Labour promised a "new politics," but the scale of its victory, the self-confidence of its leadership and the extent of the alienation from the old party politics have combined to make the change more drastic than even its advocates had expected. This is not just another party victory on a bigger scale, but a new political system growing within the shell of the old. Tony Blair is inaugurating a populist presidency and rearranging the balance between institutions.
New Labour is more than a house-trained version of Old Labour. It is a people's party, a national congress, a Rassemblement du Peuple Anglais. "People's politics" replaces party politics, consensus replaces ideology and a Blair mandate eclipses Labour's. The leadership reads the polls and reflects majority opinion, for all against none. The new majority-all but the ghettoised poor and the self-separating rich-is reacting against two decades of sectional government, from the left in the 1970s then the right in the 1980s.
The people want stability. They want a leadership they trust and which responds to them rather than to party elites. Mass political parties, once the instruments of government and mobilisation, are becoming sectional machines, one constituency among many others. Of course, as Hugo Young has pointed out, the populist evocation of the people-over the heads of party and parliament-has unpleasant echoes. But the new presidentialism does not make Tony Blair the man on the white horse. His empathy with the new majority reflects neither the paranoid, Poujadist side of Gaullism and Thatcherism nor their authoritarian instincts. This is presidency without a necktie.
After four election defeats Labour campaigned nervously on a minimalist manifesto. As a result, the party has no mandate; Blair has one. Whatever academic research may say about the relative unimportance of the "leadership effect," the perception is that Blair won for Labour. The party and its grateful new MPs view him as the author of victory. His is the power and the mandate.
The party is coming adrift from its roots and is uncertain about where its base is, or whether it has one. The national organisation has overreached itself. It is deep in debt, its key people are transferring to government, its teeth are being pulled-it will be unable to bite Blair as it did Wilson and Callaghan. The Blair-inspired increase in membership will fade and the party may lapse back into networks of self-protective local coteries-some corrupt, all overstretched by the effort of defending control of local government. The new society, after all, seems to require only a low-involvement party run by mail order and postal ballot.
The parliamentary party, too, is being transformed into a leadership club. Most new MPs see themselves less as parliamentarians and more as party activists in a continuous campaign outside Westminster to rally support for government policies.
The presidential refrain is hardly new. It has been evoked in the past whenever a prime minister has won with a large majority, and it has been reinforced in recent decades by the slow decline of mass parties and the media focus on leaders. But what was a trickle has become a flood.
The diffusing of power through the programme of constitutional reform serves to make the presidential leader loom even larger in a more tightly controlled centre. A strengthened No. 10 policy unit working closely with the Cabinet Office enables the centre to exercise far greater control over the Whitehall machine. The centralisation of co-ordination and presentation, including all contacts with journalists, has in effect-as Peter Riddell of The Times points out-"downgraded the independent standing of departmental ministers." As has the existence of free-floating ministers like Frank Field who appear to have strong direct ties to the centre.
Cabinet has become a ratifying rather than a deciding body, with big decisions taken in advance by individuals or groups of ministers working to the leader. Peter Riddell again: "Blair has had little interest in lengthy cabinet discussions. On several key issues, such as Bank of England independence or proportional representation for European parliament elections, the cabinet was informed, almost in an off-hand way." The student fees decision was a Blunkett/Blair decision, while Blair, Chris Smith and Peter Mandelson decided on a Millennium Dome which nobody wants.
(Such a presidential structure makes the courtier/communicator/ conciliator role, so brilliantly performed by Peter Mandelson, ess-ential. Unfortunately, Mandelson wants to be a grown-up minister with his own department; this would weaken the system. Personalised presidentialism needs an agent of the leader's will and someone to deflect the heat from him.)
Blair has a bully pulpit and a national mobilising role, like the US president. Yet any British president is, of course, far more powerful than his US counterpart. A British leader controls the executive, which in turn controls parliament. Clinton is buffeted by the media. In Britain, media pressure falls on disposable ministers lower down, while the leader concentrates on the "big picture."
Currently the British media is rather subdued. This will not last, but many of Labour's old media enemies face difficulties positioning themselves against a machine which is better at reading public opinion than they are. Rolling focus groups will inform the president's men of how they and their actions are regarded by the only constituency that matters-the voters.
New Labour's skill in managing the media democracy, so well polished in opposition, has been brought into the heart of government-and was shown off to magnificent effect in the response to Diana's death. The system has, indeed, become monarchical to a degree which makes the monarch look superfluous. The president, like the monarch, is there to heal not divide.
What then could undermine this new presidentialism? The party, which once provided a ladder for dissent and a means of pulling the leader to the left, is becoming a plinth to support him. Partnership into Power, the document passed at the conference, makes this official. Most new MPs refuse ideological categories. Labour sits bang in the middle of the political road like a huge amorphous, blancmange blob, attractively coloured and difficult to displace. The Tories are pushed on to the verges, the Liberals are forced into complicit co-operation.
If the party provides no opposition, what about events themselves? The consequence of economic orthodoxy will certainly be slower growth. A macro-policy dedicated to defeating inflation runs directly contrary to micro-policies aimed at job creation. As the consequences of this become apparent there may be a bunker phase. But Gordon Brown will have to bear much of the criticism as President Blair hovers above the mess. Lesser lights will be ruthlessly disposed of, and the best young backbenchers are already being groomed to replace them. Blair is an elitist. His commitment is to the best and brightest, not party or trade union hacks and repayment of past favours.
The British constitution is whatever government can get away with. It ties no one to anything and accepts whatever grows within its husk. This does not necessarily mean permanent presidentialism. But John Major's greatest legacy to British politics is a Blair majority big enough to last. It may be based on the same percentage of votes that Major won in 1992, and the majority may well be squeezed as the normal volatility and impatience of the electorate reasserts itself. But unless the president flips, Blair will be there for a decade-a lifetime in politics.
Ideologues will not like it, but they are a dying breed. Party activists will be disappointed but have lost the little power they had. Quibbling intellectuals will quibble, but they are irrelevant. Why complain about the inevitable? This is the way things are in media politics when sectionalism and ideology are dead, mass parties dying and the nation tired of the excesses of an elective dictatorship.
Besides, what is the alternative? There is no mass demand for change and no agreed agenda. Lack of confidence brought Labour to power, hands tied, but few want it to escape its self-imposed restraints. So it makes political sense to trust Tony and go with the grain. Indeed, the "modernisation" programme implicit in presidentialism promises to be more radical than anything New or Old Labour could offer through traditional party government. Blair is sincere about his limited range of objectives. To advance and achieve these could offer more than any half-hearted attempts to "go for growth" or promote equality. Let Prozac politics rule. Almost OK.
