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Mr Blair needs to underline the purpose of his radicalism

If Labour can't state basic social democratic values of greater equality and, yes, redistribution now, then when can it?

Donald Macintyre
Thursday 19 September 2002 00:00 BST
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All right, Tony Blair's speech on poverty yesterday wasn't quite the "New tax blow for the middle class" some of the advance publicity had prepared us for. Which doesn't mean that the speech – which mentioned redistribution in its first paragraph – didn't matter. Too often, perhaps, he has expanded on the first part of "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" at the expense of the second. Yesterday he was unequivocal in asserting that poverty was a cause of crime. For this reason alone, the speech was important to the unprecedented self-examination under way on the European left in advance of Sunday's German election.

For a man deeply preoccupied with Iraq, Blair continues to monitor European politics with an extraordinary closeness, as his presence at a private centre-left think-in last weekend testifies True, it was a seminar convened by Policy Network, an international think-tank chaired by his old friend Peter Mandelson. Nevertheless, it isn't every head of government who would drive early on a Saturday morning to a hotel in rural Surrey and discuss the problems of the European left with an assorted group of British and European politicians and policy wonks.

It's at occasions like this that you get a sense of Blair's vastly grown intellectual self-confidence as a proven election winner. But you also get a sense of his frustration that not everyone on either the European or British centre-left yet sees what to him is perfectly obvious: that for social democratic parties to succeed politically, they now have to begin by occupying, in the face of growing voter insecurity, some of the territory traditionally yielded to the right, including crime, defence, asylum and welfare reform (not to mention sound economic management). And how impatient he is for left-of-centre parties to forsake old-fashioned socialist statism for "an enabling rather than a controlling" state. Blair worries that the Italian left hasn't yet realised that at least some of Silvio Berlusconi's welfare reform plans – changes long taken for granted in Britain – are actually correct because they will strengthen the Italian economy.

In fact, Blair is irritated to find that he has to gang up with some of the more prominent right-of-centre leaders against excessive European centralisation, for the simple reason that some of the European left hasn't yet got it that the drive for ever-closer union is merely handing their reactionary and right-wing opponents the potent national identity card. And it's pretty obvious that Blair believes that while Germany has seen off a potential threat from the extreme right by dealing with the perceived defects of its asylum and immigration policies, few other European countries, almost certainly Britain included, can yet be sure of having done so.

As for Europe, so at home. Here his key mantra continues to be that New Labour will fail only if it isn't New Labour enough. Where he is faced with entrenched union opposition to public service reform – and to the private finance initiative (PFI) in particular – he is as uncowed as he is impatient. He thinks, almost certainly rightly, that union members are vastly more worried about pensions than PFI if the latter can deliver better hospitals and schools.

One of his overt regrets is that the Government did not begin the process of radical public service reform much earlier – though he would also, rightly, acknowledge that this would have been difficult given the tightness of the public finances in the first two years of government. In his model, there must be no let-up in the search for radical new ways of delivering public services in the public interest: continuous revolution rather than yielding to the seductive attractions of "consolidation". For this view, Alan Milburn, the Secretary of State for Health, struggling to usher in his self-governing "Foundation Hospitals" against Treasury scepticism, is one of the most powerful pioneers of the "radical" anti-statist view of public services, in which what works is all that matters.

It would be foolish to ignore, let alone reject, the force of most of this. Who now objects to the use of private contractors to collect rubbish or run public baths? The old left was indeed hung-up on means rather than ends. A service doesn't become less public just because it is delivered by a private-sector instrument.

But this doesn't mean that the opponents of reform are exclusively to blame for the fact that much of this remains controversial within Labour. The Government could have done more to help to modernise the unions. And it looks in retrospect as if making the much wider use of the private-sector in public services the "story" of the Labour manifesto launch before the 2001 election was a serious error. This was not only because it unnecessarily ignited trade union outrage – synthetic as well as real – but also because it gave rise to an impression, not yet dissipated, that New Labour was guilty of a fallacy that mirrored that of old Labour: namely that means are as important as ends. There was at least a danger that in an argument (promoted largely by the Government itself) about use of the private sector, the purpose – better public service delivery – got lost.

Partly this was, and sometimes still is, a matter of rhetoric. Ministers were too reluctant to discuss their goals out loud for fear that it would switch off the Daily Mail audience, who might fear any measure targeted at those less well off than themselves. For this reticence continued despite the near-collapse of political opposition. Philip Gould, one of the leading "radicals" around Blair, is a brilliant strategist. But he sometimes talks as if the many-headed Tory monster is just about to come charging invincibly over the brow of the hill. This just doesn't stand up as a story. If Labour can't state basic social democratic values of greater equality and, yes, redistribution now, when can it?

But it's not just rhetoric. To take just one random example, for all the education reforms – some of which, like the literacy and numeracy tests, have most benefited the least well-off children – there is a still a huge challenge ahead in extending real opportunities to the 50 per cent of the population who, even under Labour's plans, won't get into higher education.

It is hardly worth contesting Tony Blair's passionate belief that credibility on traditionally "right-wing" issues makes it much easier to deliver for the left. One of the many insights in Joe Klein's recent book about Bill Clinton is the former US President's candid admission that he should have postponed his attempt at universal health care until he had tackled welfare reform. However, the corollary is that governments of the social democratic centre-left also need continually to renew belief in what they are for, and in what distinguishes them from the right. "Radicalism", yes, but radicalism (like prudence) for a purpose.

Modestly, but importantly, Blair started to do this yesterday. Before a no doubt fractious and uneasy party conference the week after next, he needs to do more.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk

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