There’s the scary suggestion that the electorate sees through D.L.’s charade. “People are getting hacked off,” says the journalist Liz to the spin doctor. “They’re beginning to notice.”
All fiction, of course. In the real world, as “Feelgood” was delighting London audiences, the offstage targets of Beaton’s lampoon have been coasting to victory at the polls on June 7. In real life, Prime Minister Tony Blair and his party have often disappointed and sometimes dismayed Britons. But they have managed the economy well enough to roll over the hapless Conservative opposition, echoing Labour’s impressive 1997 win that ended 18 years of Tory rule in Britain. Blair II is a stunning electoral moment for Britain, marking Labour’s restoration as a credible, modern party of government. “For 25 years right-wing ideologues have said that social justice had to be sacrificed in order to sustain a virile economy,” says Labour M.P. Denis MacShane. “Blair has proven them wrong. Margaret Thatcher can finally retire.”
Not to mention Helmut Kohl. Blair II, like Blair I before it, is also a timely boost for the European center left. Since Labour’s victory in 1997, followed by Lionel Jospin’s in France and Gerhard Schroder’s in Germany, the center left has lost some ground across Europe. In 1998 only two of the 15 European Union countries, Spain and Ireland, had center-right governments. Today Italy, Austria and Luxembourg–and, to a lesser extent, Belgium, where power is shared–are also in center-right hands. The left continues to dominate the intellectual arguments on public policy. But to stay in power, as Blair has, the left must contend with “different political constraints,” says Laurent Bouvet, editor of Revue Socialiste in Paris. Now, he says, the left’s thinking is necessarily “more pragmatic”–attuned not just to election but re-election. Facing elections of their own next year, Jospin’s Socialists and Schroder’s Social Democrats will show just how tuned in they are.
Labour’s return to power was never in doubt. But the sheer size of it, judging from the polls, confirms that Blair’s first term demonstrated that his electoral success is built on more than a national yearning to put the Tories out to pasture: it established that New Labour, as revitalized and restructured by Blair and his fellow modernizers, can run an economy and not just a party. Blair’s first government was hardly problem-free. His party’s left wing believed he should use his huge majority to move left; he resisted. He was politically damaged–or so it seemed–by dismal public services, a fuel-tax protest and a foot-and-mouth epidemic that led to the slaughter of more than 3 million farm animals. In the end, however, the voters seemed prepared to reward him for sound economic management–and to believe him when he said that for Labour there was no returning to the bad old days of paralyzing strikes or spending splurges followed by economic collapse.
Recasting Labour’s image was foremost on Blair’s agenda four years ago. He quickly set a Labour-means-business tone by granting the Bank of England government-free control of interest-rate policy, by eschewing new taxes and by agreeing to stick to the previous Conservative government’s spending limits for two years. By moving Labour to the center, Blair was determined to put the Tories out of business. Fifteen years ago it would have been almost inconceivable that a Labour leader could actually manage to do it, as Blair seems to have, at least for the time being. Equally inconceivable would have been the sort of declaration he made last week in launching Labour’s “business manifesto.” “It is Labour alone,” he said, “that is capable of providing the economic platform that business so badly needs.”
Blair’s center-left comrades on the Continent have never been completely at ease with him. Their policies tend to be to the left of his. Their links to unions remain stronger. They pour more public money into (generally superior) public services. Their idea of big government is slightly grander, measured by government spending as a percentage of GDP (France, 53 percent; Germany, 48 percent, and Britain, 41 percent). They resented the fact that, if only by getting there first, Blair was crowned in the media as Europe’s dominant Third Way leader. Of course, that was before the very term “Third Way” fell out of fashion and at a time when Blair’s stature benefited considerably from his friendship and ideological kinship with Bill Clinton. Now Clinton is gone and the Third Way has become a punch line of political satire.
All that having been said, the job of reinventing the center left goes on across Europe. Britain, France and Germany are very different countries. And what works for Goran Persson in Sweden may not work for Antonio Guterres in Portugal. But center-left parties everywhere still face the “same fundamental issue of modernizing social democracy,” says Mark Leonard, director of the Foreign Policy Centre in London. Adds Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics and author of numerous books that popularized Third Way thinking: “A lot of people say the Third Way was alive two years ago and now it’s dead. [It’s] just a matter of labels.” Giddens argues that the European political models of a generation ago–old-style socialism and Thatcherite capitalism–are “dead or inept. So everybody needs to have some sort of Third Way position, whether you chose to call it that or not.”
What continues to unite the old European left, apart from the common cause of re-election, is its direction: toward the center. Blair’s mission, according to M.P. MacShane, is “to save social democracy from the Social Democrats, to save the left from old-fashioned, 20th-century leftists.” Jospin and Schroder shy away from such politically incorrect language. In their own fashion, however, they have been as untraditional as Blair in helping the center left shake off its image as socially conscious but economically backward. Schroder pushed for radical reform of the state pension system. Jospin dramatically reduced the state’s participation in the transport, banking and defense industries.
With Labour’s return to power, the arguments over whose Third Way is the best Third Way will heat up again. The French center left would argue that, certainly from a Continental point of view, Blair is taking the Labour Party too far to the right. “The strength of center-left parties in Europe is to occupy the middle ground between contradictory demands, such as the market and [worker] solidarity, modernity and traditional values,” says Gilles Finchelstein of the Socialist Party’s Jean Jaures Foundation. Indeed, the French center right believes the French left remains pretty unreconstructed in comparison with New Labour and Germany’s Social Democrats. “Schroder’s and Blair’s models are not social democratic, but are increasingly moving toward a modern system of economic liberalism. They are very close in some cases to what the French right is proposing,” says Jean-Francois Cope, vice general secretary of French President Jacques Chirac’s Rally for the Republic Party.
And the gap between New Labour and the Continental left may well widen. Even during the British election campaign there were signs that after June 7 Blair would be going much further in his radical reform of public services. Blair’s left wing–“the old contemptibles of egalitarian socialism,” in the words of former deputy Labour leader Roy Hattersley, who counts himself among them–will once again want him to take advantage of his electoral mandate by moving to the left. He won’t. Judging from the clues Blair has dropped and a leaked report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, whose work tends to be a good guide to thinking by policymakers in Blair’s circle, what he will do is involve the private sector much more in public services.
Blair will not tear down Britain’s still generous health and education systems; to the contrary, he seems prepared to set aside the almost timid “prudence” of Blair I in order to invest more public money if necessary. But the money won’t necessarily go to public institutions or public employees; it may well go to private companies providing or managing public services. The IPPR report, for instance, notes that of the £12.5 billion spent by the National Health Service on personal social services such as residential care in 1998 and 1999, nearly 40 percent went to the private sector.
If Blair follows through on these plans, he may take his party farther than his French or German counterparts are willing to go. But then Blair is better equipped to be bold–blessed for the time being with a bigger mandate and an opposition in total disarray. And yet, will his own left wing revolt as he moves rightward? Will conservative Britons warm to this gentrified ex-socialist who’s absconded with many of their policies? “Blair,” says M.P. MacShane, “is going to really test the British people” by challenging public-sector unions, by demanding that the Whitehall civil-service establishment behave more like private-sector managers and by “taking on corporatist unions,” such as those representing farmers and doctors. “Hang onto your seat.” Long after the final curtain falls on “Feelgood,” T.B.’s second act will be providing plenty of drama for audiences at home and across the Channel.
