Tony Blair's big picture

18/09/1999

This week Tony Blair envisaged progressive forces governing Britain for 100 years. His Conservative opposition seems unable to mount a challenge. Yet as the party conference season comes round again, there are at least three major issues to trouble him. A Guardian columnist looks at the state of the main political parties. THE British parliamentary and elect- oral systems are calibrated to produce strong government. There is no stronger leader in the democratic world than a British prime minister in command of an unbreakable majority in the House of Commons. In theory, and often in practice, he can do exactly what he wants, confident that his party is sufficiently infused by loyalty and ambition to be whipped into line. Tony Blair, more than 170 seats ahead, is such a leader: commanding, untouchable, sensitive to the limits of what is required to ensure a second election victory of like measure, probably in two years? time. This should make for a rather boring passage of political history. Political interest is aroused by uncertainty, and right now there is little uncertainty. British politics, however, are not boring. They are just interesting in a different way.

Instead of the precipice the leader might fall over, we find him gazing at the mountain he turns out to have great difficulty in climbing. Blair?s predecessor, John Major, lived for five years on the edge of the cliff, his narrow majority in danger of being withdrawn from under him at any moment by his own rebellious party. Survival was his object, and the chance that he would not make it gave politics a galvanic, if unconstructive, fascination. Blair, by contrast, cannot be pushed over. Yet this very absence of conventional danger reminds one that falling into the abyss is not the only mode of political failure.

Here we have a very strong leader, unchallenged from within his party or outside it, who nevertheless is far from solving every problem he addresses. Education, the health service and the state of social order ? three elements of the civilised society to which he promised to give his greatest commitment ? may no longer be matters of much ideological disagreement. They are being addressed by a government that has carte blanche to try any expedients it can dream up, and which has broken out of the self-imposed financial constraints that limited what it could do in the first two years. Yet there is no consensus that it is succeeding in any of these fields. Waiting periods for attention in the health service are longer than ever. Schools and teachers, though assailed from Whitehall by every kind of initiative, plan, demand and target, remain the object of widespread dissatisfaction. Despair at elements of social breakdown recently drew from the Prime Minister the famously perilous injunction of several of his predecessors: the need for the nation to discover a moral purpose.

We learn that even the strongest leader does not have all the answers. Tony Blair exudes great confidence in general. He has the big picture ever in view: le grand tableau, as he likes to call it. Arguably, he is the most formidable political operator, on a field he utterly commands, to occupy Downing Street in the last 50 years. He keeps a competent team of ministers and advisers working hard at the grindstone of public service reform. But what we see as a result is nothing dramatic. The problems are ever with us. Welfare reform, in particular, is the slowest tanker with the deepest draught, barely perceptible in its proclaimed turn-around. There must, we hope, be a visible, measurable pay-off from a such great investment of political and financial resources. But the test cannot yet be made. We are witnessing a laboratory experiment, untrammelled by the distractions of political survival, in the sheer intractability of the major problems that trouble all advanced societies as the twentieth century closes.

In an age of short attention-spans and low horizons, this should be bad for the Blair Government. They should be punished for such involuntary indulgence in long-termism. But they are shielded by the strong economy, the seeds of which they inherited, and the fruits of which they have not squandered. Blair puts the highest value on proving that this Labour Government, uniquely in Labour history, has surpassed the Tories as the natural custodian of a sound economy. He wants Labour to be the default mode of Britain?s modern way of political life. So far nobody can gainsay him. For the present time, that has been achieved, and is much reinforced by the party?s mastery of image-making. Tony Blair bestrides all means of communication. And anyone inclined to start creating trouble about the shortage of dramatic early results in the fabric of the nation?s services has only to look at the state of the Conservative Party, the main opposition. The Tories make their own contribution to the stasis. They simply do not matter. Not only their feeble presence in the Commons but their inability to marshal an intellectual challenge make them bit-part accomplices in Blair?s long, speculative march. They give him all the leisure he needs to address the problems before him.

This is a novel experience for most voters. It is a deep-down reality, however, which politicians find it impossible to believe in. Despite its objective situation, the Blair Government lives in the usual state of frenetic anxiety about the next election. Although strong, it is not calm. Three zones of neuralgic uncertainty are especially worth noting, as disturbers of the peace in the new political season.

The first may seem obscure, but remains an issue. Electoral reform, on which the Jenkins Committee reported, is unfinished business that tears Blair himself two ways at once. Not many others in the Cabinet want proportional representation in any form, but part of his own big picture has always been the prospect of a second term when he needs the Liberal Democrats ? not to mention the even grander tableau in his mind of a progressive coalition of parties whose agendas have much in common. The new Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, has credentials to establish. Blair has still to decide whether PR goes any further. The two leaders must work out what, if any, concordat they intend to enjoy in the post-Ashdown era. A referendum on PR is out of the question before the next election, but the promise of one some time cannot be abandoned with impunity. The way the politics of this matter are treated now, by both the parties, will indicate what is likely to happen between them over the next decade. Whether Kennedy sees Liberals cleaving to Labour is an open and fascinating question. Whether Blair could carry his Cabinet in helping them to do so is another one. Can he achieve the progressive coalition, which he fervently believes in, without electoral reform, in which he has probably lost the little faith he had?

THE second disturber is likely to be Ireland. William Hague has already made this clear, with his sharp attack on the peace process, an unprecedented breaching of the bipartisanship that kept Ulster politics out of mainland Britain for 30 years. It was a reckless shift, showing a party more desperate by the week to draw attention to itself, no matter how callow its exhibitionism. But that does not diminish the risk Blair could be running, if the peace process collapses. Ulster would be the main victim, but his own government will not be helped. It did not need Hague to make the point. If gangster-terrorism resumes, it will be at the hand of many vicious prisoners, on both sides, whom Blair and Mo Mowlam agreed to release as part of the Good Friday agreement. However defensible at the time, this will not look good to British voters if they are once again being assailed by the random brutalities of an IRA bombing campaign. Blair has been brave and tenacious over Ireland. But an enormous amount rests on his succeeding: not just the future of Ulster innocents, and serious chunks of the economic and defence budgets of the United Kingdom, but his reputation as a man of judgement whose policies have healed rather than fractured British society.

The third looming disruption is the most predictable. Amid all the absence of serious argument, Europe is the counter-case. The Conservative Party have made it their defining issue, with a policy of scepticism towards the euro that has now expanded into a demand for full-scale renegotiation of the treaties of Rome, Maastricht and Amsterdam. The radicalism of this stance seems to have escaped even its chief formulator, William Hague. It contemplates a series of demands by Britain to dismantle the present powers of the European Court, repatriate many of the tasks assigned 40 years ago to the European Commission, and reduce the European Union to the trading organisation that was the frustrated dream of Britain from the beginning of the Common Market.

What Hague?s policy does not say is what will be Tory Britain?s response to the rejection of most of these demands, as would certainly happen, by the other members of the EU. We have to supply our own answer. It can only be exit, a proposition now widely discussed in polite Conservative society, but one which, as both Hague and Michael Portillo, his newly menacing rival, know, would horrify the British people. Labour, for its part, remains neurotic about the euro: proof positive of the capacity of the most powerful governments to underplay their strength. But how far Blair is able to address, expose and tear apart the unspoken consequences of the Tories? European agenda is the largest question of the hour: the proper guarantor that this should not be a quiet season, after all.