High Noon for the centre left

Across Britain, Tony Blair’s Labour government has aroused disappointment among its supporters and hatred among its opponents. Yet it retains an unprecedented opinion poll lead. In “Pariah Kingdom”, a polemic for openDemocracy, the Scottish academic and author, Tom Nairn, diagnoses a continuity of “regime” from Thatcher to Blair. He suggests that both leaders have preserved the traditional state in a country that wants to be modern and decentralised. The result is an “After-Britain”, a parody of power.

openDemocracy brought three leading political commentators together to take Nairn’s article as a starting point for a discussion of Britain during and after the election. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Centre and a columnist for the Independent, Matt d’Ancona is Deputy Editor of the Sunday Telegraph and a Director of the Centre for Policy Studies, and Matthew Taylor is the Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and before that was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy. They were joined by Tom Nairn, and the discussion was chaired by Anthony Barnett.

In an experiment, readers now have around two weeks, until 10 June, to develop and post their own questions to the participants in the discussion forum. The participants will reply after the election in this, the first openInterview. We have invited each to select what they think are the best questions.

Matt d’Ancona – Tom’s piece is enormously stimulating. It made me think that one of the most commendable things Tony Blair has done was to form a truce with Thatcherism. That may not be what Tom wants me to conclude. But Blair sees that politics now is not adversarial but sequential. And that the big battles today are not going to be straightforward matters of left versus right, but rather about where régimes are heading next – Tom’s use of that term is acute. The point was precisely not to rebel against Thatcherism but to move beyond it. The first four years needed to demonstrate that New Labour had come to terms with Thatcherism in a way that makes this possible.

So yes, Blair has not escaped her influence, and should not have. Whether the mandate of a second election victory will be to permit Labour to take the country towards a new model, a continental vision of social democracy, say, is still unclear. It is certainly unclear whether Blair either wants to, or is capable of it. I suspect he does want to. I’ve never bought the line that he’s a crypto-Tory. So for me the big question is whether he has the political will. Also, time is running out. He is clearly a two-term prime minister. These are no longer strategic questions, they are immediate, practical questions.

Matthew Taylor – If Labour’s first term is the opening chapter of a longer story it will not have been bad. If it turns out to be the whole story, it would be a disappointment. The project is necessarily incremental. Its objectives are the essential social democratic ones of achieving quality public investment and eradicating poverty.

If Labour continues in power and carries out two further comprehensive spending reviews like the current one, with public spending continuing to grow at only one per cent a year above overall economic growth, then we would have a public expenditure of 44 to 45 per cent of GDP by about 2010. This is the norm for countries in Europe that are both richer and more productive than ours. It would represent a substantial shift in the role and quality of public services, and how we perceive them as they cease to be in constant crisis. From this perspective, Blair’s Labour could turn out to be pretty good.

There is a “but”. I can’t stand the word “narrative”, yet I use it the whole time, and we need one. Where is the clarity about Labour’s ultimate objectives? What does it believe is the good society, or the good citizen, or the good state? Imagine Labour rules for twenty years – what would society be like? Labour ministers are vague, opaque, and contradictory in their account of where they want to take us with the project. It is a real problem and leads to incoherence. They have done so much on reforming the constitution, for example, yet they seem very anti-democratic about the next stage of the process. They have no account of what a good democracy and a good state should be.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – I don’t agree that you should discuss this in abstract terms, such as “a good state”. You have to consider what a good state is for this country. There is no neutral template we can aspire to. This country has a past, a present, and a future. It isn’t Italy, or France. In terms of, say, the Race Relations Act, we achieved something positive. Instead of asserting pride in it, the government cover up the progress with nonsense about immigration and a return to images of Empire. They may want to please both the Mail and the Guardian – both the right and the left – at the same time. But all they are doing is annoying both. It makes no sense.

The problem, Matthew, is that it is madness to do something interesting and inspirational and then pull back. On the issues that matter to me, the tightening of the race relations legislation was a big move in a completely different direction to Margaret Thatcher’s, and all credit to them. In other respects, their relationship to her is almost Oedipal. The worst example is over asylum, where their fear of not being Tory enough militates against everything they should be doing. On the story that this country is going to need for immigration, New Labour is scared witless. Asylum is possibly the worst example of its carrying on in a brutish tradition that is abysmal and immoral.

They could certainly take a more positive line on immigration. Their fear of doing so is insane. The situation will never be as good for them as it is now in electoral terms. So while it is much too simplistic to say we have lived under Thatcherism for the last four years – we have not – Labour is deeply disappointing on the democratic agenda, including the wreckage over London, the fiasco in Wales, regional break-ups, the total abdication of democratic principle when the opposite is called for. All this is deeply problematic.

Tom Nairn – I will follow Yasmin’s example and begin from my own vested interest. Like Yasmin, I was overjoyed and delighted by many of the things that this government launched. After eighteen years struggling for some kind of Scottish political deal, most of them spent in conditions of dire hopelessness, Labour got there and did it, and delivered well and quickly.

Why aren’t we more grateful? Because they have acted without thought of the larger things. Instead, they want to cut off the future that their actions promise. This is what Yasmin is saying about race and asylum. They’ve made new departures while refusing the central changes we need to carry them forward and make them work. There is nothing more infuriating than being taken in the right direction and then suddenly finding yourself turned back in a vicious circle.

Labour: gatecrashing the party

MT – There is a crisis of thinking, a crisis of ideas. But where should the Government get its ideas from? If the Tories are in a mess, then so is the left, which does not have the capacity to think up anything interesting. We need practical ideas and utopianism – and yes, British utopianism, not abstract utopianism. The absence of this stems from the fact that those of us who do engage with these problems don’t seem to have a vision.

Md’A – I think you do have a vision. From my position, working for a right-of-centre paper, I’m often surprised by how coherent the thinking on the left is except for “the thinking about the thinking”. You have set out a clear way. You outline it in some of your writings, Matthew – a new approach to Europe, eradicating poverty rather than equality, constitutional reform. On the latter, constitutional reformers won’t take ‘yes’ for an answer. Blair has completed a lot of the demands that Charter 88 called for. And if it’s not everything, it is still only the first term. Maybe the rest of the agenda will be fulfilled if it is demanded.

I think the important psychological backdrop is that Labour has not come to terms with being in power. It’s not that it doesn’t have a vision but that it dare not speak it. Because it still regards itself as gatecrashing the party. Blair and company look back to 1997 and instinctively they still think of it as a coup. A trick they pulled off thanks to the support of Rupert Murdoch. But perhaps it wasn’t.

Perhaps the mantra that we all utter, “This is a Conservative country”, isn’t so. It’s certainly a first-past-the-post country, but any non-Labour person can see it is also the country of Wilkes, JS Mill, Keir Hardie and the NHS. As an outsider, I’m aware that there is another tradition for Labour to draw on in a second term – and it’s not the tradition of Margaret Thatcher.

YA-B – I am struck by Matt’s image of Labour thinking of itself as a gatecrasher. It’s true. In this country, there is still the idea here that some are born to rule, and others to be ruled. New Labour lacks the deep confidence to drive change, even if it is incremental.

MT – But where is such confidence to come from? Labour has to get that confidence from intellectuals, working through the difficult issues. Instead, Labour’s discourse is incredibly closed. Everything is for the best, everything we do is good, every consequence fine. They will never admit to a dilemma or welcome a real debate. Their closed form of discussion is terrible.

TN – But why do they behave like parvenus, in the Edwardian sense Matt describes? It is because they are still living in that period mentally. They have inherited those structures of identity along with Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy. An immense historical freight weighs them down.

It means they still don’t believe they are the real rulers. They feel the need to pretend that they are. So they construct a synthetic, closed circle of trusted people around them – a new elite that has to stand in for the “true rulers” of the United Kingdom, who have at the same time incomprehensibly degenerated into William Hague and company. The “failure to be open-minded” described by Mathew stems from their failure to confront the ancient state-nation of Britain. “Gatecrashers” can’t enter into open and therefore potentially revealing discussion.

MT – Can I question the “they”? There is a psychological story here. A lot of people in the Labour Party had to talk nonsense throughout a large part of the 1980s. They were then forced to modernise. Yet they were still rejected in 1992. It was profoundly traumatic. After five years of modernisation from 1987 to 1992, all they got was an extra three per cent of votes from the Liberal Democrats.

This led to them having to learn a new script of a different sort. Always being “on message”, pandering to prejudices and all of that. You’re talking about a group of people who for years felt it was impossible to express themselves honestly. Then, in government, it has become just Brown and Blair. And that’s not good. We need other people to come through who are willing to articulate different parts of the agenda.

The democratic agenda

AB – You think it is exclusively the New Labour machine, not the inheritance of the British state, which creates the closed mental world you describe?

MT – Not completely, I’m taken by the idea of the influence of British inheritance. But things are now opening up. We can take an approach that is slightly more hopeful and ask how we can get some dialogue going, and what sort of debates we want.

I am dismayed by the lack of ambition on democratic reform in the manifesto. But progressives are voicing their concern. I know most about the critique of the centralising dirigiste method of public sector management they have embraced. Labour has handed away more power from Whitehall and Westminster than any government in British history. But it has also centralised much more control over public sector management in England. The big issue now is not the West Lothian question, but how can you control everything from London?

We are just beginning to work through the questions this raises. It comes down to asking what we are willing to see done differently in different parts of the country. Ask citizens if they want things done locally, they will say yes. Ask them if they want one hospital service to be a different standard from that in another part of the country, they say no. It’s impossible to find anyone in the government who doesn’t stumble over these contradictions. Nor do I think that people like me in the policy community give them the tools to be able to work through the issues.

Proportional representation will be absolutely crucial for this. There are genuine disagreements over it, which take us to the heart of two different accounts of what it means to be on the left. The first-past-the-posters say, “Get and keep power in order to look after the poor, it doesn’t matter if your electoral system is a bit crooked.” Progressives say a fair electoral system is fundamental to any pluralism and a democracy worth its name. Recently, the progressives are beginning to move again on this issue. For example, Patricia Hewitt’s recent piece in the Financial Times.

A Tory solution?

AB - Suppose we don’t get proportional representation and the Conservatives return. Can they once again set a new agenda?

Md’A – The Conservatives are in a jam on all sorts of levels. William Hague’s instincts were better when he first became leader and pushed for an inclusive politics. Then he went into reverse. We’ll find out on 7 June if that was a wise strategy. The dilemma for Conservatives is, what are the questions for which their solutions are needed?

In 1979 they were obvious – what to do about inflation, the unions, the balance of power between communist and capitalist states. The issues now are more numinous, less glamorous but just as important. It is really important for regular people whether schools are run by Local Education Authorities or not. But it’s difficult to make a compelling political narrative out of that. It’s really important whether doctors have their own fundraising practice or are answerable to some larger structure. These smaller ideas do not lend themselves to grandiose idealism, but are where the Tories should be heading.

But until the European argument is resolved it is very hard, if not impossible, for them. The debate on monetary union has been going on since the Madrid summit in 1989. Until it is resolved they won’t be able to escape from it. Only when the Euro issue is resolved can the Tory Party get back to repositioning itself for power.

AB – This brings us back to Tom’s argument. Remaining half-in, half-out would leave Britain preserving the illusion that the past is still a possible future.

MT – I’m not sure it does. In focus groups, people say they agree with the Tories on the Euro but find them obsessive and not ready for government. It turns the Tories into a pressure group. Quite an effective one on the particular issue…

Md’A – Exactly. It’s a single-issue question. There’s a massive difference between agreeing with a single-issue spokesman and wanting him to run your government.

Are visions permitted?

YA-B – I don’t feel that this is the world as I experience it. The two Matthews see what is happening in incremental policy terms. I feel that unless there is a much more visionary story, on both sides, the discomfort and sense of loss and purposelessness that all of us are feeling – and it is a real crisis at the moment – will not improve. If elections become narrow events, which are only about what is happening in your locality, it will be a terrible loss.

I’m interested in a new vision of what this country is going to be in this century. Who are we as a nation? Are people like me going to be real players in it? Is the Tory party going to continue its dance with bigotry? It was inspirational to take on the House of Lords, and then we end up with fifteen ridiculous “People’s Peers”. It’s like going to bed with someone who promises you the earth and can’t deliver.

MT – But Yasmin, Oliver Letwin has just got himself in trouble because, as a front bench spokesman, he has talked about where he thinks the Tories ought to be in ten years time. As a rightist he believes in a much smaller state. He thinks that if the state spends people’s money it intrudes on their freedoms, limits enterprise and prosperity. This is a vision.

But it has caused the Conservatives a problem, which shows the difficulty for politicians of articulating long-term ideas. When you do it sounds extreme. This is the one thing you mustn’t be in modern politics. It’s the killer characteristic, the focus groups will tell you.

Opening up politics and creating a wider space for debate is terribly important. I go around the country to speak at youth forums and parliaments – not a single one is organised on party lines. Young people aren’t interested in that. They want a different way of talking, and we need to drag the politicians into that somehow. v The nations question

TN – But this is not nearly as true in the periphery – Scotland, Wales or Ireland – as it is in England. We don’t have this paralytic relationship with Europe. Isn’t the real dormant question, where does England fit in? What nation were you talking about, Yasmin?

YA-B – I stick to Britain, Tom.

TN –But the Parekh report, which you helped with, has quite a lot in it about shifting boundaries. And British electoral policies turn on the view of middle England. Where is it? Who is it? What is it? Over eighty per cent of the people in this state have an identity question, which everyone seems incapable of addressing except circuitously, and leads to the curious, dazed sense of walking backward which people feel.

Md’A – The Conservatives dabbled with Englishness as a theme at the beginning of this parliament. Internally, there was a strong debate that has gone dormant. It may return post-election if the English feel disenfranchised. Personally, I hope not. I’m British through and through, not English. The British state is good. It preserves diversity and porousness. Talk of Englishness as a separate entity makes me a bit dizzy actually, and nervous.

TN – Vertigo.

Md’A – Yes, there is a sort of vertigo, because I’m not persuaded of its different existence as a coherent nationalism in the same way as Scottish or Welsh nationalism.

MT – I agree. I think the English brand is damaged. I back England at football, otherwise I’m much more interested in municipal identities, and regional identities. I’m much more optimistic about resolving the dilemmas of solidarity and diversity at the municipal level than I am at the national level. To put it crudely, it is possible to be from Birmingham and a Sikh, a Brummie and a Jamaican, a Brummie and an Irishman or a Scot, in a way it is not possible to be English and all those things. Nation-states are too big for the small things in life and too small for big things in life.

YA-B – This regional dream, Mathew – that once you decentralise, good things happen – isn’t true. Some of the most horrendous battles for supremacy and deliberate exclusions take place at local level. Many places with a strong regional sense produce the worst racist incidents and ethnic tensions. There is a lot of romance about that kind of devolution and decentralisation. I completely agree with Matt. It is the vague, porous Britishness, which is open, owned by nobody, that is the best shape for someone like me. I could never be English.

AB – The three of you extol Britishness and reject Englishness. But just suppose the Conservatives win on a middle England ticket in, say, four years time, after some split or other in the Labour government drives down their support and reputation for competence. A flight from Labour will create a Scottish Nationalist majority in the Edinburgh parliament, perhaps in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. At the same time Europe may be forging a larger constitutional settlement. This would be anathema to the Tories but could be a godsend to Scotland, where the dominant parties are all pro-European.

This is a scenario for the break-up of the British state, with Scotland opting to join the Euro as a Hague government cuts back social expenditure. If the Scots hold a referendum and leave, what is your nationality? However much preferable it is being British than being English, your nationality is also something decided by others. It is easy to say, “I don’t like the brand”, but it is what you are born into and in that sense what you are.

Md’A – OK, to pursue the brand analogy, if you go into the shops and it’s the only one left –

TN – It is the only one left!

Md’A – I think Matthew’s point is that he still wouldn’t buy it and I agree entirely!

TN – A new British settlement can’t be done without England.

MT – The only way to save Britain, in my view, is to make new links between Newcastle and Glasgow, between Manchester and Edinburgh, between different sub-national centres. The Scots do not give a fig for England.

TN – That is completely the opposite of the truth. Almost all individuals and families in Scotland and Wales have the strongest imaginable vested interest in the preservation of “Britain” in the sense of links. The last thing they want is the fracturing of British civil society, or a break-up in the ethnically driven Yugoslav sense.

But they are now at the point of recognising that political differences are on another plane from this. They want self-government to be combined with a positive relationship with Britain, or the Isles, or whatever name is appropriate. The concern about this is far deeper in the periphery than among the English, the majority of whom seem indifferent. We, in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, North and South, have set out on a new and redefining constitutional reform. We can’t do it constructively without the English.

I think the three of you are mad on this point, in the sense of being in reality-denial. Middle England has been tapping you on the shoulder for the last seven or eight years. To do him justice, William Hague has tried to respond. Although his proposal to turn the parliament of Westminster into a parliament of England once a week is so preposterous that I find it difficult to take seriously. But if you want to retain a larger Britain, for this century, as you put it, Yasmin, then there has to be an England to negotiate this and to want this.

YA-B – I think people in England are, in a hazy and vague way, worried. I get a lot of emails from people anxious about England and where it is going. And it is an emotional thing – the elite have sidestepped this one for quite a long time. If you listen to the radio phone-in programmes, there are many angry calls from the English to say why can’t they have that box which says ‘English’ in the recent census form, for example. These are small temperature changes – but they’re significant ones.

Matthew is part of the metropolitan elite, which is confident and powerful. But there are people who live in the same areas as you who feel that their Englishness is being lost, degraded, and not respected, while everyone else’s ethnicities are recognised. Young kids bring this out in the playground. You have to be careful not to underestimate these emotional reactions.

MT – Of course people in Scotland don’t want Berlin walls to be erected, or bans on visits to relatives who moved to Coventry to work in car factories. But you mustn’t assume this correlation between identity and constitutional nationhood. I maintain that the Scots couldn’t care less about English politics. You could take away the constitutional link, but that doesn’t mean you’re shattering the links of identity and family.

I think that if Britain ends, it will be with a whimper not a bang; it will just become irrelevant to people’s lives. Nor will it mean I’m left as being fundamentally English. I’m left as not being anything. I’m white with nothing interesting in my background. A Londoner who supports West Bromwich Albion and likes bits of Cornwall because I spent holidays there. And that’s how I want to be.

The 2001 election

AB – The election does not touch these issues.

MT – That’s because Tom is right that elections are about the chance to toss out a bad government, that’s all. People in Britain are confronted with a choice of which of three parties they dislike the least. They know perfectly well which will win so why should they take much interest? By the way, I think claims about voter apathy are greatly overstated. There was a good turnout in 1992, because people didn’t know who was going to win. When people don’t know who will win, they’ll vote. It’s a rational judgment.

Md’A – Precisely because the outcome is so foregone, and a lot of people are taking the decision not to vote, it’s turned into an oddly interesting campaign. I would never have guessed that tax would be the issue for the first week or so. It won’t have the slightest effect on the result but it’s a really interesting debate for the future. People have been saying that Labour has been fighting the last election – in a funny way, they might be fighting the next one. The limits of taxation, the size of the state – these are really big issues, and they will return if the progressive agenda flourishes in the second term.

The old-style activism is going. What matters is the influence people can have on their lives and their local communities. That’s why the devolution- decentralisation debate, not just in constitutional terms but also in public service terms, is absolutely central to the future debate. But it may not resolve itself in ways that people used to call political, in the 1960s for example.

MT – Can I try to fit these strands together? New Labour hasn’t told us whether the good society, in their view, would have a high degree of civic activism. Civic activism is apparently something the poor do, in order to attack social exclusion. It’s not something the middle class is expected to do. It seems at times that Labour would rather people did not have a debate, or argue back, but were just compliant.

One of the things that was compelling about Margaret Thatcher, and created real loyalty, is that she called on people to express themselves. She said you had to express the private bit of your character – the acquisitive, competitive bit – and if you did not, then you’re not really living a full life. New Labour needs to say that if you’re not expressing the civic part of your character, the part that is about participating, you are also not living a full life.

Linked to this is another change. Social democratic thinking has replaced the traditional objective of reducing inequality with ending poverty. Labour now talks about the eradication of poverty, and about raising the floor. It is not concerned about stopping the widening gap between the floor and the ceiling or diminishing it through redistribution. Its core objectives are eliminating poverty, as a way of life associated with an incipient underclass, and increasing spending to create a quality public sector.

YA-B – You can’t make a good society by narrowing peoples’ vision, domesticating them to live satisfied lives in smaller and smaller environments. A lot of people aren’t going to vote for Labour because we despise their politics and rhetoric on asylum, which has nothing to do with civic responsibility. You can’t be civically responsible and treat outsiders like dirt. We are living in a globalised world, and how we treat the rest of the world defines what we are like at home.

AB – Race and asylum are playing a major part in the election, though I’ve not yet seen a good speech on them. But other major issues are not.

The fate of the environment is of deep concern to people of all generations and persuasions. Is it part of the election campaign? No, it is not.

As part of its election coverage, openDemocracy is taking on the spin-doctor’s stereotype of “Worcester Woman”. We’re taking time to go and talk with actual women in Worcester. It’s striking how frequently they express anxiety about the role of corporations, from the supermarkets, to plcs taking over local business, to the branding of what children want and value. Often in very articulate ways, people fear corporations have got power and are not accountable. Is this central issue being confronted during the election? No, it is not.

And take the constitution. When I talk to people in Number 10, they say it’s a non-issue, that you can’t write new constitutions except after wars or revolutions. Yet only thirty miles away the Germans and French are arguing about a European constitution. It is happening, on a continental scale and to us.

If we’re going to talk about civic responsibility, and I do, then part of the responsibility of a political class is to lead its people to confront issues that it can clearly see are coming, even if it makes voters uncomfortable and focus groups don’t like it. This is what leadership is about, if it is about anything. But what do we have? All the party leaders go around saying how we must lead in Europe. None of them are leading here.

(long pause)

MT – What a good way to finish.

AB – It was a question.

TN – You raise a huge issue and whatever it is that is happening here has common links with what is going on in the US, France and Italy and the need to understand their elections.

MT – Let’s not lose all sense of optimism. The left in the ’80s was in a terrible state of conflict and madness. In the ’90s it was in a state of total discipline around the Labour Party to get power at all costs. We now have a process of disenchantment. The danger is that one group will cling on to hope, and another will just say, “yah boo sucks, Blair is a traitor”. I think we must move beyond that. More people in government are aware of “progressive dilemmas”, to use David Marquand’s phrase. There is an opportunity for those who want to take on issues in a constructive way, which has not existed but might do in the next two or three years.

YA-B – Anthony said that at least race is one major issue that has been raised during the election. I don’t think so. Not in the way that is really important. A huge mind-shift is needed to move on from the idea of white nationhood. This is just as true for New Labour as anyone – they are still incapable of having an equal relationship with black people, wanting gratitude and expecting fear. This is another very important debate that needs to happen.

Md’A – This is it for the centre-left. There has been a long and in many ways glamorous preamble, with only minor disappointments along the way – domes, Mandelson and so on. What happens now, on 7 June, will transform the political landscape.

The sight of Blair back in Number 10 will be a major moment. The expectations will be enormous. People expect Labour to be the government and they want it to deliver. The progressive sector will not have another chance. You deliver now or that’s it. It’s 11.59. I’m looking forward to it. It’s going to be very interesting to watch.