Guardian Comment Is Free blog, following Jason Walsh’s article: Consumers led by Chameleons.
A lack of ideology is a criticism often targeted at Tony Blair, but on closer inspection the question may have more to do with whether he has a political vision that is different to the neoliberal status quo.
On 27 February 2002, backbench Labour MP Tony McWalter asked a question at Prime Minister’s Question Time on whose answer many had pondered since his election in 1997. He asked for: ‘a brief characterisation of the political philosophy which [the PM] espouses and which underlies his policies.’
Blair, after a few seconds contemplation came back with the answer that the NHS was an example of such a characterisation. On first thought, one might think this a fair and honest answer.
The more cynical among us might dismiss the answer as being the first thing that came to mind. Nye Bevan’s ‘from the cradle to the grave’ health service, the proudest creation of old Labour, supposedly envied by the rest of the world, gives free access to health care to all, regardless of means or background.
However, in light of the ongoing displeasure of trade unions such as the GMB at private sector involvement in public services, and of Blair’s proposal to eventually make every hospital a foundation hospital with decentralised power, there may be more truth to the Prime Minister’s answer than meets the eye.
New hospitals are being built by the likes of Carillion PLC, a company whose profits rose by 11 per cent in 2002, with £5 billion worth of orders on its books and £700 million of new orders already this year. Carillion’s PR firm, Weber Shandwick had its Managing Director Colin Byrne work for the Labour party business relations unit at the party’s Millbank HQ during the 2001 election campaign.
It is links like these that show how, contrary to being a party ‘for the many not the few’ and espousing social justice and equality, New Labour primarily serves and is manipulated by corporate lobbyists and PR firms who have an open door to Tony Blair’s government.
As a similar example, Lord Browne, the chief executive of BP signed a deal with a Russian oil company, TNK, in Downing Street in February 2003. Blair had earlier made a call to Vladimir Putin to oil the wheels of business on behalf of the company also known as ‘Blair Petroleum’.
This from a PM who leads supposedly ‘Britain’s first green government,’ who pledged in the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rather than to assist companies in deals to pump more oil and increase them.
Such evidence makes many think that a leader who promised so much has delivered so little. It is undoubtedly partly the reason that Labour Party membership has declined from 400,000 to less than 180,000.
The PM looks up to entrepreneurs because they ‘make things happen,’ as he is reported to have said. There is also the advantage of such people being able to line the party coffers as the likes of Lord Sainsbury, the supermarket mogul and GM food advocate have done. Unfortunately Blair seems to overlook the possibility that as well as bringing about changes for the better, the private sector may also cause deeper, more fundamental changes in society that aren’t.
Far from standing up to such interests in support of social justice and equality, challenging the ‘forces of conservatism’ and the Establishment, as he pledged to in his 1999 conference speech, Blair was already part of the elite and has served their interests ever since.
As an example, the PM’s thinking, and by implication that of New Labour seems to go something like this: In order to give the voters what they want, we’ll tell them that we’re treating them as ‘individuals’, rather than citizens.
By creating the controversial foundation hospitals, power is decentralised to individual hospitals from government. In doing so, private sector involvement in the form of companies building and maintaining schools and hospitals ensure that the promises to build them are met. All this leads to satisfied voters, profitable companies and efficient public services with happy staff, which should also please the trade unions.
At the same time, the method of accounting shows annual payments to companies of a fraction of the lump sum amount that would have come out of the public purse if the government was paying for the construction of buildings in one go. By combining the three objectives, Blair believes that his policy and aim of making public services more efficient can be achieved.
However, radical improvements outlined in New Labour policies and speeches are revealed to be the usual political empty promises. New hospitals are built but house fewer beds than the ones they replace. Fewer patients are treated on time. Waiting lists grow. Nurses are leaving the NHS due to their long hours and harsher working conditions. Thus voter dissatisfaction increases.
Foundation hospitals risk creating a two tier NHS where one tier has foundation hospitals where some improvements are evident whereas others are left to deteriorate in areas that are marginalised or unattractive to the interests of private companies.
The only real winners have been the government, who are still in power with the ability to spin and lie, while presiding over a budget that on the surface looks good. The closely linked companies involved have increased profits and contractually guaranteed annual income from taxpayers’ purse.
Meanwhile Blair pays little lip service to the underlying dissatisfaction felt by trade unions, public sector workers, who he labelled as one of the ‘forces of conservatism’ that was preventing New Labour’s project from taking shape. In light of the above they may be the country’s only real opposition. Their problem is that the actions of the PM for whom many of them voted do not match what they thought were his aims.
Prominent figures such as Chris Smith, Frank Dobson and Clare Short have joined the likes of Alan Simpson and Jeremy Corbyn on the Left of Labour, indicating that there is a growing resentment over the Blair’s growing rightwing stance and his appeasement of President Bush. Clearly their leader does not accurately represent them, certainly is not aligned with their beliefs and arguably never was.
On the surface Blair has an enduring positive image in the media and is seen to be doing his best to please everyone. To the readers of Saga magazine he is a caring father and family man. To business leaders and the CBI he is a man who wants economic growth and national prosperity to go hand in hand with tax rises and increased regulation so that social justice is seen to be done.
In his early years in Downing Street he hosted parties at which Stella McCartney and Oasis were guests, giving an image of being cool and youthful. At Princess Diana’s funeral he spoke softly and sounded emotional. When taking the decisions to go to war he was a tough, strong war leader. In a school he played the guitar while Home Secretary David Blunkett plays the drums. The kids think he’s fun, the teachers see he is good with children and the papers get their photos to go with an amusing caption.
From the very beginning of New Labour, politics has been treated in the above way and as a business rather than a genuine desire to improve and create a fair and just society. When Tony Blair became leader in 1994 while the Conservatives were still in power, he realised there was a void to be filled by his party.
The clique that was Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell allied themselves with the likes of pollster Philip Gould and looked to the Democrats’ Bill Clinton across the Atlantic for inspiration.
Like any company launching a new brand or product, New Labour embraced the Nineties corporate mantras of branding, focus group market research and that old Eighties slogan ‘image is everything’. While forging a power base in the Tory heartland of Middle England, they were also developing intimate relations with the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Lord Sainsbury whose respective political and financial support they needed.
Blair embodied the brand being youthful, photogenic, clever, appealing to the influential female vote and symbolising the face of the party that would reinvigorate the country, generate a positive outlook, a sympathetic media view and give birth to New Britain.
The accompanying message was that the party would give voters their country back and with it improved schools, transport and hospitals that had been so recklessly underfunded by the Tories. People were promised that they would become stakeholders in a dynamic partnership between the private sector and the state, and the benefits were to be shared by all.
The brand had the usual political honeymoon period; the Conservatives were in disarray and have been ever since. New Labour made promises and espoused everything voters wanted to hear: ‘education, education, education,’ ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,’ ‘the people’s party governing for all the people,’ ‘Britain’s first truly green government.’
The PM’s blind faith in these methods and the benevolence of business extends not just to the provision of public services, but in the conduct of politics, its fundamental priorities and to some extent the language he uses as well.
Blair speaks of treating people not just as citizens but also as individuals. What actually results is that we are treated as consumers. The image of New Labour is an image to be sold to the public. What matters is not the quality of the product – whether his policies are working and delivering tangible results to the electorate or not - but whether the message and image created has the desired effect and encourages support, and at election time a vote for the party.
The PM’s modernising agenda, the use of the words ‘radical’, ‘progressive’; the pledges to create jobs, safeguard communities, work with business, while achieving aims of social equality and justice, to look after the advantaged as well as the disadvantaged, while on the surface seeming sincere, disguise the fact that the very policies he believes in are those the Left usually opposes.
In one frank conversation with Paddy Ashdown and Roy Jenkins in 1997, Blair is reported to have said: ‘I have taken from my party everything they thought they believed in, I have stripped them of their core beliefs.’ During a speech at the Confederation of British Industry annual dinner in May the following year, he remarked that New Labour ‘rejects the outdated ideology of state control of the old left and the laissez-faire of the New Right.’
Liberal critic Ralf Dahrendorf identified this Third Way about which the PM pontificates as ‘a politics that speaks of the need for hard choices but avoids them by pleasing everyone.’ Roy Hattersley wrote that ‘taking the politics out of politics is not only absurd, it is democratically dangerous.’ Professor Anthony Giddens, the Blairite Director of the London School of Economics confessed in his 1999 Reith Lecture that: ‘Theoretical flesh needs to be put on the bones of policy making.’
In 1998 Blair wrote in a Fabian Society pamphlet: ‘The Third Way stands for modernised social democracy, passionate in its commitment to social justice and the goals of the centre-left, but flexible, innovative and forward-looking in the means to achieve them. It is founded on the values which have guided progressive politics for more than a century – democracy, liberty, justice, mutual obligation and internationalism.’
What has emerged in the years since he wrote those words is that this passion, innovation, flexibility and looking forward that he spoke of were no more than a disguise for the decisions then untaken: to use private means where the public sector was deemed to be failing, and to rely on the flexibility, innovation and progressive approach, putting faith in the ‘unstoppable force’ of the free market, globalisation, in business, science and technology to solve the country’s and the world’s social and political problems.
Where the Left seeks to curb the forces of globalisation and the increasing commercialisation of culture and public services, New Labour embraces them and believes they can be a force for good. Doubts and a precautionary approach just don’t seem to enter the equation in Blair’s mind. In admiring the proactive and risk-taking approach taken by the corporate CEOs he so admires, the PM seems to want to emulate them as much as possible in his politics, while at the same time almost indulging their every whim.
This managerial approach sees the old political principles of Right or Left, old Labour or Tory and their claims to political truth as kinds of fundamentalism. Because of the increased uncertainty of the world we live in, in his eyes you cannot impose top-down political solutions, but merely work out a functional response within the barriers of globalised markets, technology and communications.
Rather than attempting to shape these forces, his approach sees them as a given that political parties must live with rather than as political constructions in themselves that can be steered. This idealistic approach ignores the fact that the inherent neoliberal values that shaped global markets are a result of definite interests and political choices whose aim is to dominate social and economic policy. Blair sees his function as one of shaping a weak social policy around these forces.
In relation to Iraq, George Bush’s eagerness to go to war was one that could be perhaps delayed, but not opposed. The men in power in Washington and the imperialist foreign policy outlined by the Project for the New American Century organisation are seen as a given rather than the result of political choices or vested interests.
Likewise the unilateral approach of the US on the Kyoto Protocol is seen more or less as a given. In this light Kyoto is perhaps a failed example of the Third Way and arguably Blair is simply one of many in similar positions who increasingly take the same approach. Instead of analysing the facts and having the conviction to take a principled approach, politicians framed the policy around the ability of national governments to achieve small reductions in CO2 emissions while accommodating the demands of global corporations which must be taken as a given.
Similarly, on the subject of genetically modified crops, whereas the Left has its doubts about their merits and grave fears about their risks, the PM dismisses such views as ‘anti-science’. Any doubter of his is one of those ‘forces of conservatism’ to which he referred in 1999.
Rather than fulfilling the pledges that he espouses; those of social justice and equality in combination with market enterprise, and seeking to create a ‘New Britain’, perhaps Blair has been influenced by the same lobbyists and corporate interests who had close ties to the Tory Party when they were in power.
More sympathetic readers may believe he has naively embraced them in the hope that he can influence them in the necessary way so as to achieve his weak political aims. Either way, and to the detriment of the people he pledged to serve, many on the Left would agree that he has failed.
The PM pays but lip service to radical ideals and this is ultimately the downfall of his weak ideology. Aims such as social justice, equality and environmental protection cannot be achieved while economic growth and global markets are seen as givens over which politicians have little control. As I have suggested, on the contrary, this serves the definite interests, and does not challenge the political choices that led to this situation in the first place. When this is taken into account, Blair is merely a follower and not a leader at all.
'It's all about bucks kid, and the rest is just conversation.' - Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's film, Wall Street.
A lack of ideology is a criticism often targeted at Tony Blair, but on closer inspection the question may have more to do with whether he has a political vision that is different to the neoliberal status quo.
On 27 February 2002, backbench Labour MP Tony McWalter asked a question at Prime Minister’s Question Time on whose answer many had pondered since his election in 1997. He asked for: ‘a brief characterisation of the political philosophy which [the PM] espouses and which underlies his policies.’
Blair, after a few seconds contemplation came back with the answer that the NHS was an example of such a characterisation. On first thought, one might think this a fair and honest answer.
The more cynical among us might dismiss the answer as being the first thing that came to mind. Nye Bevan’s ‘from the cradle to the grave’ health service, the proudest creation of old Labour, supposedly envied by the rest of the world, gives free access to health care to all, regardless of means or background.
However, in light of the ongoing displeasure of trade unions such as the GMB at private sector involvement in public services, and of Blair’s proposal to eventually make every hospital a foundation hospital with decentralised power, there may be more truth to the Prime Minister’s answer than meets the eye.
New hospitals are being built by the likes of Carillion PLC, a company whose profits rose by 11 per cent in 2002, with £5 billion worth of orders on its books and £700 million of new orders already this year. Carillion’s PR firm, Weber Shandwick had its Managing Director Colin Byrne work for the Labour party business relations unit at the party’s Millbank HQ during the 2001 election campaign.
It is links like these that show how, contrary to being a party ‘for the many not the few’ and espousing social justice and equality, New Labour primarily serves and is manipulated by corporate lobbyists and PR firms who have an open door to Tony Blair’s government.
As a similar example, Lord Browne, the chief executive of BP signed a deal with a Russian oil company, TNK, in Downing Street in February 2003. Blair had earlier made a call to Vladimir Putin to oil the wheels of business on behalf of the company also known as ‘Blair Petroleum’.
This from a PM who leads supposedly ‘Britain’s first green government,’ who pledged in the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rather than to assist companies in deals to pump more oil and increase them.
Such evidence makes many think that a leader who promised so much has delivered so little. It is undoubtedly partly the reason that Labour Party membership has declined from 400,000 to less than 180,000.
The PM looks up to entrepreneurs because they ‘make things happen,’ as he is reported to have said. There is also the advantage of such people being able to line the party coffers as the likes of Lord Sainsbury, the supermarket mogul and GM food advocate have done. Unfortunately Blair seems to overlook the possibility that as well as bringing about changes for the better, the private sector may also cause deeper, more fundamental changes in society that aren’t.
Far from standing up to such interests in support of social justice and equality, challenging the ‘forces of conservatism’ and the Establishment, as he pledged to in his 1999 conference speech, Blair was already part of the elite and has served their interests ever since.
As an example, the PM’s thinking, and by implication that of New Labour seems to go something like this: In order to give the voters what they want, we’ll tell them that we’re treating them as ‘individuals’, rather than citizens.
By creating the controversial foundation hospitals, power is decentralised to individual hospitals from government. In doing so, private sector involvement in the form of companies building and maintaining schools and hospitals ensure that the promises to build them are met. All this leads to satisfied voters, profitable companies and efficient public services with happy staff, which should also please the trade unions.
At the same time, the method of accounting shows annual payments to companies of a fraction of the lump sum amount that would have come out of the public purse if the government was paying for the construction of buildings in one go. By combining the three objectives, Blair believes that his policy and aim of making public services more efficient can be achieved.
However, radical improvements outlined in New Labour policies and speeches are revealed to be the usual political empty promises. New hospitals are built but house fewer beds than the ones they replace. Fewer patients are treated on time. Waiting lists grow. Nurses are leaving the NHS due to their long hours and harsher working conditions. Thus voter dissatisfaction increases.
Foundation hospitals risk creating a two tier NHS where one tier has foundation hospitals where some improvements are evident whereas others are left to deteriorate in areas that are marginalised or unattractive to the interests of private companies.
The only real winners have been the government, who are still in power with the ability to spin and lie, while presiding over a budget that on the surface looks good. The closely linked companies involved have increased profits and contractually guaranteed annual income from taxpayers’ purse.
Meanwhile Blair pays little lip service to the underlying dissatisfaction felt by trade unions, public sector workers, who he labelled as one of the ‘forces of conservatism’ that was preventing New Labour’s project from taking shape. In light of the above they may be the country’s only real opposition. Their problem is that the actions of the PM for whom many of them voted do not match what they thought were his aims.
Prominent figures such as Chris Smith, Frank Dobson and Clare Short have joined the likes of Alan Simpson and Jeremy Corbyn on the Left of Labour, indicating that there is a growing resentment over the Blair’s growing rightwing stance and his appeasement of President Bush. Clearly their leader does not accurately represent them, certainly is not aligned with their beliefs and arguably never was.
On the surface Blair has an enduring positive image in the media and is seen to be doing his best to please everyone. To the readers of Saga magazine he is a caring father and family man. To business leaders and the CBI he is a man who wants economic growth and national prosperity to go hand in hand with tax rises and increased regulation so that social justice is seen to be done.
In his early years in Downing Street he hosted parties at which Stella McCartney and Oasis were guests, giving an image of being cool and youthful. At Princess Diana’s funeral he spoke softly and sounded emotional. When taking the decisions to go to war he was a tough, strong war leader. In a school he played the guitar while Home Secretary David Blunkett plays the drums. The kids think he’s fun, the teachers see he is good with children and the papers get their photos to go with an amusing caption.
From the very beginning of New Labour, politics has been treated in the above way and as a business rather than a genuine desire to improve and create a fair and just society. When Tony Blair became leader in 1994 while the Conservatives were still in power, he realised there was a void to be filled by his party.
The clique that was Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell allied themselves with the likes of pollster Philip Gould and looked to the Democrats’ Bill Clinton across the Atlantic for inspiration.
Like any company launching a new brand or product, New Labour embraced the Nineties corporate mantras of branding, focus group market research and that old Eighties slogan ‘image is everything’. While forging a power base in the Tory heartland of Middle England, they were also developing intimate relations with the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Lord Sainsbury whose respective political and financial support they needed.
Blair embodied the brand being youthful, photogenic, clever, appealing to the influential female vote and symbolising the face of the party that would reinvigorate the country, generate a positive outlook, a sympathetic media view and give birth to New Britain.
The accompanying message was that the party would give voters their country back and with it improved schools, transport and hospitals that had been so recklessly underfunded by the Tories. People were promised that they would become stakeholders in a dynamic partnership between the private sector and the state, and the benefits were to be shared by all.
The brand had the usual political honeymoon period; the Conservatives were in disarray and have been ever since. New Labour made promises and espoused everything voters wanted to hear: ‘education, education, education,’ ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,’ ‘the people’s party governing for all the people,’ ‘Britain’s first truly green government.’
The PM’s blind faith in these methods and the benevolence of business extends not just to the provision of public services, but in the conduct of politics, its fundamental priorities and to some extent the language he uses as well.
Blair speaks of treating people not just as citizens but also as individuals. What actually results is that we are treated as consumers. The image of New Labour is an image to be sold to the public. What matters is not the quality of the product – whether his policies are working and delivering tangible results to the electorate or not - but whether the message and image created has the desired effect and encourages support, and at election time a vote for the party.
The PM’s modernising agenda, the use of the words ‘radical’, ‘progressive’; the pledges to create jobs, safeguard communities, work with business, while achieving aims of social equality and justice, to look after the advantaged as well as the disadvantaged, while on the surface seeming sincere, disguise the fact that the very policies he believes in are those the Left usually opposes.
In one frank conversation with Paddy Ashdown and Roy Jenkins in 1997, Blair is reported to have said: ‘I have taken from my party everything they thought they believed in, I have stripped them of their core beliefs.’ During a speech at the Confederation of British Industry annual dinner in May the following year, he remarked that New Labour ‘rejects the outdated ideology of state control of the old left and the laissez-faire of the New Right.’
Liberal critic Ralf Dahrendorf identified this Third Way about which the PM pontificates as ‘a politics that speaks of the need for hard choices but avoids them by pleasing everyone.’ Roy Hattersley wrote that ‘taking the politics out of politics is not only absurd, it is democratically dangerous.’ Professor Anthony Giddens, the Blairite Director of the London School of Economics confessed in his 1999 Reith Lecture that: ‘Theoretical flesh needs to be put on the bones of policy making.’
In 1998 Blair wrote in a Fabian Society pamphlet: ‘The Third Way stands for modernised social democracy, passionate in its commitment to social justice and the goals of the centre-left, but flexible, innovative and forward-looking in the means to achieve them. It is founded on the values which have guided progressive politics for more than a century – democracy, liberty, justice, mutual obligation and internationalism.’
What has emerged in the years since he wrote those words is that this passion, innovation, flexibility and looking forward that he spoke of were no more than a disguise for the decisions then untaken: to use private means where the public sector was deemed to be failing, and to rely on the flexibility, innovation and progressive approach, putting faith in the ‘unstoppable force’ of the free market, globalisation, in business, science and technology to solve the country’s and the world’s social and political problems.
Where the Left seeks to curb the forces of globalisation and the increasing commercialisation of culture and public services, New Labour embraces them and believes they can be a force for good. Doubts and a precautionary approach just don’t seem to enter the equation in Blair’s mind. In admiring the proactive and risk-taking approach taken by the corporate CEOs he so admires, the PM seems to want to emulate them as much as possible in his politics, while at the same time almost indulging their every whim.
This managerial approach sees the old political principles of Right or Left, old Labour or Tory and their claims to political truth as kinds of fundamentalism. Because of the increased uncertainty of the world we live in, in his eyes you cannot impose top-down political solutions, but merely work out a functional response within the barriers of globalised markets, technology and communications.
Rather than attempting to shape these forces, his approach sees them as a given that political parties must live with rather than as political constructions in themselves that can be steered. This idealistic approach ignores the fact that the inherent neoliberal values that shaped global markets are a result of definite interests and political choices whose aim is to dominate social and economic policy. Blair sees his function as one of shaping a weak social policy around these forces.
In relation to Iraq, George Bush’s eagerness to go to war was one that could be perhaps delayed, but not opposed. The men in power in Washington and the imperialist foreign policy outlined by the Project for the New American Century organisation are seen as a given rather than the result of political choices or vested interests.
Likewise the unilateral approach of the US on the Kyoto Protocol is seen more or less as a given. In this light Kyoto is perhaps a failed example of the Third Way and arguably Blair is simply one of many in similar positions who increasingly take the same approach. Instead of analysing the facts and having the conviction to take a principled approach, politicians framed the policy around the ability of national governments to achieve small reductions in CO2 emissions while accommodating the demands of global corporations which must be taken as a given.
Similarly, on the subject of genetically modified crops, whereas the Left has its doubts about their merits and grave fears about their risks, the PM dismisses such views as ‘anti-science’. Any doubter of his is one of those ‘forces of conservatism’ to which he referred in 1999.
Rather than fulfilling the pledges that he espouses; those of social justice and equality in combination with market enterprise, and seeking to create a ‘New Britain’, perhaps Blair has been influenced by the same lobbyists and corporate interests who had close ties to the Tory Party when they were in power.
More sympathetic readers may believe he has naively embraced them in the hope that he can influence them in the necessary way so as to achieve his weak political aims. Either way, and to the detriment of the people he pledged to serve, many on the Left would agree that he has failed.
The PM pays but lip service to radical ideals and this is ultimately the downfall of his weak ideology. Aims such as social justice, equality and environmental protection cannot be achieved while economic growth and global markets are seen as givens over which politicians have little control. As I have suggested, on the contrary, this serves the definite interests, and does not challenge the political choices that led to this situation in the first place. When this is taken into account, Blair is merely a follower and not a leader at all.
'It's all about bucks kid, and the rest is just conversation.' - Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's film, Wall Street.
posted by John Reynolds at 5:40 p.m.
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