Wednesday 5, April 2023

Blair’s legacy

Tony Blair has been in the news again. It’s the 20th anniversary of the Second Gulf War. There are numbers of reports of Keir Starmer soliciting advice from Tony Blair (e.g. here). The shadow cabinet have been working hard to raise their media profiles. I listened to this podcast, a very favourable profile of Rachel Reeves, who shows the same sort of on-message discipline that I can just remember from Tony Blair’s heyday. The same goes for Wes Streeting, who is, from what I can tell, constantly ‘on-message’, and therefore a huge contrast to the more relaxed time when Jeremy Corbyn was in charge. I am sure that Tony would have loved to expel Corbyn from the party. It looks like he finally got his way via a proxy.

In my opinion, for what it’s worth, Tony Blair is the reason that the UK electorate have voted Conservatives. It is not the genius of David Cameron or Theresa May or Boris Johnson that won elections. It’s the fact that the divisions that were sowed by TB left the Labour Party incapable of forming an effective election-fighting force. Voters who are naturally on the right think they might as well vote for the real thing, rather than an ersatz version. Voters who would ‘normally’ vote Labour don’t want to vote for a party that has been in the middle of a civil war ever since they last left office. They either want Corbyn but are afraid that there will be an internal coup and they’ll be left with a ‘Red Tory’ party, or they actually want someone like Tony Blair but are afraid that if they vote Labour they’ll end up with Momentum.

I have some sympathy for Blair. In spite of his massive wealth and popularity amongst the Davos set, he seems to be reviled by Left and Right alike. The Daily Mail and similar rags have portrayed Blair as some sort of ghoul, circling the globe in his private jet, landing only to collect bags of tax-free lucre from despots and rent-seeking corporates and financiers. For me, Blair is more of a symptom than a cause. It’s the fact that we live in a system in which politicians can have this kind of afterlife, funded out of the monopoly profits that were created by earlier ‘business friendly’ legislation, and paid to send the strongest possible signal to the new incumbents that is the issue, not the individual recipients.

So, what has led us into a system where politicians are lead into such temptation? One problem seems to be a ‘first past the post’ system, which leads to two dominant, permanent parties. An other seems to be a press which is aligned with big business (hardly an uncommon thing). Maybe there are others. A lack of dislocation, such as that produced by war, or revolution, or runaway inflation, may cause institutions to fossilize into a coalition to defend the status quo, although if that is the case the cure may be worse than the disease.

Although ‘First Past the Post’ has failed to produce large majorities consistently, and has given disproportionate power to fringe parties, such as the DUP under Theresa May, it has ensured the dominance of a two-party system. This suits both Labour and the Conservatives, but does not lead to good policy decisions, and leaves voters increasingly disillusioned and disaffected.

Tony Blair has even been accused of being responsible for the rise of the Scottish Nationalist Party and the concomitant fall of Labour in Scotland, which is in some narrow sense is true, as Blair introduced the devolution that brought the Scottish Parliament into existence. Certainly, the loss of Scotland has critically injured Labour.