LONDON, 24 December 2005 — Will Tony Blair still be prime minister this time next year? Until recently I assumed the answer was yes. Granted that, post-Iraq, Blair is a more divisive and tarnished figure than before, and less of an electoral asset too. But he is also a man with a third mandate and still pretty much at the top of his game. Logically, from Labor’s point of view, he should go in the second half of this Parliament, giving his heir apparent, the current UK Finance Minister Gordon Brown, the best chance to craft a goodwill bounce into an election-winning position. The polls show that Labor voters agree. Now, though, I’m not so sure it will happen.
Why not? Because the Labor party is in danger of sleepwalking into a trap set by the new leader of the Opposition Conservative Party, David Cameron, that’s why. Cameron has twin tactics for making the Conservatives electable. The first is to move the Tory party from the right to the center. This week’s poll for the Guardian newspaper shows just how well that is going. The key here is not the Tories’ single-point lead over Labor. It’s the fact that half of Liberal Democrat voters and more than a third of Labor voters said that Cameron “is someone I could vote for.” This is new and important. It won’t do to dismiss this as a George Bush-style deception.
Cameron’s second tactic is equally simple. It is to get Blair out as soon as possible. Early days these may be, but those Cameronian embraces of Blair have a cold logic. The aim is to divide Blair from his party in the hope that a Labor revolt will clear the Tories’ most formidable foe from their path. If Blair is forced out, Cameron will paint Labor as the enemy of change and reform. He will say that the Tories are the party that can achieve what Blair failed to do. And he may very well succeed. Because important parts of that message would be true.
That is the dilemma that faces Labor as 2005 draws to a close. It is indeed a moment of decision for a party that 13 years ago appeared incapable of ever winning another general election and which for the last 11 years has never seemed likely to lose one. It is a moment of decision about the New Labor project, warts and all. Of course, that project was never perfect and has inevitably accumulated a list of flaws, and sometimes worse, that tax the patience of even the most forgiving. Of course, too, nothing is for ever and New Labor has to be reformed and renewed like anything else. But the fact remains: the only reason Labor won any of the last three elections was because of the New Labor transformation.
And if Labor repudiates — or is seen to have repudiated — that transformation then a credible challenger, such as the one it may now be facing, will drive it out of office.
It is essential to be even-handed here. There is a share of fault and vanity on all sides of Labor’s current argument, along with the passionate feeling. The anti-Blair fanatics, seemingly indifferent to whether the government survives or not, have much to answer for. But some of the Brownite irreconcilables can sometimes be incredibly shortsighted too. And Blair himself has seemed prone again this year to kamikaze moments in his relations with his party. It is a sign of Labor’s current vulnerability that there is so little of the necessary care, rigor and distance in the debate about the government’s current predicament, especially in the argument over the government’s schools white paper.
It is not an accident that the arena in which this turmoil must now resolve itself is that of education. The left no longer seriously pursues a radically egalitarian economic project. History has forced that illusion from the field for the foreseeable future. But the idea that a new and more equal world can be created through education remains a widely held and honorable one, even if it is just as tantalizingly hard to achieve.
Blair can sometimes seem insensitive to that. But his critics are selective too. The UK’s Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott should be nobody’s hero for his extraordinary attack this week on the government’s education plans. “If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that everyone wants to go there,” he told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper.
The great danger? What world is he living in? Certainly not the city port of his constituents, whose schools consistently produce the worst school results of any education authority in the whole of England. A few good schools there would be just what the city’s next generation needs.
The critics also need to confront their denial about the school system’s wider failings. By 2008 Labor expects spending per pupil to have doubled since 1997. Yet 43 percent of 11-year-olds still do not reach required levels of literacy and numeracy. This is not a system that is working well. Labor MPs may choose not to face that fact, but in the meanwhile a lot of their voters have to live with it. A YouGov poll this week showed that only 57 percent of Labor voters think schools are improving. A third of Labor voters believe that the comprehensive system — totemic for so many for so long — was a bad idea.
I accept that Blair may be so driven by political positioning that he sometimes fails, on this as on earlier issues, to give the practical side of his reforms the attention that they need until forced into it by the fear of parliamentary defeat — never the best way to get a piece of legislation right. But Blair’s critics — especially those who live in areas with good comprehensives and those who send their own children to private schools — should not be so dogmatic or naive about the need to address the failings of the system in new ways.
