[A-List] The Policy Network: UK introspection

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

This is interesting: Mandelson's ability to play to the gallery is
analysed sympathetically here by the author who provides quite a good
analysis of the contradictions of the UK political-electoral system and
the Third Way agenda. With the pronounced shift towards more powerful
political executives and the correspondingly presidential style of
leadership that that is a natural consequence, it is not at all clear
how the sort of reforms (however "sensible") advocated here and by
Mandelson will come to pass. Unless, of course, Mandelson himself is
speaking for a sizeable majority within the state apparatus who would
prefer to be rid of the possibility of electoral upset and who would
prefer to restore a measure of bureaucratic continuity between different
administrations by following a coalition politics model of the kind seen
most often in continental Europe. But it's also a measure of how deeply
damaging in the long term has been Thatcherism's promotion of a set of
values and expectations that are deeply inimical to the long term
interests of British state and capital. Witness the infrastructure
crisis unfolding at this very minute.


Blair will have to go further if he wants a lasting legacy

Mandelson has raised the unspoken question at New Labour's heart

David Clark
Tuesday May 21, 2002
The Guardian

A year and a half after he was forced out of the government for the
second time, Peter Mandelson continues to defy the predictions, and in
many cases hopes, of those who said he was finished as a significant
force in British politics. They should have known better, for those who
celebrated his fall from grace most enthusiastically hold the key to
understanding his enduring hold on the imagination of the political
class.

A pivotal figure since becoming Neil Kinnock's director of
communications in 1985, Mandelson's continuity of service and his role
in the decisions that defined his party's return from the wilderness
entitle him to a claim of paternity over the New Labour project perhaps
greater than that of Tony Blair himself. It is an honour that has
brought some very mixed blessings indeed.

On the one hand, the clamour for his resignation in 1998, and again two
years later, owed at least as much to his unique status as a figure of
hate for the enemies of New Labour as it did to the substance of the
allegations against him. In the same circumstances other ministers might
well have survived.

On the other hand, he has become established as the authentic voice of
New Labour whose every utterance is imbued with an almost mystical
significance. It is in this role that he is currently starring with the
publication of an updated version of his 1995 book, The Blair
Revolution. It is an intervention as notable for the forcefulness with
which it exposes New Labour's failings as the earlier edition was for
its evangelical assertion that New Labour represented the one true path.

Mandelson's critique is truly sweeping: fear of losing led to the
development of techniques for political and media management that have
become a liability; New Labour has appeared to accept too much of the
Thatcherite consensus and lacked the confidence to promote progressive
values like equality; the government has been too controlling in the way
it has tried to run the country; the relationship with business has
alienated traditional supporters and led to allegations of sleaze;
ministers must make the case for further tax rises if they are necessary
to improve services.

Those who have felt most exasperated with New Labour's timidity and
style of politics now have reason to believe in the possibility of
change from within and perhaps even to regret Peter Mandelson's absence
from office. His ideas would certainly add momentum to the process of
revisionism that appears to have taken hold in Whitehall over the last
few months.

New Labour finally appears to be developing a more confident style of
government. The Budget marked the abandonment of the New Labour
principle that additional social spending must be financed by growth
rather than wealth redistribution. No less significant was the decision
to put House of Lords reform in the hands of parliament. If Tony Blair
continues this process of opening out - by making a serious effort to
work with the unions on public service reform, for example - he will
recover much of the goodwill he squandered in his first term. What
should concern him and his advisers, however, is the real, but unspoken
question raised by Mandelson's book: to what extent has there been a
Blair revolution worthy of the name?

A glance at the government's most significant achievements reveal very
little that is distinctively Blairite. Most of them are either
traditional Labour demands (full employment, higher public spending,
House of Lords reform) or part of the Kinnock/Smith inheritance
(devolution, the minimum wage). Blair may have won as New Labour, but it
is not immediately apparent in what sense he is governing as New Labour,
except by giving rise to unflattering headlines about spin and influence
peddling. To the extent that there have been genuine policy innovations,
such as the New Deal or independence for the Bank of England, they bear
the imprint of the chancellor rather than the prime minister.

Nor is there much that could be considered revolutionary in the sense of
achieving the sort of permanent and irreversible shift that Blair
himself has defined as the benchmark of success. Thatcher, whose
radicalism he aspires to emulate, genuinely did change the face of
British society; the council houses she sold will never be bought back,
the industries she privatised never renationalised, the closed shops she
broke never re-established.

With the exception of the Scottish parliament and the removal of
hereditary peers, most of what Labour has done could be undone within
the lifetime of a single Tory government that decided to run public
services down again, repeal the Human Rights Act and sweep away the
elaborate system of tax credits for the poor. As things stand, there is
little prospect of achieving the epoch-making results the New Labour
project once promised and to which Blair so evidently aspires. There are
only two things that could change this.

The most obvious of these would be to hold and win a referendum to take
Britain into the euro. When Tories say that Emu would be the end of
Britain, what they mean is that it would be the end of their Britain;
and they are right. It would be the end of the post-imperial illusions,
cultural insularity and vulgar laissez-faire economics on which modern
British conservatism is built. It would locate Britain at the heart of a
political and economic system based on the values of community and
social solidarity that form the core of Blair's vision.

The second option would be, as Mandelson suggests, to resurrect the
vision of a New Politics. If the Wanless report is correct in stating
that health spending must grow faster than the economy for the next 20
years, there will need to be a continuity of progressive governance of
the kind that Britain has never seen before.

Blair correctly diagnoses the structural weakness at the heart of
British progressivism in the split between its liberal and social
democratic components. But his preferred method of overcoming it -
merger - stands no chance of success. If he is really serious about
ushering in a "progressive century", his only hope is an electoral
system capable of accommodating competition on the centre-left between
progressives without handing victory to the right.

Those who protest that Labour seems to have done quite well under
first-past-the-post ignore the extent to which it continues to distort
British politics to the right by handing the balance of power to a few
dozen seats in middle England. A coalition for higher public spending
that depends on the long-term commitment of Mondeo Man will prove too
fragile a basis for the transformation Blair seeks.

Separately, or together, these reforms would fundamentally reshape the
boundaries of British politics. The danger is that if Blair fails to
achieve either of them, he will have succeeded in the revolutionary act
of winning elections again and not much else.

· David Clark is a former Foreign Office special adviser.