One wishes Blair the best of luck, but has he gone ever so slightly mad?
PETER OBORNE
War has always been the accomplice of the Left and sometimes the motor of revolution. Income tax was first imposed by the younger Pitt in the Napoleonic wars. The first world war saw the imposition of a formidable armoury of state control, the second world war practically left Britain a socialist country. So it is with the aftermath of the tragedy in the United States. It has enabled New Labour to resolve the longstanding confusion about its own identity.
Millions of words have been devoted to a contemplation of the real nature of Tony Blair's administration. The Prime Minister and his numerous apologists have claimed — and many of us at one stage came to believe — that New Labour is a new political party, which accepted many of the free-market insights of Margaret Thatcher. A smaller number were never convinced. They maintained that New Labour was simply a disguise, a crafty way of getting a sufficient number of the British middle classes to forget the shambles of Labour rule in the 1970s.
It has never been that easy to tell which of these two interpretations was correct, in large part because Tony Blair and the Labour party were unable to reach a conclusion themselves. Throughout their time in opposition, and all through their first term of government, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were obsessed with making themselves electable. They moved with extreme caution because they could not believe that the Conservative party, so long the most successful election-fighting machine in the Western world, had ceased to be a threat. Their fear vanished with the landslide of June 2001. Labour now feels secure in government and takes victory for granted in 2005. It has the confidence. in short, to come clean about its objectives. It is this that made the Brighton conference, held in the shadow of war, so illuminating. There was no more need for falsehoods, deceptions and camouflage.
Of course, old habits die hard: the revelation that Gordon Brown is resolved to turn Labour back into the party of tax and spend was merely implicit in his speech to the conference on Monday, as he assured delegates that he would stand by his ambitious spending targets regardless of the state of the economy.
It was left to his adviser, the indefatigable Ed Balls, to tell the press afterwards what the Chancellor really meant. Borrowing, and then tax, would take the strain from any downturn. Asked about an increase in National Insurance contributions, Balls said, 'We gave no commitments in the area during the election.' Balls spoke with perfect truth. Though coming under pressure from the Tories to do so, Labour refused to rule out rises in NICs during the election campaign.
But his pronouncement marks a sharp break with all promises that have gone before. Tony Blair came to power in 1997 proclaiming that the 'age of tax and spend is dead' and promising not to hit voters in their pockets. Between 1997 and 2001 he did so, but only by stealth; now his Chancellor has indicated that he is ready to turn to a more direct method of raising tax. I asked one Labour pollster whether the party could get away with these tax rises. Oh yes, came the reply. Indeed the pollster argued that the tax rises would flummox the Tories: lain Duncan Smith would be accused of standing in the way of public service improvements if he opposed tax increases. Gordon Brown will clothe his forthcoming imposition on the middle class with morality; nobody does that better. This war will be used as more than a cover for rising taxes. Still more striking, on Tuesday Tony Blair used the war as a reason to end New Labour's long period of procrastination over the single currency. Though the logic was impenetrable, it does appear that this new turn in world events has eased some personal log-jam in the Prime Minister's nature.
There was one fundamental difference between the Prime Minister's speech at Brighton on Tuesday afternoon and every other speech he has given. The others claimed to be open and transparent, but their primary purpose was to conceal. Examined in retrospect, they turn out to be little more than a list of empty slogans and verbless sentences crafted for the most part by Alastair Campbell. This speech is not open to that imputation. Blair's aides said beforehand, in awed tones, that it had been written by the Prime Minister himself. There is no reason to doubt this claim. Listening to the speech was embarrassing. The candour was absolute. The speech gave me the impression that he is going very slightly mad; at any rate he plainly feels that he has a date with destiny. This is a feeling that quite often comes over prime ministers — it assailed Margaret Thatcher during her third term — and it is not always a good thing.
The Prime Minister has come to sense over the course of the past few weeks that he has been given a unique insight into how to solve the problems of the world. He does not merely feel a notable confidence that he can dislodge the Taleban as Afghanistan's governing party. He also feels that he can replace it with a new regime which — judging by the way he described it at Brighton, 'one that is broadbased, unites all ethnic groups' — might well have been modelled on the general management committee of the Islington branch of the Labour party. But this complicated exercise is only the least in a series of Herculean tasks that the Prime Minister went on to set himself with that boyish, open-eyed candour of his: peace in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, an end to poverty and, for good measure, sorting out Africa. If Rwanda had happened today, he remarked casually, 'we would have had a moral duty to act there also'; and so forth.
There is no accusing the Prime Minister of a lack of ambition. It is perhaps not irrelevant to point out, however, that after more than four years of government Tony Blair has failed to sort out schools, has made a mess of transport and has left the NHS in a shambles. But in those areas, too, he has been just as unable to explain how he plans to achieve his very laudable aims.
Missing from Mr Blair's speech was any warning that the war might be long, that British soldiers might die and that we face the prospect of retaliation. Entirely lacking was any sense of the bleak, remorseless intractability of events, or that man is a shameful, fallen, miserable creature. Politicians with generous natures and expansive schemes for the betterment of mankind crop up from time to time. Usually they are American; invariably they fail. Tony Blair's ambition is the broadest in reach of any world statesman since Woodrow Wilson or perhaps J.F. Kennedy. Wilson's scheme was rejected by the world while Kennedy's legacy was Vietnam. Nevertheless, one wishes Mr Blair all the luck in the world.
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