Two may days ago there were plenty of good reasons for voting Labour (or even Lib Dem). But they were mostly negative, and almost all were uninspiring. There is still a case for saying that the Blair government is competent and will serve the country well. There is even an argument to be made that New Labour is not quite as right-wing as it seems, or that its alliance with the Lib Dems is something more than cynical calculation on either side. But the efforts of Blairite pundits to present New Labour in glowingly positive terms have been almost as comical as the attempts by Friends of Bill to defend their errant president in high-minded terms.
Few journalists have promoted Blair so vehemently as Polly Toynbee of the Guardian. She is sensible enough to acknowledge that the government is neither socialist nor radical, but insists that "it is progressive," a most interesting distinction. She tries to illustrate the "progressive" alliance between Labour and Lib Dem with a list of the "liberal creed both parties share and conservatives don't." There hasn't been anything so touching-or so risible-in the papers since the election. Some of her points sound simply weary: "A presumption in favour of the underdog... Celebrate cultural, social and racial diversity..." It could be a letter to the New Statesman in, say, 1954, from a dirndl-wearing progressive school mistress. More to the point, it might be a "mission statement" drafted by the PR department of some multinational corporation-or the "Aims and Values" with which Blair himself replaced Clause IV. Polly's list goes on: "Belief in progress: things can always be made better"; "Belief that all humans are redeemable (in this world not the next)"; "Trust in reason over heritage, custom and superstition." If these are liberal touchstones, I am not sure that they are well-chosen. You don't have to be a pure Burkean conservative to sense that the past 200 years have not been a good advertisement for simple trust in reason and progress. The Jacobins and Bolsheviks claimed to be celebrating the triumph of Reason when they put their enemies to death.
"Belief that history always proves conservatives and reactionaries wrong" sounds confident. But if Polly means "always," she must think that in 1940 the reactionary conservative Churchill was wrong, which would be a very odd thing to think. Things go further awry with the next point.
"Creating wealth and using it creatively" is a phrase Lady Thatcher herself would be proud of. Blair indeed thinks that "Margaret Thatcher's emphasis on enterprise was right," and that "Britain needs more successful people who can become rich by success through the money they earn." And how does that distinguish him from a conservative, except that an old-fashioned High Tory might find his money-worship a little vulgar?
"Side with the consumer not the owner or producer" are fine words-and more pure Thatcherism. "Siding with the producer" is what the Labour movement has stood for until now; that is what trade unionism means. If Labour is now siding with the consumer, then it has not just reinvented itself, but inverted its own history.
Then comes a contrary puzzle: "Tax as much as you dare." Some mistake surely? This may be "progressive," but it sure isn't New Labour. Blair is convinced that John Smith's "alternative budget" lost Labour the 1992 election. Ever since, Blair's central political conviction has been that no party he led would ever be associated with high taxation. If Polly doesn't know that, she hasn't been paying attention.
"Enjoy, don't fear the shock of the new in culture and art." The schoolmarm in her dirndl is back again. Anyway, I am not sure what this is doing on the list. Nabokov used to point out that if there has been a correlation between artistic innovation and political progressivism in this century, it has usually been inverse: he was thinking of his own creativity in anti-Bolshevik exile, compared with the dismal kitsch of official Soviet art.
Still, even Marxists aren't always wrong. Embrace the shock of the new by all means-from the Turner prize to experimental literature-if only to learn what EJ Hobsbawm has rightly called the most salient cultural development at the end of the 20th century: the final and total bankruptcy of the avant-garde.
"Regard sex and family life as no business of the state" could have been written not so much by a Thatcherite as by an extreme 19th century liberal-individualist. Can Polly mean it? If sex and family life are no business of the state, then the state has no business supervising marriage, divorce and child-rearing-or in looking after their casualties by means of compulsory welfare. There is an element of language-chopping in Polly's whole exercise. It would be just as easy to draw up a list of things such as representative government and a rule of law which both constitutional conservatives and democratic socialists believe in, but the hard left or right don't.
US commentators don't always get British politics right. But when Joe Klein wrote in the New Yorker that the closer you look at New Labour, the more it seems like a rhetorical device designed to enable a group of technocrats to persuade themselves that they had not become middle-aged conservatives, it seemed awfully near the knuckle.
