“Blairism’s greatest triumph was shifting the centre ground to the left.”

Pardon?

“Blairism’s greatest triumph was shifting the centre ground to the left”

I agree with Gastro George… you are joking, right?

“Blairism’s greatest triumph was shifting the centre ground to the left.”

“… the same idiotic obsession with market mechanisms…”

Is this meant to be hilarious?
I’m quite staggered.

1,2,3

Let’s be clear here – in 1996 poverty wasn’t a political issue any more, unemployment was a post-industrial price worth paying and a massive shortage nurses, with regular 18month waits for operations, was a result of the nature of the NHS, not a result of a lack of funding.

In 2006 unemployment was well down and poverty was an issue that Labour was being attacked for not reducing fast enough. The NHS budget doubled to pay nurses enough to recruit and keep them, and the public was judging waits against an 18 week target not just whinging about 18 month waits with an apathy born of believing it could never change.

Anyone really want to pretend that isn’t a shift in the centre ground towards higher public spending and greater desire for social justice?

So let’s all be grown ups and acknowledge that while Labour was no where near as ambitious as we would all like – it did at least achieve some things.

Otherwise why not just vote Tory/LibDem ourselves?

oh – and I agree with the article, though we are going to have to be realistic that the centre ground is shifting right again already, and we have five years of hardline right-wing small state government who are already trying to shift the centre ground so we need to work for years just to get back to as left as Blair and Brown made us.

Yes, and I hear Catholicism’s greatest triumph was shifting the centre ground toward secularism.

I do agree that Ed Miliband – if he lives up to his talk – is probably the best candidate (of those with a chance of winning). He appears to be signalling he’d like a departure from the New Labour’s CBI-based policies, which can only be a good thing…

‘Blairism’s greatest triumph was shifting the centre ground to the left.’

I thought it returning the country to the Days of Empire when Johnny Foreigner did what he was jolly well told or we’d slap him silly with all our military might.

Or repealing all those blasted ‘civil liberties’.

Didn’t NHS spending increase under the Tories?

What does “the centre ground” mean here? Does it refer to politicians’ policies, their rhetoric/PR or the opinions of voters?

The author only defends the window-dressing interpretation. I don’t think many people would agree that changing politician’s presentation strategies was a particularly great triumph.

As for the other interpretations, i don’t think the centre now is very much to the left of where it was in the 1980s, either policywise – the current government is more right-wing than Thatcher’s in many respects, and the opposition now is certainly less left-wing – or voterwise: centre-left parties received much the same vote-share in 2010 as in 1980 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_popular_vote.svg).

Can anyone think of a way in which “the centre ground” is different now that is worth being triumphant about?

If nothing else, this post contains this absolute gem:

It is not the right place to argue if the electorate was right or wrong

By definition the electorate are right. That is democracy for you. To claim you know better than the electorate is supreme arrogance or borderline totalitarianism.

More to the point though, I notice that this is about qualities, but no mention of direction or policies. If you think that Cameron was all about presentation, why is he persisting with the idea of less government (although he should memo some ministers on that) and with the Big Society idea which has never gone across well? There has to be substance, or an opposition leader looks like an opportunist scavenger wanting power for his or her own sake. Ed Milliband may have this, but it would be nice to see it displayed.

And since when was cycling to work a party political issue?

There is more than one dimension to politics, as any fule kno.

Blairism’s greatest triumph was shifting the centre ground to the left.

By ditching Clause 4 and dissociating the party from CND, you mean? Surely that was shifting the party (rightwards) into the centre ground?

Thanks for the comments. In response to a couple:

8. Watchman: To claim you know better than the electorate is supreme arrogance or borderline totalitarianism.
Hyperbole on totalitarianism aside, the question being posed is not whether the electorate were right or wrong – it is axiomatic that the will of the people interpreted through the distorting prism of our electoral system is observed in its results – but rather whether Cameroon “Compassionate Conservatism” – which is the platform they ran on – will be evidenced in the actions of the Tory government. In short, will people get what they voted for? I think many Liberal Democrat voters certainly believe they haven’t, which is why their support is waning so markedly. And I think many of the independents that voted Tory last time will see that under the thin patina of compassion in the modern Tory party lies the same old heartless bastards of Maggie’s days. Other posters are right in noting that this Tory government is executing a program informed by an extremely right-wing ideology, but that’s not what they said they would give us. And that disconnect will, I hope, provide Labour with a huge opportunity in the next General Election.

4. Margin4Error: Thanks for your post. It seems to be wilfully deceiving to believe that Blairism did not put issues of social justice, community cohesion and quality of public services back to the fore. Often in quite abstruse ways. Let’s take New Labour’s obsession with targets. By utilising admittedly arbitrary metrics on the efficiency of the NHS, the debate was shifted from waste, funding, etc., to the actual quality of the services. I have no doubt people got annoyed with Labour’s constantly benchmarking aspects of services delivery, but it helped to focus people on what sort of service we want, ask them to aspire for better, and implicitly accept that the funding needs to be there to allow the services to be delivered to our expectations. That shifted the terms of the debate to one which allowed Labour to double investment in real terms, make substantial improvements to the quality of infrastructure, staffing and clinical outcomes. Whereas when I was a kid the debate seemed to constantly focus on waste and inefficiency. A government is able to set the terms of the debate in the media and among the people, and should they choose to focus on one aspect of a service over another that can have a profound effect not just in terms of debate but end results and collective commitment.

>Blairism’s greatest triumph was shifting the centre ground to the left.

OMG, no smiley, no irony… I didn’t get beyond that line. For fucks sake

Imran,

Appologies about the hyperbole – an occasional habit rather reinforced recently by having Churchill played at me every time I turn on the TV.

Your analysis seems dependent on one key factor which I see assumed a lot but never proven: that independent voters who shift between parties (which I assume is most of the population at least in theory) are motivated by finding a compassionate party. This seems to be axiomatic around here in discussion of the Labour leadership, and to some extent is the message the candidates for that post seem to be putting across about how they will lead Labour back to power. This presumption needs proving before you can actually rely on it. Mrs Thatcher won three elections on the back of not being particuarly caring and considerate, and Labour lost the last election despite portraying the Conservatives as a throw back to the eighties. It might be worth considering that the electorate do not vote for the nicest party, but the most effective. I suspect the Liberal Democrats will do pretty well at the next elections (not as well as this time maybe), as most Liberal Democrat voters are not the wooly sandal-wearing tree-huggers of popular stereotype but actual hard-headed liberals. People who understand nice is not always best.

Put it this way. Most people instictively understand spoiling a child and never disciplining him or her will not be good for the child or parent. Why do you assume that they will not apply this logic to governments also? There was a lot of talk of detoxifying the Conservatives, but what did this really involve – they won because of a number of factors, not because they fooled people they were nice. To assume this is either to credit your political opponents with great skill (which you then have to consider they will be able to use again in a different way) or to assume the electorate are quite stupid.

There is a danger in this drive to compassion, which is that you easily portrayed as not concerned for most people (including many towards whom you are being compassionate, who will identify themselves with the ignored majority). The cries of what about the poor, the ill, the jobless etc can work to alienate those who do not see themselves as defined by such statuses. So to analyse things so clearly in terms of compassion, you need to be sure this is a factor.

Watchman,

Thanks for the comment. I agree that people’s perceptions of the competence of a Party’s leadership is a factor. However, it’s one among many. The voters that turned from Labour to the Tories are a heterogeneous bunch in terms of motivations and beliefs. I canvassed throughout the election in two constituencies – one a rural Northern constituency near where I grew up, one an inner-city London constituency where I live now. We had voters that were obsessed with single issues and thought the Tories were better on it (usually immigration to be frank, which always made me feel terribly uncomfortable given my heritage). We had voters that naturally tacked to the centre-right, felt Blair was an acceptable Labour-type (given his impeccable Progress-type credentials) but that Brown was a socialist. We had voters that just wanted a bloody change. We had very few voters though that said “Osborne seems like he knows what he’s doing economically-speaking” or that “Cameron seems more Prime Ministerial”. I have no doubt there were some, but not many. Many people, of course, talked about the nature of the Tory candidate. In Hammersmith our opponent was Shaun Bailey who is the living embodiment of the Cameroon Big Society and Compassionate Conservatism narratives. A working class black guy that runs a charity for kids who grow up in deprivation and still lives in social housing.

Blairism was borne of its time. It was a narrative that appealed to those that were just sick of Maggie and wanted a credible alternative. It had one foot planted directly in their territory in the Third Way/ Blairism style. And it was highly effective in shifting the terms of the debate. I thought the way he did it was at times spectacular. And the results speak for themselves in public services. Where he messed up policy-wise was on Iraq and on civil liberties.

But the debate in the next General Election is different. We can win by exposing the hypocrisy of the Tories. Read http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1582012,00.html and tell me if there isn’t material to hit them with next time around? It’s Political Communications 101 to just relentlessly savage expose their hypocrisy and lies. We can win by having well-thought-through policies that reflect broad consensus. And we do that by having a leader with the empathy to listen and the intelligence to see the Partnership in Power institutions have become calcified and afflicted by patronage and to instead return power to Conference and to the people. In this country the many still suffer far more than the few. And they will suffer more and more over the next few years. As Blairism worked in 1997 and was borne of its time, the next Leader’s approach needs to reflect political realities now. Another Blair wouldn’t work in the post-Blair Britain. I think Ed Miliband has the right stuff to fight the NEXT election and not 1997 all over again or even 2010 all over again.

Thanks again for your comments. It is certainly not a monochromatic topic, and it merits extensive, continuing debate.

Imran,

Nice to see someone who can seperate past and future when writing on the leadership issue. I tend to agree with a lot of what you say, even if I’d probably disagree with most of your proposed issues and solutions. And Ed Milliband has been impressive at times (his media performances at Copenhagen were brilliant – if he could be that human all the time, your original argument might work). Not convinced that he will be able to overcome Mr Cameron though.

Imran

Agree with your response. There are simpler examples though to present to people who pretend Blair was the same as Thatcher and didn’t move the wider public outlook to the left.

Most notably the Tories spent the last election bending over backwards to make themselves appear progressive. This is a little more significant than appearing fair (the bland nothingness sadly weilded by yellows before and after the election)

This is a valuable example because frankly, pre-blair, it simply didn’t claim that. It didn’t even see value in lying and pretending to be progressive, with its associations of redistribution through taxation, benefits and expanded universal services like the NHS and schools.

Now it at least pretends – because it has to. The public expect those things to some extent and that is a big change. Indeed one of the key problems the Tory government has right now is that their talk of being progressive has collapsed very early on. That’s going to be tough for them because they are now less able to shift its meaning to something more comfortable for them, and less redistributive. (Note they talk about social mobility, not poverty, pretending they are unrelated, and that the first is more important than the second – this is part of a roadmap to getting the public back on side against redistribution.)

So shifting debate was a big plus, but it is not irreversable. We need a Labour leader who can adjust to changing terms of debate over the coming five years and hopefully limit the shift to the right.

The point about Labour’s biggest achievement is expanded on here:

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/07/08/what-was-new-labours-greatest-achievement-allow-me-to-explain/

In fact I agree with it. He did not move vastly leftwards but he did move the country leftwards for a bit, on some issues.

Nice article Sunny – sorry I missed it first time round.

@14: ” I thought the way he did it was at times spectacular. And the results speak for themselves in public services. Where he messed up policy-wise was on Iraq and on civil liberties.”

That seriously understates the extent of failure by the Blair-Brown governments IMO.

For starters, spending on the NHS about tripled during the 13 years of New Labour governments but most folks will need a lot of convincing that the quality of healthcare provided by the NHS went up three times. By assessments of independent think-tanks, the NHS rates as fairly mediocre in comparison with the healthcare systems in most other west European countries.

The terrible state of the housing market is another outstanding issue:

“Houses are less affordable than 50 years ago although the quality of homes has improved, according to the Halifax. The lender, now owned by Lloyds Banking Group, said that over the last five decades UK house prices have risen by 2.7% a year, allowing for inflation.

“This was above the 2% annual increase in real earnings over the same period. Prices increased the most in the last decade, and separately lenders warned that lending to first-time buyers would be constrained for ‘some time to come’.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8468605.stm

“Housebuilding fell to its lowest level for more than 60 years in 2009 – with just 118,000 new homes completed, according to government figures. The number is the lowest since 1946, when official records began and represents a 17 per cent drop on the number completed in 2008.”
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/construction_and_property/article7032641.ece

Exactly what did New Labour governments do to reverse the historic failing of vocational education provision?

The recent news about the outcome of the National Curriculum tests after 13 years was hardly impressive:

“The National Curriculum test results also revealed that in spite of an improvement in English and maths, more than a third of pupils still left primary school without a proper grasp of the basics in reading, writing and maths.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ba881948-9f3f-11df-8732-00144feabdc0.html

As for social mobility:

“The chances of a child from a poor family enjoying higher wages and better education than their parents is lower in Britain than in other western countries, the OECD says”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/10/oecd-uk-worst-social-mobility

Bob B

Your first response in 19 is deeply flawed.

“For starters, spending on the NHS about tripled during the 13 years of New Labour governments but most folks will need a lot of convincing that the quality of healthcare provided by the NHS went up three times.”

In the early extra spending, most went on getting enough staff in the NHS that waiting times would stop rising and start falling. That meant putting up wages for people like nurses and porters. Of course it would be utterly ridiculous to pretend – as your comment would require – that we only needed to raise the wages of the new staff we were hiring. We had to raise wages of existing staff too (not just because the law and fairness requires it, but also because we needed to stop people leaving the sector)

In effect encouraging the first extra 100,000 nurses into the NHS cost not only higher wages for those 100,000 but for also higher wages for the existing nurses too.

And amid that you have utterly missed the point of the article.

The fact is in 1996 the government was not talking about the need to get more people to work in the nhs and that this would require higher wages, higher spending, and higher taxes.

by 2001 the government campaigned in a general election on a platform of raising taxes and public spending to improve services and better paid nurses and teachers. (It wasn’t specific about which taxes, but even so that was a phenomenal shift in public attitude)

Also – I fear the left needs to stop talking about social mobility. It is step 1 in Tory language (tory of both colours) towards abandoning the unemployed and poverty again – with the new focus on a vague and unverifiable aim of ensuring a few more poor kids can get rich when they are older.

In fact this is something that may happen anyway once Labour’s 13 years in office starts to take effect – though keep in mind those who benefited from Sure Start and expanded primary education are still only teenagers at the oldest and so not yet 30 and earning any kind of wage on which to judge the impact of Labour’s 13 years on social mobility.

The fall in recent years has been the result of failing education policies that pre-date even John Major.

But the language is useful to a tory government that doesn’t want people to think about poverty and unemployment as issues for government policy.

@20:

NHS staff needed to be better paid? According to this survey in 2005, British doctors are among the best paid in Europe:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article758105.ece

However, this was the outcome: “The NHS has seen a year-on-year fall in productivity despite the billions of pounds of investment in the service, latest figures show. The data from the Office for National Statistics showed a fall of 2% a year from 2001 to 2005 across the UK.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7610103.stm

Now check out the league tables of an independent Swedish think-tank – Health Powerhouse – for healthcare systems in other west European countries in which the UK ranked at 14 out of 33 countries covered:
http://www.healthpowerhouse.com/files/EHCI-2009-general-Press-release-final.pdf

“Accidents, errors and mishaps in hospital affect as many as one in 10 in-patients, claim researchers. The report in the journal Quality and Safety in Health Care said up to half of these were preventable.

“Checks on 1,000 cases in just one hospital found examples of fatal surgical errors, infections and drug complications.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7116711.stm

“Britons are increasingly turning to prescription drugs to cure every ailment, a new study found. The average number of prescriptions dispensed per person rose from eight a year to more than 16 over the past two decades, according to the paper, titled A Pill for Every Ill.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/britain-turning-to-prescription-drugs-1930212.html

Much of this discussion resembles watching two bald men fighting over a comb. None of the candidates will make any difference, because the only ones with a chance of winning are tainted by their association with the manifest failures of New Labour, its illiberality, its failure to adequately advance a progressive agenda and its disasterous foreign policy.

Bob B @19 is right on the money as far as I see it. Despite some progress being made by throwing money at things, we actually seem to be going backwards as a society, chiefly because NuLabour was too scared of being progressive. It was always a cynical vehicle to get and stay elected. You only have to listen to Blair to see he had no greater purpose than being in power. He may have principles, but they are so flexible and readily jettisoned as to scarcely merit the term.

It may be enough for the new leader to be “not-Blair” or “not-Brown” for the sake of the Labour party electors, but none of the candidates has “the vision thing”, and none of them would be appreciably better than than their predecessors.

Imran, Labout won’t win the next election. The opposition might LOSE it, but the chances of “New” Nu Labour coming up with a coherent, progressive alternative under any of the current candidates is vanishingly remote.

Galen

did you not read my explanation of why a doubling of the money could obviously not result in a doubling of servcie. (Capital build up over generations being the key part of that, though of course the issue of the cost of raising wages to fill vacant positions plays a part too)

Don’t kid yourselves that throwing money at the problem didn’t get results. It did.

Oddly though, lets be clear here, this debate is arguing that the real success of Labour wasn’t massively improved services (though services improved) and was that it changed the debate to a point where improving services by paying enough wages became possible for the first time in years. And that’s a very different argument.

You might oppose that change in the terms of debate. John Major certainly did. But that doesn’t mean the change didn’t happen.

Also – as an interesting philosophical question – if NHS spending doubled under Labour – should the NHS of 2010 be compared to the NHS of 1997 to see whether it doubled its success, or should it be compared to the NHS that would have been in 2010 had it continued to deteriorate as it was in 1997?

Because in theory we might have significantly more than twice that services by now.

I like asking these questions as I think people forget the state of the UK’s social fabric in 1997. Labour can’t take credit for all of the change. Some is technological, some, like the significant fall in criminality, started before Labour came to power. But remembering what the UK used to be is hard given how much it has changed.

@24 margin

I’m not disputing that increased spending didn’t achieve results: of course it did. However, I’m not here to praise Ceaser, but to bury him. There is a real question mark as to how effectively the vast amounts of money were targeted, and the general framework (both philosophical and operational) within which it was allocated and spent.

Although it may be true that the terms of reference of the debate were changed, that’s really damning with faint praise. It hardly took a genius to deconstruct the miserable failure of previous Tory administrations: the trouble is that NuLabour, far from setting out a truly radical, progressive agenda uncritically accepted far too much of the sub-Thatcherite platform. If it wasn’t league tables, it was faith schools. If it wasn’t choice in health provision, it was ID cards.

Life often imitates art they say, and by 1997 the choice of “Things Can Only Get Better” as a signature tune seemed entirely apposite. Looking back over the 13 years that followed, it’s obvious that things changed. Whilst not denying the positive things achieved you seem to be glossing over both the awful aspects of NuLabour, and the fact that much more could and should have been achieved to make Britain a fairer, more equal and safer society. The fact that it is not is a huge indictment of the Labour party.

Galen

In part I agree with you. In particular I agree Labour was not ambitious enough and didn’t push far enough.

In part though I disagree with you. Particularly where you list some things you don’t like and seem to equate them with a lack of will on the part of Labour’s leadership to push far enough.

The fact is lots of Labour people like league tables, and faith schools are a move to a more equal system of education since until that policy came along only the Christian and Jewish churches had faith schools, not muslims, hindus or Sikhs. Also I don’t really understand why choice in health provision is bad.

And I don’t know about damning with faint praise.

We are not talking about radical or iconic change akin to that of Attlee’s government or Thatcher’s. But we are talking about 13 years in which just about every concievable area of social well-being that government can influence improved, often quite significantly.

And that happened because Labour changed the debate and dialog, It made addressing poverty a political issue again. Likewise training people to get them into work. Spending more to get better services was made into an option again. These things mattered.

I was reading Robin Cook’s The Point of Departure today and was struck by something he said about the Tory leadership battle in 2001. Roy Hattersley and Robin were discussing the insanity of electing true blue Thatcherite Iain Duncan Smith. Robin and Roy thought only Ken Clark could reach across to the centre ground.

In an intriguing passage Robin says this: “The Tory leadership contest has distinct echoes of the closing scenes of Medea, with Margaret Thatcher, who has never forgiven Clarke for knifing her a decade ago, predicting that his elections would lead to ‘disaster. John Major, who has never forgiven Duncan Smith for almost knifing him over Maastricht, has denounced the Duncan Smith supporters as ‘electoral poison’”

What strikes me is the parallel to today. Duncan Smith’s supporters wanted to return to the ideology and approach of Thatcher, their last successful leader. Clarke’s supporters believed they needed something new (albeit in reality old). Similarly, David Miliband’s utterly dull cheerleaders on the right of the party believe Tony 2 is what they need. And Ed’s are the one’s saying we need something new. That indeed New Labour and David Miliband are the right solution but for yesterday. And what we need is not to retreat to what worked then but to take the battle to today’s problems and political configurations.

A salutary reminder that what we see now is an echo of timeless arguments in the face of loss and despair, and that the right solution is the one that is the boldest, the one that licks our wounds but then comes up with something new to floor the enemy.

@27 margin

I’m much less sanguine than you appear to be about the positive aspects of NuLabour: even an idiot can be right sometimes, and the good things achieved certainly don’t outweigh the bad in my view.

As for faith schools, I’m with Richard Dawkins on this one. I don’t see how anyone on the progressive left can support giving state support and funding to faith schools. They are divisive and simply encourage factionalism and the perpetuation of outdated religious dogma. If people want to brian wash their children let them do it on their own dollar!