PROGRESS AT 15
12:00pm, 8th JULY 2011
Let’s get a few preliminaries set out clearly.
1. Let’s get one thing very clear. I’m a Labour supporter. I support the Labour Party. I support its Leader Ed Miliband. Come the next election I will be campaigning for a Labour Government not a Tory one and a Labour Prime Minister not a Tory one.
2. I led a Labour Government pursuing progressive policies. A minimum wage; the largest ever investment in schools and hospitals; Sure Start; childcare; a new Department for International Development with a tripled aid budget that leads the world today in development policies; millions of pensioners saved from poverty; a million children lifted from poverty; and in everything from devolution to a Mayor for London, the winning of the Olympic bid, to civil partnerships and the country’s first Muslim Ministers, a new way of doing, thinking and acting. I’m proud of it. We should be proud of it.
3. Until 1997, in a hundred years of Labour history, we had never won two successive full terms; or governed for more than 6 years at a time. We won three successive full terms and governed for 13 years. As a result the Tories, to win, had to start borrowing from us, not from them. That is a sign of our success not our failure. So when they goad you by saying they’re carrying on my policies, it’s not because I believe what they believe; but because they want YOU to believe that I believe what they believe. So they hope we will relinquish the policies that made us winners and embrace the policies that made us lose. It’s an old Tory trap. Best thing: don’t fall into it.
4. I remain unremittingly an advocate of third way, centre ground, progressive politics that came to be called New Labour. From 1997 to 2007 we were New Labour. In June 2007 we stopped. We didn’t become Old Labour exactly. But we lost the driving rhythm that made us different and successful. It was not a Government of continuity from 1997 to 2010 pursuing the same politics. It was 10 + 3. So the policies I listed above are universally regarded as progressive. But I am every bit as proud of school reform that gave hundreds of thousands of children a first time chance of decent education; health reform and patient choice that cut waiting times dramatically; ASB and tougher crime policy that cut crime by 35% – the only Government since the war to do so; reforming university finance to keep our universities amongst the best in the world; and of a pro-enterprise and business policy that took away from the Tories the mantle of the Party of business. Because job creation is a progressive project and you don’t create jobs by attacking the businesses that create them. And I’m also proud to have engaged our magnificent Armed Forces in removing brutal dictators the world is better off without.
5. Some of these policies could be supported by people who don’t vote Labour. That’s not a bad thing. In the real world of the 21st Century there will be some pick and mix of policy. Sometimes it will be less left vs. right than right vs. wrong. Above all, today efficacy – i.e. effective delivery, motivated of course by values, matters as much if not more than ideology. Don’t fear it. Embrace it. It liberates us to get the correct policy. And the best policy is usually the best politics. It is not a betrayal of principles. It is applying principles to changing times.
6. So New Labour is not, was not and never should be about sacrificing the principles of social justice, solidarity and equality to win. It is about understanding that, in a world of change, if we don’t change, our principles become a refuge from the world not a platform to go out and transform it.
7. This is true here. It is also the lesson from round the globe. Progressives win when they have the courage to be the change-makers. They lose when the public senses that to please themselves, they retreat to where they feel calm, comfortable and small c conservative, echoing the politics of protest, but shunning the hard decisions of Government.
8. Of course 1994 is not 2011. Some of the questions are different. Some of the answers are different. The financial crisis, not least, has seen to that. But the attitude should remain the same: open, creative, modern, fighting from what I once called the radical centre, always at the cutting edge of the future not searching for a justification to return to the past. And confident.
9. Confident enough to be prepared to debate, when we lose, why we lost. Now here’s the thing, there is no point in being prissy about it. Parties of the Left have a genetic tendency, deep in their DNA, to cling to an analysis that they lose because the Leadership is insufficiently committed to being left, defined in a very traditional sense. There’s always a slightly curious problem with this analysis since usually they have lost to a right-wing Party. But somehow that inconvenient truth is put to the side. This analysis is grasped with relief. People are then asked to unify around it. Anything else is distraction, even an act of disloyalty. This strategy never works. Never.
It is often said that when I was Leader of the Labour Party, we were control freaks. In the sense of managing Government announcements and staying on message, we were. But we were throughout always conducting a debate with a perpetual drumbeat of opposition from those who thought New Labour was a betrayal of our principles. I never resented that debate. I cheerfully engaged in it. I enjoyed it. Because I was confident in what we were doing, where we were going and why. Confident that if we carried on taking New Labour to a new level we would carry on winning.
10. Final point. We should also be confident we can always win. First rule of politics: there are no rules in the sense of inevitable defeats or certain victories. This Tory Government can be beaten. But whether it is or not depends at least as much on what we do as what they do. Nearly always when we lose, we take several elections to find our way back to winning. This time can be different. It should be different. For the sake of the country it needs to be different.
Because understand one thing very clearly. Yes, there is crossover in policy today left and right. Yes there are things this Government does that we can and should agree with as well as things we can’t and shouldn’t agree with. But a Tory Government is a Tory Government. And by the way, is a Tory Government despite the fact that a few political tourists with a faulty guidebook called Lib Dems stumbled into it and have now been press-ganged into being cheerleaders for policies they used to denounce. A Tory Government may support policies like the minimum wage now. Don’t think for a moment they would have invented them.
Progressives will always make different choices from Conservatives. But the choice we make right now is about ourselves. And I believe we can and will choose the future, the centre and a return to the place where the big choices are made: Government.
CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY
yup,political tourists wearing very dark glasses, blinded by the right,the might,the few moments in the sun,but boy are those wings melting !!
Strange that he didn’t mention devolution to Scotland. Did he want to avoid questions about that? I remember well Blair and his Scottish cronies repeating the matra that ‘devolution has strengthened the Union’ – it’s a shame he was never progressive enough to allow the English a referendum on whether we wanted a parliament.
“open, creative, modern, fighting from what I once called the radical centre, always at the cutting edge of the future” That is the part of new Labour that will be the legacy for the future. Forget the rest, because times and circumstances change (though i hope to high heaven the Minimum wage remains). Tony’s priority along with his colleagues as I remember them as an activist were always about reason and compromise and about being open minded and inclusive in bringing people into a wide tent that is our Party. In fact if it was not for the opennes of attitude we would not be talking Purple Books and Blue labour today. We would not be questioning the success and failures of thirteen years and we would not be taking on a debate the Tories struggle with with their narrow dogmatic position. New Labour has already become an ingrained part of our thinking whether we accept this or not. It has drawn out in most of us the idea that e are a collective despite our differences and allowed us the flexibility to share certain areas of ground and identify with them as values and principles that we share. of course we cannot always have our own way that is democracy but we can get the fundamentals because of the shared instincts and the better parts of society that our Party reaches out to that our opponents cannot satisfy. David Cameron would give his right arm (and i mean right) to have a Party as open and willing to challenge ideas as ours. The debates I have witnessed over the past year have been nothing short of incredible. We settled into a terrible situation of the Leadership (two brothers of all things) and managed not to go into some kind of stupid and pointless infighting. The media reports of our divisions are exagerated as most of us understand what we are opposing with the Tories. For those who fear the loss of a legacy or even whether or not there was one, I can tell you all there damn well is and was. It will live on too. But I would beseach everyone in our Party to consider the most important lesson that New Labour brought ot me back in 1997 and when I served as a Councillor in Norfolk where we wiped the floor with the Tories, as they watched helplessly and with envy, and that was the inclusive nature of our Party and its modernising message of hope that was an inclusive one to people of all backgrounds, where ones attitude towards others and society was more important than privalage, Nepotism and the core traditions of the Narrrow Conservative Party. It is highly ironic that after berating “blairites” the strongest thing keeping me in the Party at the moment after, along with the progressive and inclusive majority of unpaid volunteers and incredible people at all levels of the Party, and the energetic Margaret Hodge MP skipping from door to door, is the attitude expressed above by Tony Blair. Because its a very positive and as he says optimistic position and it was that atatitude that permitted a solidarity, a group of people of all ethnicities, creeds, cultures and backgrounds to wipe out Nick Griffin and his BNP following. I disagree with David lammy on Tony being afraid, because it is a mute point as the legacy exists in most of us who have been practising it, and in more than just our political lives as we aspire to be hopefully marginally better people with more mature attitudes. It has been an awful two years and where we have gone wrong, time and again and where we have shot ourselves in the foot is where we have attempted to emulate the Tories and we do not have to do that and we must certainly not close the doors of the Party that we share and commit ourselves too, to any social group. We have to ensure that our processes are open, are optimistic and are not centered around a narrow group of people or we risk losing any authenticity with the public we need to serve. Our future aspirations should be based upon a holistic acceptence of divergent views and more importantly an open minded attitude towards those we disagree with and as is happening today in the media as Cameron attempts to appear cleaner and more radical than Ed Milliband, we need to be as clean as possible in our dealings with business so to command objective competance in an area our party has many suspicions, some legitimate and some less so. Understanding business is more important than dogma, understand what it can and cannot be expected to do, along with any other platform of potential service/manufacturing provision. Which again takes us back to opennes which lends itself to keeping an open and optimistic attitude that is essential in these difficult times. The New Labour Legacy is secure, I see it daily in the volunteers I meet, they express it without thinking, especially but not exclusively the youngsters. Whatever pathway our Party takes the work done in 1997 will always remain and the closed dogmatic argument s of the past that are alien to the pragmatic public mindset are simply unsustainable. Labour will develop other angles and trends, but again the very workshop that permits development or an aspect for the here and now, which will eventually become then, will only be offshoots of New labour and the attitude of free thinking it promotes. When modernising our Party, Ed Milliband and his colleagues must spare a thought as I have, despite my own frustrations and concerns at our exposed areas to the Tories, to the importance of a fair and open Party that offers people an open door and a chance to be part of something which has a positive meaning and that cannot be dominated by any secular group especially during these difficult times. I do not think Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown need to worry about legacy. They truly opened the doors in 1995 to something that was more than a dogma, or a fashion, or a passing trend. They opened the door to a Party that had to become applicable to the british people and they succeeded as far as any mortals with all the fallabilities of mortals could. Power is a nightmare and it changes anyone who goes near it with few rare exceptions. But the values Tony Blair has listed that I mentioned when I recognised yet again from researching New Labour, is elemental. Cameron can only clumsily grope at it wistfully. We live it, breath it, and it will be the very indepth ingredient that sees Cameron’s cold cynical party booted out of office if we can let it manifest and exercise our better parts and be distinct from the conservatives to have nothing, nothing to offer the people of this country but failure, suffering and the most appalling economic fallacy that is renowned in history for its continual and repeat failure using a distorted view of an impovershed past to justify weakening the UK further. Am I a Blairite? Am I New labour? Am I a “progressive”. Not really. But I have an open political mind and many new ideas, and that a New Labour thing and it aint going anywhere its with us for the future because without it we lose our grounding and are lost.
Apologies for grammer/spelling i write very swiftly and then move onto work.
A timely reminder of what has been missing from our politics since Tony Blair left the scene.
No doubt this Labour supporting speech will receive scant attention from the feral press, in contrast to the headlines when Blair said something vaguely supportive of some Tory policies. Forget about the News of the World fiasco, it is this kind of twisted coverage of politics in this country that is the greatest media scandal of our times.
Yup. The man is mad. I speak as psychiatrist.
Well ,
should Tony Blair justify himself ? No..
He was the leader 0f the Party when we needed to be elected.. Blaiir appealed to the middle class English voters. Now Labour should move on
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and of course it wasn’t The Sun that some flew too close to !
Tony Blair’s speech was a thought, straightforward, unapologetic, positive address, giving credit to his government (and why were we SO quite about that at the election and so shamefaced too often now?) and a look into the future.
Yes, we have to learn from our mistakes but not by outstepping the Tories and saying (as we seem to) “Actually, you are right – we won’t do that again”.
But also – and this he did not mention – in some ways, even in government, instead of saying how much we improved, say, schools. NHS and crime rates, we seemed to think that everyone knew that and so said how poor schools were peforming; how much the NHS needed to change; how we had to clamp down on crime.
Maybe Blair’s most significant remark was that it doesn’r matter if “new” drops from New Labour or the personalities change, it’s the attitude that counts: that’s the one that one three major election victories and transformed Labour from being an interregnum beween “natural” Tory governments to a natural part of government.