First, the positive side: Tony Blair has transformed the Labour Party and, more important, British politics as a whole. When he took the leadership in 1994, Labour had lost four consecutive national elections and had been out of power for nearly a generation. By jettisoning socialism, loosening ties with the unions and presenting Labour as the party of fiscal responsibility, Blair made it electable. More than a decade later, it still is.
Blair’s transformation of the entire British political landscape has been even more remarkable. Before him, Labour was still a party of the traditional European left: identified with the working classes, wedded to a philosophy of tax-and-spend and equally wedded to the idea of state-centered solutions to social and economic problems. The Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher and a succession of others, all now largely forgotten, were best understood as Labour’s alter ego: everything Labour was not.
Blair’s triumph lay not in moving Labour from the far left to the center but in abolishing left, right and center. He caused British politics to pivot on an axis of delivery and accomplishment rather than on the creaking axis of class versus class and ideology versus ideology. The British people cared little for class politics–and cared less and less as time went on. They wanted better schools, better health care and better roads and had no strong views about how all these wonderful things could best be achieved. By the government? Sure: if the government could do it, fine. By private enterprise? Sure: if private companies, could do it, that too would be fine. The post-Thatcher Conservative Party has been slow to adapt, but under its new leader, David Cameron, it has begun to. Ideology and exclusivity are out. Pragmatism and inclusiveness are in. David Cameron, just as much as Gordon Brown, is Blair’s political heir.
Now for the debit side, which also weighs heavy as both Brown and Cameron know. Large numbers of Britons have fallen out of love with the entire political class. Opinion polls show record numbers unwilling to vote for any of the main parties–or to vote at all. In an election held tomorrow, “None of the above” would be a formidable contender. One reason is mounting public distrust of all politicians’ honesty. They can’t be trusted to tell the truth. They consistently promise more than they can deliver. What Vietnam and Watergate were for the United States, Iraq and “cash for honors” are for Britain. Brown pays a price for having been a leading member of the Blair administration. Cameron pays a price for voters’ refusal to believe that standards would be any higher if he were in power.
Voters, in addition, cannot trust politicians to deliver. Britain has prospered under Blair. Unemployment has fallen. Inflation has been contained. Most people’s disposable income has increased. But a majority of Britons feel, if anything, worse off–not in terms of money but in quality of life. A recent YouGov survey for the London Daily Telegraph found 57 percent of respondents assenting to the proposition that “whichever party is in power, the quality of life in Britain seems to deteriorate.” Britain’s roads are more congested, housing more expensive, schools more unruly, cities more congested and prisons more desperately overcrowded.
Pragmatic politics–the politics of delivery–contains its own nemesis. Improvements come slowly and piecemeal and often go unnoticed. The media thrive on horror stories. Politicians of all parties, once elected, find it hard to deliver–and are often not seen to be delivering even when they are. The politics of pragmatism sounds sensible, even cozy, but in much of Western Europe, not just in Britain, it is proving an intractable, somewhat dispiriting affair.
Alas, no other politics is on offer. The most political leaders can do is try to damp down popular expectations and equip themselves with better management tools. Blair, Brown and Cameron are not only pragmatists, incapable of being located on any left-right dimension. They have something else in common. They are career politicians, with no prior experience of running anything. Their grasp of means is as feeble as their grasp of ends is firm.
Tony Blair began by seeking a philosophy. He tried the Third Way, then the Stakeholder Society, before abandoning the whole attempt. Brown shows no signs of harboring grandiose intellectual ambitions. Neither does Cameron. Partly for that reason, no one can really know what a government headed by either would be like–except that it would probably look suspiciously like Blair’s government, carrying with it both parts of his two-part legacy.