Elections in Britain on 5 May 2005 brought a third victory to Tony Blair’s New Labour party, though with a much reduced majority in parliament, only 35 per cent of the popular vote, and barely a fifth of the overall electorate—the lowest percentage secured by any governing party in recent European history. ‘When regimes are based on minority rule, they lose legitimacy’, Blair had told an audience at the Chicago Economic Club in April 1999. He was thinking at the time of the former Yugoslavia of Slobodan Miloševic´ and of apartheid South Africa, but his warning could now be applied to his own regime. More people abstained from voting in May 2005 than voted Labour. Disgust, rather than apathy, was the root cause of the abstention.
Widely celebrated as the first, ‘historic’ occasion on which a Labour government had won three elections in a row, the Blairite success might more relevantly be described as the sixth victory of a British government operating under Thatcherite principles since Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979. ‘Almost everything Blair has done personally—in education, health, law and order and Northern Ireland—has also been an extension of Conservative policy between 1979 and 1997’, argues Anthony Seldon in his exhaustive study, Blair, the largest and most useful of the raft of recently published biographies, most of which have been hagiographic but some more critical. Seldon’s charge is difficult to refute, and Blair’s relatively meagre showing in the election of 2005 had much to do with the disillusion of traditional Labour voters, finally obliged to admit that their party had been captured by the proponents of an alien ideology.
Blair’s enthusiastic endorsement of the illegal American invasion of Iraq in 2003, in which he played a leading role as military ally and political cheerleader, dismayed an even wider section of the British electorate and played an important part in whittling away his majority. Yet many Labour Party supporters were equally disappointed by his programme on the home front and his failure to construct a progressive alternative to the neoliberal policies established by Margaret Thatcher and John Major, his immediate Conservative predecessors. In continuing their drive to establish a neoliberal agenda and to roll back the frontiers of the state, Blair will be judged by history as an imitative and lacklustre politician with no wider achievement than that of building on their legacy.
None of New Labour’s projects were original. The Northern Ireland policy that produced the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 was the dream of John Major; he had put in the spadework. The process of decentralization, which led to the creation of political assemblies in Scotland and Wales, was the handiwork of John Smith, Blair’s predecessor as Labour leader. The private finance initiative (pfi)—the introduction of private firms into the provision of education and health in the public sector—was one of several outlandish schemes first discussed in the Thatcher years. City academies, the retention of grammar schools and the device of top-up fees to help fund the universities were all Conservative proposals. Only the enthusiasm for war, the strategy of reforging the Anglo-American alliance and the resurrection of imperial ambition can be laid at Blair’s door.
Blair’s lack of original thinking is the principal complaint outlined in Anthony Seldon’s book. Seldon is a distinguished and talented historian, writing in the conservative interest. The headmaster of one British private school, Brighton College, and soon to be head of another, Wellington College, he was the founder, with Peter Hennessy, of the Institute of Contemporary British History. He is the author of a small library of books, several of them about recent British prime ministers. His inordinately large biography, although tenuously chronological, is essentially thematic, with twenty chapters on the various dramas of the Blair era, and twenty on the individuals with whom he has been closely associated. These include members of his kitchen cabinet—Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell and Anji Hunter—as well as figures from the world outside, like Clinton and Bush.
Seldon is a demon for work, and there is a wealth of material from private interviews as well as from cuttings. Yet it is essentially a British and American account, with little about Britain’s allies in Europe—a notable and perhaps understandable omission. Although initially attracted to Blair, Seldon appears to have fallen out of love with the Blairite project (or lack of it), and his book reflects his own sense of disillusion. It seems that Blair proved less interesting, and less important in British history, than Seldon had imagined he would be.
Hopes that Blair might have led a genuinely radical government, to equal the achievements of the great reformist administrations of 1906 and 1945, were never high at the best of times, but after eight years he had produced little of substance for the history books. He had come to power in 1997 with a blank sheet that he proved unable to fill. At home, he had no personal project of significance, and the Labour Party of the 1990s was bereft of ideas of its own. After 18 years marked by fierce internal arguments and divisions, Labour was fearful of anything that smacked of a real alternative to the Conservative programme. The promise to maintain public spending at Tory levels during the first two years of government was indicative of a wider lack of nerve. In foreign affairs, Blair’s dismal record of policies that flew directly in the face of Britain’s wider interests ranks with those of Neville Chamberlain and Anthony Eden, although he sometimes seems to fancy himself in the mantle of William Gladstone, the great nineteenth-century liberal imperialist. As the Iraq Occupation has degenerated into ever-deeper violence and chaos, ‘Iraq’ joins ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’ in the lexicon of British foreign policy disasters.