The obsession of some with the term ‘Blairite’ is Orwellian in its ability to shut down debate before it has started

In a recent lecture on ‘the good society’, by way of Louis Althusser, Milan Kundera, TH Green, John Ruskin, William Morris and Dylan Thomas, Jon Cruddas argued that: ‘“Blairite” is now an orthodox term of abuse within the party; his name triggers jeers at our annual conference; many around Labour appear more angry at Blairism than with David Cameron and Nick Clegg.’

He is right, of course. Ken Livingstone became only the latest leading figure to blame ‘the Blairites’ in his valedictory Today programme interview, warning his ‘friend’ Ed Miliband that his only mistake so far has been to seek to appease the ‘discredited old Blairite wing’ of the Labour party.

Once Blairite meant ‘supporter of Tony Blair’ (which included just about everyone who prospered on his coat-tails). Then, after 1997, as a distinct policy agenda emerged, it meant a Labour moderniser – one keen to transform the public services, boost British industry, tackle antisocial behaviour, end welfare dependency, and to see Britain play a progressive role in the world. Like Thatcherite, Bennite, Gaitskellite, Kinnockite or Bevanite, the term denoted either loyalty to the individual politician, or adherence to the policies they espoused, or both.

But anyone keeping half an eye on political blogs and tweets over the past 18 months has witnessed the steady appropriation of the term ‘Blairite’ by the old hard left of the Labour party and its Guardianista fellow-travellers; the term has undergone a deliberate transmogrification into a synonym for ‘rightwinger’ or even ‘Tory’.

Many collective nouns started life as insults, and became accepted: ‘Tory’, ‘Quaker’, ‘Jesuit’, ‘Suffragette’, ‘Whig’, ‘Methodist’ and so on. ‘Blairite’ is on the opposite journey, from acceptability to insult. You even have the bizarre doublethink of minor-league defectors to the Tory party self-identifying as ‘Blairite’ or Tory cabinet ministers such as Michael Gove being described by others as such. You can no more be a Blairite in the Conservative party than a cat becomes a dog by entering Crufts.

Should we care? Sticks and stones, and all that. Yes we should, because this is about more than the invention of a new insult to add to the canon. The hard left’s objective is not merely to appropriate the term, but to destroy the ideas it represents. Those Guardian columnists and Labour leftwingers, exiled since the mid-1980s, scent blood. They sense they have ‘got their party back’. They want to kill Blairism.

George Orwell long ago pointed out that while ‘thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.’ His dystopia depicted totalitarianism enforced by removing words from the dictionary: fewer words, fewer thoughts, less room for dissent. If the ideas of ‘Blairism’ – using the private sector to eradicate NHS waiting lists for knee and cataract operations, for example – can be dismissed with a single rhetorical swipe of the hand, then the arguments for modernisation and tough reform become harder to make.

Words matter in political discourse. The US Republican strategist Frank Luntz has made a living out of ‘reframing’ the debate by using different terms. Catastrophic ‘global warming’ becomes the benign-sounding ‘climate change’. Environmentally disastrous ‘drilling for oil’ becomes ‘energy exploration’, evoking the pioneering spirit. An inheritance tax sounds fair. A ‘death tax’ does not. Labour’s hard left has copied the US right’s trick. They have taken a word and turned it into a pejorative, like the Republicans did with ‘liberal’.

We have only ourselves to blame for this playground name-calling. We started it. We called everything pre-1994 ‘Old Labour’, despite delivering ‘Old Labour’ policies such as the national minimum wage, full employment, increases in universal benefits and targets for the eradication of child poverty. We sniggered when we called Roy Hattersley ‘Roy Trottersley’. We pretended 1994 was year zero, publicly at least, and we did not do enough to locate ‘Blairism’ in its rightful place in social democrat revisionist thinking. We did not anchor sure starts or academies in the tradition of the co-op, or the ‘respect agenda’ in the communitarianism of RH Tawney or John Macmurray. We pretended we invented it all ourselves, when really we were standing on the shoulders of giants.

The term ‘Blairite’ is lost to us now, like the man. But the story does not end there. The idea that traditional values and virtues can be applied to the bewildering complexity of modernity is not dead. Nor is the animating principle of the Labour party, that we seek elected office to enact our programmes. Nor is our passion for progress nor our outrage at iniquity. A new generation, undaunted by disparaging sobriquets, has taken up the struggle with renewed vigour and clarity. It does not matter what they end up being called. We shall judge them by their deeds.

As William Morris explained: ‘Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.’

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Photo: Tim Stevenson