Giles Radice termed it ‘southern discomfort’. In 1992, in the aftermath of Labour’s fourth consecutive general election defeat, the veteran MP bemoaned his party’s inability to win those vital seats in southern England which would enable it to form a government.
Nearly 15 years on, and there’s a distinct trace of that era in England’s local authority election results. Outside of London, where Labour now has overall control of less than a third of the capital’s 32 boroughs, the party managed to hold on to only two councils south-east of a line from Bristol to the Wash.
By contrast, Labour’s vote in the northern metropolitan boroughs and some of the shire districts was much more buoyant, as the party began to make up some of the heavy losses it sustained in 2004’s local elections. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that this year’s results hint at the ‘revival of an older political geography’, as the Tories come back in the south and suburbs and Labour holds its ground in its more traditional heartlands.
Elected in part to overcome the north-south divide, which had bedevilled Labour throughout the previous decade-and-a-half, Tony Blair is clear where the party’s problems rested on election day this year: ‘We were losing New Labour voters,’ he says simply.
The Prime Minister also evinces little doubt that the way back for the party is not so different from that which he and Gordon Brown first charted in the early 1990s: ‘We took a real pummelling in the weeks leading up to the election,’ the Prime Minister admits, ‘but I also think that we’ve got to rebuild our New Labour support. We’ve got to make sure we don’t lose the support of people who have come to us as New Labour, and I think that’s particularly true in issues such as law and order and public service reform.’
Tony Blair is, of course, keen to point out that the results were both not as bad as many had predicted, and that, in parts of the north and Midlands, Labour made gains. He also adopts a somewhat philosophical, if not relaxed, view. Local election defeats are, he says, ‘an inevitable part of being in government. It happened right through the 1980s when we were thumping the Tories in local elections and a fat lot of good it did us in a general election.’
The critical question, therefore, is ‘not whether you suffer reverses but how you handle it’. The key, he suggests, is ‘you have to keep changing’. ‘New Labour has always got to be moving to the next stage and realising that, as you are in power more, so you have to get even more of that centre ground back.’ The arguments which the party made to win office nine years ago – he cites under-investment in the country’s public services, the failure to address social division, and the presence of chronic economic instability – lack resonance now. ‘We can’t say those things anymore, because we have put a lot of those things right,’ he says.
Continuing the process of public service reform is thus vital to reviving Labour’s electoral fortunes, believes the Prime Minister: ‘What we’ve got to be doing – and this is the importance of public service reform – is saying, not merely have we put the money in, but we are the people to make the service far more consumer-friendly for today’s world, but on the basis of fairness, not ability to pay. If we are not making those reforms and changes, then people will say: “You were fine at curing the previous problem – which was under-investment – but the next problem – which is giving the quality of service – is something you can’t handle”.’
Tony Blair recognises that, for many in the Labour party, the issues involved are difficult: ‘To say the traditional notion of comprehensive education has to change radically is a tough thing for the Labour party to handle. We’re very proud of having created the comprehensive system and I understand why it’s tough for people, but the fact is the world has changed and it’s not good enough today. We’re proud of the National Health Service, but it’s not enough today that you simply keep it true to the principle of ability to pay not based on wealth, because when people are paying their taxes and they get a certain standard of choice and service in any other walk of life, they’ll say: “If you’re putting in all this extra money, I want to be able to choose where I go, and I want the health service to be at my convenience, not at the convenience of the people running it”.’
He is also fully aware that what he believes to be ‘a minority’ on his backbenches don’t share this view: ‘The trouble with the parliamentary majority – although let’s be clear, it should be large enough to see any government through – is that a small number of people, who are opposed to New Labour, obviously have, if they are prepared to work with the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, a greater purchase, certainly in parliamentary terms.’
But it is not only the need to keep abreast of rising public expectations which Labour needs to be aware of, says the Prime Minister: ‘The problem is, and this is particularly so when you have been in government for a long time, the pendulum starts to swing back a bit and people start to worry as much about tax as they do about investment in public services; they start to worry as much about issues to do with mmigration and asylum as they do with issues of fairness and anti-discrimination.’
It is in this context that Tony Blair places the renewed threat from the Conservatives. ‘I’ve always said,’ he argues, ‘beware of the Tory party: they are only sleeping but at some point they will awake.’ He believes that Cameron is trying to move to the centre ground but is unconvinced that the Tory leader is doing this in any way substantively: ‘He’s changed, or is trying to change, image. I am not saying that’s not important, but it’s got to be backed up by policy. I think they will have some very tough policy decisions to take in the end which will expose whether they are truly in the centre ground or not.’ Up to now, he goes on, ‘all that’s happened is [David Cameron] has junked some previous Tory positions that he was very much in favour of himself.’
So is there no parallel with Labour’s modernisation in the 1990s? ‘In the end, we changed policy. People like myself were obviously Labour modernisers long before I ever got the leadership, in terms of [the party’s approach to] the trade unions, energy, law and order and so on.’
The Prime Minister is, however, convinced that Cameron has set his sights on ‘picking up the New Labour vote’. ‘We’ve got to be ready for that,’ he warns. And the solution is to outpace the Tory leader in the process of change: ‘We’ve got to be in a position where when he publishes the outcome of his policy review in a year or 15 months time, then we have already moved on to the next stage of New Labour, so he’s having to catch up with the last set of policy decisions we have taken, and then measure up to the next set that we have taken.’
But is there not a paradox in the fact that, while Tony Blair charges that the rebranding of the Tory party is more style than substance, the rebellions on the government’s backbenches over the past year suggest that, under his leadership, Labour itself may not have changed that much itself? The Prime Minister pauses a moment to reflect. ‘I think the Labour party has fundamentally changed. I think it is a modern, social democratic party,’ he continues. And then, without missing a beat, it’s back to his constant refrain: ‘The problem is, what a modern social democrat means constantly has to change.’