POLITICS
Peter Mandelson has a caring policy for the poor: he wants to boss them about
BRUCE ANDERSON
The most important political event of the past few days was a publication. The document in question is sprawling — far too long for its meagre content — and ill- written. But it does expose systematic duplicity. The central characters are shown to be wholly unfit for ministerial office. I refer to The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? by Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle.
There is a puzzling passage on page one: `Is New Labour a clever piece of position- ing — a creation of spin doctors and public- relations men — that lacks real substance. . .?' My old friend Peter Man- delson has many qualities, but they do not normally include modesty. So what does he mean by writing 'doctors' and 'men'? There is only one doctor, only one man, and his triumph has been to persuade and bully his party and its leadership to renounce sub- stance in the interests of electorability.
This is a skilfully crafted book, for the authors were afraid to write anything that could be quoted against their party. In antic- ipating Central Office's reaction, they cite Job's wish 'that mine adversary had written a book'. But their fear was a good counsellor: they skim over the issues as nimbly as a weaver's shuttle. It is a record-breaking achievement to have produced a 274-page book on politics which says almost nothing.
The weakness of the arguments is most apparent in the section on social cohesion. The authors begin with the most fashionable current political question: how can we recon- cile social cohesion and a successful competi- tive capitalist economy? They have a charac- teristically slick answer. You juxtapose the two desiderata in the same sentence, thus implying that they are logically connected. You state firmly that you (and Tony Blair) are in favour of both — and you hope that your reader will believe that you have achieved them. Before accusing Messrs Mandelson and Liddle of hypocrisy, we have to remember that we are dealing with per- sons who do not know the difference between an argument and a soundbite. We can only hope that their readers are less gullible.
That capitalism places strain on social organisations is self-evident. The history of the modem West could easily be entitled `Capitalism and its discontents.' But the problem is not social cohesion, of which there is no shortage. All of us depend upon such cohesion throughout our daily lives, and for at least 99 per cent of the time, there is no difficulty in doing so. The prob- lem is crime, most of which arises from the refusal of a growing underclass to obey the law and accept social discipline.
Messrs Blair, Mandelson and Liddle all imply that there is a connection between underclass misbehaviour and growing inequality, as if higher taxes on the rich would somehow appease the criminals. That argument collapses as soon as it is stated, but anyone who wishes to appreciate its full glib absurdity ought to read our authors' section on the Bulger murder, which breaks another record: no one has ever discussed that case in such a cold-hearted way.
We are informed that Mr Blair was upset by the murder as an 'ugly manifestation of a society that is becoming unworthy of the name'. So it was all the Tories' fault: if only Cedric Brown had had to pay more tax on his share options, Jamie Bulger would still be alive. But after counselling from Mr Mandel- son, Mr Blair was able to cope. At this point, our authors' prose comes to life; they are now dealing with a topic that does arouse their emotions. Tony Blair made a speech. 'It was a seminal speech. He was nervous about making it . . . But . . . more than any other speech this one defined the man and imprinted his character on the public mind.'
So there we have it. Murdered toddler, good soundbites, favourable ratings: New Labour.
There is one example of a society in which crime fell and an underclass was moralised: Victorian Britain. But this owed nothing to witterings about social cohesion or inequality. It occurred for two reasons; first, the spread of 'Victorian' — i.e. bour- geois — values throughout society; second, when that failed, repression. That is an example worth following. Instead of pursu- ing cohesion and finding it to be only a Blairite rhetorical illusion, we should coerce malefactors and make them cohere.
There are times when Mr Mandelson comes close to recognising this. He is not only an authoritarian, he has no fellow- feeling for the poor. Not for him 'there but for the grace of God go I'; his only response is 'how by the grace of God do I make them go to the polling booth?' The absence of sentiment could be useful, for the underclass does need to be bossed around, and Mr Mandelson has some use- ful suggestions as to how this might be achieved. But New Labour cannot abide clear thinking. After one passage which stresses the importance of marriage and the dangers of family breakdown there is a denunciation of 'prejudiced nonsense about the recklessness of single mothers'. But that is a matter not of prejudice but of post-judice. There is no realistic way of tackling the problem without acknowledg- ing that many single mothers have been reckless and trying to discourage others from emulating them.
In the 1970s, Peter Mandelson worked for the TUC, taking notes at meetings. His prose style was ideally suited to that task, judging by this book, for its writing and its contents are in harmony: flatness and banality matched by emptiness and evasion. But there is a deeper reason for the bad writing. Most politicians care either about specific social groups or about some ideo- logical project or about their country. Whatever their faults, old-fashioned Labour figures like Denis Healey or John Smith did believe in a better deal for those at the bottom of the heap. They also thought that a more socialist way of run- ning things would liberate human potential.
Margaret Thatcher cared passionately about her people, the striving upwardly mobile. She was also a patriot. For what and whom do Messrs Mandelson and Lid- dle care? In the book, they invent some ordinary people to use in creating political parables. But there is no conviction in the writing: it is a third-rate advertising man's attempt to describe the target consumer.
All good writing must be founded on sin- cerity, just as no sincere writing can be entirely worthless. If our authors want us to believe that they care about the human con- dition, they will have to start by doing so. Apart from Tony Blair's successful exploitation of Jamie Bulger, there is one other point at which the authors' prose car- ries conviction. Appropriately, it deals with power, one of Peter Mandelson's favourite words. When he uses it, he savours it like an oenophile rolling a first growth around his palate. And so he does here, in a pas- sage ostensibly critical of our system of gov- ernment, when he writes of 'the thrill of power in opening the red box'. That is the Mandelsonian equivalent of Smith's social- ism or Thatcher's patriotism; that is his car- ing dimension, in its full sincerity.
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