Tony Blair’s announcement that he will not, if Labour is re-elected next year, lead the party into a fourth general election leaves British politics with a peculiarly American feel. Assuming the Prime Minister is returned to Downing Street in the spring, he will, like an American president beginning his second term, know that his time in office is limited to, at most, another four years and that his party will, sooner rather than later, begin the search for a successor. In short, Tony Blair has set his own term limit.
And, like a second-term US president who can see – in a manner that British prime ministers rarely do – his political mortality, Blair’s thoughts are no doubt now turning to his legacy. If the Prime Minister wants to achieve the kind of irreversible and seismic change which only Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher have achieved in the postwar period, he will want to think back to the promise and hope of 1997 – that Labour could close Britain’s progressive deficit and create a modern, social democratic country – and consider the task ahead.
However, Labour’s ability to achieve this goal is dependent upon the party winning the coming general election with a resounding majority (the subject of Progress’ cover story this issue). Perhaps surprisingly, the need for this kind of result is not universally recognised in the party. In the past, some have argued that the size of Labour’s majorities in 1997 and 2001 have diluted its message and weakened its purpose. By this reckoning, the requirement to hold wealthy, ‘Middle England’ constituencies causes the party to lose sight of those whose interests it ‘truly’ exists to defend. We disagree fundamentally with this assumption. At its most simple level, even in the wealthiest parts of the country, there are thousands of traditional Labour voters who need, desire and deserve to be represented by a Labour MP. The party’s MPs should not be seen simply as expendable lobby fodder.
More worryingly, the ‘smaller is better’ view returns Labour to the politics of false choices: the belief that the interests of much of the working- and middle-classes are simply irreconcilable. Again, Progress has always rejected the notion that Labour cannot create a broad coalition of support around policies – a strong and stable economy, high-quality public services, and an attack on inequality in all its forms, to name but three – that reflect the values of aspiration, fairness, and tolerance that most Britons share. Let’s not return to the days when it is assumed that Labour’s traditional supporters lack ambition or are not concerned about living in safe communities, or that the middle-classes are uninterested in tackling poverty or the quality of public services.
Finally, those on our own side who would rather that Labour did not achieve another landslide victory and substantial majority are taking a dangerous gamble about both the nature of the opposition and the character of a small-majority Labour government.
The Tory party is certainly doing its very best to look dead and there is something both pathetic and risible about its claims after every new by-election humiliation that the constituency in question is ‘not our natural territory’. At the current count, the Tories are suggesting that the Midlands, London and the north of England are not their ‘natural territory’, which leads one to ask: where is? Remember that, prior to 1997, Labour was winning by-elections in such ‘natural Labour territory’ as Wirral South and South East Staffordshire.
However, lamentable as their performance currently is, the Tories are not clueless. Michael Howard’s decision to tack to the populist right and concentrate his fire on immigration and asylum, crime, Europe and ‘political correctness’ (good code for social liberalism) is a classic ‘base mobilisation’ strategy, designed to motivate the 30 percent or so of the electorate who will probably vote Tory come hell or high water (they voted for William Hague, after all).
As the 1997 and 2001 general elections proved, this share of the vote brings few dividends in terms of seats (although it is arguable that Hague’s strategy in 2001 prevented a total collapse of the Tory vote). Howard’s gamble, however, is that turnout will fall further at the next election and that his task is to motivate his base to come out and vote and hope that the other two-thirds of the electorate will not bother to show up. Remember that in 1999 the Tories reaped large numbers of seats in the European elections on just this assumption (and they probably would have achieved a similar performance this year had it not been for the presence of the UK Independence party outflanking them on the right).
The politics of low turnout elections are not pleasant: witness the manner in which George Bush has attempted to win the US presidential election this year by trying to piece together small blocs of voters on the basis of narrow, divisive appeals.
Labour must avoid, therefore, sleep-walking into a low turnout election and finding itself returned to power with a only small majority. In such a scenario, the parliament that follows would see the Tories – for the first time in over a decade – with the wind in their sails. Labour will struggle, as John Major did after the 1992 general election, to claim much by the way of mandate and its opportunity to effect real and lasting change will be severely weakened.
At the next general election, therefore, Labour must make a broad, forward-looking appeal that seeks to both raise its own level of support and turnout overall. The achievements of the past seven years need to be advertised not so that we can seek the gratitude of the electorate for them, but to show both the distance we have come and, perhaps most importantly, to demonstrate that politics does matter and can, quite literally, change lives.
The ten-point plan outlined by Tony Blair at the party’s conference – particularly the pledges on health and education, childcare, pensions and the promise of ‘a fair deal for all at work’ – should do much to reassure Labour’s members and voters that this will truly be a third term worth fighting for. Indeed, the plan indicates that on most fronts, the Prime Minister is still committed to eradicating the progressive deficit that he inherited in 1997. Childcare for all will do much to help close the inequality gap; new goals are being set to make Britain’s public services fit for the 21st century; and building on Gordon Brown’s economic mastery, we have the promise to ‘widen the circle of opportunity’ further.
A conference speech cannot cover every aspect of policy, but over the months ahead, we would like to hear more from the Prime Minister on the two final areas of the progressive deficit – building a modern constitution and placing Britain at the heart of Europe – which barely rated a mention in Brighton. The government must give an indication both that the great unfinished constitutional business of Labour’s first term – House of Lords reform – will be completed with the creation of a majority-elected second chamber, and that it will act to counter the poisonous xenophobia of the right and make the case for the EU and Britain’s adoption of the proposed constitution.
It took the Tories until their third term – with Nigel Lawson’s swingeing tax cuts in 1988, the introduction of the NHS internal market, and the privatisations of the utility companies – to really effect a decisive break with the postwar consensus politics that they so despised. However, the ideological self-confidence and momentum that the Thatcherites showed after 1987 owed much to the scale of their general election victory that year. For Tony Blair, a sustained effort to close the progressive deficit is a goal as radical and ambitious as that embarked upon by the Tories in their third term. It will, however, require a victory as emphatic as that achieved by Margaret Thatcher in 1987.