Why Tony Blair must be mighty pleased to be in Africa
PETER °BORNE
Politics returned to normal this week. Gordon Brown, back from Scotland, reoccupied the centre of the stage, while Tony Blair went abroad. It has been an odd start to the year, with Brown absent and with the Prime Minister doing his best to imprint his personal stamp on domestic affairs, It would not be quite right to say that the government has been in trouble, then again wrong to say that it hasn't. The period is hard to characterise. There has been an absence of certainty and conviction. The government has seemed neither to exercise, nor to lack, authority.
It is obvious what the Prime Minister has been trying to do. As always he has been trying to place himself in the position of a decent man can-ying out the only reasonable course of action in trying circumstances. The Downing Street strategists have a technical term for this. They call it 'triangulation', a term they have imported from the Clinton Democrats in the United States.
Triangulation is New Labour's lodestar. It is based on a version of the Marxist dialectic. Its key assertion is that, in any given situation. there are three possible courses of action. Two of them are contradictory and wrong-headed. The art is to find another route ahead — the so-called 'Third Way' — which retains the virtues but not the drawbacks of the other two. The classic product of triangulation is New Labour itself. Its key claim is to have replaced both 'Old Labour' (the Labour party before 1994) and the Tories (mad Thatcherite free-marketeers). New Labour says that it alone can provide a third way that synthesises the economic dynamism of the one and the social compassion of the other. As an electoral strategy, this proposition has been staggeringly successful.
There are two big problems with triangulation, at any rate as practised by Tony Blair. The first is that it involves telling lies. The 'Old Labour' governments of Wilson or Jim Callaghan were never the command economies of New Labour mythology. On the contrary, they both endeavoured to fuse capitalism and socialism, creating in the process a centrally managed corporatist mush very similar to the state of affairs under Tony Blair today. Likewise the Tories never much resembled the mad free-marketeers and slashers that New Labour now asserts that they were. Quite the contrary: spending on schools and hospitals rose far faster under Margaret Thatcher than they have under New Labour, a point that Lain Duncan Smith would do well to get across.
Yet it is an essential part of New Labour's version of the Third Way to claim that this is not so. Here is the Labour party chairman, Charles Clarke, in last week's Tribune: 'The 18 years of Thatcherism were principally about disinvesting in our public services. The cuts regime, driven by Margaret Thatcher's philosophical conviction that -there's no such thing as society" and her political preoccupation with tax cuts,
however irresponsible, dramatically reduced our public service's capacity.' This is no more than puerile sloganising and palpable falsehood which impoverishes public debate because it makes a sensible discussion about the future of. say, the health service impossible.
The second problem with triangulation is more damaging still. It is a proven guide to strategy; but it is an impediment to action. Obsessive devotion to the Third Way is the underlying reason, for example, behind Tony Blair's endless dither and procrastination over the euro. To move forward on the single currency means taking a decisive step in one direction or another. But the Third Way prohibits this.
It is the same with the debate over the unions and the public services. The Downing Street strategy is classic triangulation. Tony Blair wants to paint New Labour as an enlightened, pragmatic political party dealing in a brisk, modern way with intractable problems. He wants to range against it on both sides the 'wreckers' he spoke about in his speech at Labour's spring conference last weekend. The term 'wreckers' was often used by Joseph Stalin to describe the kulaks, gypsies. Jews, bourgeois profiteers, shirkers and other undesirable elements who allegedly sought to block his five-year plans: after show-trials they were executed or sent to the gulag. It has always been a term favoured by New Labour when describing its political opponents: in the latest manifestation Tory wreckers who plot to destroy the health service versus the union wreckers who are mindlessly opposed to sensible Blairite reforms.
It is a strategy that might well work if only Tony Blair knew what these reforms were; the trouble is that triangulation does not tell him. Last week's war of words with the trade unions (hostilities began after a briefing to journalists from Stephen Byers's ineffable special adviser Jo Moore that unions were 'wreckers', and ended four days later with an ingratiating telephone call from Baroness Morgan in Downing Street to the TUC general secretary John Monks) was about abstractions. The reason New Labour has looked so rudderless on public-sector reform for the last six months, with almost daily changes of attack and emphasis, is that they know where they want to be but not what they want to do. They have a strategy, but no direction No wonder that Tony Blair was happy to set off for Africa on Wednesday night. He is happiest with grand gestures and easy pieties; his genius is for finding the right tone. In this he closely resembles the late Harold Macmillan, whose famous 'Winds of Change' speech was delivered exactly 42 years ago last Monday.
Macmillan's trip to Africa was a more leisurely business than Blair's frenetic journey: it lasted six weeks and the prime minister took ten days of 'carefree pleasure' to travel back to Britain on the liner Capetown Cast/e. Macmillan's purpose was to disengage from, Blair's to re-engage with, Africa. Both men had recently won general elections and reached that stage in a prime minister's career when the lure of world travel somehow seems more attractive and rewarding than quotidian domestic politics.
Macmillan — who compared Africa to a 'sleeping hippo in a pool' — lasted three more years after that trip, a time of mounting political and professional difficulties. It would be overhasty to predict what the future holds for Tony Blair, except to say this: that when he returns home, public services will have got no better. And that Gordon Brown is back behind his desk, working, thinking, plotting, and full of angry conviction.
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