Reappraisals (36 page)

CHAPTER XIII

The Gnome in the Garden: Tony Blair and Britain’s “Heritage”

In the spring of 2001, during a BBC radio discussion of the forthcoming British general election, a young journalist voiced her frustration. “Don’t you agree,” she asked her fellow panelists, “that there’s no real choice? Tony Blair believes in privatization, just like Mrs. Thatcher.” “Not quite,” replied Charles Moore, editor of the (Conservative)
Daily Telegraph
. “Margaret Thatcher believed in privatization. Tony Blair just likes rich people.” That is indeed so, and although Moore’s witticism doesn’t really address the question, it points, perhaps inadvertently, to something seriously amiss in England today.

Two weeks after that exchange Blair and his New Labour Party duly won the British general election, overwhelming the hapless William Hague and his moribund Conservatives by a sweeping majority. He could hardly acknowledge it, but this famous victory, like much else in Blair’s glittering political career, was only possible thanks to a threefold inheritance from Mrs. (now Lady) Thatcher. First, she “normalized” the radical dismantling of the public sector in industry and services and its replacement with the “privatized” Britain whose praises Blair enthusiastically sings. Second, and in the process, she destroyed the old Labour Party and facilitated the task of those who fought to reform it: Blair had merely to reap the reward of their work. Third, her asperity and her intoleranceof dissent and disagreement have fractured her own party and rendered it unelectable. The British never much cared for the woman or her policies, but they conceded a grudging admiration for her style and they tolerated her excesses and eccentricities. Her successors, John Major and William Hague, have enjoyed no such latitude.

Even so, New Labour’s performance was far from glorious. For the first time in modern British history, abstainers (41 percent of the electorate) vastly outnumbered those who voted for the winning party (25 percent). There were some good reasons to vote Labour: Blair’s government has introduced a minimum wage, addressed the disgracefully high level of child poverty in Britain, taken a firm and honorable stance over Kosovo, and urged the cancellation or reduction of third-world debt. There were also credible grounds for voting against: the scandal of the Millennium Dome, political cronyism, overcozy relations with Labour Party donors, mismanagement of the foot-and-mouth disease crisis, and the embarrassing condition of public education, the National Health Service, and the railways.

But many people didn’t vote at all. There are various possible explanations for this. Characteristically, Blairites sought the most “spinnable”: According to Baroness Jay, Labour leader in the House of Lords, people stayed away from the polls because they were “contented” with their prosperous lot (an imprudent echo of Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s 1959 claim that the British people had “never had it so good”). Even if true this adds scant luster to Blair’s achievement. He inherited a stable economy and a benevolent international economic environment; the best that can be said of his first government is that it did not squander its advantages. Meanwhile, within twenty-four hours of their victory, some Labour members of Parliament were proposing a solution to electoral apathy: Voting, they suggested, should be made obligatory.

That hint of sanctimonious compulsion—Nanny knows best—is something many people find distasteful in Blairite triumphalism. But it isn’t the real problem. What seems to grate most is the ersatz quality of Tony Blair and his politics. He doesn’t exactly believe in privatization (but nor is he against it . . . ), he just likes rich people. He talks the talk of devolution, but as prime minister he is notoriously obsessed with control. He is a populist who shuns direct contact with the voters (witness his palpable distaste and embarrassment when confronted with unscripted questions or disapproval during carefully orchestrated walkabouts). In one preelection speech he urged Labour activists to “work not for ourselves” but “for what we can do for our country” (even his friends had the grace to find this a little much). He conveys an air of deep belief, but no one knows in quite what.
¹
He is not so much sincere as Sincere.

There is nothing contrived about Tony Blair’s inauthenticity. He came by it honestly, as it were. Old Labour stood for the working class, trade unions, state ownership, and the nostalgic little-England socialism of William Morris and the Webbs. Its last leader, Michael Foot, led it to electoral catastrophe in 1983 with a political program so fatuously anachronistic that one of Labour’s own spokesmen famously called it “the longest suicide note in history.” Blair has always seen it as his first task to put all that far behind him.
His
Labour is resolutely “New.” There is frequent mention of gender but none of class.
²
Blair has experimented with various catchy identification tags—“Third Way,” “Cool Britannia”— whose common message is youth and novelty. It is not quite clear what they actually mean—there is much talk of the need to be “post-tribal” and inclusive. In any case, it is their appearance that counts.

In London, this seems to work. It is an international truism today that London is once again “swinging.” It is prosperous, bustling, cosmopolitan: a world-class financial and cultural mecca, etc. Among young Europeans it is
the
place to be. And something odd has happened to Londoners themselves—they actually seem to believe everything they hear about their city, which may account for Labour’s success there. The skeptical, mocking Cockney has been replaced by a town full of civic cheerleaders. No one seriously denies that Britain’s capital city is overpriced and overcrowded, that its transport system is inadequate, its laboring classes cannot afford housing, and its Victorian-era sewage system is dangerously dilapidated. But Londoners today happily entertain a form of cognitive dissonance: Yes, it’s all true, they concede—but all the same, London is “back.”

There
is
a superficial patina of prosperity about contemporary London, a glitzy, high-tech energy that makes other European capitals feel a bit dowdy and middle-aged, just as Tony Blair seems fresh and forward-looking when contrasted with some of his continental counterparts. But the gloss is two centimeters deep. The contrast between private affluence and public squalor is actually greater now than at any time I can remember. As for the often repeated assertion that what has made London (and by extension Britain) great again has been the rise of private initiative and the reduction of a debilitating dependence on the state, this is just cant. Londoners today, like everyone else in Britain, may be employed in the private sector, but they are as dependent on the state as ever.

In an economy shaped by relatively low wages for all but a few, and quite high fixed costs for everyone, they rely on the government for their education, their health, their transportation, their civic facilities and amenities. Even their “private-sector” job itself is frequently underwritten by state assistance in the form of tax indulgences or direct subsidy. And in an age of job insecurity, a very large number of people have at some time or another had occasion to draw unemployment assistance. This is a truth hidden from Londoners: partly by Blairite rhetoric and partly by the ultravisible but quite unrepresentative world of the city financial institutions. But it is a lot clearer once you go north of the capital.

Of the ten administrative regions of England, only three (London, the South East, and East Anglia) reach or exceed the national average wealth per capita. All the rest are poorer, some far, far poorer. The North East of England in 2000 had a gross domestic product per head just 60 percent that of London. After Greece, Portugal, rural Spain, southern Italy, and the former Communist countries, Great Britain is the largest current beneficiary of European Union structural funds—which is a way of saying that parts of Britain are among the most deprived regions of the EU.

Britain’s healthy employment figures are skewed by the disproportionate size of the capital city: Unemployment in the North of England remains much closer to the worst levels in continental Europe. For the young it is camouflaged by state-sponsored make-work and by training schemes for which Blair can take credit. But many men over forty, particularly in the former mining, steel, and textile towns of South Yorkshire and Lancashire, will never again hold a steady job. Tony Blair’s Britain offers them nothing much worth voting for. In the rock-solid Labour seat of Barnsley Central, at the heart of the defunct South Yorkshire coalfield, only two out of five people bothered to cast a ballot in 2001.

But if Tony Blair and his New Labourites ring false even to their core voters, they nonetheless mirror something all too true about the country at large. Barnsley was once an important mining town. Thirty years ago the town breathed coal—literally. Today, in Barnsley’s covered market, the liveliest business is being done by a stall selling nothing but local nostalgia (to Barnsley residents—there are no tourists): old photos and prints and books with titles like
Memories of Old Doncaster
,
The Golden Years of Barnsley
, and the like. They are almost the only reminders of a world that has just recently been lost and yet is already half-forgotten.
³

Outside, Barnsley’s town center has been eviscerated. Like almost every other town I saw on a recent visit to the region, Barnsley has had the civic heart ripped out of it and replaced by tawdry pedestrian malls encased in concrete parking garages. Midmorning on a weekday in June the streets were filled with families window-shopping and youths loitering in clumps. No one seemed to be going anywhere. “Olde-worlde” signposts direct you to the sights of Barnsley’s nineteenth-century municipal heritage. There is no longer a railway station. In its place sits a charmless “Travel Interchange.” The soiled, decrepit diesel units that pass through the “Interchange” are marked with the logo ARRIVA, the name of the company that was given the local train franchise against the unfulfilled promise of private investment in the region’s transport services.