Dear David
1st February 2004
The prime minister has many troubles ahead. Yet, unforeseeable crises aside, it now looks probable that Tony Blair will both lead the Labour party into the next election and that he will win it. So it is important to ask where New Labour should go from here. As I understand it, setting the Iraq war aside, you have become thoroughly disillusioned with the whole enterprise. I remain a supporter and I would like to explain why.
This government has changed Britain for the better, and will accomplish still more in a third term. What is Labour in power for? Its prime purpose is to turn a Thatcherite society into a social democratic one. By this I mean a society that is cosmopolitan rather than narrowly nationalistic; in which economic prosperity is combined with social justice; and where there are robust, effective public institutions.
Mistakes have certainly been made since 1997. In its first term the government was over-cautious. It stuck too closely to Tory policies in health and education. Devolution was not driven by a coherent vision. Little progress was made on European issues. Transport was placed too low down on the list of priorities.
However, substantial progress has been achieved towards the goals I outlined. This is the first Labour government to preside over a period of steady economic growth - the precondition for generating revenue for social spending. Britain has low unemployment, a situation to which the New Deal has contributed. Seventy-five per cent of the working population is in employment, one of the highest levels of any industrial country. The decision to place control of interest rates in the hands of the Bank of England was a correct one.
Constitutional reform and devolution have already altered the country irrevocably. Separatism has declined since the arrival of the Scottish parliament. The advent of elected mayors is an important step. Britain has signed up to European legislation on human rights. The proposed supreme court is a worthwhile innovation.
This is a government with a better track record on the social justice front than its critics give it credit for. It is not easy to track inequalities, but the latest estimates indicate that in 2003-04 1.3m fewer children will be living in poverty than in 1996-97. Child poverty remains an endemic problem, but is at its lowest level since 1991. There were 400,000 fewer over-65s living in poverty in 2001-02 than in 1996-97, a fall of almost 20 per cent. It has been the right strategy to get as many people in work as possible, above a decent minimum wage. Those living in workless households are five times as likely to be below the poverty line than in households where at least one adult is in work. Whatever one thinks of the Iraq episode, the government has taken a lead on development issues, pushing for more money to tackle global poverty.
What of public services and the public domain more generally? I know this is an area where you believe Labour has pushed on with the attack on public institutions initiated by Margaret Thatcher. The public sphere, you say in your new book, Decline of the Public, has been diminished rather than revived under New Labour. Citizenship has been hollowed out by an emphasis upon consumerism.
I agree that a centre-left government should stand for the renewal of public goods and institutions. But I interpret what New Labour is trying to achieve differently from you.
Although in Britain it is a risky business, the government put taxes up, channelling large amounts of money into the NHS and education. This policy in itself is a major contribution to the strengthening of the public domain, as well as lifting the morale of those who work in these sectors. However, reform of public sector institutions is crucial to making such investment pay. Many state bodies are overly bureaucratic, dominated by producer interests and unresponsive to citizens' needs. The government overdosed on targets and central regulation in its early attempts to pursue these concerns. But it has pulled back from most of these over-zealous endeavours and the general thrust of policy is right.
It is right, for example, to try to expand the range of choice that people - especially poorer people - have in healthcare, education and elsewhere. Such an emphasis does not mean equating citizenship and consumerism. I argue that in the market sphere the individual is a "consumer citizen." Consumer choice is what drives a competitive market. Yet markets presume norms of trust, which markets themselves cannot generate, and require regulation to protect consumers. In the public arena, by contrast, the individual is a "citizen consumer." Choice and diversity of provision are desirable, but professional ethics and a public service ethos have a more central role.
The state and the public sphere are not the same. In this sense the term "public services" can be misleading. Experimenting with new ways of delivering public goods is a vital enterprise, not at all the same as "creeping privatisation." The Scandinavian countries are the most advanced social democratic states in the world. Yet these are also the countries where there has been most acceptance of the need for reform and change. Foundation hospitals, for example, were pioneered in Denmark and Sweden, as was the use of vouchers in education and the provision of services for the elderly. We should be pursuing a similar non-dogmatic approach here.
All best
Dear Tony
5th February 2004
I am not disillusioned with New Labour; I am un-illusioned. When Tony Blair was elected leader of the Labour party, I rejoiced. I applauded his decision to campaign for a change in clause four, and marvelled at the panache with which he did so. I marvelled so much that I rejoined the Labour party which I had left 15 years before. But well before the 1997 election I was beginning to smell a rat. The shallow rhetoric of "modernisation" and a "young country" suggested a lack of ideological conviction which seemed ominous.
All the same, you are right that this government has a far better economic record than any previous Labour government. Gordon Brown deserves the credit. He is the best Labour chancellor since Roy Jenkins, perhaps since Stafford Cripps. And whereas Jenkins and Cripps had to spend their time clearing up the mess left by their predecessors, Brown followed the best Tory chancellor for 50 years - Kenneth Clarke. I also agree with you that the Blair governments have been more redistributive than many of their critics realise. For that, too, the lion's share of the credit belongs to Brown.
Where do we differ? First, over the government's attitude to the public domain. You conclude that because it has channelled large sums into the NHS and education it has strengthened the public domain. But the strength of the public domain has nothing to do with the level of public spending. Massive public spending can coexist with a crippled public domain. It did so in the old Soviet Union. In this country, the public domain was a child of the Victorian era. It grew rapidly from about 1860 until the end of the century, but public spending hardly grew at all until the 1890s. I believe the state can be an enemy of the public domain as well as a friend. On the whole, the British state was a friend in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. By the last quarter of the 20th it had become a bitter enemy. It is still an enemy today.
The public domain encompasses much more than the public sector. In my book, I list many public domain activities and institutions. Here are some: the Pennine way; Amnesty International; fair trials; impartial public administration; disinterested scholarship; welcoming public spaces. Spending levels have little to do with any of these. They reflect an ethic of public service and a culture of citizenship, which the state can snuff out but cannot implant. The public domain is the domain of citizenship, equity, service and professionalism. It depends on the rule of law, and therefore on an independent judiciary, insulated from political interference and popular pressure. It also depends on disinterested professionalism, embodied in a professional ethic. These have to be protected from market pressures - not because there is anything wrong with markets in their proper place, but because the public and market domains are distinct entities. And the proxy markets which successive governments have forced on the public services in the name of reform can do even more harm to the trust relationships that lie at the heart of the public domain than real markets. The vitality of the public domain depends on strong, confident intermediate institutions, capable of resisting incursions from the central state. Democratic accountability, too, is a corollary of a culture of citizenship. In this country, its growth was connected with the emergence of a professional, non-partisan, career civil service, and the demise of the nepotism and cronyism that Radicals dubbed "old corruption."
Looked at in this light, it is preposterous to claim that the Blair governments have strengthened the public domain. One of their most obvious hallmarks is contempt for the rule of law and disdain for judicial independence. The Iraq war was fought in defiance of international law. David Blunkett can hardly open his mouth without savaging lawyers and judges. Blair has fetishised trust-corroding targets and audits as wholeheartedly as the Thatcherites did; and he has shown the same disdain for public service professionals. The Thatcherites ignited the audit explosion which has done more damage to the public domain than any other development of the last 20 years, but the Blairites have fanned its flames. And the whole culture of audit rests on the premise that professionals are inherently untrustworthy, and that the professional ethic is camouflage for monopolistic cartels.
The Blairites' approach to governance is even more disquieting. Yes, they have honoured the devolution commitments they inherited from John Smith; in truth, they had no alternative. But they disdain local government as thoroughly as the Thatcherites did. Their treatment of the House of Lords is a scandal. Britain desperately needs effective checks on the elective dictatorship in Downing Street. An entirely nominated upper house can't possibly provide that. Worst of all, they have systematically blurred the distinction between professional, career civil servants, with an ethic of public service, and the personal ministerial appointees who now pullulate all over Whitehall. That is the real moral of the Hutton inquiry. We have returned to the favouritism and cronyism that the 19th-century reforms of public administration rooted out.
Which brings me to our second difference: Iraq. The Iraq war cannot be set aside. It is the defining episode of Blair's premiership, as surely as Suez was for Eden's and Munich for Chamberlain's. As with Suez and Munich, it was a catastrophic blunder. However questionable John Scarlett's role in the September 2002 dossier, the intelligence services were not responsible for this. It was Blair who led Britain into war, not the joint intelligence committee. He helped to inflict dreadful damage on the UN, poisoned our relations with the two core states of the EU, and split the Labour party. His credibility is now in tatters. The Hutton inquiry has done nothing to restore his reputation because the inquiry's terms of reference were so restrictive that he could not examine the issues that really mattered. Now it looks as if the same will happen with the Butler inquiry. To appoint one inquiry with overly restrictive terms of reference might be forgiven as a lapse. To appoint two looks suspiciously like a habit. It is not a habit social democrats can condone.
All good wishes
Dear David
10th February 2004
I was hoping to concentrate on the domestic agenda because the Iraq war, Hutton report, proposed Butler report, 45-minute claim and so forth have been so exhaustively debated in recent weeks. My views do differ from yours. There were many reasons why Saddam's regime had to be confronted. It was Saddam, after all, who sought to hoodwink the UN over many years and who drove his country to ruin through his obsessive desire to dominate the middle east. Saddam could have stepped down - or if he didn't have any WMD, provide clear evidence - at any time in the build-up to war. If decisive action had not been taken against his regime, he would have continued to split the international community and defy the UN - and he would still be in power today. It would have been far better if the UN security council had been able to reach agreement on this. And Saddam might have acted differently if a united international community had condemned him, backed by the threat of force.
I think many on the left are too complacent about the dangers posed to western democracies by the new terrorism. It is not just an extension of the terrorism we are familiar with, such as that practised by the IRA or Eta. The new terrorism is geopolitical in its aims and ruthless in the means it will use to achieve them. Al Qaeda has cells in dozens of countries, held together by a sense of mission. September 11th now seems to be downplayed by many people, but other 9/11s, only worse, could happen. Blocking off possible connections between rogue states and geopolitical terrorism is crucial. Saddam's Iraq was a ticking timebomb against this backdrop. The intervention in Iraq has certainly had some influence on Libya's decision to abandon its WMD programmes, the rethinking going on in Iran and the uncovering of the export of nuclear knowhow from Pakistan.
You say the Iraq conflict will be the defining episode of Tony Blair's premiership, implying that it will lead to his decline and fall. I presume you want Blair to stand down, as a leader whose "credibility is in tatters." There is a sort of unholy alliance of anti-war newspapers and the right-wing press apparently aiming at the same outcome. But I think it is a delusion to suppose that if Blair were somehow forced out, Labour would march on to better and greater things. Labour's prospects would be irretrievably damaged.
On the public domain, I have no quarrel with your Durkheimian point that strong intermediary groups are essential for a healthy civic life. A centre-left party should stand for the renewal of the public sphere, not for a society where everything becomes commercialised.
However you also claim that "the strength of the public domain has nothing to do with the level of public expenditure." I find this assertion extraordinary. The years of underinvestment in public services during the Thatcher period, coupled with her disdainful attitude towards them, were highly damaging. It seems to me both churlish and wrong to say that the funding Labour is putting into the health service and other areas is not a significant contribution to enhancing the public domain.
You say "trust the professionals," whether they are dons, doctors, judges or civil servants. New Labour wants to reform the state and public agencies so that they are more open, efficient and responsive to the needs of citizens. Professional power can facilitate these objectives, but clearly it can also block them. Professionals can form closed shops, resist change and innovation, act as special interest groups, be disdainful towards the public, or otherwise coast along on the privileges they enjoy. The government quite rightly has sought to change these practices, as well as introduce wider reforms in public sector provision. And with some success. There are few "Lucky Jims" in universities these days.
I agree that detailed targets and auditing are counterproductive, and tend to spawn a new layer of bureaucracy. They can corrode the very ethic of public service that promotes dedication and commitment. These points, however, have been registered and responded to. We have to find a better balance between accountability and autonomy, and serious efforts are being made to do just that.
Finally, what about the "elective dictatorship" in Downing Street? Your account ignores the changed environment in which political leaders have to function today. There are fundamental and difficult problems - which we, as a society, are far from having faced up to - in the relation between the media and democracy in an era of media saturation. The decline of parliament is directly connected to the fact that the way in which politicians respond to questions on the Today programme often counts for more than what they say in the chamber. The "advisers" whom you excoriate have stepped into the gap. It won't do to say that we should simply go back to how things used to work 30 years ago. Every country is struggling with these questions, but I see no easy solutions.
With all best regards
Dear Tony
11th February 2004
The differences between us are deeper than I thought. On Iraq and its sequel, I don't think Saddam's phantom WMD had much to do with Blair's decision to go to war. I think he went to war because he believed it was a vital British interest to fight alongside the world's only superpower. There is nothing dishonourable about that view, but even so it was a terrible mistake. The crux of the issue has to do with geopolitics, not Iraq or even the middle east. Blair believes in a unipolar world and is viscerally hostile to the suggestion that Europe should try to become an alternative pole of power, balancing the US (and one day China). I believe in a multipolar world: the notion of a single, permanent hegemon, to which the rest of the world must forever bend the knee, flies in the face of some of my most deeply held values - human dignity, self-determination, diversity and pluralism. Quite apart from that, I believe that a multipolar world will sooner or later come into existence whether we like it or not. The spectre that terrifies me is of a weak, divided Europe, incapable of defending its interests in a world dominated by the Americans, the Chinese and perhaps the Indians. I therefore believe that Britain's overriding interest is to stay alongside the core nations of the EU, and to work with them to consolidate and strengthen the union in the face of the centrifugal pressures let loose by an ill thought out enlargement. My reason for thinking Blair's Iraq policy catastrophic is that I believe it brought the above spectre nearer. (He is rowing back a little at the moment, but I see no evidence that he has changed his basic attitudes.)
On the public domain, we are talking about different things. For you the public domain is a set of institutions. For me, it is a set of practices, embodying values. Hence our differences about the relationship between the public domain and public spending. Like you, I'm glad to see this government spending more on health and education. But however desirable it may be for other reasons, the extra spending won't, by itself, do anything for the public domain. Your suggestion that Thatcherite "underinvestment" weakened the public domain is a piece of Labour mythology. Public spending as a proportion of GDP fell very little in the Thatcher years. What damaged the public domain was the remorseless attack on professional autonomy and the equally remorseless marketisation that accompanied it. Both continue under Labour.
Of course, professionals have to be accountable. Lack of accountability was the worm in the bud of the public domain in the old days. But it's never a good idea to call in Beelzebub to drive out Satan. Accountability through markets, proxy markets and corporate sector managerialism have done infinitely more harm than good. We have to devise new forms of accountability - qualitative rather than quantitative, localist rather than centralist, bottom-up rather than top-down and involving stakeholders along with professionals in a process of social learning. This is an extraordinarily difficult task, but we haven't a hope unless we abandon the bossy, centralist mindset that New Labour shares with old Thatcherism.
However, even this is a minor matter compared with what I now realise are the really crucial differences between us. I'll try to describe them as fairly as I can. You evidently think that anything that weakens Labour's chances of winning the next election is, by definition, a bad thing. I am afraid I don't. On the contrary, I think the return of a third Labour government with a massive parliamentary majority, on the back of little more than 40 per cent of the popular vote, would be a disaster for British democracy, and therefore for social democracy as well. The best possible result would be a hung parliament, followed by a Lib-Lab coalition, the abandonment of our antediluvian first past the post electoral system and the slow conversion of our equally antediluvian political class to a politics of pluralism, negotiation, power-sharing and mutual education. The second best would be a small Labour majority, which would force the party leadership to abandon the macho posturing and we know best triumphalism of the recent past and might - who knows? - persuade it to adopt proportional representation (PR) of its own accord. But a third Labour term with a big majority would mean more posturing, more triumphalism, more hubris - and, almost certainly, eventual nemesis.
Behind this looms an even deeper difference. Pondering your letters, I have come to see that you are committing the besetting sin of old Labour - the sin of concentrating on outcome and forgetting process. In a giveaway phrase in your first letter, you said you wanted a "social democratic society." For me, the very notion of a social democratic society is an absurdity. Social democracy is not an end state. It is a process: the process of applying the fundamental values I mentioned a moment ago to ever-changing social realities. The true lesson of old Labour's failures was that British-style majoritarian democracy, and the elective dictatorship it inevitably produces, are incompatible with such a process. New Labour has taught us the same lesson, in spades.
All the best
Dear David
12th February 2004
I'm a Labour supporter. I hope Labour will win a clear majority again. A hung parliament and a Lib-Lab coalition would not be good for the country. Look at the poor performance of the Lib-Lab coalition in Scotland, which has produced policies that skirt the core problems of the uncompetitive Scottish economy. On the whole I'm a supporter of PR, but I don't feel as passionately about it as you. The advantages are obvious, but there is a well known down-side, including the space opened up for extremist parties.
There's something mildly comforting about being called old Labour again - that hasn't happened to me for some time. More seriously, I find the concluding paragraph of your letter quite mysterious. I am a social democrat, and I regard Labour as a social democratic party, which shares a great deal in common with social democratic parties elsewhere. A social democrat wants to further a society that embodies the core values of the left - solidarity, equality and protection of the vulnerable. These values, as we have discussed, can't be achieved in a society where markets are allowed free rein; they presume active government and a flourishing public sphere. But constant policy reform is needed to help realise them.
No one can possibly think that social democracy can reach a final state. Revisionism is an essential part of the history of social democracy and has to remain so. That for me is precisely what New Labour and the third way debate is about - responding positively to social change. Scandinavian social democrats have been even more innovative than New Labour. You claim that one can't talk about a "social democratic society," but it seems to me perfect sense to say that the Scandinavian countries are the most developed social democracies in the world. It also makes sense to say that we can give Britain a hefty nudge in the same direction.
I am a committed European and I want Britain to play a positive role in the EU. A multipolar world, however, could be very dangerous. The EU certainly has to reform itself. At the moment it is free-riding on US military power. The Europeans couldn't even resolve the conflicts in their own backyard, in Bosnia and Kosovo, without the US military. It isn't surprising that many in Europe simply repress the threat posed by the new terrorism. We need a stronger and more co-ordinated Europe, although not one that would be a military rival to the US. But we also need a US that constructively engages with the EU and the wider world community, and I hope a Democratic president will be elected who pursues such an aim.
All best
Dear Tony
13th February 2004
I can't sum up my position. I'm not sure I have a "position." What I have are instincts and values, and these point me in a very different direction from yours. I'm also a Labour supporter of sorts, but support for the Labour party comes a lot lower down my list of priorities than the health of British democracy, the need to replace the backward-looking and corrupting political system of this country with a new framework in which we can practise a different politics, and the need for an independent and powerful European presence in the dangerously unbalanced global political economy of our time. I would like to see a hung parliament after the next election because two terms of overweening and unrepresentative Labour majorities have taught me that the party will not move in the direction I want it to take unless it is forced to.
So why do I believe all these things? Essentially because my core values are not solidarity, equality and protection of the vulnerable - important as the first and last are. (Equality is a very dodgy notion; in the last 100 years more crimes have been committed in its name than in that of any other political ideal, with the exception of racial purity.) My core values are human dignity, self-expression, self-respect, self-realisation, diversity, pluralism and, above all, tolerance. I rejoice in difference. I rejoice in the marvellous diversities of human cultures and traditions, and I want to protect them from the monstrous regiment of universalists. The political theorist from whom I have learned most is Isaiah Berlin - though I don't like to see him treated as an icon, as too many people in Oxford seem to do - and like him, I bristle at the very notion of a single, all-embracing, universally applicable ideology. No creed will ever do justice to human diversity; no creed will ever arm us against the inherently unpredictable contingencies of political life. GK Chesterton was right when he said mankind's favourite game was "cheat the prophet."
That's why I took you to task for talking about a "social democratic society." The very notion seems to me to belong to the destructive and dysfunctional family of notions that includes a "socialist society," a "classless society," a "market economy," a "Christian country" and a "Jewish state." It implies that we know how to remake society, when we don't and can't; and that we know where history is heading, which we also don't and can't. For the same reason I bristle at the prospect of perpetual US hegemony, and the assumption of successive British prime ministers that we have no option but to hunt with the Americans. By the same token, I want to junk majoritarian democracy ?l'Anglaise, together with the elective dictatorship associated with it, and come into line with the overwhelming majority of our European neighbours. I'm astonished by the insular parochialism that leads you to support a patently bankrupt system found nowhere else in the democratic world. I do, however, agree with you about the desirability of a Democratic victory in the US election. If the Democrats do win, Tony Blair will be the only significant head of government in the world who still supports the Iraq war. A nice irony.
All the best
