POLITICS
Playing on the deeper strata of the broad masses' emotions
BRUCE ANDERSON
This is the time of year when columnists try to foresee the future. This year, that is a problem, for it is hard enough to foresee the past. It is not clear, moreover, whether 1997 will turn out to be a watershed year like 1945 or 1979, one of the framework dates in any interpretation of British poli- tics, or whether it will merely be a rerun of 1964, which was almost universally herald- ed as a watershed in the first few months after Mr Wilson's victory, but which ended in meretriciousness and failure.
Mr Blair started with one great advan- tage; his legacies from the previous govern- ment. The first was a strong economy. As soon as John Major became Prime Minister he began to implement the economic strat- egy which he had originally conceived while he was Chancellor. That strategy, disinfla- tion and steady growth, remained unaltered for the next six and a half years — the ERM was only a tactic — and by May 1997 its success was manifest, except in public opinion. Mr Major failed not because his policies failed but because his government was a rhetoric-free zone (Tony Blair will never make that mistake).
As a result of his predecessor's strategic victories and rhetorical failures, Mr Blair inherited not only a sound economy but a ripened public opinion. By 1 May, much of the public was terminally exasperated by the Tories. That the actual grounds for complaint in no way justified the intense sense of grievance was immaterial, and greatly to Mr Blair's advantage. By doing hardly anything, he could appear to be putting everything right, while the public, fed up with being fed up, was willing him to succeed. They had given Mr Major the doubt of every benefit but for Mr Blair they have reversed the order. Even when his ministers have run into trouble, he has been unaffected. We have heard of Teflon presidents; thus far, he has been the first Teflon premier.
That is also courtesy of Mr Major, for it would not have been possible unless the Tories had suffered such a heavy defeat. Mr Blair's majority has enabled him not only to dominate his government but to stand above his party. Whereas previous Labour pre- miers were undermined by factional con- flicts, Mr Blair believes that, within limits, he can turn them to his advantage. He would like to project himself as the man who commands the centre, while brushing aside irrelevant proposals from marginal groups such as Old Labour, or the Tory party.
This gives the Tories a problem. The conventional wisdom is that in the early phase of a Parliament the opposition should say little. To do otherwise would not only remind the voters why they cast their ballots as they did. It would risk committing the opposition to ill thought-out policy positions which the government could later use in evidence against it. Even if the oppo- sition did manage to stumble into a good idea in the early months of a Parliament, the government would have plenty of time to steal it: an especial danger under Mr Blair's magpie administration.
Here again, it is hard to be sure whether the conventional wisdom still applies after 1 May. But it is clear that masterly inactivi- ty is not a risk-free option for the Tories. The longer the PM can present the welfare debate as a contest between Blair and Blunkett — Blair having the whip hand in the Commons — the happier he will be. Mr Hague spent too much of his first few months reminding the voters how young and new he is, a point that had already been grasped and not necessarily to his benefit. He was too slow in projecting him- self as the next prime minister. He has, admittedly, done well in the Commons, where he regularly bests Mr Blair at PM's Questions. If that mattered even half as much as it did when Harold Wilson was getting the better of Alec Douglas-Home, Tony Blair would be in difficulty, as the public realised that the Leader of the Opposition was cleverer and sharper than the Prime Minister. As it is, Mr Blair is benefiting from the dumbing-down of poli- tics. So for Mr Hague Parliament is not enough. He will have to find a way of rein- serting his party into the debate and of using his oratorical gifts to develop a tone of voice that will command public atten- tion. That there is no easy way of accom- plishing this makes it an even more urgent priority for the new year.
Mr Blair, meanwhile, would like his new year to bring more of the same. The longer he can go on winning the last election, the nearer he will be to winning the next one. There are, however, a couple of problems at opposite ends of the macro/micro scale. The first is the Far East; will its faltering markets plunge the world economy into gloom? You reads your City forecasters and you tosses your coin. My hunch is that the doom-mongers underestimate the inge- nuity of the banking system. There is a vari- ant on the adage that if you owe the bank a £1,000, you have a problem, but if you owe £1 million, the bank has a problem. If the banks owe one another £100 billion, the whole world has a problem, but it is the sort of problem which central bankers are good at solving, as they showed during the Latin American debt degringolade in the early Eighties. Unless there is a further development such as military action by North Korea — not impossible, given that regime's desperate condition — world eco- nomic growth will be lower than it might have been, but there will be no crisis.
There will be a crisis over the Millenni- um Dome. It is interesting how the word `pseud' went into disuse during the 1980s, as if in response to that decade's apparent tough-mindedness — though Thatcherism had a higher pseudo-intellectual quota than was acknowledged at the time. But not as much as the Dome; it will be pure pseudery in every molecule.
The Tories, of course, are not guiltless. The Dome is a reminder of what can go wrong at the end of a government, when everyone is concentrating only on essentials and second-order projects slip through unscrutinised. There is also Hezza, one of the dome's progenitors; a man of taste in his own house and grounds, but one who can rarely resist the allure of grandiloquent flashiness. But as it realises that it has less than two years not only to complete the dome but to find a meaning for it, White- hall is beginning to display the first signs of panic. Mr Hague has those two years to extricate himself from all responsibility and to ensure that the blame is heaped on the government in general and on Peter Man- delson in particular. That should not be a hard task.
That is, unless the British people really have changed character and discarded those robust attributes which were the pop- ular basis of Anglo-Saxon pragmatism: common sense and cynicism. In the 1920s, a prescient anticipator of many recent pro- paganda techniques wrote that 'the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emo- tional nature than consciously or voluntari- ly'. We just have to hope that Hitler was wrong, at least about the British.
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