Robert Marshall-Andrews

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The Labour Government elected in May 1997 - New Statesman

Article from New Statesman

The Labour Government elected in May 1997 is the most powerful peacetime administration of the twentieth century. And it is active. In barely three months it has, in no particular order, reformed the Bank of England and the regulation of the City, banned all handguns, stopped the production of landmines, raised and released 5 billion pounds to attack welfare dependency , provided mass education for the under fives and devolved real power to the people of Scotland . Not bad, particularly when seen in context. Ten.years ago the party responsible for this blitzkrieg was in full retreat through the Kyber passes of British Politics. Half the army had deserted .The remainder, containing an uncomfortable number of madmen, faith healers and freeloaders, hauled a vast baggage train of sacred totems under deadly fire over an apparently endless stony path of public hostility.

The explanation for this most remarkable of recoveries is, I would suggest, of critical importance and depends entirely upon your point of historical and political vantage. One view simply perceives a new leadership ruthlessly abandoning the baggage and the camp followers, buying off the grand muftis, seizing the enemy's ammo and leading the glorious charge. Another perceives the tidal dialectic of history eroding, inevitably the sandcastles of an arrogant Toryism whose time was up.

Within the Labour Party itself, however, there are those who entertain a neo-mystical belief in the (new) Labour movement extending back, (as Tony Blair once worryingly assured us,) to the Old Testament Prophets and moving by some divine modern covenant towards the economic, social and spiritual salvation of the British People. In other words the redemption of the Labour Party is but a stage in the redemption of Britain in our own image.

The current ascendancy of this view has profound implications for the future, no less, of the governance of Britain. Already we are surrounded by the vernacular of newpolitik. A Government barely three months old talks freely of a total and fundamental shift in the nature of British politics. And they mean it.

Furthermore the capacity to achieve this seismic goal is unprecedented and awesome. Across the political landscape the natural countervailing forces to the power of government have capitulated, disappeared or been consigned to splendid impotence. The Tory party has collapsed utterly on a scale yet to be fully realised. Even in the darkest nights of Labour's retreat we knew nothing like this. In Parliament, Tories wander virtually leaderless wearing victims' grins. In the country, in large areas they have ceased to exist as a political organisation, haemorageing members and devoid of recruits. The Liberal Democrats, for their part now walk to heel on a short leash, a posture clear to everyone except themselves. Outside Parliament, the press and media, once the curse and curb of Labour Governments now actively cheer us on or, at worst, acquiesce and will do so for as long as we pursue the fiscal and monetary policies of which their proprietors approve. The City and industry, ably and deliberately courted, have followed suit and a continuous trickle of the macro financial Establishment enter the corridors of Government by unchallenged invitation. Of the other great Estates, the Trade Unions are reduced to supplication, in part by legislation and in part by the changing nature of work and, finally, the Labour Party itself, whose Conference historically exhorted, enraged, exasperated but ultimately checked and monitored its own governments, will now inevitably concede it's powers to the leadership. On any analysis, within the loose constraints of the constitution, this is total power forfeit only by consent.

In part, of course we are here by accident. The Party did not conceive so massive a victory and, in one sense the strategy of key seats was designed to prevent it. (There are also signs that the Government does not entirely believe it's own luck. The vigorous use of the whip coupled with gratuitous reminders of the penalties for indiscipline seem more appropriate to a parliamentary majority of 17 than 170.)

What causes far greater concern is that the grand design which was essential to the recovery of the Labour Party and its victory has become, irresistibly, the basis of government itself. The courting of the Press Barons, the City, major industry, the Lib Dems and, to a lesser extent the luvies of the belle monde, may fortell a fundamental shift for which the workhorse of the parliamentary party now provides merely the thrust. Few political thinkers can doubt that we are, through accident or design, moving rapidly towards the coalition of the Centre, a perpetual power structure, semi-elected, semi-appointed, semi-annointed and deriving its legitimacy from a proliferation of focus groups, national forums, phone in question times and commissions, Royal or otherwise, charged with custody of the public good. This is, say its adherents, a politics from which the yah boo has been removed along with the tedious process of confrontation, dialectic or debate: a Tyranny of Enlightenment.

And who knows, they may be right. Perhaps the modern post industrial pleuralist state has outgrown parliamentary democracy along with the curse of manual toil and class divide. Maybe. There are many of us who entertain grave and persistent doubt. The challenges of modern politics are not obscure. They are to rescue the domestic and global underclasses and to ensure their willing, rewarded participation in free societies which inhabit an improving environment. Within these simple propositions profoundly conflicting interests remain at war and no form of unitary government, however benign and however wise can give voice and credence to them all. Days of reckoning must come, as they always have. At the end of the windfalls and student loans and motoring levies lie the ancient choices inherent in the unequal distribution of resources and the finite capacities of growth. When those choices fall to be made the inconvenient, unlovely thoroughly unmodernised dialectics of parlimentiary government will reappear in all their yah boo forms. And who knows when they do and the mantles of the Old Testament prophets have been stowed away we may see Peter Mandleson back in the chamber.