[A-List] UK state: neoliberal continuity

["Michael Keaney" <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

There is no Blairism. An 'ism' needs a coherent set of ideas

This last decade has seen a new style, a new PR technique, but not a new
ideology. Thatcherism remains the guiding light

Simon Jenkins
Wednesday April 25, 2007
The Guardian

We are to be overwhelmed. A tidal wave of epitaphs, eulogies and
obsequies of Tony Blair is upon us. His era will crave definition. The
flesh must be made word, and the word is Blairism. Already it is
creeping into the columns of this paper. It hangs on the lips of friend
and foe alike.

Let us get one thing straight. Blairism does not exist and never has. It
is all froth and miasma. It consists of throwing a packet of words such
as change, community, renewal, partnership, social and reform into the
air and watching them twinkle to the ground like blossom until the body
politic is carpeted with sweet-smelling bloom. An -ism implies a
coherent set of ideas, an ideology capable of driving a programme in a
particular direction. In plumbing the shallows of Blair's ideas, even
his guru, Raymond Plant, was reduced to taking refuge in Daniel Bell's
End of Ideology. Like most British prime ministers - whatever they
proclaim - Blair in office has taken things as he found them, tootling
along until the dying fall of his departure.

That is not to say that Britain under Blair and Gordon Brown has lacked
a guiding light, but that light has been Thatcherism. This reality has
been obscured by the congenital bipolarity of British politics and the
bifocalism of the Westminster media, in which protocol requires that
everything is expressed in terms of government and opposition. Hence
Blairism cannot be Thatcherism because Blair is Labour and Margaret
Thatcher Tory. For a decade British politics has, quite simply, been
wrongly described.

Blair and Brown became Thatcherites by conviction in the early 1990s and
have never deserted the faith. They tore up Labour's pledges to raise
income tax, restore trade union rights, renationalise utilities, keep
the NHS in public hands and pursue nuclear disarmament. Blair never
criticised Thatcher, indeed he adored her and boasted of her praise for
him (in the Sun) before the 1997 election. Since then he regularly
sought her advice on foreign policy, above all in "hugging close" each
incumbent of the White House. He professed friendship with George Bush
and has preferred the right to the left among fellow European leaders.

Meanwhile Brown at the Treasury renationalised nothing and privatised
anything that moved, including much of public administration. Brown's
emblem has been the soaring wealth of the City of London, grown fat on
his fees. He has displayed to a fault Thatcherism's achilles heel, a
disbelief in the public service ethos. The greatest of all
privatisations, of the bulk of public sector investment, would have made
even Thatcher blanch. And she never dared his assault on unemployment,
single parent and disability benefits.

Blair's apologists cite a few items with which to clothe his -ism, such
as the minimum wage, tax credits (invented by Geoffrey Howe), a gesture
against foxhunting and the odd inner-city initiative. There has been
modest progress on child poverty and waiting lists (if you believe
them), though the poor appear to have grown poorer under Blair, and the
rich far richer. Europe's social chapter was signed but not implemented.
Taxes have risen but chiefly on expenditure, as Thatcherism ordains. Any
government in power for a decade and consuming 40% of the national
product could hardly fail to show some improved public welfare.

A leader shows his ideological bias when faced with real choices. In
Blair's case these have included whether to ally himself with Europe or
America, renew Trident, pursue comprehensive as opposed to selective
schools, keep the private sector out of the NHS, privatise London's tube
and use consultants rather than civil servants to cure administrative
evils. On each occasion Blair has opted for the prevailing Thatcherite
orthodoxy inherited from John Major.

The public sector may not have shrunk drastically under Blair, but then
it did not do so under the Tories, nor has it in any other modern state.
Thatcherism was never anti-statist, rather a different way of ordering
the state. It is one that Blair has never renounced, nor sought to
replace. To him and to Brown the path to delivery of public services
lies through private money and the private sector. That is Thatcherism.

Lexicographers will seek other definitions of Blairism. One might be the
manner by which he attained power in 1993-97. This was his "project" to
hijack the Labour party and turn it into an electoral machine for his
own brand of charismatic leadership. The neutering of the unions, the
humiliation of the national executive and annual conference, the
rewriting of Clause Four and the concentration of power on the leader's
office constituted a coup on a scale not seen since the growth of modern
parties in the 19th century. The coup was brilliant, but it did not
usher in "Blairism", rather it made Britain safe for Thatcherism for
another decade. It was a project for winning power, not for using it.
Blair captured Labour much as Napoleon captured the French revolution.
It was his finest hour, but it was no ideological innovation.

Another definition of Blairism to break surface is as a description of a
style of rule. Here Blair is in line of descent from 19th-century
exponents of messianic authority such as Nietzsche and Max Weber. Like
their "ideal leader", he is never politically specific, always
visionary, never partisan, always charming and disarming, a "friend to
the people". Such qualities are quasi-religious, those of exposition
rather than decision. They are what we now call spin not substance.
Blair's 1995 conference speech, an hour-long confection of pure verbal
candyfloss, was a classic of the genre. He has been a remarkable
exponent of this style, but it remains a style, a technique of public
relations, not an -ism.

The word Blairism reflects a yearning to fit politics into a conceptual
straitjacket, but it is a misnomer resulting from Britain's archaic
political conversation. Blair's term in Downing Street has been the
continuance of an ideological narrative that began in 1979, not 1997.
The old saw, that a government that lacks an anchor in ideology will
founder on the rock of personality, would certainly apply to Blair were
it not for the fact that he has had a rock, he has had an ideology. It
was Thatcherism.


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