The End of Decline: Blair and Brown in Power
Brian Brivati
Politico’s, 192pp, £20.00
‘And so it was that, by the time they took the bunting down from the streets after VE Day and turned from the war to the future, the British in their dreams and illusion and in their flinching from reality had already written the broad scenario for Britain’s post-war descent … a dream turned to a dank reality of a segregated, subliterate, unskilled, unhealthy and institutionalised proletariat hanging on the nipple of state maternalism.’
Corelli Barnett’s bleak finale to The Audit of War marked the pinnacle of a literature of decline charting Britain’s collapse from the age of empire and wartime pre-eminence. While the history was always circumspect, its political impact was readily apparent. Mrs Thatcher consistently deployed the trope of decline – premised around welfarism, socialism and consensus politics – to promulgate her neo-liberal agenda.
But now Brian Brivati, deftly weaving his way through the rhetoric and reality of ‘decline’, has made the case for the Brown-Blair years shedding the discourse of descent. As such, this is as much a debate with history as public policy. ‘We are a country that is now envied rather than pitied by other states around the world and we have achieved this through a consensus rather than confrontation,’ he writes. ‘In the new measure of greatness that suit a new century we are a great power once more.’
After something of a textbook canter through the literature of decline (with the usual suspects of Martin Wiener, Corelli Barnett, and Sydney Pollard featuring prominently), Brivati stands up his argument through an analysis of various policy areas and intellectual paradigms. An important component of the New Labour achievement, he suggests, was to broaden the notion of political success beyond the economic measurements of the Thatcher years to include public services. As a result, the political consensus has now moved to encompass the public sector. Just as in 1951, the Tory opposition now finds itself committed to retaining what Douglas Alexander has termed this ‘progressive consensus’.
Interestingly, Brivati – like any good historian – also attempts to understand Blair in his own terms and seeks to measure just how successful the notoriously intangible ‘modernisation’ project was. And here he makes a very interesting point about the relative judgment of New Labour in comparison to the Attlee or Thatcher years. Politics and society has changed, he suggests, to such an extent that the old model of achievement based on extensive state intervention is now no longer applicable. ‘What Blair-Brown has done is much less dramatic but if you look at it from the perspective of the citizen it appears more sustainable and appropriate in the context of the age we live in as a way of doing politics.’
Turning to the nuts and bolts of governance, Brivati seeks to show how Blair and Brown accepted the thinking of JK Galbraith’s The Culture of Contentment and modelled an economic strategy ‘to minimise the slippage of the uncertain into the underclass’. On foreign affairs, Brivati offers a studied defence of high-minded interventionism. ‘The reassertion of Britain’s place in the world as a beacon of liberal internationalism and the articulation of an ethical foreign policy which shames the standard position of most other major European players will in future be seen as the core of the Blair-Brown legacy,’ he confidently asserts. And, with this foreign policy confidence, has come a new internal and external understanding of our self-image as ‘a nation in the ascendant’.
There are some less sure-footed moments in this book. Brivati’s analysis of the role of Christianity in public policy is markedly off-beam as is, I would suggest, his critique of New Labour’s ‘hysterical’ immigration policies. Far more compelling is the totality of the work: a serious attempt to draft a corrective literature of positive commentary in contrast to the groaning bookshelves of decline. If there is a broader criticism, it is the occasional ‘end of history’ tone that sometimes surfaces. Brivati is inclined to a thesis-antithesis-synthesis model of political development with all its Hegelian connotations of historical fulfilment. But what history is already showing us is that the Brown years – in contrast to the Blair-Brown years – could offer a radically different outcome to that widely predicted by the Tory pollsters. No sign of decline here.