Tony Blair cannot escape politics

Sir Tony Blair’s intervention in the Labour Party leadership contest is probably, if we’re honest, just what Andy Burnham needed. Never mind Wes Streeting trying to make life awkward on Europe. Getting to define yourself against “forty years of neoliberalism” is basically doing the contest on easy mode.

It helps too that Sir Tony’s prescription — set out in a five-thousand-word essay for the TBI — would, if enacted in full, constitutes the most right-wing government programme this country has enjoyed since the 1990s: deregulation, full exploitation of our natural energy resources, welfare reform, a wholesale overhaul of healthcare, and doing “whatever it takes” to stop the small boats. 

Now a lot of that is extremely vague. It is very easy to say, as does Tim Shipman, that “literally every honest sensible person in all the main parties privately agrees with all these propositions”; but for the most part the proposition they agree with is “we should solve this problem” – not how. It is in the question of “how” where the vast bulk of politics is. 

Yet Blair has a curious, almost wilful blindness to this fact. As I just said, what we have of Blair’s programme is extremely right-wing. But the man himself doesn’t see it that way; in fact, he frames it as the “radical centre”. He does this in two ways. First, as described above, by simply skating over how he would do many of the things he wants to do. But second, a flattering but deeply wrong-headed definition of what “the centre” is:

The centre – properly defined – is where you put policy first and politics last. So, you begin with the question: what is the right answer? And only once you have that do you engage in the political task of persuading people of it. 

Britain is in a mess precisely because in recent years it has done the opposite.

Both main parties have gone off the rails by putting internal politics first and good policy second. Labour moving to the left after 2007 culminating in the absurdity of the Corbyn leadership. The Tories with Brexit.

In this Blairite conception, “politics” appears to mean what you or I would call “marketing”. Responsible government is when people come up with good policies and then try to market them; irresponsible government is when parties start with a marketing objective – how do we reach our preferred voters — and start designing policies that pander to those voters.

The idea that there exists any such thing as non-political policymaking is absolute rubbish

Now like many foundational errors, there is enough truth to this to sell it. Britain definitely has a problem with politicians trying to work backwards from what voters tell them in focus groups, rather than coming up with a coherent agenda and then trying to sell it. Voters are not obliged to think deeply or coherently about government and their accumulated preferences will not, usually, add up to anything remotely practicable.

But the idea that there exists any such thing as non-political policymaking is absolute rubbish. Everything about policy, from what you consider a problem to what you think are legitimate methods for solving it, is political. Even in societies with a very strong consensus, where there isn’t a high degree of political dispute, the things agreed upon don’t stop being political. 

Yet the idea that you could somehow have a non-political politics was very much a feature of the New Labour era, the apogee of the “third way”. It was that sort of thinking underpinned the transfer of power away from Parliament to courts and quangos; if a given right or responsibility wasn’t “political”, then it could be safely entrusted to an independent body without letting politicians get their grubby hands on it. 

A pithy summation of this style of progressive politics, for which I can’t take credit but the original author of which I cannot recall, is that it aimed to “take the politics out of politics and put it into everything else”. Another European example might be Angela Merkel’s insistence that there was simply “no alternative” to her programme. 

As she and Blair have both discovered, however, there is a fundamental brittleness to a political order built on the premise that it exists beyond politics: once that consensus breaks, nobody is equipped to actually defend it in political terms. The AfD have not yet won power in Berlin, nor Reform UK in London, but in both Britain and Germany the once-hegemonic orders of Blair and Merkel are already being washed away in the river of time.

Blair talks about the “radical centre”. But given his definition of politics, it isn’t at all obvious what, under his framework of politics as sales tactics, the substantive difference between left, right, and centre would even be. Nor, were he ever to get a chance to actually deliver his agenda, would he be likely to carry many of the self-defining centrists with them; for actual centrism is not the middle ground between the political extremes but a rarified extreme of its own, a redoubt from which a political minority hold the line against the public will on things like immigration and the death penalty.

Sir Tony is not really that sort of centrist. Whilst his politics doesn’t fit perfectly onto the classic party split, he seems essentially to be an economic and law-and-order right-winger afflicted with raging neophilia and a blasé attitude towards institutions, broadly unmotivated by the popular will but cognisant that one can’t govern against it forever. Given that he ended up in the Labour Party, one can understand why he is so keen to define the politics out of his politics.