It was one of those conferences where politicians and advisers get together to discuss some key issue on Chatham House terms. After dinner, two of Tony Blair's brightest advisers set me the challenge of coming up with a mainstream Tory statement which Tony Blair could not possibly make. It was tough: they had put into his mouth just about every possible Tory sentiment. (Eventually we came up with: "Accountability to parliament is at the heart of British democracy"; we all agreed he could not possibly say that.)
That is just a personal example of the wider strategic challenge Tony Blair has presented to the Tory party over the past ten years. Historians may judge Blair harshly as a prime minister, because he came into office in more favourable circumstances than any other 20th-century leader and then frittered away that extraordinary opportunity. But whatever one thinks of Blair's achievements as a prime minister, he was a political instrument perfectly designed to cause maximum problems for the Conservative party.
The challenge Blair presented to the Conservatives was best captured in his slogan "the third way." It fails some of the? conventional tests of a political slogan—it doesn't, for example, connect much with the outside world, and it isn't much used nowadays. But it still summarises a brilliant political strategy which Blair has stuck to through thick and thin. The skill of the third way lies in what it implies about the first way (new right) and the second way (old Labour). Old Labour is supposed to have understood fairness and obligations to others but failed to understand the market. The new right is supposed to have understood the market but nothing else. At last Britain had a political party—New Labour—which understood that you could combine both. Indeed, Tony Blair would claim that for the first time, a British political party understood that fairness contributed to economic efficiency and economic efficiency could be harnessed to the goal of fairness. Whenever asked an either/or question, his answer was always "and."
This is, of course, a caricature of both the history of Blair's own party and the beliefs of mine. It does not acknowledge the social democrat tradition within Labour, from Tony Crosland to David Owen. The late Roy Jenkins is acknowledged, but more as a missing link to the progressive liberalism of the early 20th century. Blair never refers to Harold Wilson, perhaps because there are so many parallels between the programme on which Wilson was elected in 1964 and the Blair-Brown agenda of 1997 (meritocracy and education, tax-benefit integration and raising the growth rate by improving productivity and investing in human capital).
As for the Conservatives and the new right, we were supposed to believe in a cross between the social conditions of Dickensian London and the economic policies of 1950s Hong Kong. But from the start of the monetarist revolution, Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher recognised that there was more to Conservativism than just the minimum state and devil take the hindmost—Keith Joseph's first essays for the Centre for Policy Studies were entitled "Monetarism is Not Enough," and "The Case for a Social Market Economy."
Yet however crude the historical caricatures, Tony Blair's political strategy worked. After all, he was offering the British public the combination of a Californian economy and a Swedish welfare state. It sounds like an attractive offer. It used to be said that you could market shampoo either by claiming it made your hair more lustrous or that it killed dandruff, but not that it did both. Blair at his height showed you could in fact break this rule.
It set a trap for Conservatives into which we proceeded to fall time after time. For ten years we drove ourselves demented trying to define clear blue water between us and Labour, and all we managed to do was to create clear blue water between us and the electorate. We either sounded like a bunch of right-wing extremists living up to Labour's caricature; or, if we attacked Blair as a destroyer of community, sounded like we were coming at him from the left. Both approaches left the electorate deeply confused about what Conservatives really stood for.
At last the penny has dropped. There is only one thing we can do to escape the horns of the dilemma Blair has sharpened for us: challenge him from the centre ground. Indeed, we must trump him. We can and should offer both a stronger economy and a better society than Blair.
People want all the freedom and excitement of mobility and enterprise. But we also want to feel we belong and that there are unreflective obligations and ties that bind us to others. Any mainstream political party in Britain has to offer some coherent account which combines these fundamental aspirations. Tony Blair briefly managed to create the impression that he was the first politician ever to have recognised this and that New Labour was the first vehicle for expressing it. Now, under David Cameron, we are beginning to see a coherent Tory attempt to regain this ground. The Conservatives dominated British politics in the 20th century while the centre-right was weak on the continent precisely because we embodied these two aspirations in one political party. On the continent there was often a rural party that represented the values of community and tradition. Then, separate from them, there would be a rationalist, pro-market, anti-clerical liberal party. British politics could have taken that shape, but after the Liberal split of the 1880s, both these strands were united within the Conservative party. This is our tradition more than Labour's. We can now rediscover and renew it.
When it comes to the economy, we have seen the steady growth of regulation under New Labour. Economic contracts are more and more being treated by law as if they are social relationships as well. That is what the language of stakeholders was all about. We want companies to be good citizens, but don't believe this can be achieved by ever more regulation.
When it comes to society, Labour doesn't really understand our traditional identities and the institutions which have shaped them. When they talk about who we are, they just give us a list of universal values that could come from a UN declaration. They don't appear to understand that our liberal democracy and personal freedoms are protected by a distinctive set of civic institutions. These are not ethnically exclusive but they were shaped by a unique national history. Labour has little time for these institutions and the thicker social relationships which they sustain. Their understanding of citizenship is thin and contractual, and it is the government that holds the other end of the contract.
So they are thinning our social ties and thickening our economic relationships. Both of these processes have gone too far.
