SON OF THE IRON LADY

The Blair years: how does he measure up?: As Tony Blair becomes the Labour leader with the longest continuous term in office, Westminster Editor James Cusick finds unnerving parallels with Harold Wilson (Sunday Herald, 03 August 2003)

When Blair accepted the leadership after making a deal with Gordon Brown, he said to his party: “I will tell you what our task is. It is not just a programme for government. It is a mission of national renewal: a mission of hope, change and opportunity.”

A year later, in October 1995 at the party conference in Brighton, Blair effectively tried to create a new political party. He told conference: “The prize is immense. It is new Britain … New Labour, New Britain. The party renewed, the country reborn.”

Wilson, like Blair, wanted a reinvention of Britain, using science and technology to transform it. During the 1964 campaign he promised the “big idea” would be driven by people “with fire in their belly and humanity in their hearts”. [...]

Blair’s continuing appetite for reform can be paralleled with Wilson’s personal belief that he was a moderniser, intent on using a reformed Whitehall to stimulate economic growth based on applied science allied with an “applied” revision of ministerial government that included setting up a ministry of technology and a department of economic affairs.

Ministers now joke about the electronic bleepers controlled by Alastair Campbell and how much Blair’s spinmeister tries to keep everyone on-message, but Wilson during the 1966 election campaign began that style of control. All speeches that year had to be cleared with Number 10 “in order to co-ordinate the presentation of the government’s policies”. The text sounds like a prototype of the bible of spin.

Although Wilson never carried the ideological baggage associated with the classical ideal of socialism, he always thought it crucial to maintain links with the left. Blair does much the same thing. The annual party conference has seen Blair corner the power of the organised left, stifle criticism, turn the gathering into a yearly love-in of Labour in power, but at the same time moves are always made to pacify the activists and remind them that old Labour is still safe in the hands of New Labour.

As one MP claims: ‘‘This is where Blair’s hijacking of the party is at its most brilliant. Wilson had years of strife from the unions, everything from incomes policy to the battle over reform on union rights. Blair inherited a union movement that Thatcher had castrated. But rather than offer union rejuvenation, Blair has benefited in his six years in power from their lack of power. But just as the unions ultimately destroyed Wilson at the end of the 1960s, the unions can still make life difficult for Blair.’’

It's hard to see how you can miss the point that by keeping the unions on their knees, governing from the Center-Right and thereby both rejuvenating Labour and leaving the Tories deep in the wilderness, while making Britain a nearly co-equal partner with America on the world stage, Mr. Blair has achieved something truly significant. People, especially on the Left, may disagree with what he's done, which is essentially to make Labour a more Thatcherite party than the Tories, but it is remarkable nonetheless. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 9, 2003 7:50 PM