We're living through a technology revolution which is the 21st C equivalent of the 19th C Industrial Revolution. It will change everything and therefore everything should change including radical reorientation of Government. This is the context in which we tackle inequality, promote social justice and redistribute power. And the context for urgent action on Climate. Green politics is no longer single issue politics. It is a new approach to politics altogether.
But it needs a reengineering of society and the economy which can't be left to the politics of street protest. The old labour market isn't coming back. Traditional solutions won't cure regional disparity, low productivity, stagnant wages amongst a section of the population, the communities and people left behind. We need a re-imagining of the modern economy. But an old fashioned left advocating old ways in a new world, won't be trusted to do it. Which brings me to the third point: the right ideas in politics never work without the right mentality.
I mean the mentality of Government. Its aim is not to trend on twitter, or to have celebrities temporarily fawn over it or to glory in a bubble of adulation pricked by the sharp point of the first tough decision.
Our task is to win power and get our hands stuck into the muddy mangle of governing, where out of it can be pulled the prize of progress measured not in fine words spoken at a distance, but in real grounded changes in the wellbeing of the people, some of which they may thank us for and many of which they will never even know were down to our struggle to place self discipline over self indulgence.
Our mission is to take causes and make them practical; to say yes to the ambition and no to over ambition or the wrong ways of realising it. To go to where the people are and show them how, together, we can do better. To root our actions in their reality. To align their values with ours. That is the scale of the remaking. What is going to make the next years different from the first.
So, I have taken stock. All prime ministers intervene. Few control and then only for some policies, some of the time. Maybe, as Enoch Powell said, all political careers end in failure. The problems the Blair government shares with all others have been compounded by two problems of his making: conflicts at the centre and his management style.
What he wants is results. He has a feel for policies but not how the results come. He comes back to this when one or other of the policy areas gets hot: education, then transport and now health.
I have told stories about the dependence of the prime minister on the court politics of the core executive and on the networks of service delivery. I have also pointed to the importance of party support, and the impact of political adventures in the international arena on domestic politics. Some of the claims about the changing pattern of political leadership in Britain are accurate.
It helps to distinguish between the electoral, policy making and implementation arenas. First, personalisation is a prominent feature of media management and electioneering in Britain. If I must use presidential language, it is here in the electoral arena that it is most apt. Blair is the figurehead. But this statement must be qualified immediately because the court politics of the duumvirate fits uncomfortably with the notion of monocratic leadership.
Brown played a pre-eminent role on the election. But who stood beside Tony Blair in the first Labour Party electoral broadcast? Milburn retired again. It was simple. It was brutal.
Blair needed Brown and Brown judged it in his interests to cooperate. The rest of us wonder whether Brown still held firm to his view that there was nothing Blair could ever say to him now that he could ever believe and, if so, was the deal on leadership succession confirmed in writing?
In the policy-making arena, there is some truth to the claim that Blair centralised policymaking on No. The continuous reform of the centre speaks of the failure of coordination, not its success. Here, other senior government figures, ministers and their departments, and other agencies are key actors. Similarly, although personalisation can affect implementation, that effect is intermittent.
Too often, the presidential thesis treats intervention as control. There is much that goes on in British government about which the Prime Minister knows little and affects even less. And all these arenas are embedded in dependence on domestic and international agencies and governments, making command and control strategies counter productive. So, we have a paradox. On the one hand, journalists, political scientists, and practitioners are telling tales of a Blair presidency characterised by centralisation, personalisation and pluralisation.
On the other, the same people recount governance stories in which British politics consists of fragmented policy making and policy implementation networks over which a core executive maintains a fragile—and increasingly fraught—influence.
I want to draw attention to two ways of interpreting this paradox. First, all the chatter about a Blair presidency is a counter both in the court politics of the duumvirate and in wider party politics.
So, it matters not that the presidential analogy is misleading because the game is not about empirical accuracy but about expressing hostility to Blair in particular and the Labour government in general. The critics have several specific targets. So the term is a smoke screen behind which lurk several criticisms of Blair and the Labour government. Conversely, when critics bemoan the demise of Cabinet government, what exactly has been lost?
Weller [] distinguishes between the Cabinet as the constitutional theory of ministerial and collective responsibility, as a set of rules and routines, as the forum for policymaking and coordination, as a political bargaining arena between central actors, and as a component of the core executive.
To suggest that Blair has abandoned the doctrine of collective responsibility is nonsense. Leaks are abhorrent. Unity is essential to electoral success. Dissenters go. To suggest that any prime minister in the post-war period has adhered to anything but a pragmatic view of individual ministerial responsibility is equally foolish.
But what are they acting as a smoke screen for? Why do so many people who describe British governance as multipolar, nonetheless constantly talk about a Blair presidency? I argue the paradox arises because of the bewitching effect of the Westminster Model of British politics.
In the need to preserve Westminster fictions, the tales of presidentialism are a smoke screen behind which we find a widespread acceptance of the governance story.
If a commentator accepts any version of the governance narrative, with its stress on interdependence, then any tale of a Blair presidency will be undermined. Command and control mix with interdependence and cooperation like oil and water. The interweaving of the two tales is obvious if I revisit briefly the accounts of Foley and Weller. Both are core themes in the governance narrative. Again both are key notions in the governance narrative. So how does the Westminster Model infuse talk of a Blair presidency?
Of course, there is no agreed version of the Westminster model. There are at least three possible versions: Tory, Whig and Socialist. Philip Norton is a Tory and a combative defender of the UK constitution against all comers. Interdependency is a necessary feature of government in the United Kingdom. This interdependency has enabled government to cohere and deliver programmes of public policy because each part of the political system has recognised its distinct role within the system.
It has been an interdependency of defined parts … The more the prime minister and senior ministers have sought to centralise power in their own hands then perhaps paradoxically, the more fragmented British government has become. The glue of government has started coming unstuck. What to do? He criticises the notion of the Blair presidency to resurrect the Westminster Model. However, he too recognises that Britain must change to meet the challenges of an interdependent world.
In sum, he describes a world of complex interdependencies. To meet these demands, he envisages, for example, No. All such changes would be within the context of collective government. Or to rephrase, to meet the challenges posed by the governance narrative, Hennessy envisages a return to cabinet government with reinforced analytical and strategic support. His notion of the British presidency is less that it is dangerous, although it may well be, but that to institutionalise it is to plant an alien invention in British soil.
The Socialist tradition in the guise of New Labour has its own conception of how British government should be run. So, the No. Second, it consigned Labour traditions, many of which are more democratic, to the dustbins of history. The contrast with Jim Callaghan or Harold Wilson is marked:. He is able to provide himself with his own sources of information, he can send up a trial balloon or fire a siting shot across a Ministerial bow without directly involving his own authority or publicly undermining that of the Minister; and has the necessary facilities to take a decisive hand in policy-making at any moment he choose to intervene.
Deserting Labour traditions for Thatcherite dynamism had its costs. It provoked criticism for eroding the:. His three predecessors as Prime Ministers, Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan, had governed collectively: no previous Labour leader, from Keir Hardie to John Smith, had adopted such a personal style of control, and in this respect, as in others [Blair] showed himself to be a leader lacking empathy with the traditions of his party. Yet Blair and his entourage consistently deny they have abandoned collective government, arguing their reforms are consistent with present-day constitutional conventions.
In part, such a defence is mere conventional convenience. If policymaking is presidential, then only the president is to blame when things go wrong. However, when the government faced its many policymaking and implementation problems, it blamed those long-standing whipping boys of the Westminster constitution—the civil service—said to lack both ideas and drive. Such auto-critique was not on the central agenda. The governance narrative conflicted with their view of a strong centre.
Command and control remained in vogue for running services built around many governments and organisations. But whatever the attractions of command and control, it did not work.
I once heard Hillary Clinton in a private moment expressing astonishment at his lack of doubt, using a withering American phrase popularised after the Jonestown mass suicide. She meant that he had abandoned all caution and every sliver of scepticism. And he had. The result was the invasion of The American timetable was set, and Blair couldn't change it.
Or at least believed that he couldn't. One lingering question remains, and will lie unanswered. Could Blair have exercised decisive restraint if he had threatened to withdraw his support? Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would have been contemptuous, but what of the American people?
There are some people who believe that he underestimated his own significance at that time. A public signal of real alarm from America's principal ally, a figure hugely popular in the United States, might have had more impact than even he believed. We can't know. We do know that he had become determined to show no sign of weakness, and it was costly. Great conviction; not enough doubt. Think of one day, a few months after the war began. Blair addressed both houses of Congress in Washington and got more than a dozen standing ovations.
Heady stuff. He has been totally in the ascendant since his victory in abolishing Clause Four in , appealing over the heads of the union block vote to individual party members. There has been a huge presidential-style elevation of Tony Blair himself, with no dissent tolerated.
But these factors have been even more intensified during his premiership, and especially since the June general election. There are over advisers working for Tony Blair personally in 10 Downing Street alone.
As Prime Minister he has increasingly ignored parliament and the parliamentary Labour Party ; he has by-passed traditional committee structures ; unlike Wilson or especially Callaghan, he steers clear of the House of Commons tea-room. The Cabinet is largely a formality and no longer a decision-making body : it held just two short meetings in the fortnight after 11 September and a typical Cabinet lasts barely half an hour.
He has operated in presidential mode especially in foreign affairs issues as in the Kossovo crisis or policies against Iraq, in personally negotiating the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland in , and at times in handling the various crises in running the National Health Service.
His immediate power over the government machine is greater than that of an American president. He is truly our first post-modern prime minister. Blair has seemed in total presidential command. He governs largely through a small War Cabinet, including a number of little-known private advisers, ex-diplomats and defence experts. He has operated as his own foreign secretary, with Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Geoff Hoon, defence secretary, as supporting figures easily pushed aside ; even the massive brooding presence of Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been sidelined.
The dispatch of British forces to the war zone was not discussed in Cabinet at all. In late November, the sending or otherwise of up to 6, British troops to assist in the distribution of aid and providing a stable environment for a post-Taliban regime to emerge, rested on discussions between Blair and George Bush, not on decisions taken by the British government. He has never seemed more popular, more obviously in charge. They have not always been obviously successful : he was harangued by President Assad in Syria and briefly shunned in Saudi Arabia.
Back home in Britain, a few critics said he should be spending more time in handling domestic problems. But the general effect has been overwhelmingly positive for him. In the United States, he has at times almost seemed to overshadow Bush to the extent that many Americans have declared that they would prefer Blair as their president. He has been hailed in the American Senate as one of them. By contrast, Churchill in was a traditional parliamentarian whose electoral defeat in was to be humiliating indeed , while Mrs.
Thatcher always faced internal resistance to her policies throughout her eleven years in Downing Street. So far Blair has swept aside all internal opposition even if his relations with Gordon Brown remain a cause for press speculation and rumour. Blair, after all, is the first Labour party from Keir Hardie to John Smith, not to be any kind of socialist.
Yet he faces no threat at all from the left. The Old Left, a bugbear for labour leaders from Gaitskell to Kinnock, has virtually disappeared. There is no Bevan, no Benn. The presence of aged figures like Benn and Arthur Scargill and veterans of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament like Monsignor Bruce Kent at peace rallies during the Afghan crisis is almost a statement of defeat in itself - that is the best they can produce.
Of course, the collapse of the old left is the result of many wider factors, including the social changes that have undermined trade union and socialist militancy, and the end of the cold war since Blairism, after all, depends on Blair. It depends on how successful he is personally. But what may be the effects if the war drags on, without an evident political solution and amidst growing humanitarian tragedy?
What if there a terrorist attack by suicide bombers in Britain itself? But it will not last for ever. Within the government, even Blair is not all-powerful - witness delay over the Euro or contemplating reform of the voting system. In the movement at large, the Labour Party respects Tony Blair but does not love him ; he has reinvented the Labour Party, after all, almost like reinventing the wheel.
There is a huge danger of hubris leading to nemesis, as with the ancient Greeks. The British political culture has no place for Bonapartism ; it could not accommodate a de Gaulle, or any British version of it.
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