by Jonathan Todd

Labour’s new policy supremo, Jon Cruddas, says that Tony Blair got worse the longer he was prime minister. Phil Collins, the Demos chair, not the Genesis drummer, says the opposite: Blair improved in office.

According to a speech that Cruddas delivered shortly before his appointment by Ed Miliband:

“From 1994 to 2001 Blair managed to build a liberal patriotic sentiment in the country; it subsequently collapsed. Blair set out as ethical socialist, ended as a neo-classicist.”

It all went wrong, on this account, when Cruddas stopped working for Blair. Collins disagrees. He thinks that Blair was a better prime minister by the time he was working for him at the end of his premiership.

When reviewing Anthony Seldon’s biography of Blair, Collins wrote:

“There is a common account of the Blair years that runs as follows: the first term contained some good things, hampered by excessive financial prudence; the second term was lost to Iraq; the third term was no more than a parade of vanity as a prime minister without authority hung on. This is conventional but a long way from wise … The second term was when Blair really found a method for reform of the public sector … The third term was, in many ways, the most fruitful: school reform, the NHS into surplus, pensions reform, energy, Northern Ireland – a good record for a supposedly defunct term.”

The man writing the next Labour manifesto has, therefore, succumbed to the conventional and un-wise. Perhaps this is a consequence of seeing politics, as Cruddas said in his speech, “more about emotion than programme; more groups, community and association – imagined as well as real – rather than theoretical or scientific”.

What Collins might praise as an effective method for public service reform, Cruddas may lament as a politics denuded of emotion. But when these judgements are made, they aren’t fundamentally judgements on Blair. They are windows onto the political soul of the judge.

What we talk about when we talk about Tony isn’t really Tony: it is political strategy.

Cruddas prefers first term Blair because he puts more weight on emotion than programme. Collins concludes that Blair improved, even as his emotional resonance diminished, because his programmes became more effective.

But isn’t there a third way? Don’t we need programmes that deliver and emotions that grip in politics?

President Obama had no lack of emotion in 2008 but now more desperately needs programme successes. Equally, didn’t the emotion of his election itself change America in ways that the coming to office of a programme-obsessed technocrat would not have done?

The usual lifecycle is to find emotion easier to summon as a challenger, promising to bring change, and to learn on-the-job, coming to know more of the programmes that will actually deliver change in office. But programme and emotion matter throughout. Couldn’t, for example, David Cameron have been made to appreciate the emptiness of his immigration rhetoric before he demonstrated this in office? The well thought through programme of opposition saves problems in office. The enduring capacity to capture emotion may overcome any such problems.

“Rebuilding Britain” was a pitch for emotion made by Cruddas in the Observer last Sunday. And that’s not a bad pitch. It potentially opens up and frames debates about some of the biggest issues facing our country, which I’ve previously identified as, the economy but also the substance of new devolution settlements for Scotland and the English regions, Britain’s role in the EU but outside the Euro, and health and social care systems capable of meeting the challenges of ageing.

We can’t say what Britain is and should become without answering these pressing questions and in so doing rebuilding the social fabric, the institutions and the infrastructure of Britain. This challenge pulls on the heartstrings like a rousing rendition of Jerusalem. But it won’t be met with emotion alone; it also requires the heavy intellectual lifting of the programmes admired by Collins.

Collins gave his take on the nature of such lifting at the recent Progress annual conference. He spoke of having worked in Blair’s Downing Street towards the end of his premiership and finding an old Conservative policy document. He slightly edited the document, disguised its origins, and circulated for comment amongst colleagues. They told him: “It is a fairly bland statement of what we believe”.

That the policy of the Blair administration had become indistinguishable from the policy of the Major administration, even to those working in the Blair administration, may be taken as evidence to support the Cruddas view that Blair “ended as a neo-classicist”. But Collins maintains that the episode shows that there are certain core concerns and approaches that time in office force politicians back to. And it is to store up problems for the future to stray in opposition too far from them, as Nick Clegg did when he committed to abolishing tuition fees.

We can, of course, debate where the limits of the possible are to be found. But we delude ourselves if we think that emotion can dissolve these limits. Programmes matter as well as emotions.

Jonathan Todd is Labour Uncut’s economic columnist

Tags: Jon Cruddas, Jonathan Todd, Phil Collins, Tony Blair

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2012 at 7:00 am and is filed under Uncut. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.