New Statesman & Society leader, 24 June 1994
Tony Blair's speech at last week's Guardian/Fabian Society "Whatever Next?" conference in London was without a doubt the clearest expression of his overall beliefs that he has made during this Labour leadership election campaign.
"The socialism of Marx," he declared, "of state control of industry and production, is dead. It misunderstood the nature of a modern market economy; it failed to recognise that the state and public sector can become a vested interest capable of oppression as well as the vested interests of wealth and capital; and it was based on a false view of class that became too rigid."
"By contrast," he went on, "socialism as defined by certain key values and beliefs is not merely alive, it has an historic opportu-nuity now to give leadership. The basis of such socialism lies in its view that individuals are social, interdependent human beings, that individuals cannot be divorced from society. It is, if you like, social-ism.
"It contains a judgment that individuals owe a duty to one another and to a broader society – the left view of citizenship. And it believes that it is only through recognising that interdependence and by society as a whole acting upon it that the individual's interests can be best advanced."
So there you have it – Tony Blair, just like John Smith, is a Christian socialist in the R H Tawney mould. For him, socialism is not about nationalisation and planning, nor is it about class struggle. Rather, it is "a set of principles and beliefs based around the notion of a strong society as necessary to advance the individual".
And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Leaving aside the question of whether Blair was being fair to Marx, who was much less of an enthusiast for "centralised state control of industry and production" than Blair thinks (and rather more nuanced in his ideas about class), it is perfectly reasonable of him to distance himself from the dominant Marxism of this century – the disaster that was "actually existing socialism".
He is also quite right to make it clear that he is opposed to the notion, dominant on the British left from the 1920s until the late 1970s, that socialism is all about nationalisation and planning. Labour's association with the bureaucracy and inefficiency of the Morrisonian model of nationalisation (a model, incidentally, that owes a lot to Fabian admiration for Stalin's Russia) did it tremendous harm, as indeed did its enthusiasm for the tower block.
More generally, Christian (or rather ethical) socialism, with its emphasis on the importance of altruism, solidarity and community, is an honourable tradition of left thinking, untainted by the bureaucratic statism at the heart of Leninism and Fabianism. Like G D H Cole's guild socialism, anarchism and the ideas behind the cooperative movement, it is a useful tool for developing a non-statist socialism – the only sort that can be credible at the end of the 20th century. We do need to place what Blair called "a new settlement between citizen and society" at the centre of the left's concerns.
But there are difficulties here too. If the left needs a political philosophy, and if Blair's broad approach has a certain amount going for it, the picture is not entirely rosy. Most fundamentally, there is a major tension between Blair's advocacy of values of "social justice, cohesion, equality of opportunity and community" and his enthusiasm for the market and for the consumerist affluence that has transformed the everyday lives of the majority of people in the developed world since 1945. As many left and green thinkers have argued since the 1960s, it is the rise of privatised consumption that more than anything else has eroded feelings of solidarity and community in modern industrial societies: ours is a society of enjoying the home we have bought, driving to work alone in our cars, staying in to watch the television. Certainly people feel isolated, certainly they yearn for a feeling of belonging – but to satisfy these cravings demands a quite extraordinarily profound transformation of our whole way of life. Blair, like most of us, wills the end but not the means.
More mundanely, there is the problem that political philosophy butters no parsnips. However appealing the big idea of community and solidarity might turn out to be – and it certainly worked for Bill Clinton in 1992 – it cannot be all that Labour offers the electorate if it is to win the next election. The party needs concrete policies to give credibility to its vision and to reassure voters that a Labour government would mean more than just a change in government rhetoric.
Last weekend, however, Blair talked of "a central vision based around principle, but liberated from particular policy prescriptions that have become confused with principle". The charitable interpretation is that he meant that Labour shouldn't stick to particular policies just because they have always been Labour policies, which is fair enough. But it is equally plausible that he meant that the party should fight the next election with the minimum of concrete policy commitments.
Such an approach is superficially tempting, particularly on the economy: given the impossibility of Keynesianism in one country and the unpopularity of taxes, it is difficult these days to put together an economic policy package that is both election-winning and specific, as Labour found in 1992. But it would be a disaster to yield to the temptation. If Labour goes into the next election without being clear about what precisely it will do with the reins of power, it will not win the trust of the electorate. Even Clinton, in a political culture dominated far more than Britain's by the soundbite and the political broadcast, offered more than just big ideas.
