Has New Labour reached its tipping point? The moment at which, in retrospect, it will be seen to have lost its purpose and direction-still, perhaps, capable of governing, even winning another election, but no longer the coherent political force that could swat away challenges from left and right with ease.
That is the current consensus among political commentators, both sympathetic and hostile. Columnists have again been telling us how Tony Blair has finally lost his "Midas touch." The fact that most of them have been saying this at every sign of trouble for five years cannot exclude the possibility that this time they may be right.
Things do, indeed, look grim. Europe has always been a place where New Labour's centre-ground populism was destined to collide with its grand projet idealism; it is currently looking more ragged than usual with the right-wing getting its teeth into the European constitution referendum and the decision on the euro awkwardly suspended. On top of that, the weapons of mass destruction issue and the manner in which Britain was taken into the Iraq war has stirred up earlier anxieties about "spin." To cap it all the relationship between Blair and Brown seems at a dismally low ebb.
So is the game up? No. The weather can change on most of the above in the next few weeks and months. Moreover, the government seems untroubled by the two most significant cabinet resignations since 1997, the biggest mass demonstrations in memory and a revival in the role and authority of parliament. (So much for the end of politics and the death of the legislature.)
But what lies behind this rekindling of political passion? It is a foreign policy issue-Iraq-which has enabled the disaffected to reach back to a familiar anti-imperialist vocabulary. This, in turn, has been partly in response to Blair's foreign policy-driven attempt to inject new moral purpose into politics.
Domestically, however, politics remains as fuzzy and technocratic as ever-and neither the left nor the right has found a way of effectively challenging New Labour's hegemony.
For technocrats there are all sorts of important debates going on about more decentralised delivery of public services, flexible targets, and so on. When it is not pure 18th-century court politics, the argument between Blair and Brown can even be seen as a resonant clash between social liberalism and social democracy. (The Blairites want more freedom in the public sector to raise the floor of the whole system, even if that means a wider gap between the best schools and hospitals and the rest. The Brownites worry away more at that widening gap and dispute whether the floor will in fact be raised at all.)
But important though they are, these are not arguments to set the pulse racing-or to galvanise domestic political participation. To take part in these debates it is no good just feeling passionately that our society is too unequal or centralised or polluted, you have to know things about policy debates and how institutions work. And most people, even members of political parties, don't know enough to join in. (Those who do know enough often lack eloquence or charisma, reinforcing the unheroic or simply uninteresting image of technocratic politics.)
Without the visceral appeal of the old Labour religion-which however battered and betrayed was one day going to usher in the good society-people on the left have drifted away from national politics. If they do feel inspired to action it is likely to be on an international issue like Iraq, or for Britain's most idealistic young people it is the global justice movement.
There are still interests, of course. "Our people" is a phrase that has not gone out of use on left or right. But as Britain continues to become more sociologically fragmented, politicians have to try to spread their appeal even further beyond their blurring class bases.
And that is what New Labour has done over almost ten years with such success. It dropped socialist ideology and narrow class appeal and exchanged it for moderate social reform and a broad but shallow contract with the electorate-a contract which tends to downplay conflicts of interest between different sections of that electorate. It was what many voters had wanted for a generation, but it alienated much of the activist base in constituency parties, trade unions and local government. New Labour pragmatism also ended up repelling the academic and media intelligentsia who are oddly uncurious about the new politics.
Most of the time this doesn't matter. But at moments of drift or crisis (like the petrol tax events of three years ago) the thinness of support for New Labour, even within the political class, becomes a problem. It has no troops out there to carry its messages to the public to counteract the daily drubbing it gets in much of the press, and it has no overarching ideology to give its supporters a sense of purpose and direction. Moreover, so effectively has its centrist politics disabled the Tories that it does not even benefit-at least not yet-from the tribal, party loyalty generated by a strong political opponent.
The problem is this: New Labour has helped to kill the old politics but it has not created a new one. There remains that link between a few centrist politicians and a large slice of voters. But what used to come in between has been hollowed out, replaced by a largely hostile and cynical media and a more plebiscitary democracy.
The answer of some people on the centre-left, like Michael Jacobs at the Fabian Society, is to bring back ideology. He says that if the main theme of the second term is reform of public services it is bound to be characterised by drift and confusion. While the performance indicators continue to point in the wrong direction, or only falteringly in the right direction, Labour needs ideology to keep its activists happy and show the electorate that it has a vision.
But the ideological bridges have been burnt. New Labour cannot now turn round to party activists and say we still believe in radical social change. Nor can it say to the electorate: judge us on our nice progressive values and motivations rather than our policy results.
Creating a sense of political purpose in a post-ideological age is not easy. It may be impossible. A lot of the trends of the new politics-the decline of party, class and ideology and the rise of the media-apply across the western world and developed quite independently of New Labour. It was the latter's ability to ride the changes that helped it to win two landslide elections.
It has achieved some big things with those two victories: sound economic management, constitutional reform, increased redistribution and welfare reform, and now huge investment in the public services. Unlike in the US where Clinton has left precious little legacy, there will be a significant Blair legacy in domestic politics even if New Labour were to dissolve tomorrow.
But six years after that first victory there are few signs that New Labour has begun to shape a new politics. Can it renew itself in office? A lot of effort is being put into this summer's "progressive governance" conference in the search for intellectual vitality. Yet none of this is likely to help create a new generation of New Labour activists-partisans for moderation-nor a moderate, but appealing New Labour narrative with street resonance. Perhaps that, too, is anachronistic-reaching back to a fleeting postwar world of mass politics, a time when ideology and policy still connected. Perhaps the point of the new politics is that you must get by without activists or ideology. The centre turns out to be a lonely place-at least between elections.
