Progress Annual Lecture by the Rt Hon Peter Mandelson MP on 11 February 2004
The argument of this lecture is that Labour stands tonight at a crossroads. We can go forward to a bold third term. We can build on New Labour’s achievements in reconnecting our Party and the British people with the values of social justice and fairness. Or we can falter under the present assault on our government and Prime Minister by the combined forces of the oppositionist left and reactionary right.
The oppositionist left never came to terms with New Labour. They resist the hard choices necessary in government. And in some cases seem determined to play into the hands of the Tories by exploiting Iraq issues to question Tony Blair’s integrity. My message tonight is this dalliance must stop.
This is surely the most successful Labour government ever. Of course we have made mistakes. All governments do. But for the last six and a half years, policy has followed one unambiguous direction – to address Britain’s ‘progressive deficit’.
In 1997, Britain was a long way from being a modern social democracy. Our constitution belonged in the dark ages. Decades of under-investment meant that the public goods that other European countries take for granted had deteriorated to a calamitous state of physical disrepair and shattered morale.
Britain was a country where we spent literally billions keeping the able-bodied idle, and where millions of hard-working people were denied a living wage. Widening social divisions ripped communities apart: one in three children were living in poverty. Neighbourhoods, including areas in my own constituency of Hartlepool, were ravaged by crime, disorder and anti-social behaviour.
Our purpose in Government since 1997, driving through every policy, every reform, every spending commitment, has been to make up that progressive deficit – ensuring that everyone, not just the privileged few has the chance to succeed.
We have created a modern, pluralist democracy.
We have entrenched economic stability ensuring steady growth and a million and a half more jobs. We have committed unprecedented investment in the public services so that this year, next year, the year after, Britain is the only major industrial country where spending on health and education is rising in real terms.
We have introduced rights that working people take for granted in much of Europe: the minimum wage, four weeks paid holiday, improved maternity and paternity rights, the basic right to join a trade union.
For the unemployed, we have built an empowering welfare state through the New Deal, the Working Families Tax Credit, additional childcare places, and an automatic entitlement to basic skills and IT training in an economy where 90% of new jobs are IT-related.
In foreign policy, agree with the specifics or not, we have stood up for Britain by leading in the world, not retreating in isolation.
All this represents a fundamental shift of wealth, power and opportunity to the hard-working majority in our country.
Little wonder the right hate us and hate what we are doing.
People have never understood the driving purpose of New Labour. It became fashionable in the 1990s to say that we had squeezed the ideology out of British politics. That in our drive for the centre ground we had eliminated all the fundamental differences between the parties.
This is a basic misunderstanding of our goal of aligning the centre with the left to create a winning majority for Labour to implement social democratic policies.
The British people have always shared Labour’s values of fairness and social justice. The twentieth century problem for Labour is that they did not trust our Party to be an effective vehicle for their implementation.
For decades, the Conservatives have skilfully played on fears of Labour to undermine public trust in us: in the 1920s it was the spectre of Bolshevism and revolutionary Socialism; in the 1950s the scare that Labour planned to nationalise every corner shop and raid every humble savings account; in the 1980s it was the return to trade union militancy or surrender to the Town Hall Trots who did the Tories’ work, and branded our party as the enemy of ordinary working people and their aspirations.
In his first three years of leadership, Tony Blair banished a century’s fears. And “having been elected as New Labour, we governed as New Labour”, making those fears part of political history.
That is why liberated from the past, the progressive project has such exciting potential in this new century. Because the point of
removing the dogma has been to strengthen the values that are at the heart of our party’s appeal – that was the whole point of re-writing Clause Four. The achievement of New Labour has been to redraw the contours of the political map so we have a much better chance of winning a majority for a renewed ethical commitment on the British Left.
For much of the 20th century the Labour Party agonised over what were, in essence, a set of false choices. We have seen through them.
New Labour has demonstrated clearly that it is possible to be both principled and electable; to speak with conviction while addressing the hopes and fears of voters; to combine active government with a competitive market economy; to encourage individual aspiration while strengthening collective security. That is why the propaganda of the right is so venomous against us and why no one in our Party should fall into the trap of helping to ventilate right-wing attacks against us.
We are approaching the rubicon in the life of this government. How we deal with the present, sustained attempts to foment unrest around the government will determine in what shape we survive in office and fight the coming election.
Cross that rubicon, and we will continue to make Britain a better place for all its citizens. Fail to navigate our way across it successfully, and we will be badly set back.
No one is entitled to take a third general election victory for granted. But the bigger risk is that we win – though without the full electoral mandate and the internal cohesion to ensure a bold third term.
There are strong interests who want to see New Labour fail. The right, because New Labour is what stands between them and power. And regrettably, in the case of some on the left, because New Labour stands between them and opposition, where fundamentally they prefer to be.
I ask people to take a step back and think through what is going on.
The ‘oppositionist’ Left
First, the ‘oppositionist’ Left.
Let me be clear who I mean. I draw a sharp distinction within the Labour tradition. I do not mean Labour’s legitimate Left. Many in that tradition came into politics – I know because my father regarded himself as a leftwinger throughout his life – out of disgust with the inequalities and unfairness of British society.
The legitimate Left shares a passionate commitment to change, has strong emotions of internationalism and pacifism flowing through its veins – which is why their opposition to war in Iraq was principled - but in its heart of hearts wants a Labour Government to succeed and prefers half a loaf to none at all.
The oppositionist Left on the other hand regard power, almost by definition, as disappointing. They are more comfortable with opposition even though there we achieve nothing. They see the labour movement as a defensive organisation to protect ‘us’ against the injustices of ‘them’. Their outlook is determined fundamentally by the ethos of resistance. They were brought up on a diet of protest. They march to a comfortable tune, reassuring in its certainties and readily equipped with the same hand-me-down analysis of each situation. The predictability of their responses does not make them any less persistent.
First, they begin with a theory of rightward drift. In their eyes, the Labour party is always selling out. Ask them who are the heroes of the golden age or when the great sell out started, and one is usually met with silence or dishonest praise. Memories are conveniently short.
Attlee was reviled by many in his time. Neil Kinnock, John Smith and every past Labour leader were accused of the sell out. I remember Neil in particular, a moderniser before it was fashionable, being constantly reviled by those forever pleading for Militant to be given a second chance. In this respect, Tony Blair is not the first “sell out” nor, doubtless, the last.
This feeds the theory of betrayal. The leadership, in their eyes, once in office, will always fail to deliver on its promises. They leave aside the unwelcome fact that the leadership often never promised to do many of the things they wish it would. In 1997 New Labour deliberately fought the election on a series of specific pledges which symbolised our priorities. Yet we were soon being castigated for not doing things we had never said we would do in the first place.
New Labour causes particular offence to this group because we “institutionalised” betrayal by re-writing Clause Four and modernising the party. When commentators refer to the “opposition to Blair” in his own party, they forget that a critical minority never supported him and New Labour in the first place.
Deeply conservative, this group clings to the old confusions of ends and means, which acts as a block to any change in the way things have been done, save lavishing more money on them.
So, they oppose diversity in schools because that might mean some schools improve better than others, ignoring the huge gaps that exist between schools as it is. They are, in the end, content for some children to be denied a high quality education as long as the imagined purity of the system they defend endures.
The same is true of hospitals. The attack on Foundation Hospitals was in the end born of deep seated opposition to admitting that one hospital might be better run or more attractive to work in than another. The unwelcome fact that our universal public services are in reality far from uniform in the quality of their provision, was the truth that dare not speak its name throughout this debate.
In the end this minority strand of left opinion wants everything to be free and everything to be the same. It is the politics of levelling down.
They do not want diversity in public services. They want everything to be paid for out of increased taxation. If to govern is to choose, to oppose is to never have to choose. So in the end, they are more comfortable in opposition than in government.
Unwilling to face tough choices, they betray those whose interests they claim to represent. And there is a final strand in oppositional Left thinking which has had a profound impact on our recent politics. This is a visceral anti-Americanism which has become so intense it leads to political positions which are morally bereft and absurd.
Witness the parodying of the fall of Saddam’s statue by the protesters in Trafalgar Square during President Bush’s visit – as though there was a moral equivalence.
To compare the leader of our strongest ally and the world’s biggest and most vibrant democracy with a despotic dictator who used chemical weapons against his own people, had his opponents fed live into shredders and carried out a reign of terror over Kurd, Shia and Sunni alike is the politics of the left wing playground.
Of course there is a legitimate debate to be had about Iraq and I respect those who had a genuine disagreement with the government over the war. But some people have convinced themselves that the United States is a malign influence on the world and that all military action involving the US is by definition wrong. They think a moral foreign policy should never go beyond the distribution of overseas aid.
But honest opponents of the war can simultaneously express their opposition but accept the Prime Minister’s good faith in prosecuting it. And they should acknowledge the facts on the other side of their argument.
A unanimous view of the Security Council that Saddam had WMD and that the dictator failed conspicuously to comply with UN resolutions for 12 years. Even the countries that opposed action never challenged the belief that Saddam had WMD. The Iraq Survey Group discovered after last year’s conflict that Saddam was undoubtedly developing WMD, including new biological agents. Hans Blix admitted last May that little progress had been made in identifying unaccounted for items produced in the 1990s including 3.9 tons of VX gas, 8,500 litres of anthrax, 550 artillery shells and 25 missile warheads bearing germ agents.
Indeed, those who opposed the war and are thrilled that no WMD have been found should be asking themselves: what exactly has happened to this deadly arsenal? And if the weapons are no longer in Iraq, where are they now?
But unfortunately, some Labour party meetings and some writers in the left press provide a source of therapy for those who prefer to duck these questions and disguise uncomfortable truths.
The new feature, though, of this situation compared with previous times in office, is the position of the overwhelming bulk of Labour Party members. They want their party to be in power, they want the government to succeed, they are proud of its achievements and appreciate that today’s world poses grave dangers which Britain must play its part in confronting.
I believe their patience is becoming exhausted with those parts of the movement who are throwing their lot in with the right in their attacks, not just on the issue of the war but on the Prime Minister’s personal integrity in taking the decisions he did.
Which brings me to what the right are up to.
Remember how the Right think: they believe they are a legitimate government, born to rule, and we are not. And the opposition to New Labour from these quarters is a much more serious threat. For, if the group on the left wield some power in the media and in our culture, the right wields even more.
The parliamentary rebellions over foundation hospitals and student finance gave the right hope. At long last, Labour was reverting to type by collapsing into division and rancour. On student finance, the right thought their moment had finally come. But they were deeply dismayed that Labour did not in the end perform to type.
A second Labour term was never what they expected. Before then, Labour governments are supposed to screw up through economic mismanagement and internal division. For them, a third term is truly unthinkable and drives them to despair.
The Tories know that the cumulative impact of social democratic change grows bigger, the longer our government holds office. Think back ten years and see how things have changed already. Gone is the xenophobia and isolationism, the false moralism of “back to basics”, and the sanctification of greed of the Thatcher-Major years – it is instead being steadily replaced by our values of tolerance, openness, rights with responsibilities, principled internationalism.
Now the Tories are being forced onto our ground as New Labour sets the terms of political debate: just last week a Tory spokesman admitted that his party would include a target for reducing child poverty in its next election manifesto – unthinkable five or ten years ago.
The oppositionist left and the Tory right may not feel they have anything naturally in common and I am not suggesting that the coalescing of right and left is a conscious conspiracy. But the Conservative Party is desperate: a third Labour term must be avoided at all costs.
So the consequence is that the infantile disorder of left oppositionalism and right wing fury are coming together in a pernicious pincer movement. And the person at whom they direct their anger more than any other is our Prime Minister.
Two strategic failures have brought the Tories and the oppositionist left to an utterly untrue charge that Tony Blair deceived the nation over Iraq.
The Tories’ message about New Labour has been confused and incoherent ever since 1994. At first we were dismissed as superficial gloss and tinsel. Remember Bambi ? Then, with ‘New Labour, New Danger’, we became an unprecedented almost demonic threat. But in government, the threat failed to materialise. So the attack changed to one of being obsessed with ‘spin’. But their new approach under Michael Howard is simply to avoid politics altogether, and concentrate on playing the man instead.
This is testimony to the Tories’ abject strategic failure in defeating Labour by other means.
Bereft of any developed policy agenda capable of bringing them victory, and desperate to avoid too much focus on the extreme policies they do have, they have decided simply to brand Tony Blair a liar, and to use the war in Iraq which they supported as the platform to make the charge.
That’s why they fastened on the issue of intelligence and whether Tony Blair lied about it or distorted it.
The charge is completely baseless. The accuracy of the intelligence may now be disputed but there is no doubt that it existed. Indeed, through the government’s publications we have all had unprecedented access to this intelligence material. Against the background of 9/11 and the world threat of WMD falling into terrorists’ hands, the Cabinet judged they could not ignore this intelligence. They were correct not to do so.
It is thoroughly disingenuous to argue that the Prime Minister did not have believable intelligence – we know that he did – or that somehow he incompetently did not understand it or that he wanted to go to war for a completely different set of political reasons. But this will not stop the Tories.
Their view is that if they repeat their charges often enough they will stick – no matter what the evidence is, no matter how many inquiries refute the charge, no matter how many judges find their claims unfounded. And they believe that the war gives them an opportunity to ally with Tony Blair’s leftist critics to double the volume and bring them safety in numbers.
Not since the days of appeasement or Suez have the Conservative party followed such a morally bankrupt course as they are now pursuing.
He wants the Prime Minister to resign for fighting a war which he supported, and claims still to support.
He aligns himself with the very anti-Americans he claims are a threat to our security.
He condemns reliance on intelligence with which he and his then leader – who saw it – had no quarrel at the time.
He questions the Prime Minister’s integrity, and seeks to undermine the international standing of the British government, on a matter of vital national importance, when his precise claims are held to be unfounded by an independent inquiry headed by a distinguished judge.
The only principle animating Michael Howard is the destruction of the prime minister – whatever the hypocrisy, contradictions and unholy alliances this involves, and he has entered into all three up to the hilt.
It calls into question not just Mr Howard’s judgement, but whether he could ever be trusted to put country before party.
The leftist critics of the war have, in a grotesque mirror image of the Tories, arrived at the same charge of deceit because of misjudgements of their own.
They told us that the war would be a disaster – and with the caveat that all wars are messy, it was executed superbly.
They told us that post war Iraq would be an appalling and unending quagmire; in fact the situation is tough, with attempts being made largely by outside elements to de-stabilise the progress being made, as we have seen in recent days, but it is a huge improvement on the daily fear and oppression which the people felt under Saddam.
They told us that the world would be plunged into crisis, with the Middle East up in flames; in fact the world is a safer place with other states revealing their previously concealed WMD programmes.
Rather than have to stand up and make the rather embarrassing argument that we should have left the dictator Saddam well alone, and allowed him to carry on with his butchery, the leftist critics have used the argument about intelligence judgements to justify the charge of government deceit. No amount of clarity from Lord Hutton or anyone else will stop them clinging to this life raft.
So these are the two routes that have brought the Tories and some of our own Party to precisely the same point. For each of them, it is a convenient shield to cover up shortcomings and contradictions of their own they would rather not have exposed, which is why both sides are willing to keep the argument going. It is a contemptible marriage of convenience.
And we should add to this mix a media which takes sides on this issue as never before and which in a number of cases is seeing the division between news and comment all but disappear.
When Lord Hutton entirely cleared the Prime Minister and those who work for him, the judge’s integrity was attacked. His report was dismissed first as flawed, then as naïve and in the end simply set aside.
Look at the absurdity of this situation.
At the same time as the twin dangers of proliferation of WMD and terrorism have been highlighted by the dramatic and alarming admissions of the WMD salesman Mr AQ Khan in Pakistan, some choose instead to obsess about a testimony from a disenchanted defence intelligence officer which has already been given to Lord Hutton and refuted by his superiors, in order to pursue a further rerun of the debate over the 45 minute claim in the government dossier of 18 months ago.
This issue is being used opportunistically on left, right and media alike and some individuals in our own Party should know better than to resort to such tactics in their search for vindication of their opposition to the war.
The party cannot afford such self-indulgence.
When individual PLP members consider joining in, because they disagree with this or disagree with that or just because they want revenge or vindication, I say: first think of your party and of the millions of our fellow citizens who depend for their livelihoods and life chances on the future policies and actions of the Labour government.
Let us recall what’s at stake and how far we have come.
In 1979 the eminent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote a seminal essay entitled the Forward March of Labour Halted. The decline of the manual working class meant Labour was in retreat to its industrial heartlands. Its chances of winning in future would progressively decline.
Despite moderate changes in our programme and organisation, for much of the 1980s it looked like Hobsbawm was right. Labour lost, again and again and again.
But 1997 showed that New Labour had overcome Hobsbawm’s prediction. Like Hobsbawm, Tony Blair knew that a retreat to the urban heartlands would consign Labour forever to opposition against a triumphant right.
Of course to win we had to appeal to Mondeo man and Worcester woman. We did, we won, and we are achieving a great deal of progressive change as a result.
There is no great moment of crisis for this government. No Black Wednesday, no winter of discontent, no great devaluation crisis – no loss of nerve. Instead our opponents are seeking to block our ability to act and communicate by throwing bucketfuls of mud in the hope that some of it sticks.
Meanwhile, as the Westminster village gets ever more febrile about the latest “worst week yet” for the Prime Minister, most Labour party members simply want him and the government to get on with their work. But that’s not enough.
It falls to Labour Party members to defend their government from these twin attacks from left and right. It falls to us in the party to sustain a government which has secured economic stability, full employment in many parts of the country and record investment in health and education. It falls on us to get out there and fight for our government. It is a battle worth fighting and a battle we must win.
We cannot afford to be complacent. The Tories are in a calamitous state. But reactionary ideas in Britain keep a more than residual hold. If the public begin to lose faith in us, they will turn not to the left, but towards a reactionary Britain more vicious even than anything we saw in the 1980s.
* A Britain that turns its back on Europe
* Where action on asylum means persecuting every immigrant
* Where law and order means locking people up, not dealing with crime’s causes
* Where people opt out of public provision with incentives to go private
* And where hierarchy and class are apparently the engine of economic success.
From these prejudices – driven by a culture of grievance and a pessimism about change – flow a set of right wing policy prescriptions:
* Tax cuts before investment.
* Fewer people going to university
* Unemployment as a tool of economic policy
* Families paying for private healthcare
* Britain pulling away or out of Europe
Put together these reactionary impulses, and it adds up to a fortress Britain, too scared of Europe to realise our prosperity, too doctrinaire to build a decent health service; too elitist to allow the sons and daughters of working people into the best universities; too backward-looking to understand modern family life; too defeatist to let all our people have the opportunity to succeed.
This is a battle for the soul of our country. We will not have put in place a project for lasting progressive change until we successfully take on and defeat these ideas.
This is the backcloth against which we need to plan for a third term.
We have local and European elections in June.
We will have what may well be our last pre-general election conference this autumn.
We cannot afford to mess around. Nobody with the party’s interests at heart will continue to do so.
Just look at what a third term in power could see us doing:
* Building public services that are genuinely the best in Europe on the basis that they are free to all, personal to each.
* Spreading prosperity beyond the South East ensuring that every region and every community shares the fruits of economic prosperity – with no-one left behind.
* Mounting a coherent, comprehensive attack on the barriers of race and class that hold people back, disfiguring the ideal of equal opportunity in Britain, through a historic commitment to investment in education and skills.
* Cutting crime by really effective action to prevent re-offending – creating new employment opportunities and investing in genuine rehabilitation for ex-offenders – breaking the cycle of crime in each community.
* Lightening the growing pressures on working families by making work pay even better, improved childcare opportunities, new flexibilities in the workplace.
* Devolving power closer to people in local neighbourhoods, giving local people the power to take decisions that improve the quality of life, and tackle anti-social behaviour.
* Defeating decisively the forces of Euro-scepticism that hold Britain back from realizing its prosperity in a globalised economy.
* Restoring trust in politics and strengthening public institutions, ensuring the public realm is once again a beacon of opportunity and integrity for all in our country.
* Sustaining and strengthening New Labour’s position as the conscience for progressive politics in Britain, creating a society that is more tolerant, more open, more just, more free.
Is all this too ambitious for a Labour government already in power for longer than any other ? Have we lost our appetite for power?
Are we still up for the tough choices and decisions that confront us? Or are we ripe for a spell in opposition again, just as some would like?
It is, as John Prescott said recently in a different context, “make your mind up time”. For my money, I am with the Deputy Prime Minister. We are up for it and we must make clear that our mind is made up, firmly, for the tasks that lay before us, both in forging ahead with the project and in getting the party back behind the project.
Though the centre of political gravity shifted hugely to the right in the 1980s, it has now moved back. The centre-left can be confident. Our ideas are in tune with the times. We are the Party of change. And change is the theme of our times. Our country, its economy, society, constitution, are all in far better shape than 1997. That’s why we must continue with the programme of investment and reform, stay true to our progressive ideals, and continue to make real and lasting change.
And, at the same time, let us watch with pride as the Tories become as skilled and practised at the art of opposition as we became during those long years in the wilderness. But let us not give them any help in raising the Titanic, and let us stop yearning for the false simplicity that opposition demands.
Instead let us get on with the task we have set ourselves and confront those seeking to derail us. There is no time to lose.
END