Bye-bye Blair

Anthony Giddens
OVER TO YOU, MR BROWN
188pp. Polity. Paperback, £9.99.
9780745642239
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
YO, BLAIR!
128pp. Politico’s Publishing Ltd. £9.99.
9781842752067

Here are two polemics on the Blair years from clever and experienced writers who should never be left alone together in the same room. Anthony Giddens’s habit is to give mildly reproachful indications that some aspects of New Labour governance have been disappointing since Tony Blair was swept to power in Britain on May 1, 1997. Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s rage against the man he describes as a “pious God-botherer” and charlatan, one who has destroyed his country’s independence, bursts dyspeptically from virtually every page.

Both authors establish their perspective with a scene-setting description of visits to Washington, DC. Wheatcroft applauds the refusal in July 2006 of Nouri al-Maliki, newly appointed Prime Minister of democratized Iraq, to bow to American bullying and take Israel’s side in its short war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. He contrasts this stand with Blair’s subsequent refusal, in Washington en route to a Carribean family holiday, to condemn the Israeli counter-attack. It is cited as further shameful evidence that Britain’s poodle Prime Minister has reduced a proud and ancient nation to craven subservience.

As much the intellectual-as-courtier as Wheatcroft is the armchair freedom fighter, Lord Giddens’s anecdote is equally revealing about its author’s perspective. He describes his own first trip in the Blair entourage to the twentieth century’s New Rome in 1998: by Concorde with New Labour’s VIPs, black limos from the airport escorted by police outriders, high-level meetings, the White House dinner where he stands in line to meet President Clinton between Harrison Ford and Barbra Streisand. The reader half-expects to learn that both stars offered to play Tony and Cherie Blair in the film of The Third Way if only Giddens would knock his 1998 Blairite text into a script. No such luck, but the visit was “a bit different from teaching sociology in Cambridge”, the wide-eyed author notes.

Indeed. A prime ministerial cavalcade is a seductive experience and Giddens appears seduced, albeit by red-carpet treatment that is distinctly at odds with the unflashy and egalitarian values of social democracy he preaches in Over to You, Mr Brown. As Wheatcroft might interject, “That’s Blair for you, showbiz vulgarity triumphs over substance every time”. Yet Giddens’s book is by far the more useful of the two as Blair hands the key to 10 Downing Street to his long-term collaborator, No 11 neighbour and rival, Gordon Brown. It contains little that is likely to be unfamiliar to fellow toilers in academe (he generously cites the research of others), to policy-holics like Mr Brown or to colonies of think tanks on the banks of the Thames. But to the lay reader contemplating a Brown future or to students, it will prove accessible and stimulating reading. Giddens knows undergraduates well enough to bribe them with a joke or three at the start of every chapter. There is more Groucho Marx here than Karl.

So what does Giddens propose? And will Prime Minister Brown, steeped in ten years of government experience as Britain’s finance minister as Blair was not in 1997–8, take any notice of such an arch-Blairite scholar? Brown is famously wary of those who have not sworn a blood oath of loyalty, though he has promised to be more open and inclusive. Giddens could be a test. His tone is respectful (twice as many index references to Gordon as to Tony) and he certainly shares much of what will now become the New Labour Squared agenda. Wealth creation through a lightly but firmly regulated free-market economy; a state in which power is devolved but which ensures that its citizens have the necessary means – health and education, jobs and money – to lead fulfilled lives; personal security from crime, terrorism, Big Brother and climate change; a better work/life balance; a better EU/US balance too; it is a familiar list, one which New Labour has promoted while failing, Giddens concedes, to synthesize as the “third way” between Thatcherism and the lost semi-socialist world of 1945–79.

All this is to be achieved in a society where the overall tax burden remains roughly at the 40 per cent-plus of GNP where it now stands, but reweighted in a more egalitarian and greener way. The rich should pay more, the poor less. The poor should also get their fair shares of society’s goodies, health care and Cambridge bursaries for their kids, though they must be persuaded to take more responsibility for their own lives too. It is an important insight of Blairism that Attlee’s welfare state model delivered more to the middle class and the clever than to the poor, a reproach to Labour critics who extol the Golden Age.

“Children First” should be Brown’s guiding principle. Yes, says Giddens. Excellent, but it already is. The real question is how to do all this. Giddens is right to say that New Labour’s record in reshaping public services, redistributing money to the poorest and much else since 1997 is much better than generally acknow

ledged by left-wing Labour critics of the Betrayal School, let alone by libertarian upper-middle-class conservatives like Wheatcroft, who ignores it. But, like New Labour, Giddens is also better at saying what “should” happen than at doing the difficult bit and setting out exactly how a policy goal is to be achieved. Lloyd George knew what to do: break a few heads. But, on the home front at least, Blair has usually been timid and consensual. Hence the pervasive sense of disappointment as he departs that Young Lochinvar did not fulfil his promise, that presentational gloss – doubtful statistics about exam results, “spin” in the jargon of Fleet Street’s counter-spinners – has too often been a substitute for delivery.

Giddens knows this and ruefully acknowledges some of it, just as he admits that the activist, interventionist foreign policy he sees as essential to a globalized, inter-dependent world has led to half-cocked disaster in Iraq. Giddens does make some specific proposals, such as a 1 per cent annual wealth tax on assets on a sharply rising scale. This is easier said than done when the über-rich have their own versions of Islamic banking networks. The Swiss apparently have such a tax, but it is probably a secret. Would it be wiser to concentrate, as Giddens also suggests, on changing the behaviour of the rich by encouraging philanthropy to grow to US levels or solidarity to German ones?

What the Blairite peer does not do is to challenge, as some constructive critics have, the long-term effectiveness of Brown’s key policies for the alleviation of poverty: the New Deal, which actively prods the long-term unemployed into the labour market, a local version of the Clinton approach; or the Treasury’s system of tax credits, a form of negative income tax designed to bolster the net income of the working poor, so complex that it seems to need better accountants than are employed by the City’s derivatives traders.

Giddens is right in saying that the next general election, due in 2009–10, is wide open, but that the Conservatives under the reviving leadership of David Cameron could win it – unless Brown makes a far more effective positive case than Blair has done for what he and Giddens call “the progressive consensus”. Like Brown, Giddens tends to shy away from what fails to interest him or makes him uncomfortable. He seems unaware that the primary function of state power is not SureStart, but protection from external threat and internal lawlessness. There is not much here about defence or law and order. Though the right-wing UK Independence Party is gently deplored, there is also a striking absence of any mention of the British National Party (BNP), its rival for disaffected votes – in the BNP’s case Labour ones – if Brown stumbles. It happens.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft has no such fastidiousness. He revels in a fight. As a title, Yo, Blair! says it all. The author is one of eager millions who believe that President Bush’s overheard greeting at the G8’s St Petersburg summit was a personal and national humiliation rather than the kind of boyish banter routinely used by one private school and Ivy League college child of privilege to another. A nickname addict, Mr Bush calls tall reporters “Stretch” and says “Hey, Bolton” to his former colleague, John. I do not think he says “Yo, Putin”. Nor will his recent embarrassingly warm farewell tribute to his “good” and “courageous” ally persuade Blair’s detractors otherwise. After all, Wheatcroft quotes approvingly Kendal Myers, the State Department analyst who rashly called Churchill Washington’s first British poodle. As the old bulldog himself might have put it, “some poodle, some leash”.

Of course, Blair is open to sustained criticism for the way in which he took Britain to war again in 2003 and the way he failed to exert the influence that decision should have given him in Washington to help shape the disastrous occupation. He did no better than Colin Powell. But few then realized how dysfunctional the second Bush presidency would be, over New Orleans, the budget process and climate change policy, as well as over its lurch from gut isolation to the worldwide big stick after 9/11. Where Wheatcroft, assorted Little Englanders, Big Europeans, Trotskyites and BBC executives go wrong is in their unshakeable belief that Blair acted in bad faith from the start. In saying during the military build-up of 2002–03 that Saddam Hussein could stay in power if he disarmed he stands accused of contradicting his post-bellum justification, the removal of a dictator. Yet if Saddam had disarmed he would have been overthrown.

It is possible to have honest disagreement about the above assertion, but Wheatcroft on Blair is not a combination to entertain that possibility. Wearily often he asserts as fact things he cannot know. For instance, that public grief for the Queen Mother was sincere, for Diana synthetic, and compounds his own prejudices by uncritically treating the media as a sparkling stream, not a polluted river. In the 24/7 era of rolling news-as-entertainment, this is a crucial blind spot.

Nor does he give thought to Blair’s over-arching calculation of Britain’s national interest, that the global hegemon (however temporary its status) should not be left to act in total isolation from the international community, even from a UN whose own record had been as erratic, self-serving and at times murderous (usually by default) as any State Department Under-Secretary for Latin America. Hug the White House close: though their greater experience would almost certainly have counselled caution in Iraq, Churchill (who bombed it first) and Margaret Thatcher would have grasped that point – as Anthony Eden tragically did not.

All the same Yo, Blair! could have been fun. Evelyn Waugh, whose scornful, snobbish rage against the vulgarity of the passing parade Wheatcroft seeks to emulate, still makes us rock with laughter in his austere mockery. If Anthony Giddens is too mildly reasonable, Geoffrey Wheatcroft is disarmed by his own anger, a saloon bar ranter still going on when the bar is shut and the broken glass is being swept up.

_________________________________________________________

Michael White is an assistant editor at the Guardian, whose political editor he was from 1990 to 2006.