Coming up for Blair

In 1964, having lived my teenage years in South Africa, I returned to England on the eve of Harold Wilson's triumph in the October election. Now, as I settle back in South Africa, England lives in much the same expectancy of Tony Blair: again we have a Tory government, long led by a commanding figure, but now replaced by a nicer and lesser leader, a government grown stale in age, rank in scandal, ripe for the plucking: again we have a Labour party buoyant with future imaginings under a dynamic young leader, putting aside sterile years of strife to embody-once again-the hopes of a generation. The cycle seems almost complete.

The feeling that English history doesn't progress, that it just goes round and round, is clearly very comforting to the large, perhaps predominant part of the British soul which is nostalgic to a fault. No other country so enjoys endlessly recreating Victorian and Edwardian images of itself or sedulously reproducing the torments of its class system. And now we're quite caught up in it because that's the only thing the American market buys into: of course, our one recent film success had to feature not just any old weddings and funerals but ones with "toffs," a Scottish laird, and country homes, with an ineffable, apparently effortless Englishman gliding through it all. (In 1964 the apparently effortless Englishman was James Bond, which is to say, Sean Connery-a Scot). About a year ago I was sitting in a cinema in Durban surrounded by Zulus and Indians watching-well, I'm not sure whether it was Howard's End or the Remains of the Day. I realised that I really couldn't bear to watch another reel of this sort of thing. As an Oxford don one is well placed to see the elaborate, timeless workings of the British class system, its intricate cruelties and its endless self-obsession. I have watched it, studied it, suffered from it and am now utterly bored by it-above all by its cloying parochialism. Time to go. And yet, despite that, I dragged myself dutifully to Shadowlands, only to see my beloved Magdalen College parodied in the same pitiless time-warp. "All those actors wandering around the college looked much more like real Oxford dons than any of us do," said one of my colleagues.

But the feeling that the approaching age of Blair is merely a cyclical phenomenon is only a part of the reason for the wariness that I and others like me feel. Anyone who remembers the age of Wilson cannot but feel many times bitten and more shy.



Wilson's death occasioned all the usual homilies about him being a nice man; with the only sour note attaching, inevitably, to his final Honours list. But if you had lived through the whole Wilson era you were punch-drunk long before that final list. The early failures were far more important-above all his decision to mortgage the whole administration's career to maintaining the value of the pound, and thus the failure of the promise to end "stop-go." It was bad enough that Wilson, whose strong suit was economics, should have been elected to hold the pound at a clearly unsustainable level; worse still that he should have picked on a new rate ($2.40 to the pound) simply because this meant that one cent was worth one penny; worst of all that he should have made that embarrassing and consciously untrue speech about the pound in our pockets not being worth a penny less than before.

but what could be more typical of Wilson than to know that after the general public and the quality journalists have picked over your words, there come the academics and biographers, the would-be worldly wise who want a more sophisticated explanation for events. So he later let drop the aside that the real reason he had not devalued immediately on assuming office was that all future Labour governments would be hampered by public expectations of Labour as the party of devaluation. This aside has been obediently trotted out by biographers, although it is clearly ludicrous to suppose that Wilson, for whom a week was a long time and next year an eternity, would seriously have cramped his style for the sake of Labour governments as yet unborn.

For that was how Wilson carried the hopes of a generation: a failure of nerve covered by a clever phrase with "spin" on it, covered by a further duplicity. On top of that we had his Toad-of-Toad-Hall posturing: the bogus grandeur of "East of Suez," the "smack of firm government," the infamous "dog-collar" speech, the petty bourgeois striving apparent in his use of the word "governance" for "governing," and the ghastly pretentiousness of the title Lord Wilson of Rievaulx, thus inventing a Norman pedigree for Huyton Man.

Wilson admired-indeed tried to ape-Churchill and Macmillan but failed to note how proudly both men had carried the tradition of the great commoner. Wilson could have earned genuine respect by pointing out, as they did, that he had won his greatest laurels as plain Mister and that was what he would stay, like Shakespeare or Darwin or the greatest American presidents. But Wilson always remained the little boy posing for the camera outside No. 10-in his dotage he would stop shoppers in his local North Oxford supermarket and, across the wire trolleys, badger them with "I used to be prime minister, you know." He was incapable of seeing that his own Honours lists were further undermining the waxwork flummery of title. The end result was not only sad, but tacky.

This much is now almost trivially true: the real significance of Wilson lay in the generation whose hopes he carried, those who came of age politically in the early and middle 1960s or, to be more precise, the age cohort born between 1942 and 1947. This group, which included the huge post-war baby boom, was the first to benefit from the National Health Service, the first to get glasses and dental care on demand, the first to benefit from the 1944 Education Act and from the post-war slum clearance and mass housing drive. They even benefited from rationing-there was just enough food for everyone, and children got free orange juice as babies and free milk at school. It was the luckiest generation for a hundred years, perhaps the luckiest ever. These children were imbued with surpassing confidence-as they grew up in the 1950s the economy expanded steadily, life got brighter and more permissive and they increasingly dictated its pace. They became Britain's first-ever teenagers to be labelled as such, the first real rock 'n' roll generation, their music and their styles and their humour carrying all before it.

As this cohort left school it flooded into a whole new generation of universities created for it. National service was abolished just before this cohort came of age, with the result that its young males were the first in living memory lucky enough not to bear arms. As they bought houses, the property market soared. They rolled on to an easy labour market and all got jobs. The entrepreneurs among them (Richard Branson, Alan Sugar) often made fortunes. Those who entered large organisations dominate them to this day. Whatever they did seemed to work. For a brief period, this generation made London the cultural capital of the western world. Not only the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but virtually the whole British rock explosion of 1963-66 came from this group, as did Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber. So did the England team that won the 1966 World Cup, the dominant fashion-designers of the age, the Monty Python team-and so on.

This lucky generation was unaccustomed to anything but success. As it poured into the electorate of the 1960s, it placed its hopes in Harold Wilson. When hopes were dashed, the impact on the political culture was profound and long-lasting. The damage was done by 1970; even with the return of a Labour government in 1974 there could never be bright morning again. It made little difference when Wilson gave way to Callaghan, who gave way to Foot, who gave way to Kinnock, who gave way to Smith: the disillusionment was too ingrained for that. Probably only former Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald has cast a greater pall, for he too had inherited great hopes-hopes born not just of earlier Labour impotence and entrenched Tory rule, but of bitter unhappiness that the land of hope and glory had disappeared in August 1914.

With Tony Blair, we are back, if not in the land of hope and glory, at least in the land of hope. This much is apparent from polls, which regularly credit Labour with a lead of 25-30 per cent. That this prolonged and massive lop-sidedness has been uncorrected by several years of low inflation and rapid growth is a sure sign that Labour has now established a moral and political hegemony comparable only to Wilson's hey-day of 1962-63. In essence the combination is the same: Tory moral sleaze sapped the party's perceived "fitness to govern;" a split over Europe which was serious enough even in 1962 for Labour to win South Dorset, of all places, and is far more grievous now; and a Labour leader who is both younger and clearly cleverer than his Tory counterpart. In the end, of course, there was a certain unreality in Wilson's lead, which duly collapsed as the election neared, but he nudged home in 1964 nonetheless. At present, most political pundits believe that Blair must win-blithely ignoring the fact that he will require the biggest swing since 1945 to do so, and that he will, surely, face a Tory campaign based on a fierce English nationalism.

In a sense Labour has made this difficult to avoid. It has positioned itself as the pro-European party, the better to exploit the well-publicised Tory divisions on the issue. But the deeper reason for a jingoistic campaign is the success of Margaret Thatcher's use of the defence issue against Labour in 1983 and 1987. Labour's plans for nuclear disarmament were taken as symptomatic of a more general Labour unreliability when it came to national interest. Labour, the accusation ran, simply lacked the moral backbone to stand up not just to the Russians but to the union bosses, the IRA, the left within its own ranks, and to just about whatever pressure groups were badgering it at any given moment. Labour might promise this or that but in the last analysis it was irresolute, even shifty. There was enough truth in this to make the Tory barrage highly effective, particularly because it linked with folk memories of Wilson's real shiftiness as well as Thatcher's own legendary determination. The beauty of the tactic was that the more Labour changed its policies in a moderate direction, the more open it was to the charge of shiftiness. This lingering sense of distrust and unreliability clung to Neil Kinnock-and probably sank him in 1992.

the 1997 version will clearly be that Labour cannot be relied upon to stand up for the British national interest against the encroachment of the EU, that Labour will "give in" not only to the time-honoured pressure from the unions, but will fail to defend British sovereignty. It will "give in" to pressure from Brussels for a single currency and a social charter which will dull Britain's competitive edge. Labour's devolution plans will be depicted, as Robin Cook dryly puts it, as giving away Scotland to the Scots. There are ominous signs that the issue of European-wide border controls will see a resurgence of the immigration issue. Recent months have seen a big crack-down on illegal immigration rackets, and Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, is clearly bidding for the tough-guy image which Henry Brooke achieved as Conservative Home Secretary in the Tory government in 1964. In the 1964 election this resulted in the taunt: "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour." Something along these lines is clearly possible in 1997: the endless expos?s of false passport rackets, bogus asylum-seekers and phoney marriages on the one hand, and the clamour over young black muggers in London on the other, have re-created an indignant nativist mood of potentially Powellesque proportions.

For the first time in over 20 years opinion polls show a quarter (in some circumstances a half) of all respondents keen to encourage the "repatriation" of immigrants, despite the fact that most were born in the UK. This mood is fed further by ripples from America. The victory of measures against illegal immigrants in a referendum in California, and the University of California's decision to strike affirmative action from its books are not of parochial significance. Nearly 20 years ago it was the Californian revolt against property taxes which launched the Thatcher-Reagan era of tax-and-services cuts; today another wave is gathering on the American west coast, this one aimed at cheap-wage immigrants and "affirmatively" recruited women and blacks, who constitute a double threat to white male interests within the labour force.

This will impact strongly on Britain because the basic sociology of white male grievance is similar. The collapse of employment in smokestack industry has been a catastrophe for the white males who almost exclusively worked there and whose trade union strength depended heavily on these bastions. On the railways, in the docks, in steel, coal and car production there has been a prodigious decline both in jobs and in the real wages of those who remain in work. Any rise in family living standards since 1973 has, in the UK and the US, been caused by the rise in female employment in the burgeoning service sector.

The result is that a large number of blue-collar males in both the US and the UK are in a decidedly prickly mood. They are more certain than ever that the immigrants who may undercut them further must be kept out; they feel their position has been eroded sufficiently without their having to endure further competition from women and blacks; and they absolutely cannot bear being lectured on political correctness by the sort of middle-class women whose over-confidence seems to symbolise their plight. Thus the loathing for both Glenys Kinnock and Hillary Clinton.

To win in 1997, Labour may have to row upstream against this mood of nativist populism. Economics will not get it off the hook. If the Tories can then boast of four years of steady growth and low inflation, it will be difficult to say that Labour can do much better than that, especially since the party has quietly given up on Keynesian demand-side answers to unemployment, and promises instead only such banal supply-side remedies as more training. The party will no doubt dwell on the lack of a feel-good factor and make the usual noises about the need to favour investment over consumption, but this will be difficult, given that it is precisely the downward pressure on disposable consumer resources that has undercut property prices and made people feel bad. Moreover, there are many Labour voices who, faced with a stout Tory defence of British sovereignty, will find it hard to sing a pro-European song.

Two points may be argued against this, one sociological, one tactical. The first is that although there is a "natural" anti-European popular majority in Britain, at moments of decision a pro-European elite consensus has always won the day. Since British membership became a live issue in 1962, the polls have often shown large anti-European majorities. Proletarian feeling was always the strongest on this score, which was why every faction with a working-class following (the Labour left and the TUC, Enoch Powell, the National Front, Ulster Unionists, the SNP and Plaid Cymru) called for a "no" in the 1975 Euro-referendum. But every time that the question of membership came to a head-1962-63, 1967 and 1975-the press, the bien pensant middle class and the City of London combined with crushing force to turn opinion round. True, this alliance will not operate at full strength in 1997-British membership is not at stake-but it is likely to look with favour on Labour all the same.

It is in this respect that Blair has most closely imitated Wilson. In 1964 Wilson actually succeeded in conveying the impression that he would be a better manager of a capitalist Britain-more competent, energetic, more committed to technological progress, more knowledgeable about economics-than the Tories. Similarly, Blair is attempting to show that he has made Labour safe for the establishment, and not just over Europe. Rumour had it a year ago that Murdoch promised Labour support from the Sun if it would abandon Clause Four: with Clause Four gone and Blair now given a column in the Sun's sister paper, the News of the World, this rumour is looking better than most.

With socialism thus formally abandoned, Labour's chief claim to radicalism lay in Charter 88-style constitutional reform; but this too has been watered down to almost nothing. At first we were promised a Bill of Rights, but this would be meaningless without entrenchment in a written constitution, which is definitely off the menu. Then we were promised an extraordinary reform of the House of Lords. All those with hereditary titles would keep their seats but lose their votes to a vast new bevy of life peers: a simple substitution of birth for patronage with the elective principle as far away as ever. Since then the whole notion of Lords reform has been dropped. With Labour's remaining plans for devolution under mounting pressure, it seems quite likely that a future Labour government may skirt constitutional reform almost entirely. Moreover, Labour under Blair has accepted virtually all the Thatcherite inheritance-her anti-union legislation, all the main privatisations, persisting high levels of joblessness (Labour no longer even aims at full employment) and-to the protest of such an impeccably moderate figure as Roy Hattersley-a two-tier education system within the state sector. Naturally, these days Labour also wishes to keep the nuclear deterrent.

All of which is understandable. Blair has set out to design a party which will not scare the children or frighten the horses, but there is a good deal of criticism, both journalistic and political, of the resulting vacuity and thus the apparent opportunism of Labour's stance. Quite often this criticism comes from those who, if Labour were sticking to its guns, would be tut-tutting at its old-fashioned fundamentalism; a sense of danger is just as attractive in a political party as it is in a man or a woman. When a socialist party makes itself safe for the establishment and learns to love capitalism, one thing it loses is sex appeal. The fact that Blair's enthusiasm for "reform" is exactly measured by his keenness to move his furniture into No. 10 is also both true and unendearing.

But such carping misses the larger point that, in effect, Blair has decided that the most important thing is to secure l'alternance-as the French put it. It will be difficult enough for Labour to win at all and pretty much a miracle if it achieves a majority of, say, 20. But in 1997, after 18 years of Tory rule, an alternation of the ruling elites will be exactly what the system requires if it is to remain the system the British rightly admire. If the price of this alternance is that Labour has been neutered and will certainly disappoint, and that British politics will thus remain stuck in a mould, curiously unchanging, it is still better than having the sort of one-party dominance that Italy and Japan have experienced to their cost. A country that can have both stability and change, all in perfect peace, is pretty lucky-a chosen country.

This is what living in the third world does for you. Today, outside the office where I work, I watched a man with a Kalashnikov at the ready, supervising the dispatch of a vehicle from the bank. Car hi-jacking at the traffic lights is a daily hazard here. The houses near mine are surrounded by electrified wire to prevent intrusion. There is already a lot of corruption in government and it will clearly get worse. Everyone expects the dominant party to win the elections from here to kingdom come and many think the ruling party would kill a lot of people rather than allow l'alternance.

And yet I live in South Africa-a success story in relative terms. Not long ago I spent an evening with a clutch of senior judges here and it emerged that every single one of them had illegally smuggled money out of the country into sterling accounts. One only has to view Britain from here to see why even its stagnant stability is envied. People like those judges-and there are a large number of them around the world-find it reassuring simply that Britain exists. I choose to be here now precisely because things are fluid, because the re-shaping of South Africa is an exciting and wide-open task, but I too, if I'm honest, find it easier to do this partly because good old Britain is still so reliably there.

The fact that British politics seems about to complete a 33-year-cycle begun in 1964 and that, when the cycle is complete, nothing much will have changed, may be reassuring for expatriates but it must, after all, be pretty acceptable to the British too. Yet surely, fundamental change is as certain in Britain as it was in South Africa. It is impossible to imagine that Britain's antique political order can survive indefinitely-a huge parliament with little power, an overmighty central executive unchecked by direct election or even a constitution, a second chamber based on birth and patronage, the whole ludicrous panoply of monarchy and nobility. These may survive to the year 2000, but can we seriously imagine them continuing for say, a century beyond that? At some point all this will have to go and some welcome clean air let into the system at last. Yet for such change to come about usually requires a thorough-going crisis; such a change only occurred in Germany in 1945 after it was defeated in the war; in France in 1958 when the Algerian crisis brought General Charles de Gaulle to power. Happily, no such crisis is on Britain's horizon. All we can perceive is a steady drift towards collision with the far more integrationist, republican and constitutionalist culture of the EU.

The real meaning of Labour's timidity may simply be that Britain has shirked the chance to provide its own constitutional alternative and will instead have to accept one gradually imposed from outside. The next election in Britain may thus be exactly the opposite of the one which took place here last year. In South Africa the electorate voted overwhelmingly for change and hasn't really seen the change it wants. The British may vote sturdily against change and find they get it all the same. n