Things can only get better. . .
Leo Blair might only have been born last Saturday, but it could be less than a year before his father is out-kissing his contemporaries. Many pundits had speculated - at least until the Prime Minister's recent slide in the opinion polls - that Tony Blair would choose to call the next general election a year before time, on 1st May 2001.
Now that Tony Blair has just a forty three percent approval rating, making him less popular than Bill Clinton was in the midst of the Zippergate scandal, there are suggestions that the government may run a full term. But regardless of this, it is plain that the first New Labour administration is reaching the end of its first term in office.
It is time to take stock of what the government has actually achieved so far, and where it might be going - assuming, of course, that it wins the next election. That is why the Oxford University Labour Club have recently presented two speakers who represent distinct strands in the elusive school of thought that is the Third Way.
First up was Will Hutton. He is more or less a household name as the author of the seminal New Labour tract, The State We're In, which came out in 1995 as a savage indictment of the Thatcher and Major administrations. Since then, he has been editor of the Observer newspaper and now heads up the Industrial Society, an employment policy think-tank. Hutton admitted that he was not at all interested in politics as a student, but said that "seven years in a merchant bank" changed his mind.
The second speaker was Ed Balls. Described by Will Hutton as the "deputy chancellor", he is chief economic advisor to the Treasury - no mean achievement for someone who only finished his PPE degree at Keble in 1988 and confessed that he "didn't do much work for the first two years" he was at Oxford. Instead, he spent his time playing football and politics, his position in the latter being that of Keble's JCR president.
Ed Balls now no longer plays for the Labour Party football team, the Demon Eyes, and was at pains to point out that Hutton's moniker, with its political overtones, was "a silly label". "You're paid to advise," he stated firmly, "whether you're civil servants or an outside appointment like me."
Nevertheless, the chancellor's special advisor is undoubtedly one of the manifestations of the Third Way. He was a party technocrat brought in to ensure that the Blairite project did not become mired in the stagnant ponds of fiscal conservatism that were believed to fester in the Treasury after eighteen years of Conservative rule.
In that at least, he has had success. "We weren't always popular," Balls noted, but the re-education programme had been successful: "There are now civil servants travelling around proselytising the Labour message." I'm sure that Ed Balls was not intending to suggest that he was using these public servants - "brilliant, after a bit of prodding" - for party political ends.
This isn't how Will Hutton sees things. Quite the contrary, he thinks, "Gordon Brown has been co-opted by the Treasury". "Completely and totally absurd", was Balls' response, adding for good measure that "sometimes Will allows headline grabbing statements to get in the way of the truth".
Spats like these do not properly reflect the relationship between the two men; there is more a mutual respect, yet good-natured frustration with the other's views. The disagreement over the balance of power in the Treasury, however, is at the kernel of Hutton's critique of the first three years of the Blair
administration.
Hutton began by telling the assembled masses of the Labour Club that he was "very concerned about where New Labour have got to", given that "the project has lost its way". Instead, Blair was trying to build a "progressive coalition with no progressive content".
Having given vent to his "chronic disappointment" with Tony, Gordon and Ed, he named the three ways in which they had disappointed him most. First, they had kept to Conservative spending caps on health and education. Second, they had "oversold" to public the extra money they did spend on key services, thus raising expectations which would never be met. Third, Gordon Brown showed a singular lack of imagination in using the twenty two billion pounds raised through the auction of mobile phone licences to reduce the national debt.
At this point the portly Mr Hutton in his unbuttoned New-Labour-purple tie stood up and towered over his audience, then told us "I don't fucking buy it" when the government made right wing noises over asylum seekers. Instead, he continued, the Labour party should celebrate the tension between left and right by adopting a liberal stance on, among other things, cannabis use and the Euro.
Here, Will Hutton began to court controversy. Previously, the body of sentiment within the Labour Club seemed largely to sympathise with him, apart from a few raised eyebrows when he said socialism was outmoded as a public policy platform. Now he was on much more open ground, and appeared in his element. OUSU President and Labour Club president-elect, Anneliese Dodds, took him to task for his support for the legalisation of cannabis, while others queried him on the wisdom of further European integration. Underlying this was his assumption that support for these should be as natural to Labour supporters as opposition to corporal punishment.
Certainly debate like this is essential to avoid the public cynicism and apathy that surrounds modern politics. It might also engage a "more sceptical" public, which Hutton sees as being concerned with single issues rather than the grand ideological causes of the past.
Will Hutton concluded by setting out the five manifesto pledges he wished to see at the next election. First, a ten thousand pound grant for every twenty one year old. Second, one teacher for every fifteen primary school children. Third, a maximum waiting time of one hour in hospital casualty departments. Fourth, an extra five thousand pounds a year for each pensioner. For his fifth and final pledge, Hutton toyed with setting maximum income controls, or a deadline for joining the Euro, but ultimately concluded that it would be most politic to provide free childcare for all under fives.
Ed Balls could hardly compete with this bag of goodies. As he ruefully commented after his talk, "Will Hutton made you feel better". Well, that's if you don't prefer the long cross-country runs and cold bracing showers that are the "sound and prudent" policies which rang throughout Balls' message.
Nevertheless, you feel more sympathy for a man who says "there's no point in radicalism unless it's credible" when considering how likely it is that Hutton's wish list could actually be financed. Spending a twenty two billion pound windfall in a big splurge during an economic boom before an election has little to recommend it compared with using the savings in debt interest to finance higher spending over the next twenty years.
Ed Balls is justly proud of the Treasury maintaining a stable economy "for the first time in thirty years". He is haunted by the example of Nigel Lawson, who added fuel to a boom before the 1987 election, partly for political ends and partly to weaken the over-valued pound. Balls regards any attempt to manipulate the pound/euro rate, frequently called for by Labour MPs in industrial constituencies, as risking another crash and sharp recession as in the early
nineties. With the icy winds of globalisation blowing, he claims it is the government's role to "emphasise stability in this kind of economy".
Arguably, there are ways around this conundrum, such as medium term holding of foreign assets by the government, but Ed Balls moved on. He staunchly defended the private finance initiative and the privatisation of air traffic control, saying that for "long term projects, the public sector is dreadful at running it". He also surprised everyone by claiming that John Prescott was "always someone who thought we should use the private sector when it was in the public interest".
Given that one of the main accusations against the Blair government is its alleged media fixation and manipulation, I was curious to see how they treated a humble student journalist. Both made a point of saying certain things in their talk were off the record, so I can't tell you which Tory MP held less than liberal views about human rights, or which tax rise achieved a more equitable distribution of income. What was most thought-provoking was that while Ed Balls highlighted how well the government's welfare-to-work policies played with the Daily Mail, Will Hutton pointedly remarked that "the circulation of newspapers is in decline - forget them". Something to do with being ex-editor of the Observer now?
Finally, after prompting, Ed Balls finished by giving his wish-list for the five key points in Labour's next manifesto. First would be to abolish child poverty, and second to achieve full employment. Then the chancellor's advisor wanted to see the NHS put on a sound financial footing, and to see half of eighteen year olds go to university. Finally, he would promise voters a "world beating economy". I'll leave you to decide whether this represents a "seriously unambitious manifesto" leading to "massive recriminations". After all, it'll be you who'll be voting on it.
18th May 2000