Blair Made No Promises No Break

In the first months of Tony Blair’s new premiership in Britain, nobody will be able to repeat Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s withering observation about the “clatter of broken promises being thrown out the window” during President Bill Clinton’s early regime. The reason is simply that Blair made no promises.

Of course, he is not the chief executive and has little ability to make policy by the stroke of a pen. He must rely on his government party in Parliament, and in this case, it has the biggest majority of any party in 160 years. His 400-plus members out of 659 face a Conservative Party that now has no Members of Parliament in Scotland or Wales and is a minority party in England.

Yet up to the last, the cautious Blair and his advisors took their cue from Clinton’s strategies. Blair offered modest proposals rather than promises, suggested nothing dramatic and refused to reverse 18 years of Margaret Thatcher’s economic “revolution.” His New Labor borrowed not only its conservative opponents’ policy clothes, but even the British bulldog, the doughty symbol of Winston Churchill and Tory imperialism.

Nobody expected such a majority and its size dramatically changes Blair’s timid assessment of the possible. The main issues Labor’s campaign expounded were improving educational opportunities; restoring to fitness an ailing National Health Service (the people’s battered trophy from Labor’s postwar majority of 146); crime, on which Labor is as harsh as the prison-building Tories; a minimum wage; a referendum on Europe’s proposed single currency; reform of the House of Lords, and devolution in Wales and Scotland.

The latter demonstrates how the Tories’ crushing defeat eradicates Blair’s need for caution. Only English MPs will be able to speak for the Conservatives in parliamentary debates on a proposed Welsh assembly and a parliament for Scotland with tax-raising powers.

A joke already going around Westminster is that perhaps the Tories should support a Scottish parliament, instead of shrieking about its potential for fomenting secession. That way, the party might finally get some representation north of the border. As Scotland and Wales voted resoundingly for Labor or their own nationalist parties, what is the need for caution now?

The implications of such a huge majority have not sunk in. Indeed, it is unprecedented in modern times. Although the Labor hierarchy carefully vetted new candidates in key constituencies to exclude “loony lefties” or even traditional supporters from the trade unions, the number of newcomers is over double the party’s wildest dreams. They may also therefore include some of their worst political nightmares.

On health, Blair has offered Clinton-style mini-policies such as spending the equivalent of $15 million on a nationwide breast cancer diagnosis campaign. But hard realities remain on how a Labor government, pledged not to raise taxes for five years, can inject the billions needed to modernize a theoretically free health system.

Could this be a broken promise, made on the grounds that with such a majority, the government could use its astonishing power to compensate for a broken pledge before its time expired in May 2002?

But Tory speculation that Labor is not truly new and that the Oxford-educated, church-going Blair is really a wild leftie beneath his posh veneer, is unfounded. Political leaders in bourgeois democracies traditionally move rightward. They do not “lurch” to the left, as the media always describe a sinistral tack.

Blair’s massive victory will be credited with finishing off socialism in Britain. The problem here is that socialism never arrived. Previous Labor governments, especially the two under the late Harold Wilson, abandoned socialism for the pragmatic dispensation of modest social democracy. The money and privilege power structure remained intact.

It is true that Blair quickly removed the clause in old Labor’s catechism that called for nationalized industries. But Labor has not nationalized anything for decades and certainly does not intend to now. Nor, apparently, will any privatization be reversed.

But if New Labor governs for the next five years with no visible trace of the party’s origins, victory will belong not to Blair but to Thatcher.