AS I WAS SAYING
New Labour, new tone but new nothing else. I approve
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
New Labour is not in favour of change — apart from the cosmetic variety — but rather of stopping, or at any rate, regulat- ing change, which is why I, and so many other small 'c' conservatives, fearful of the erosions wrought by capitalism in every- thing we hold dear, are attracted to it. For nearly 20 years we have had a party in power that welcomed these erosions, even gloried in them. As a result the country has been transformed almost out of all recogni- tion. Now the pendulum has swung back again and we have what will very likely turn out to be the most anti-change government of modern times.
How could it be otherwise, given New Labour's overriding aim of putting the genie of capitalist triumphalism, released by Mrs Thatcher, back into the bottle? Old Labour, of course, had the same aim. It too wanted to put the brake on market forces; a much harsher brake. But old Labour, while stamping down hard on the capitalist brake, was no less determined to step down equally hard on the socialist accelerator. Any momentum of change lost by restraining bourgeois greed would be more than made up by releasing prole- tarian idealism, dreams of social justice, in old Labour's eyes, being quite as much a galvanising force for the many as dreams of greed are for the few. In short, one great capitalist engine of change was going to be replaced by a very much bet- ter socialist one.
That was what old Labour believed. It believed in building a better society by har- nessing the newly released energies of the working class, just as Mrs Thatcher hoped to do the same by harnessing the newly released energies of the middle class. New Labour, however, has no comparable vision. Its lost faith in the socialist engine of change has been only partially replaced by a wary respect — at best — for capitalism. Regulated capitalism is the name of its game; a form of capitalism which does not change things too much or too fast. Pas trop de zele either on the part of employees or employers, both of whom New Labour intends to keep firmly in their place, as determined to regulate the one as the other. Mr Blair's attitude to the middle class and the working class is rather remi- niscent of the great 19th-century Lord Sal- isbury's. Looking down from his patrician heights, he also distrusted raw energy in any shape or form. The comparison between the Tory patri- cian and Mr Blair is not as far-fetched as it sounds. For just as Lord Salisbury took it for granted that a civilised society required people of a superior culture and education to do the governing and administering, so does Mr Blair, the main difference being that whereas the former entrusted the task to an old ruling class — which had been in situ for generations — the latter intends to entrust it to a new ruling class very much of his own making. Nothing necessarily wrong with that. Possibly modern capitalism, with its almost limitless potential for disrupting our lives, does need regulating by a new breed of highly educated Guardians (pun intended). But let us not pretend that keep- ing the kettle's lid polished and in good repair — the perennial task of conservative statesmanship — is the same thing as turn- ing up the heat under the kettle, which is the perennial task of radical statesmanship. Mrs Thatcher did the latter and Mr Blair is going to do the former. Needless to say, for those who are going to comprise the ket- tle's new lid, being alive today will indeed seem very heaven. But their bubbling enthusiasm should not be confused with that much more vigorous and even menac- ing rumble that denotes a kettle on the boil.
Essentially, New Labour dreams about a society wherein the intelligentsia calls the shots — not only the man from Whitehall, which was old Labour's very much more limited idea, but men and women with managerial skills right across the board. Writing recently in Prospect, John O'Sullivan describes how New Labour's interventionism
is not vested in government alone but exer- cised by both public and private bureaucra- cy; not justified by economic efficiency alone but by arbitrary and shifting notions of equity, regulating not merely the econo- my but an ever expanding area of social life and not confined to one country but international in scope. There are many such regulators — corporate managers now empowered to decide which stakeholders should get what, judges who discover new constitutional rights that prohibit single-sex education (for boys anyway) European bureaucrats who harmonise everything from beer to bananas, quangos, opinion man- agers, and new untested institutions and international bodies.
Compared to old Labour's aim of occu- pying only the commanding economic heights, New Labour's of civilising all aspects of a capitalist society is so amor- phous as to be quite unlimited in scope. How much the mass of people will even- tually benefit in real terms from this regu- lated capitalism is impossible to say. Is it practicable to have the smooth without the rough? Nobody knows for certain, but if history is any guide, it never is. What does seem certain, however, is that the legions of regulators are going to have a whale of a time. Of course New Labour's civilising mission has not been drawn up simply to provide indoor relief for the new ruling class, any more than the British Empire was dreamt up simply to provide outdoor relief for the old ruling class, but if yesteryear's scoffers had at least some grounds for believing the first canard, so do today's have even more for believing the second. No wonder the staff at the Observer, the Independent and the Guardian went wild with joy at the news of Tony Blair's landslide victory. For even if nobody else benefits much, they and their readers can reasonably have high expectations.
But I don't want to end on a cynical note. It could be that providing new, satis- fying, even idealistic activities for the edu- cated elite is a worthy aim in itself, requir- ing no further justification. One of the troubles with Thatcherism was that it did not try to do that, believing the non-tech- nical intelligentsia to be troublemakers rather than problem-solvers. It created a land fit for the wealth-producing bosses to live in, but not for the bossy do-gooders who understandably felt left out. New Labour will rectify that with a vengeance. Henceforth instead of a disgruntled intel- ligentsia releasing venom into the blood- stream of the body politic, we may have a contented, satisfied intelligentsia pumping out milk and honey. Already the tone of the Today Programme is less jaundiced; likewise the tone of the media generally. It won't be 'I'm all right, Jack', under New Labour so much as `I'm all right, Jim, John, Sue' — not to mention Melvyn, Polly, Jeremy and so on and suchlike. A new style of politics, a new tone, a new look, even in due course, heaven forbid, a new frontier — all these can be expected, which is certainly better than nothing. But don't, unless you enjoy disappointment, expect a new Jerusalem.
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