IF you didn’t care about the outcome, this would be wonderful entertainment. The battle between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown is one of the few sagas that has crossover appeal. It can be marketed to the mass audience as a national soap opera, Westminster’s Mike Baldwin vs. Ken Barlow. Or, for those in the expensive seats, it is pure Shakespeare, part Macbeth, part Coriolanus, all power play. When a climax such as last Friday’s comes along — a hammering at the polls followed by a merciless cull of some of the saga’s doughtiest characters and talk of a coup at the top — you can hardly blame addicts of the drama for getting feverish in their excitement.
But one day all this will be forgotten, the details at any rate. Tracey Temple might live on as a pub-quiz question; perhaps anoraks will remember the job allocated to Hilary Armstrong. But in 10 or 20 years’ time, these will be lost to oblivion. They will be mere trees when the clear view is of the wood.
Imagine how events looked 30 years ago, in what turned out to be the twilight years of the last Labour government. Doubtless, there would have been frenzied interest in the Westminster soap opera, as one prime minister resigned and another fought hard to survive. Each day would have brought a fresh twist. But now those details are hazy. What we see instead is the big picture: That 1976-79 represented the last gasp of a post-1945 welfare-state consensus that gave government a commanding role in the economy, either managing it or owning chunks of it.
Perhaps historians will say that 2006 was the moment when the discipline and will to win that was forged in 1992 began to melt, when Labour reverted to type, devouring its own.
Still, this is more than a party matter. It also fits into a broader story about the country. The pre-1979 consensus was broken by Margaret Thatcher’s determination to reshape Britain in the image of the market, a neoliberal philosophy that formed a new consensus of its own. That belief in markets remains entrenched, accepted more or less by all the main parties. The New Labour government of 1997 accepted it wholeheartedly.
But Blairism was not merely a continuation of Thatcherism. For while New Labour embraced the market, it insisted market forces could not be left entirely unfettered: There needed to be a minimum wage and at least some (though not all) of the labor protections enshrined in the European social chapter.
Blairism also understood that the public realm mattered, that few people wanted to live in a world of, in the late JK Galbraith’s words, private affluence and public squalor. So New Labour would happily follow Thatcherite strictures on the economy, but would no longer tolerate persistent neglect of the public sphere. They would invest billions in schools and hospitals that had been starved of cash for decades.
Now this synthesis is becoming a consensus of its own. Few expect David Cameron’s Conservatives to roll back the minimum wage or the social chapter. The Tories promise to maintain spending on education and health; they insist they want to eradicate child poverty.
Which brings us to the current ructions tearing apart the government. How do they fit into this story? I suspect we may come to see this period as the moment when the limits of the New Labour synthesis were exposed. For at least seven years, Labour has sunk huge amounts of cash into the state. It has tried scheme after scheme to make it more efficient: Setting targets, issuing directives, oiling, buffing and shining its creaky and rusted machinery. And yet it still isn’t working properly.
That is not because Labour ministers were useless or that a different group of people would have done the job fine. It is rather a structural problem with the British state. Its machinery was designed for a 20th-century world that no longer exists. Today’s citizens are used to fast, efficient, wireless services that give them a high degree of personal choice; the lumbering bureaucracy of the state cannot catch up.
Nor will aping the private sector, pretending government can be run like Domino’s Pizza or DHL, because health, education and public safety are not like garlic bread or packages. They are much more complex to deliver.
That stands as an indictment of the specific Blairist approach to the state. This week I took part in a Radio 4 discussion asking what the left stands for today. The former Downing Street adviser Charles Leadbeater made a striking point. He said we were witnessing the failure of the “McKinsey state”, the Blair experiment in trying to run government like a big company, complete with management consultants and their expensive advice.
Blairism’s great contribution was its assertion that it was not just private value that mattered, but public value too. It tried to make that work, but failed by too often imagining that public goods could be delivered by quasi-private means.
On this logic, the next stage in the journey will be nothing less than a refashioning of the state — replacing the top-down, centralized behemoth of today with a looser, more diffuse, even “organic” network of services that fit the people who use them.
