Why the leadership contenders are all still heir to Blair

By Jon Wilson

Between 1994 and 2007 Tony Blair went on a journey. He began it as a politician who articulated a vision – albeit a vague one – of a different kind of society. He ended up – in domestic policy at least – as a bureaucrat interested in nothing beyond the efficient ‘delivery’ of a small number of public services. Politics was replaced by management.

For most of the twentieth century, successful politicians have campaigned for the kind of society they think we should live in. Even Margaret Thatcher had a social vision, with her emphasis on national pride, the aspirational nuclear family and the importance of private property.

From Keir Hardie to Thatcher, politics has been the art of mobilising people and institutions to make that vision a reality. It sometimes does that by enacting laws; but as often uses more subtle forms of influence and rhetoric as well. Whether from the left or the right, politicians have always known that Whitehall is only one, deeply flawed, instrument of change. And central government is only effective if it’s part of a broader process in which citizens, civil society and local government work with the national government to achieve a shared sense of what our common life should be like.

Sometime in his first term, Blair abandoned this broader sense of how change occurs as he developed a deepening obsession with public sector reform. Politics was confused with management. The shift happened as new Labour’s fundamental mistrust of social forces it couldn’t directly control forced it to abandon a broader social vision. Politics was reduced to a set of decisions about things the Prime Minister could line-manage. Labour politics had been captured by ‘can-do’ bureaucrats, men who seemed to know what they were talking about but had no understanding of life outside Whitehall or the town hall nonetheless.

Blair’s successors – from Ed Balls to David Miliband – have failed to cast off this inheritance. The most depressing aspect of the leadership election is the inability of each candidate to articulate a social vision: an account in other words of how we should live together.

Where, for example, should we be consumers and where should we be citizens? How far, and through what means, should we be able to make decisions about the places we work? How should our neighbourhoods be managed?

These are all political questions. Keir Hardie and Margaret Thatcher had very different answers to them, but they had answers nonetheless. But because they are not things that can straightforwardly be decided by Whitehall, they are questions the leadership contenders have not thought to address.

This limited idea of politics is the product of Labour politicians’ unwillingness to trust forces of change which can’t be managed centrally – whether local authorities, trade unions, party members or individual citizens themselves. It’s not just a new set of ideas, but a new attitude to the party’s potential partners and allies that next Labour needs to develop now.

That means the renewal of more pluralistic ideas about how social democrats exercise power. But ideas aren’t enough. More importantly, we need a different kind of attitude, a new mood of cooperation which presumes that Labour is not the only radical force in any neighbourhood; and that governments only change things when they act in with other organisations that have their own ways of doing things but which share the same social vision. The good state needs the big society.

The trouble is that that our enemies understand this far better than we do. On the face of it at least, David Cameron has a far better sense of the need to lead broad alliances. He possesses a much better sense of how to achieve change than our next putative leader. Cameron’s idea of the good society is the same as Thatcher’s – his vision is for individuals and families to left on their own against the ravages of free market capitalism, and of the big society as a substitute, not a partner of the state.

Labour will fight the Con-Dem government neither with public sector ‘reform’, nor with a long list of things a Labour state should do – but instead with a coherent vision of how the state and collective action of citizens can together push back consumerism and the free market. It’s time to ditch the Blairite inheritance and to replace Labour managerialism with a deeper understanding of what democracy means.