Tony Blair's guru spells out his terrifying vision for the future of democracy
PETER OBORNE
The result of the Ipswich by-election was unknown when The Spectator went to press. One part of the result was, however, entirely predictable: disastrously low turnout, signifying yet again the failure of the British political class to connect in any creative way with the nation at large.
This inability to connect poses grave problems of legitimacy and, in the fullness of time, even a threat to public order. The fuel crisis last year, for example, was a dramatic example of how the public's alienation from the political system can lead to violent and dangerous manifestations outside it. This precipitous loss of faith, and whether it can be reversed, was the subject of a short talk by Philip Gould, Tony Blair's political consultant, at Politico's bookshop in Westminster on Tuesday night.
Gould is the most attractive member of the largely thuggish team of close advisers that surrounds Tony Blair in Downing Street. A nervous and emaciated figure, Gould has done for Tony Blair what Norman Tebbit did for Margaret Thatcher. That is to say, he showed New Labour how to seek support from the lower middle class, the group which held the key to the run of Conservative election successes in the 1980s, just as they have for New Labour in the last two elections. What Tebbit achieved through sheer brutality, it is fair to say Gould brought about through niceness and a kind of idealism.
The peculiar importance of Gould's analysis last Tuesday was that he renounced the techniques and doctrines that have driven New Labour forwards over the past seven years. Gould gave a schematic history of postwar electioneering. The 1959 election campaign, he said, was the first modern election. For the first time television played a central role, and pollsters and PR men started to dominate the scene. The second phase, so Gould claimed, was the 'negative campaigning' developed by the Tories and the Republicans in America. This kind of strategy was 'rooted in fear — fear on tax, fear on defence, fear of change' and its most baleful moment came with John Major's desperate 'demon eyes' campaign in 1997.
By then negative campaigning was on the verge of being superseded by what Gould chooses to call the 'total campaign', with its war-rooms, rapid-rebuttal units and unblinking insistence upon 24-hour politics. This is the only way that progressive parties can win power.' insisted Gould, 'but it doesn't fully satisfy. I believe that the 2001 model of the total campaign is the last time it will ever be used. It will be replaced by the "participatory election", in which everyone has their chance to get involved. Central to what we are talking about is the shift from voter to empowered citizen. People want to participate and our role is to help them. That is the campaign of the future.'
There is a great deal that is highly attractive about Philip Gould's talk. It shows New Labour's ability to evolve in office, how it strains to move on and present a moving target to the Conservatives. New Labour recognises that there was something arid and wrong with the way it secured power in the June 2001 election. But there is every reason to doubt that Labour could ever bear to abandon its rebuttal units and war-rooms, and even greater reason to question what Gould means by 'participatory democracy'.
Gould emphatically does not mean that New Labour is intent on returning Britain to the robust democratic politics of the middle of the last century. When I asked afterwards whether Labour strategists connected the decline in turnout and growing apathy about politics to Tony Blair's special method of government and in particular his ferocious, calculated attack on representative democracy, there were simply blank looks. In fewer than five years in office, Tony Blair has imported an alien system of managerial government. At the heart of Downing Street, a team of highly talented technocrats is taking over the role of Cabinet ministers. The real foreign secretary is not really bemused, bewildered Jack Straw; it is the new foreign affairs adviser David Manning. Nobody thinks that the driving force behind Tony Blair's education reforms is the timid Cabinet minister Estelle Morris. It has been Andrew Adonis in the policy unit.
One can go through practically the whole of the Cabinet in this way. The Cabinet, and Parliament too, now fit Bagehot's description of the monarchy: they are 'formal and ornamental' parts of the British constitution. Gordon Brown's Treasury is the isolated example of an independent departmental fiefdom, hence the murderous antagonism against Downing Street. It has become fashionable to call the Blairite system of government 'presidential', but the analogy with the United States of America only half works. In the United States the powers of the president were carefully circumscribed by the founding fathers. For the most part, the president must cope with a hostile Senate and House of Representatives.
No such constraint disables a New Labour prime minister. For if Cabinet has been emasculated, this is still more true of Parliament. Stand in the Members' Lobby at the entrance to the Commons chamber these days, as I still try to do from time to time, and that once-bustling thoroughfare is an empty, dead place, inhabited by ghosts. Labour MPs are encouraged to represent Tony Blair in their constituencies, not their constituents in Parliament.
Rather than govern through Parliament. New Labour is aiming at a direct, unmediated relationship with the British voters. Philip Gould's 'participatory democracy' comes, like all New Labour's political ideas, direct from America, if two years late, and has already been patented by Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's grim pollster, in his book The New Machiavelli. It involves making use of new technology — the Internet, modern marketing techniques, text-messaging — to make contact with the voter. Philip Gould's participatory democracy really boils down to direct democracy, an ugly populism and a form of mob rule.
The Prime Minister — just look at the way he has ducked the chance to create an elected House of Lords — has chosen to rule through a narrow, technocratic elite which is invisible to the voters. This new ruling class claims to govern in the name of the people, and there is no reason to doubt that this assertion is in part sincere. But the new elite, like all elites, is contemptuous and distrustful of the voters. It refuses to deal with the voter straight, and seeks to manipulate him instead, through the artifice of focus-groups and a corrupting alliance with the tabloid press. Tony Blair and his allies are engaged in a new and frightening political experiment which has radically reordered the relationship between governor and governed: one day it will go horribly wrong.
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