New Statesman & Society, 15 March 1996
The Labour leader has decided that he needs a dialogue with the centre-left intelligentsia. It could be a tricky business, writes Paul Anderson
The participants in last month's private meeting at King's College, London, between Labour leader Tony Blair and what the Guardian described as "80 intellectuals and businessmen" are not keen to talk about it – at least on the record.
"It was done on the basis that we wouldn't be identified," says one abruptly. "All I'll reveal," says another, "is that the people named by the Guardian were all there." So Stuart Hall, Anthony Barnett, John Gray, Geoff Mulgan, Andrew Adonis and Vernon Bogdanor are all considered worthy of the Labour leader's attention – but there are no surprises there. "It would be fair to say that Blair did most of the talking," says yet another. "He said he wanted a dialogue about ideas. I think that's a good sign. But I really can't say any more."
Big deal, you might think. But the secrecy speaks volumes, even though the participants won't. The official explanation is that Blair didn't want to burden the invitees with the tag of being tame party stooges, which is fair enough. There was also, no doubt, a certain wariness in the Labour leader's office about the mischief the Tory press would make of the event – although in fact the only hostile mention that has appeared since news of it broke last week is one sarcastic diary paragraph in the Sunday Times. It was headlined "Blair says goodbye dearies, hello drearies", an allusion to his alleged preference for boring academics, rather than the literati and glitterati cultivated by Neil Kinnock.
But the low-key approach also reflects Blair's worries about the lukewarm reception new Labour has been getting from the intelligentsia. It's easy to see why he's concerned. After nearly 17 years of uninterrupted Conservative rule, his party is so far ahead in the opinion polls that just about everyone thinks it will form the next government. Since his election as Labour leader in 1994, he has consistently stressed the importance of "new ideas" to his political project – and he has made an extraordinary number of speeches outlining his thinking. New members have flocked to Labour. Blair believes, with some justification, that the impending end of a political era should be generating excitement among intellectuals – just as it did in Britain in the run-up to Harold Wilson's first general election victory in 1964 or in France before Francois Mitterrand became president in 1981.
In fact, there has been little sign of any such thing. The depoliticisation of the intelligentsia that was the most marked trait of British intellectual life in the 1980s has not been reversed. Little of the left-leaning intelligentsia has survived the wreckage of its projects since the late 1970s: the scrapyard contains not just the social democratic corporatism of the Wilson-Callaghan era and the "actually existing socialism" of the Soviet bloc, but also the left-wing Keynesianism of the Alternative Economic Strategy, the "57 varieties" of Trotskyism and neo-Leninism, quasi-syndicalist "class politics" and all but the most supple libertarian leftism of the 1968 generation. Feminism is no longer the sole prerogative of the left; environmentalism never has been. Postmodernists of various hues have long replaced Marx and Gramsci as undergraduate fashion accessories.
Except when it comes to the constitutional questions raised so effectively by Charter 88 and others, those one-time left intellectuals who have not simply given up politics are, for the most part, engaged only peripherally: the dominant mood is one of pessimism about the powerlessness of political action in the face of a triumphant global capitalism. Worse, there is no influx of enthusiastic young people, keen to seize the initiative from the sad old fifty-somethings who are still hanging on in there banging away, to the left intellectual milieu. With the partial exception of the peace and environmentalist movements, the "new social movements" of the past two decades have done little to rejuvenate or enlarge the left intelligentsia.
It's true that the surprise success story in British publishing in the past year has been Guardian economics editor Will Hutton's elegant statement of the case for Germanic corporatism and radical constitutional reform, The State We're In. For the first time since 1980, when Edward Thompson and others launched the movement against the stationing of American cruise missiles in Britain with Protest and Survive, a serious forward-looking political book has been riding high in the bestseller lists for several months. Blair himself has embraced the idea of "stakeholding" that is central to Hutton's argument, although he has steered clear of his detailed poliq prescriptions.
It's also true that Blair is not short of supporters in senior editorial position; on the quality newspapers. The Independent is the most pro-Blair daily (his fans include columnist Andrew Marr, political editor Donald Macintyre and political correspondent John Rentoul, the author of a sympathetic biography of the Labour leader), and he has plenty of admirers both on the Guardian (notably, political correspondent Patrick Wintour) and on the Observer, at least as long as Andrew Jaspan remains editor – which might not be for very long.
But one best-selling centre-left book and a gaggle of broadsheet journalists hardly constitute a wave of intellectual enthusiasm for new Labour. The most important point about the success of The State We're In is precisely that it was wholly unexpected, and the Blairites and the newspapers are, for the most part fans of the man rather than his programme. Even the Independent's enthusiasm has been noticeably muted since last autumn, when its management dumped Ian Hargreaves as editor and former Marxism Today editor Martin Jacques as his deputy; while Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has maintained; fiercely independent line, on occasion running stories deeply embarrassing to the Labour leadership. The Financial Times is as sympathetic as any international journal of record can be; the Independent on Sunday no more reliable than the Guardian; the Times even worse; and the Sunday Times largely hostile, despite the recent return of Robert Harris (a close chum of Peter Mandelson) as a columnist. That leaves the two Telegraph titles, both wildly Tory, and the weeklies. The Economist, under the influence of its political editor, David Lipsey (an aide to the last Labour government), is sympathetic but critical, as is NSS; Tribune and the Spectator are vitriolically antipathetic.
Blair's problem is simple: if there's anything that approaches a consensus among Britain's centre-left intellectuals, it is that a Labour government would mean a welcome change of personnel but that, certain constitutional reforms apart, it wouldn't be able to do very much that is radically different from the Tories under John Major and Kenneth Clarke.
There are, of course, important dissidents from this view – and they number more than Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle, whose much-hyped The Blair Revolution was published earlier this month. The most significant is a group of writers who see constitutional reform as the key to all sorts of other changes: eloquent examples include Will Hutton, Charter 88 founder Anthony Barnett, Labour MP Tony Wright and former Liberal Democrat adviser David Marquand. But it's remarkable how small this group is, and even within it there are big frustrations with the way new Labour has played its cards, particularly over Freedom of Information legislation and the promised referendum on electoral reform, neither of which are now considered immediate priorities for a Labour government.
It's also notable who doesn't feature in this circle. Stuart Hall, during the 1980s (through his pieces in Marxism Today) the most influential proponent of the idea that Labour's class-based political culture had lost touch with the real world and needed to be radically transformed, has written witheringly of the absence of big ideas in the Blair "project" (although he welcomed Blair's reduction of the role of the trade unions in Labour's organisation and his removal of the commitment to common ownership in Clause Four of the party constitution).
Anthony Giddens, probably the second most influential left-of-centre "moderniser" social theorist in recent years, has been equally critical, as have the intellectuals around New Left Review, which has made a particular point in recent years of engaging critically with western European social democracy.
Blair gets upset by the charge that new Labour lacks intellectual beef, but he shouldn't be too surprised by it. Labour has consciously opted for a responsible, minimalist programme. The intention is worthy – to avoid scaring off affluent middle-class voters while preventing trade unionists and Labour Party members from building up unrealistic expectations of a Labour government – but the side-effect is that there isn't too much for intellectuals to get worked up about.
Of course, there is plenty of Labour policy-wonking going on, particularly on the welfare state, and a key role here is played by the Institute for Public Policy Research, the independent-but-Labour-leaning think-tank created when Neil Kinnock was Labour leader. The IPPR oversaw the work of the Commission on Social Justice, set up by Blair's predecessor John Smith to examine the future of welfare, and it publishes New Economy, a quarterly edited by former Labour economic policy adviser Dan Corry that is the closest Labour gets to a forum for public debate on economic policy.
But the IPPR's work does not really amount to a ferment of ideas, and there's not a lot that is useful to Labour coming out of the other think-tanks. The most important exception is Demos. Set up by another former Marxism Today stalwart, Geoff Mulgan, once an adviser to Gordon Brown, Demos has been responsible for the only significant import of recent years in the field of political ideas, the communitarianism of the American polemicist and activist Amitai Etzioni. Etzioni's emphasis on responsibilities as well as rights chimes with the austere Christian socialism of Blair and shadow home secretary Jack Straw, and the Labour leader has declared himself a communitarian.
Communitarianism has articulate advocates in John Gray, the Oxford political philosopher who was a key thinker of the new right in the early 19808, and Observer columnist Melanie Phillips – but the wider left intelligentsia is suspicious of what it sees as the conservatism, or even authoritarianism, of communitarian prescriptions for dealing with family breakdown and crime. Whatever else left intellectuals might have abandoned since the 1960s, they remain as strongly committed as ever to social liberalism, if not libertarianism. And that almost inevitably means that most of them will keep a respectable distance from new Labour, no matter how much Blair urges them into the fold.
