In the last 30 years or so, two ideas have become indistinguishable in British politics: going forwards, and turning right. Any move to the right - privatisation, deregulation, anything that enriches big business - is presented as progress. Resisting these changes, or even, God help us, suggesting a move in the opposite direction, is an offence against modernity. A left-wing stance is not a viable political alternative, it is a betrayal of tomorrow. If you don’t trust market forces to run the world, you basically don’t love your own children.
Going forwards and turning right are different things. It seems ridiculous to have to say that, but the conflation is so widespread it seems necessary. I could understand it if we were French. In French, ‘go straight on’ and ‘turn right’ are very similar phrases - ‘tout droit’ and ‘tournez a droite’, I seem to recall. These phrases are widely used in the French town of La Rochelle to negotiate the tricky path from the town hall to the youth hostel.
But in British politics we have no such excuse. It’s not the language that has introduced this confusion. It was a series of leaders - two in particular - who wanted to take things rightwards. Thatcher and Blair can’t be faulted for following their own principles. Blair occupied a wide-right outcrop of the Labour Party; Thatcher colonised a small island just off the right coast of polite society. So inevitably they were going to tell us all that their vision was progress. The amazing thing is that we went along with them.
Those ideas are now thoroughly ingrained: businesses should run as much of the country as possible, and the state should not interfere, but just sign the cheques. This kind of opinion belongs on the lunatic fringe but, with the huge rightwards drift of the last 30 years, it now shockingly belongs to the consensus. There is a received wisdom that everyone is meant to agree with: kittens are cute, ‘Back for Good’ is a decent song, and big businesses should run everything.
You would think it had ended well. The way this right-wing consensus has emerged, you would think the extreme experiment of the last 30 years had culminated in sun-lit uplands, an end to boom and bust, poverty being made history, and affluent contentment spreading around the nation like bird flu. But it didn’t. It ended in the banks going bust and the state signing cheques that were very large indeed.
How can anyone still think that the world of big business is a superior model to anything? The old-fashioned public sector is still widely maligned, but it never failed like the private sector did. The Winter of Discontent of 1978/9 successfully put people off the idea that the public sector should ever be trusted with anything again. But the financial crisis of 2008 seems to have made no difference at all - except to make people spit after using the word ‘banker’.
The bins may have stayed uncleared and the dead unburied for a period in 1979, but that failure represents a level of competence and effectiveness that Lehmann’s and HBOS could only dream of. The militant workforce of 1979 may have failed to deal with the rubbish and the corpses for a while, but at least they never built sky-scrapers out of them and told us they were safe.
But ‘Right’ and ‘forwards’ are not the only concepts that have got muddled up.
The Labour party has also conflated a couple of ideas, and once again Tony Blair is the source of the confusion. It is easy to forget now how incredibly popular Tony Blair was. To say, ‘I didn’t vote for Tony Blair’ was, for a while, like saying, ‘I am a loveable British eccentric, given to irrational behaviour such as beekeeping and Morris dancing, and the landscape is the richer for my existence.’ It wasn’t normal. But Blair was. Strange to say it about a man that everyone now sees as a swivel-eyed ideologue, but Blair was deeply, deeply normal.
He always seemed like a pretty straight sort of guy. The only time he didn’t was when he said, ‘Look, I’m a pretty straight sort of guy.’ Out loud. With other people - and recording equipment - in the room. Staggering. But when he refrained from that kind of behaviour, he was dynamite. Until Blair came along, the only politicians you recognised as actual human beings were the flawed, sometimes gaffe-prone, ‘characters’. Politicians were either sleek and professional, or they were recognisably human: only Blair was both. Blair was totally professional, but if you met him in the pub, you knew he’d be pretty normal - as long as he stayed off the subject of his own dazzling normality.
Blair was also on the distant right of the Labour party. While his principles and instincts were more egalitarian than the Tory leaders he followed, the tactics were the same. Thatcher and Major had an ideological belief in bringing the market into public services; Blair just thought it would work. And this non-ideological attitude allowed Blair to drift miles to the right of where any Labour politician had ever been before.
And ever since, Labour seem to have lived by a very wonky piece of logic. Tony Blair was the ultimate election-winner. Tony Blair was very right-wing. Therefore right-wing policies win elections. It’s the perfect ‘therefore my dog is a cat’ deduction. Blair didn’t win all those elections because his policies were so right wing. He won because he was the ultimate performer: it’s the singer, not the song. Blair could have run with the 1983 Labour manifesto, if he believed in it, and still beaten most of the Tory leaders he faced.
So, right and forward are different; and so are right-wing and popular. And all that is required to fix both of these misapprehensions is for Labour to adopt a left-wing platform, sell it well, win a general election, and lead the country to a socialist utopia.
Right, that was easy. What shall we do next?
No comments:
Post a Comment