Don't you feel disillusioned and betrayed?" People would often ask me this during Labour's first term, and my reply was that I had lived through Labour governments before and had also studied 20th-century history, and therefore had no expectations of a socialist Jerusalem. Besides, as has often been observed, Tony Blair had got his betrayal in before he came to power.
Could it all have been different? Could a Labour government—perhaps under a different leader or perhaps with MPs who exercised greater control over Blair—have implemented a more left-wing programme and still, unlike all its predecessors, have secured three consecutive terms with substantial majorities? Or was it, given the changing composition and changing aspirations of the electorate, always bound to steer to the right?
Not everyone would agree that the Blair governments have failed the left, or even that traditional left-right terms still have meaning. For example, many people, including myself, would argue that the policy of charging undergraduates tuition fees—one of the half dozen or so issues that threatened to drive backbench Labour MPs into mass rebellion—counts as an important egalitarian measure. University students come overwhelmingly from middle-class homes; before the introduction of fees, working-class taxpayers, in effect, subsidised each of them by up to £10,000. There was nothing remotely socialist about asking millions to pay for something from which their own children, usually through lack of the necessary qualifications, were barred. In any case, means testing ensures that students from poor homes—or, indeed, moderately well-off homes—pay less than the full amount, and sometimes nothing at all.
But this policy illustrates the difficulties of defining where New Labour stands on the political spectrum. First, since the money for fees actually comes from loans, which are repaid (at effectively nil interest) after graduation and then only if the graduate's income is over £15,000, the government has introduced what other countries call a graduate tax. But New Labour does not like the word "tax"; although it would make the policy more palatable to the left, it is thought offensive to middle-class voters. Second, tuition fees undermine an important part of the British left's conception of the welfare state: its role in creating social solidarity. If certain public services are free to all, and if certain payments (such as a substantial old-age pension) are available to all, the left argues, the whole country will commit to the welfare state. This is the leftist ground that the Liberal Democrats attempted, with some success, to steal from Labour in the 2005 general election.
New Labour's difficulty with the left has often been one of tone as much as substance. It has sometimes seemed determined to upset every natural Labour constituency: not just the northern working class, but also the north London liberals, supporters of comprehensive education and so on. The growth of specialist schools, for example, could have been presented as a means of strengthening the comprehensive system. Instead, Blair's spokesman hailed "the end of the bog-standard comprehensive." Welfare reforms could have been sold as attempts to help the truly poor more effectively, updating the Beveridge settlement for a post-industrial age. Instead, Blair appeared in the Daily Mail, with a strong-jawed, gimlet-eyed picture byline, promising "the end of the something for nothing days." Scarcely a week has passed without ministers promising to lock more people up or introduce new laws against crime and terrorism. Meanwhile, achievements of which the left might approve, such as the Sure Start children's centres, have been downplayed, to the extent that the prime minister has implied, on the basis of flawed research, that they haven't really worked out.
Stealth was the watchword on tax and redistribution. But did New Labour make significant progress, albeit quietly, on the fundamentals of a left agenda: the reduction of poverty and inequality? Previous Labour governments, its supporters argued (particularly during the first term up to 2001), had never stayed in office long enough to make a difference. Economic prudence in the first term of office would prevent the government being blown off course by the loss of market confidence that had afflicted its predecessors. More "realistic" policies on, for example, crime and defence, would keep the electorate happy. New Labour would then be free to make genuine and permanent improvements that would benefit what ministers call "hard-working families."
Yet after nine years, the improvements look modest. As a group, pensioners have done best, with a one third fall in poverty. In fact, poverty among pensioners is now lower than in the population as a whole. But that is largely because growing numbers are reaching retirement age with occupational pensions and substantial housing equity rather than because of any government action.
Blair's biggest ambition—what the Guardian commentator Polly Toynbee has called "the unshakable moral underpinning of this government"—was to cut, and ultimately abolish, child poverty. And New Labour has indeed lifted 700,000 children out of poverty. But 3.4m remain there, a proportion of the child population that is higher than all but five of the 24 other EU countries. According to research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, present policies will keep child poverty at those levels until 2010. The target to cut child poverty by a quarter—originally set for 2004—won't be reached until 2020. Indeed, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) calculates that if you look at relative household spending—arguably a better yardstick than income because it reflects other resources, such as savings, borrowings and assets—child poverty has actually grown since 1997.
Nor has inequality fallen much overall. The gap in income between those at the very top and the very bottom has increased, although that between those just below the top and just above the bottom has narrowed. The top 1 per cent of the population own 21 per cent of the wealth while the bottom 50 per cent own 7 per cent, and only 1 per cent if you discount the value of their houses. According to the IFS, the Gini coefficient— the internationally accepted measure of inequality— has stayed more or less where it was: Britain actually became more unequal from 1996-97 to 2000-01 and has subsequently become somewhat more equal, ending up roughly at the 1997 starting point. Working-age people without children now suffer record levels of poverty. If you are poor, and neither a pensioner nor a parent, life under Labour has gone from grim to grimmer.
This record is not quite as bad as it sounds. One of the effects of globalisation is to widen income differentials, forcing governments to run harder just to stand still. This applies particularly during periods of economic growth, which also tend to boost asset values, thus again favouring the rich. Paradoxically, the Blair-Brown success with the economy has made it more difficult to achieve traditional left goals. Without New Labour's policies on tax and benefits—and, some of its leftist critics should note, without the means tests that concentrated help on poorer groups—poverty and inequality would be much greater. But the record scarcely warrants a dismissive attitude towards old Labour. Between 1964 and 1970, under Harold Wilson's government, the poorest tenth of Britons saw a 29 per cent rise in their real incomes against a 16 per cent rise in median incomes. By 1979, after another dose of old Labour rule, inequality in Britain was at the lowest level in history.
New Labour people would argue that old Labour's record on these things is irrelevant. Britain may have been more equal, but everyone was poorer. The policies of the 1960s and 1970s—especially tax levels that penalised hard work and enterprise—weakened the economy to the point of ruin, and the harshness of the Thatcher years was the result. If there was equality, it was an equality of decline, with the most dynamic people leaving the country or going into internal exile. What Britain needs, New Labour would argue, is a sustainable route to a fairer society, not policies that lead to economic failure and the return of the Tories.
That still leaves ample room for discussion about how far you can go and about voters' willingness to trade increased personal prosperity for a fairer society. New Labour's public spending has not been high by either historical or international standards. True, more spending now goes on public services such as health and education, rather than on unemployment benefit, as was the case under the Tories. But the present level—the highest since 1997 at 43.1 per cent of national income and now set to fall—is still slightly below the average for industrialised countries. The "tax burden" is lower than in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand and all the Scandinavian countries.
So how great was the public appetite for more tax-and-spend and more redistribution? Surveys consistently suggest it was considerable. For example, the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey in 2000 found that only 5 per cent of voters agreed the government "should reduce taxes and spend less on health, education and social benefits," while 50 per cent wanted more taxation and more such spending. Nearly 40 per cent agreed government should "spend more on welfare benefits for the poor even if it leads to higher taxes," while fewer than a third disagreed. After the budget of 2002—New Labour's most left-wing budget, with a sharp increase in NHS spending and a 1p national insurance rise to pay for it—Labour's poll ratings rose and Brown became the most popular chancellor in decades. More recently, BSA has reported that nearly three quarters of Britons think the gap between high and low incomes is too large and agree that taxes paid by the majority should help those most in need.
When it comes to the most characteristically Blairite policies—reform of public services, extension of choice and, in foreign affairs, the US alliance, even when that involves supporting George W Bush—public support has been lukewarm at best. The proportion of voters who think Britain is too close to America was recorded at 63 per cent by ICM this summer. Populus asked voters in 2004 if "taxpayer-funded public services… should be provided by the government, not private companies, because this is the best way to ensure everyone experiences the same standard of provision." It would be hard to think of a clearer statement of old-fashioned collectivist principle. Yet 71 per cent agreed.
All such findings have to be treated with extreme caution. People's behaviour doesn't always accord with what they tell pollsters and market researchers. And voters may will the end—decent public services and low levels of poverty, say—without accepting the means: that they may have to pay higher taxes themselves. In a Fabian study, carried out by ICM, well under 10 per cent thought the level of any of the main taxes—income tax, VAT, and cigarette, alcohol and petrol duty—was too low, and comfortable majorities thought them too high. Only when asked about income taxes on those earning over £70,000 a year did more than 25 per cent say they were too low. Just 0.8 per cent of respondents fell into that income bracket. In other words, when people say they support higher taxes, they usually assume that others will pay them. In the privacy of the polling booth, conscious of credit card debt, mortgages and fuel bills, they may support the party most likely to keep taxes down, and not tell anybody even when they've done so. Nevertheless, as Peter Kellner, director of YouGov, points out: "In 1997, most people expected Labour to put up taxes anyway, even though it had promised not to do so. In 2001, having established its economic credentials, it could certainly have raised the top rate of tax."
Kellner uses a new concept called "valence" to argue that, on most traditional left-right ideological issues, policies aren't nearly as important as politicians think. Provided they have confidence in the government's competence and good faith, voters don't care if taxes rise, or public services get reformed, or benefits go up. A "valence" position is one where people opt for a statement such as "what matters most is whether the government of the day taxes fairly and spends efficiently" in preference to statements that support any particular level of tax and spending, whether higher, lower or the same as now. YouGov polling finds that, on issues such as redistribution and taxation, people overwhelmingly opt for the "valence" statement. This applies particularly to those who have no strong party identification—the potential floating voters—but even among very strong Tory identifiers, more plump for the "valence" option than for a cut in taxes. True, on this measure, only 18 per cent of Labour's strongest supporters want more tax and spending and only 31 per cent more help for the poor; but, argues Kellner, the analysis suggests that "Blair and his ministers had more freedom to be progressive than is generally realised." Only on such issues as crime, punishment and immigration do people have strong preferences for particular policies—and those policies are mostly right-wing, suggesting that New Labour has at least been right to adopt a tough rhetoric, if not tough policies, on these subjects.
But if you are a leftist, you should now prepare to weep, for two reasons. First, in the wake of the Iraq war, the honours scandal and several other well-publicised disasters, notably at the home office, the government's competence and good faith are now widely questioned. "When there's a gap between rhetoric and reality, as there was in the case of WMD," says John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, "it's corrosive." Polls report high levels of contentment, confidence and optimism in Britain compared with other industrialised nations. Yet, asked if they think the government has improved or will improve anything, people give an overwhelming negative. In other words, the chances of "valence" working to Labour's advantage—of the government getting away with left-wing policies because the electorate broadly trusts its intentions—have receded considerably over the past three years.
Second, it seems that, far from building a progressive consensus, New Labour may have strengthened support for Thatcherism. Evidence for this comes from research by Curtice and Stephen Fisher, an Oxford sociologist, drawing on the BSA survey and the British Election Panel studies. They show that from 1986 to 1996, support for government redistribution from the better off to the less well off never fell below 43 per cent, and was often above 50 per cent. Since 1997 it has stayed consistently below 40 per cent, having first fallen from a peak of 51 per cent just after Blair became Labour leader in 1994. Attitudes to the welfare state—the belief that there are large numbers of scroungers, for example—have become less positive (or, at best, no more positive) since 1997. It is almost as if people had decided that if even a Labour leader didn't seem to believe in redistribution, the idea must belong to the political fringes.
Even more worryingly for the left, it seems that Blair has turned Labour supporters against the idea of redistribution. It is almost a truism that Labour is now a middle-class party, as perhaps it needed to be given that the middle classes now account for the majority of the population. But Blair has changed the ideological base of the party's support as well as its social base. According to Curtice and Fisher, he did so not so much by recruiting new supporters as by changing the views of existing supporters. On classic left-right social and economic issues, the differences between Tory and Labour supporters are considerably less than they were in the 1980s and early 1990s. And that is largely because Labour supporters, not Tory supporters, have changed.
In short, Labour probably had an opportunity to pursue left-wing policies, but it has gone. Determined to respect what it perceived as the electorate's conservatism—"ordinary people with suburban dreams who… wanted sensible, moderate policies" as the Blairite polling guru Philip Gould put it ("A roar from the suburbs," Prospect December 1998)—and particularly its scepticism about tax and redistribution, so that they usually preferred a right-wing "spin" to a left-wing one, the government failed to build support for Labour's core values. They forgot that, as Roger Jowell, co-founder of the National Centre for Social Research, puts it, "parties can influence the electorate as much as the electorate can influence parties."
Some would say the voters' move towards Thatcherite values was not a miscalculation at all, but rather Blair's intention all along. However, what Blair really believes remains mysterious, perhaps even to himself. Here the contrast with Thatcher is striking. Nobody was in any doubt about her inner beliefs. In the mid-1980s the principles were agreed, the debates were about how to get there. The equivalent Labour debates, however, betrayed a continuing search for principle; they were about direction, not distance, about where to go, not how far.
The result is that Thatcher changed Britain, but Blair didn't. Far from making the 21st century a radical century, as he insisted was his ambition, he may have laid the foundations for another conservative one. Private provision of public services, weak trade unions, huge contrasts of income and wealth—all these now seem permanent features of the landscape, their reversal as unlikely as the return of prices and incomes policies. When Labour came to power in 1997, it was not all over for the left. It is now.
