DANG GOOD DECADE:

After Labour's 10 years of Tony Blair ... the big five changes (Bill Jacobs, 7/21/04, Evening News)

1 Transforming Labour

TONY Blair was the first person in the Labour Party to realise that Margaret Thatcher was reducing it to a permanent Opposition rump.

She had successfully seduced those members of the working class who had become middle class since Labour introduced the welfare state after the Second World War.

After her 1979 election victory she assiduously wooed this group of people with policies designed to increase their wealth and detach them from their Labour and trade union roots. Most notable was the sale of council houses which turned millions of families dependent for the roof over their heads on Labour’s metropolitan fiefdoms into property owners for the first time.

She encouraged them to turn their wealth into shares and destroyed the power of the unions over businesses. More and more this newly affluent and upwardly mobile class saw Labour as part of a rather unpleasant path they didn’t wish to be associated with.

At the same time her policies over employment - or rather unemployment, benefits and the poll tax - created a growing underclass who detached themselves from society and failed to vote.

That certainly suited Thatcher’s strategists - they would have voted Labour anyway.

When John Smith became Labour leader in 1992, the Edinburgh-born and Fettes College and Oxford-educated Blair saw his chance.

As shadow employment secretary - ironically, up against Cabinet minister Michael Howard - he had spotted the effectiveness of the Tory strategy.

He persuaded a reluctant Smith to water down Labour’s opposition to Tory union laws.

Blair realised that without radical change Labour could be reduced to a permanent rump of around 150 MPs wedded to the trade unions, whom their former supporters would not consider voting for.

Once Labour leader, Blair wasted no time in reforming the party and in October 1994 announced a review of the famous Clause 4 of the Labour Constitution which committed the party to nationalisation.

After a knife-edge vote at the Scottish Labour Conference in Inverness, he defied his critics by getting the change through a special Labour Conference in 1995. Blair’s reputation as a Houdini-like politician who could escape from any spot, no matter how tight, was established.

This is the one that matters, the transformation of Labour into a fundamentally conservative party, though it's hard to believe it's more than a temporary change. Still, Bill Clinton had the opportunity to do the same for the Democrats and expressed the desire to do so, but failed even during his own presidency, thereby making the GOP the majority party.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 23, 2004 11:35 PM