- The Observer,
- Sunday June 3 2001
The shock waves of this realisation are already spreading around conservative Britain, as William Hague makes the desperate plea not to give New Labour the landslide victory which he knows could mean the destruction of his party. Yet if a landslide victory means the extinction of a brand of Tory politics that stigmatises difference, enthrones self-interest and delights in authoritarian repression while indulging every base instinct, Britain would benefit from it. For the Tories are already making important concessions. The promise to match Labour's spending plans for the first two years of the next parliament while scaling back their commitment to tax cuts is a recognition that the electorate want better public services and not just an enlargement of individual choice.
The cultural significance of a world in which the Conservatives might be a parliamentary rump - the increasingly likely outcome of the election if the opinion polls are right - is epic. The linkages between the Tory Party, political power, Tory press, City, land, business and social privilege would be ruptured, perhaps fatally. All the cultural icons associated with Conservative hegemony - ranging from the advantage of public school education to membership of the 'correct' networks - that have been breaking down for the last decade would be shaken to their foundations. Even the right wing press would have to adjust to a new landscape.
This quiet and unsung revolution, already under way, is celebrated by far too few members and supporters of the Labour Party. But Tony Blair's Government has done more. It has set in train a stunning programme of constitutional change. The Scottish parliament and the Welsh and London assemblies have already proved their worth, with Scotland's executive trail-blazing a progressive stance on student grants and teachers pay that the Government will find hard not to copy in England and Wales. Equally, Ken Livingstone's pitched battle over the London Underground has immeasurably improved the structure, funding and accountability of the proposed Public Private Partnership, and he may yet improve it further.
The incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law has dramatically underwritten the rights of individual citizens. The hereditary Lords have almost been laid to rest. In the next parliament there is every chance that the English regions will also win elected assemblies. In the round the impact on British life is incalculable; never again will we be ruled by a largely secretive executive wholly based in London. Britain, together with its independent central bank, will have a constitution that takes into the European mainstream.
Labour has also been truer to its obligations to the poor than Tony Blair and his Ministers allow themselves to earn credit for. Over the last four years, Britain's workforce has won a minimum wage, improved rights for part-time workers, for paternity and maternity leave and over trade union recognition. The incomes of working-class families with children have been boosted remarkably by increases in child benefit and income support for children; some low income families have seen their incomes jump by more than a quarter. The degree of redistribution to the bottom 10 per cent has been the greatest for a quarter of a century. Tony Blair's targets to reduce child poverty by another million before 2005, to ensure that half the country's 18- to 21-year-olds enjoy some form of higher education and to achieve full employment are massively important. They will transform life chances for many to a degree unthinkable under any Tory administration. These are not gains that should be surrendered lightly.
And abroad Labour has been enlightened and mostly liberal too. Its ethical foreign policy has been more observed in the breach - especially over arms sales. But its programme of Third World debt relief demonstrates that it has tried to support just and humanitarian causes. Mr Blair and his party believe in the European Union, where they have been constructive partners in almost every area except the euro. Here, the Government has allowed calculations of party political advantage to overwhelm its willingness to exercise leadership over one of the greatest issues facing the country. The construction of an accountable Europe that respects the rights of its nation states remains the most important task of our generation. Only the Labour Party can be trusted to ensure that Britain contributes properly to this vocation.
This is a catalogue of remarkable successes and Tony Blair and his colleagues should be deeply proud of them. These are the reasons why The Observer endorses the Labour Party in Thursday's election. However, there have been three significant shortcomings. A recurrent theme, exemplified by the verbal attack on Mr Blair by the partner of a cancer victim, has been the scarcely controlled anger of the electorate at the state of British public services.
Whenever New Labour politicians have left the con trolled environments created by party stage-managers and confronted people in the street or in TV and radio studios, they have encountered disillusion and resentment at the disconnection between what they claim and what is actually happening. Had the Conservative Party been more ably led and less ideologically fixated on Europe, Labour could now be in a very damaging battle about its incapacity to lift standards of delivery of public services. This was what it was elected to do in 1997, but in the NHS and in transport matters have deteriorated still further. Mr Blair has placed insufficient emphasis on the length of time it will actually take to re-build public services.
Labour themselves know their weakness in this area. Their campaign theme has been that there is more to do. Mr Blair has continually stressed his belief in investment in public services, even while it has fallen to a record low. Labour's promise is that they will do better in the next parliament - if departments spend the money that is budgeted there will be a big build up in public investment, and they intend to shake up the management of the public sector. If the private sector can do it better without changing the character of the service being delivered, it will be enlisted to the cause.
This is the enormous promise upon which the electorate is prepared to suspend judgment. It means giving Labour the benefit of the doubt for a second term, even over what may be a calamitous and ill-judged involvement of the private sector in areas where it has no place nor track-record. Sometimes, as with the teachers' and nurses' pay, the issue is not private or public; it is just systematic Government meanness. However, if Mr Blair can deliver his promised improvement in public services, he will not only have deserved his second term mandate but he will be able to argue persuasively for a third term in 2005 or 2006.
A second serious disappointment has been the inadequacy of Mr Blair's delivery on the environment, which he promised to put at the heart of Government. New Labour has presided over the breakdown of public transport, has failed to curb road-building as promised, has done nothing to enhance recycling and has caved in to the fuel protesters. It has not taken sustainability seriously. And it has taken the countryside crisis to make it recognise that the compact between town and country needs to be addressed and re-negotiated for the twenty-first century. It is no surprise that the party have been keen to keep the environment out of this election, and that they have been colluding in this with the Tories, who have nothing to offer. Only the Liberal Democrats and the Greens have dared raise these fundamental challenges.
The third area which has left many supporters of the Government despondent is the mean-minded Dutch auction in which New Labour has engaged with the Conservatives over the approach to asylum seekers, welfare claimants and those who find themselves on the wrong side of the criminal justice system. In the area of personal liberty Jack Straw's instincts have been too often repressive and authoritarian. His approach to asylum seekers, for example, reeks of funk and concessions to people's worst instincts. Too often on social issues, Mr Blair has appeared keen to take advice and offer implied sympathy to illiberal and unrepresentative groups. New Labour's embarrassment about promoting the public realm and public enterprise, so that we cannot even build a national sports stadium, diminishes us all. Those who pursue their conscience, supporting the national health service or sending their children to state schools as a matter of principle, have been made to feel that their values are silly and marginal. Nobody champions social conduct with moral roots, and the government often appears as wedded to individualism as any Thatcherite.
Nevertheless, in our view the overall balance sheet is still heavily in Mr Blair's favour. On the large canvas his achievements are substantial, and the prospects sufficiently bright for him to warrant your support on Thursday. At the next election, however, we also believe there should be an effective choice about where to place a progressive vote. So as a comradely encouragement to New Labour to address its deformations, it is vital that there is a stronger Lib Dem representation in the House of Commons - a launch-pad from which its transmutation into the principal Opposition party and government-in-waiting is possible.
If this can be achieved, voters will have delivered a golden prize for the new century which eluded the centre-left for all of the last.
They may be untested in office, but the Lib Dems under Charles Kennedy offer a modern social agenda alongside a courageous willingness to engage the wider public in discourse about the relationship between tax and spending necessary to rebuild public services. They should serve as an example to all politicians of the benefits of candour - and are a standing reproach to the temptation of New Labour to rely on spin and behind-the-scene fixes to produce the political results it wants. If your local sitting MP is Lib Dem we urge you to support him or her, and to vote tactically in every constituency where the Lib Dems are second to a Conservative. We provide a guide on page 19 to the seats where that can be done successfully.
But for now we look forward to a returned Labour government - aware that on public services, Europe, personal liberty and the environment it has mountains to climb. If that government delivers as it might, Britain can be an incalculably better place, and the bigger its majority the more the Conservative Party will be required to transform itself, abandoning its current ghastly array of social and cultural prejudices. We do not fear landslides. Indeed, on this occasion, we wish for one.
These are great, great prizes which for all the talk of apathy make one injunction imperative. Vote.
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