WHO WAS FIBBING, THE OLD BLAIR OR THE NEW?

The Labour leader is adept at promoting the idea that his party has transformed itself Boris Johnson wonders how much of the Old Labour lurks below the surface

THERE IS a rather good parlour game where you pick up the Bible or Shake- speare or Baedeker, or, even better, the Koran, and quote a passage until you start improvising parodically, while the listener has to guess at exactly which point you departed from the text. Well, I thought I would give you some Tony Blair. All you have to do is yell or whistle as soon as you think I am starting to send up Blair's efforts to sound like a Tory. Ready? Here goes. This is Blair in the spring of 1995: `I believe Margaret Thatcher's emphasis on enterprise was right.'

`Parents must be warned that non-atten- dance by children can lead to court.'

`Top-rate tax does not equal wealthy any more.'

`I am in favour of capi- tal punishment for those who kill policemen.'

All right, I admit it, I made the last one up. But you take the point, I hope.

The Labour leader is by any standards formidable in his public relations. Like a master organist he flits between the stacked keyboards of the press, playing us all simultaneously without hitting a bum note. His handling of the 'teachers' who frightened Blunkett's dog was assured, turning a minus for Labour into a plus.

Such is the lust for change, the despera- tion to trust him, that the electorate would seemingly forgive anything. Should they?

In theory, it is a measure of a statesman's fitness for power whether he is tenax propositi, whether he adheres to principle. So let us play another game, the one that the BBC would play, were its presenters a tiny bit tougher on what we are invited to call 'New Labour'. The game is an old, crude politician's stand-by. I only resort to the trick because it is so unfashionable and because Labour is still handled with such deference. This game is called 'But You Said, Mr Blair — And I'll Read It To You'.

We've all heard of Blair the Moderniser. Blair the Moderniser has reassured Middle England that he isn't going to tamper with the Tory trades union law which largely restored confidence in Britain overseas. But there is another character: we might call him Ur-Blair. Here is Blair the Archaiser on the subject of the 1984 Trade Union Act, an essential, democratic reform which made strike ballots compulsory: 'It is a disgrace that we should be debating today the taking away of fundamental freedoms for which British trade unionists have fought . . . We shall oppose the Bill, which is a scandalous and undemocratic mea- sure.' Young Tony was scarcely less Spar- fish, Hansard reveals, about the 1982 Act and the restrictions on secondary picketing.

Anyone can change his tune, especially in response to four election defeats. But it is more difficult, one would think, for a politician to change his or her instincts. The important question for us all, as voters expecting a Labour government, is, When were they telling the truth about what they really thought then or now?

One of the pair, Ur-Blair or Blair, is lying. I am fairly sure the fibber is, or was, Ur-Blair the Archaiser. In other words, what you now see is what you get; he really is a social democrat-cum-Tory who happens, amazing- ly, to be leading the Labour Party. Many of the converts among us will want to see it like this. They will be inclined to be indulgent of Ur-Blair. They will know why he said things like, 'We'll negotiate a withdrawal from the EEC, which has drained our natural resources and destroyed jobs' in his 1983 election address. He said them, fingers crossed, because he was a bright young man who wanted to get on in the Labour Party, like those Tories who stoutly defended the ERM in 1991 and 1992 and then repented.

The more interesting question, perhaps, concerns the rest of them. Which set of propositions, reflects the true instincts of the Shadow Cabinet, the senior figures whom Blair must heed, especially if, as seems likely, he has a small majority in Par- liament? Were they faking it for all those years, and did they decide — about a year ago — to tell the truth? Or are they dissim- ulating now? It should not be too tiresome to repeat that the entire Shadow Cabinet was opposed to every one of the Govern- ment's privatisations, that 14 of them are known to have been members of CND, that six of them voted against Britain's member- ship of the EU.

I wonder if these colleagues of Mr Blair can really have lost the emotions that actu- ated them then, that made them want to go into politics: the deep distrust of capital- ism; the hatred of the profit motive; the wariness of commercial competition; the class anger; the instinctive belief that busi- ness is best organised by the state; the urge to take and redistribute money.

Which is the real Jack Straw on the sub- ject of education? There is the Jack Straw who has beamed at Tony and Cherie Blair's decision to send their son Euan to a grant-maintained school. Or there is the Jack Straw who at a local government con- ference in 1992 called Tory plans for opting out, which broadly took power over chil- dren from left-wing councils and gave it to parents and governors, a 'disreputable and failing system'. In a press release of 1988, the old Jack Straw, Ur-Straw, said City Technology Colleges and opted-out schools are 'designed systematically to sabotage the central value of the comprehensive school'. As recently as 1991, he wanted to axe the `wasteful' City Technology Colleges, there- by, he said, saving about £50 million.

I have an idea which is the real Jack Straw. Think into the mind of someone who believes that 'the monarchy is a deeply decadent and detached system for which we are all paying'. He is obviously an over- grown student socialist.

Which is the real John Prescott? Is he the man who, with Blair, turned Clause Four into a kind of fast-food mission state- ment, or the man who told us all in Febru- ary 1994 that 'I come from the bowels of the trade union movement. I am a typical creature of the movement.' The psychologi- cally convincing Prescott, surely, is the one who said in May 1994, 'I don't believe in ditching Clause Four because I do believe there is a role for public ownership'; the one who told Labour and Trade Union Review 1990 what he would do with the Tories' employment reforms: 'There's nothing you can keep of this legislation. It all has to go.' We are told by New Labour and New Blair that a minimum wage would not cost jobs. But Ur-Prescott gave the game away on Sky TV on 18 March 1992: 'I think you have to accept that there will be some shake-out of jobs in certain areas.' Again, Tony Blair has been ingeniously vague about what New Labour would do to our tax bills. He's not saying anything on tax, except that the Tories have lied and robbed.

4 But wait, here is Prescott, only last year: There's certainly going to be a higher top rate than we have . . . You can argue about What that might be, but if we want a fair tax system, you're certainly going to have that.' And which is the real Labour policy on nationalisation? Tony Blair's office told me that suggestions that Labour might take control of some industries were 'rubbish'. But according to the master mariner and deputy leader in the Morning Star 30 August 1986, 'The public utilities should be returned to public ownership and there should be state intervention where capital- ism fails . . Or take Frank Dobson, who said in the House on 2 July 1991, 'We have said all along that we will bring the Nation- al Grid Company back into public owner- ship. It will be a high priority, I assure Hon. Members.' Margaret Beckett, Robin Cook, Tony Blair, Ann Taylor: all have called for water to be returned to the state sector.

As for their policy on the single currency, well, the answer is Yes. As Blair put it in the House of Commons, 'The answer is unequivocally Yes;' or, as Prescott said on the Today Programme on 15 June 1991, `Yes, we're against a single currency.'

Now it will be up to Jeremy Hanley, or whoever succeeds him as party chairman, to persuade the electorate that New Labour is really Old Labour, that they are still the same under the skin. It is, he must suggest, a little like the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They have seized a plausi- ble guise, while underneath are invisibly gibbering creatures from political outer space.

In fairness to Labour, the party is chang- ing under Blair. Some leftish MPs report that they receive the odd letter of protest from constituents lamenting the loss of rad- icalism. Old-fashioned constituency associ- ations have been deeply offended by the Blairite decision that 50 per cent of all can- didates must be women; and a revolt is brewing on that score. But those 80,000 new members who have joined since he became leader are, it is said, diluting the hard-left activists.

It should be recorded, too, that some of the old-style Labour Left don't really believe that the U-turn will become an S- bend when New Labpur comes to power. `It's like Gorbachev's Communist Party in the Soviet Union,' says one sad and distin- guished Labour MP. 'They just go along with whatever the leader says.' They've been lobotomised by defeat, he argues. The Shadow Cabinet are not only docile now, they would be docile in office.

`I need IVF on the National Health as I'm desperate fora council house.' `Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I don't think John Prescott is going to kick over the traces once he gets into power. John is a good guy but he loves his Jaguar. Meach- er has never really rebelled. Cook will go along with almost anything.'

Remember, though, that these are criti- cisms from the Labour Left. For believers in common sense, there is only one way to test whether New Labour's conversion is sincere, and that is to put the following questions to Blair and Co: Will you reduce the burden on posterity by following the Government in encourag- ing private pensions? Will you discourage spongers by keeping the Jobseeker's Allowance? Will you maintain Mr Lilley's, attempts to stop malingerers from claiming Disability Benefit? Will you keep compul- sory competitive tendering for local author-. ities?

I believe the answer to all those ques- tions, and others like them, is No. That is a fact that should be exposed. Mr Gordon Brown is apparently telling his friends that Labour has done, enough allaying of mid- dle-class fears. Soon, he says, Labour will have to spell out its positive policies.

Come on, New Labour. Now is the time to go on the offensive and tell us what you really think. It is the Tories' only hope.

Boris Johnson is assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph.