Tony Blair's legacy

As the Blair era in Britain drags to an end, how should the Left judge his time as Labour leader?

Whatever the timing and circumstances of his final departure will turn out to be, it's clear now that Tony Blair is on his last legs. The man who swept Labour to power in Britain nine years ago in a tidal wave of sound-bites, photo-ops and untutored optimism will soon be gone.

It seems like a long time now since 'Blairism' enthralled the European centre-left. Blair and his court philosopher Anthony Giddens launched the so-called 'Third Way' at the world in the late nineties, and for a time everybody wanted a piece of the action. Few people mention that lamentable marketing gimmick these days: there's no question that Blair will be recalled above all for his entanglements in the wars of the Bush administration.

The case against Blair's foreign policy has been ably made on many occasions, and need not be repeated here (judging by opinion polls, a clear majority of his own people reject Blair's subservience to Washington). But while the shiny facade of Blairism may have been tarnished beyond repair by sleaze and war-mongering, many of its underlying assumptions about politics and society in Britain remain firmly in place, and need to be challenged.

Working miracles at election time

Blair's reputation has always hinged on his electoral triumphs. 'The only Labour leader to win three straight elections' - there's a statistic to dazzle. But probing beneath the surface, we can see that his overwhelming victories owed more to Britain's electoral system than they did to the will of the British people. In 1997, Blair won fewer votes than John Major's Conservatives had in 1992, but received a huge seat bonus because his support was concentrated in the right areas.

4 years later, Blair managed an even bigger coup - Labour got fewer votes this time round than it had in 1992, when Neil Kinnock lost the election to Major. So at his best, Blair was less impressive as a vote-gatherer than the legendarily charismatic John Major, and managed to shrink the Labour vote as he went along.

The truth is, Blair didn't work any miracles - he simply inherited an extremely favourable situation. The Tories had scraped into office again in 1992 by the skin of their teeth, but their decrepit administration was dead in the water from its earliest days. Labour was way ahead in the polls when Blair fortuitously became leader after the death of John Smith in 1994. To borrow a football metaphor (sporting enthusiasm is one of the populist affectations that Blair has used to camouflage his naked elitism), Tony found himself in front of an open goal and just needed to tap the ball home.

Lurching to the right

There's one thing that everyone acknowledges about the Blair government: it has moved further to the Right than any Labour administration that held office between 1945 and 1979. Terrain previously occupied by the Conservatives alone has been tarmaced over by New Labour: even Labour's proudest achievement, the National Health Service, has been undermined by Blair's promotion of private health care. There has been no attempt to reverse the massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich that took place during the Thatcher years.

Blair himself should not be assigned all of the credit (or blame) for this shift. It was under the leadership of Neil Kinnock that Labour ditched many of the key left-wing policies: re-nationalisation of privatised industries, nuclear disarmament, repeal of Thatcherite anti-union laws.

But under Kinnock and John Smith, Labour still presented itself to the electorate as a moderate left-wing party with a social-democratic programme. Blair's shameless embrace of conservative values (and praise for Maggie Thatcher) is his innovation. Two key arguments have been used to justify the transformation of the Labour party into a right-wing force.

Pandering to the middle classes

The first refers to the growth of the 'middle classes', and their alleged hostility to traditional left-wing policies, which made Labour 'unelectable' unless it ditched the old agenda. The inverted commas are needed because the term 'middle class', as it is used, covers a very broad range of people. Blair himself has been heard to claim that 'we are all middle class now', which might surprise the inhabitants of Britain's worst slums.

Few terms in modern political language have been used as carelessly. Socialists have often been accused of making sweeping assumptions about the working class that owe more to political theory than the real habits and behaviour of wage-earners. There may well be some justice to the charges. But no Marxist could hope to match the certainty with which Blairites impute certain political views to the 'middle classes'.

Again, we need to look beneath the surface to what's really been going on. One thing is undeniable: over the last fifty years or so, there has been a significant change in the composition of the workforce in most developed countries. Broadly speaking, there are now more white-collar workers, more jobs in the 'tertiary sector' (neither agriculture nor manufacturing industry), and more working women. Traditional industries like steel, shipbuilding, mining and car production have been decimated as production shifts to the Majority World.

This has obvious implications for the Left. To take one obvious example, the demise of the British coal industry has broken the power of the miners' union, once the most radical and effective section of the workers' movement. But mainstream commentators have been too quick to pronounce the death of the working class. Equally important, when they talk about the 'vast' middle classes, they lump together well-paid, high-status professionals like lawyers and doctors with office workers whose conditions of employment are often as degrading as traditional factory jobs.

There is a big layer of 'middle-class' people who have far more in common with blue-collar workers than they do with upwardly-mobile professionals (never mind corporate executives and big investors). Whatever label they attach to themselves, they face the same problems of job insecurity and constant attacks by management on their pay and conditions. Outside the workplace, they depend on public services and their quality of life suffers badly when the public sector is starved of investment by Thatcherite policies.

Winning this section of society over is one of the crucial tasks for the Left in the developed world. There's good reason to believe that it can be done. Trade unions have already put down deep roots among nurses and teachers, for example, and these groups have taken part in militant industrial action. The challenge for the Left is to forge an alliance between the lower middle class and the working class (which hasn't gone away, you know) and build a progressive majority.

The myth of globalisation and the demise of social democracy

Even if this could be done, the Blairites would say, there's no point clinging on to the traditional principles of the Left. This is where the second argument comes in: the familiar refrain that 'globalisation' has made national governments powerless to impose restrictions on the freedom of capital. There's no point trying to impose a progressive tax system or robust labour regulation. All we can do is create the most favourable climate for business (lowering the tax 'burden', keeping the labour market 'flexible') and hope for the best.

It's true that changes in the global economy have undermined the space for social-democratic regulation of business. But the powerlessness of the nation-state is greatly exaggerated. 'Globalisation' is not a force of nature, as its apologists like to claim: it's a political agenda, that requires the support of national governments to make advances. Without the strong backing of the G8 powers (including Britain), the neoliberal agenda would have ground to a halt long ago.

Left-wing governments, however moderate, have always faced obstruction from the business class: they have always been threatened with capital flight, investment strikes and other forms of sabotage. But in the decades after the Second World War, businessmen had a (relatively) tolerant view of social-democratic governments. The long post-war boom provided the resources to pay for welfare programmes, while the strength of the Communist movement gave a powerful incentive to keep the lid on class conflict by granting reforms.

Things have changed since the heyday of social democracy. With economic growth less steady and recessions more frequent, business has been very reluctant to make concessions to the labour movement: in fact, all the pressure has been in the opposite direction, with incessant attempts to roll back gains made by workers in the past. The decline of Communism (and the failure of the 60s New Left to replace it) removed the fear of a revolutionary challenge to capitalism, and the corporate elite no longer saw any need to keep the moderate left on board. Britain led the way: when the Tory Party replaced the consensual Edward Heath with the abrasive Maggie Thatcher as its leader, it symbolised the shift towards an aggressive, confrontational approach, a class struggle from above against the workers' movement.

This is the social context that produced Blairism. It explains why the mainstream centre-left has followed the same trajectory across the developed world: parties with vastly different histories, from the US Democrats to the ex-Communists of Italy, have adopted strikingly similar policies. Blair became the spokesman for this tendency because he was its most brazen advocate: while other centre-left politicians adapted to the new realities with a begrudging attitude, Blair was a true believer.

It also explains why New Labour has steadfastly ignored opinion polls showing that a clear majority of the British people want the railways re-nationalised, and want the private sector kept out of the National Health Service. Blair has only been willing to follow the instructions of polls and focus groups when it suited him. Any policy that would have brought Labour into conflict with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and its media allies was unthinkable - even if it was overwhelmingly popular.

So Labour have been steadily losing votes since Blair became leader. The overwhelming desire to kick out the Tories gave the party a boost in the mid-nineties, but since then the record of Labour in power has seen its electoral base recede dramatically. Millions of working-class people have opted out of parliamentary politics, and electoral turn-out has reached an all-time low. Meanwhile, Thatcher's legacy remains firmly in place, and in some areas has even been extended. The gap between rich and poor has grown significantly since Blair took office.

After Blair

There's not much prospect of a change when Gordon Brown finally replaces Blair as leader. Many of his admirers paint Brown as a social democrat who will return Labour to its roots when he gets the chance. This ignores the overwhelming evidence that Brown shares the same ideological agenda as Blair. Even if Brown were that way inclined, he would have to push through a new agenda against the ferocious opposition of the right-wing media and the CBI. He shows no sign of having the stomach for such a fight. The crisis of social democracy was caused by powerful historical forces: it will take more than a new leader to put Humpty Tumpty back together again.

John McDonnell of the Socialist Campaign Group recently announced that he would contest the leadership election when Blair steps down. This is a promising sign: McDonnell and his supporters could use the election to kick-start a real debate about the condition of the British Left and the road to recovery. It seems likely, though, that the future of the Left lies outside the Labour party.

The future lies with activists who recognise that elections are not the be-all and end-all of politics and understand the need to mobilise people from below to change society. The successes of the anti-war movement at its best suggest that the spirit of collective action is far from dead in Britain. It's now essential to come up with a convincing strategy that can take the Left forward. Drawing up the balance-sheet of the Blair years is a vital first step.