Sticking his oar in, again…

Ben Wildsmith

There have only been two consequential prime ministers in my lifetime, and I hate them both.

The others: Ted Heath, Harold Wilson Mk 2, Jim Callaghan, John Major, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and the new bloke might as well be rolled together into a sludgy whole like strands of plasticine. Their singularities were shaped by events, rather than their effects upon them.

Not so Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. They were the ones that counted.

Thatcher’s decisions were as beneficial for part of the population as they were catastrophic for the rest. For that reason, she retains a significant following amongst people who either did well from her shattering of the post-war consensus, or who fondly imagine that they would have thrived had they been adults at the time.

Her reductive conflation of national economics with household accounting strikes a chord with many to this day, and the idea that individual effort is a guarantor of personal success remains comforting to some – particularly those whose efforts were made in the warm waters of familial privilege. (Paging Jacob Rees-Mogg).

To misquote The Big Lebowski, ‘Say what you like about the tenets of Thatcherism, but at least it’s an ethos.’

Tony Blair’s legacy is altogether more complex. After the polarising trauma of the Thatcher years, and the chaotic incompetence that followed, Blair offered a new mode of politics.

In place of ideology, we were offered ‘values’. Presentation moved from the periphery of governmental concerns to become of primary concern. Political and economic theory was to be distrusted as evidence of dogmatism. Instead, we were persuaded that a modern government could pick and choose solutions to problems as each demanded.

It was neither this nor that, it was the ‘third way’, a public/private partnership in which managerial pragmatism was the guiding principle.

For a while, this approach chimed perfectly with the electorate. Very few people fancied returning to standing around picket lines in donkey jackets waiting to be battered by the police. We also welcomed the relaxation of public spending after being told for so long that schools and hospitals were extravagances that, really, we ought to be paying for privately were we not such feckless losers.

Blair had two advantages that he remains unwilling to acknowledge. Firstly, people had an ingrained idea of what a Labour government was for.

It was assumed that its priority was the uplift of working people, so all the Mandelsonian business-speak and leveraging of private capital must only be the new way of bringing that about. So, the ideological void at the heart of the government went unchallenged.

It might be New Labour but it’s still Labour, look they’ve got John Prescott on the front bench, you can’t get more authentic than him…

Secondly, Blair was operating during a period of sustained global growth. That allowed for substantial investments in public services, creating visible improvements to communities across the UK. ‘Things can only get better,’ the red campaign buses had blared (Blaired?), and in your local hospital or school, they probably did.

What didn’t change, however, was where the money was coming from. Private capital continued to flow into public services, creating long-term financial obligations for subsequent governments.

Structural catastrophe

Increased public investment was floated by a reliance on financial services that masked the structural catastrophe that was unfolding in the local economies of areas deindustrialised over the previous decades.

We had a new wing on the hospital, but low-quality jobs and no built-in resilience when the markets corrected.

That happened in 2008, and politics since then has been a series of unpleasant distractions from the reality of our national situation.

Shifting the blame to Europe brought us Brexit, when that fared as it was bound to, immigrants came into the crosshairs of virtually all politicians.

Last year, the new Labour government seemed to suggest that our best hope for economic reinvigoration lay in manufacturing weapons for a war with Russia.

Carnage

The reality of what a government without ideology means became manifest to most when Blair took the UK to war in Iraq against the clear objection of the public. His legacy is a party that sees the carnage of continental war as an opportunity.

So, when Blair popped up this week to warn against a ‘lurch’ to the left by his party, he was returning to the scene of the crime.

His nihilistic, soulless outlook is visible to all in our hollowed-out high streets, identikit shopping centres, and the immoral, hypocritical stance the UK takes to the rest of the world.

Who on earth does he think would listen to him now?