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Spring 1999 cover

National Observer Home > No. 42 - Spring 1999 > Article

Blair's Britain: Early Portents

I.C.F. Spry

Mr. Tony Blair's experiment of New Labour deserves careful attention by Australians. The Australian Labor Party and the British Labour Party have both over recent years taken the same direction. They have discarded their original working class foundations and have been captured by a new grouping. This grouping comprises various members of the middle class who are apparently more opportunistic than doctrinaire. Their first common element is a desire for power. The second common element is a negative criterion: they are opposed to various aspects (but not necessarily the same aspects) of existing society. They have little or no respect for existing traditions and culture — rather they seek, with certain exceptions, to terminate significant traditions and to substitute a culture that is new: the so-called "third way".

The term the "third way" is largely symbolic. It does not represent any agreed system of values. So some members of New Australian Labor would see their main justification in "anti-racism"; others, in environmentalism; others in feminism; others in expanded social services; others, in a republic; and others in a miscellaneous range of issues whose only common characteristic is that they reject some aspect of a real or perceived establishment.

New Australian Labor has recently faltered. Skilful political advances were made by Mr. Paul Keating who, whatever his faults, attempted to ensure that economic questions were not answered by class prejudice. However Mr. Beazley has permitted his party to become more influenced by what may usefully be described as abstracted working-class prejudices: a desire to cause detriment to employers and persons whom they regard as wealthy (that is, as significantly more wealthy than themselves).

Because at some time the Australian Labor Party will almost certainly perceive this reversion to be electorally unproductive, it may turn again to the approach of Mr. Keating. Indeed, it appears that Mr. Keating's path had much influence on the British Labour Party.

Hence Mr. Blair's Britain is of special interest to Australians.

The culture of Blair's New Labour

Because New Labour is a combination of disparate groups, who are opposed to differing aspects of the existing culture, it is not possible to find common values amongst them except for a small number of symbolic issues, such as anti-racism, feminism and environmentalism.

Nonetheless the subject of cultural wars is highly relevant. An important recent book on these matters, by Mr. Hal Colebatch, was published recently.1 Mr. Colebatch comments:2

"Tony Blair leads the first major post-Cold War government and the first government of any major Anglomorph country to launch a specifically cultural war, though others have done so incidentally. Its objectives go far beyond entrenching New Labour in power.

They encompass changing the identity of the country and the mental landscape of those who inhabit it. The destruction of Britain's links with its past and with traditional culture seems under New Labour and the present cultural hegemony both a political strategy and an obsession."

Mr. Colebatch noted the significant comment of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci:3

"Any revolutionary class, in addition to seizing political power, must secure cultural hegemony . . . To seal its victory, such a class . . . must challenge and oust [its enemies] in the realms of religion, philosophy, art, morality, language and manners."

The Nomenklatura

In this context the setting up of what Mr. Colebatch refers to as the Nomenklatura is of particular importance. Here the term Nomenklatura refers to a politically conditioned elite placed in positions of power and intended to have a dominating if not exclusive influence.

A similar innovation has been attempted in Australia by the governments of Messrs. Whitlam, Hawke and Keating. When Mr. Whitlam came to office in 1972 a process began of replacing many senior and middle level public servants by supporters of the Labor Party or its policies. Old-style public servants, who were non-political and who sought to serve loyally whoever their political masters were at the time, were displaced. After an interregnum of Mr. Malcom Fraser, who characteristically did little to restore balance, this process was continued by Messrs. Hawke and Keating from 1983.

The tradition of non-political public servants may be regarded as very valuable. Even although all officials have their own political and social views, these views should be suppressed to the extent necessary to enable each official to act objectively. Unfortunately this tradition has been seen as an obstacle by radical political parties. Both in England and in Australia Labour-Labor governments have set out to replace public servants by those who are committed to their own policies. A result has been that without the benefits of balance and experience insufficiently tested agenda have been put into place.

Blair and the Arts

A process of radical politicisation has been extended to the arts, with a rejection here also of traditional and historically accepted cultural assumptions. As Mr. Colebatch observes: 4

"New Labour has a complex relationship with, on one hand, a pervading 'high' culture with a strong element of Nihilism — a media-arts-entertainment-fashion complex apparently emphasising ugliness, moral baseness, and death as entertainment, and on the other a proletariarised culture revolving around rock music, spectator sport, sentimentality and body functions. These two cultures meet at an increasing number of points, crushing traditional culture in a pincer-movement. This is certainly not to say the cultural Nomenklatura cannot criticise New Labour — it can and does — but that New Labour's behaviour suggests it thinks the transformation of public culture a prime weapon in the destruction of Old Britain and its associated conservative traditions and values."

So it has been commented that New Labour "sees pop as a model for New Britain," raising the question: "But what educational worth is there in an activity that thrives on abusing core values?" The conferring of honours on popular entertainers with unadmirable personal lives is not confined to New Labour, but certainly it has been taken to extraordinary lengths by Mr. Blair.

Inconsistencies between policies and action

As to Mr. Blair himself, difficulties arise in distinguishing between rhetoric and substantive actions. Mr. Blair (like the Chancellor, Mr. Gordon Brown, and the House Secretary, Mr. Jack Straw) is a member of the Christian Socialist Movement, which is reported to have marked its opposition to traditional values by appointing a lesbian as chief executive, but he has shown little expressed concern for Christian principles. It has been commented that he claims to oppose abortion, but has consistently voted for it. He claims to support the traditional institution of marriage, but the March 1998 budget reduced the Marriage Allowance. He has spoken in favour of conventional family life, but he and New Labour overwhelmingly supported a Bill to lower the age for legal homosexual relations to sixteen.

It is not surprising that it has been commented: 5

"But this government is not about policy details or about strategy; its social programme is a magpie's nest of improvisation and theft. For the Blair government, the medium is the message, and the message is Mr. Blair himself. Mr. Blair not only dominates his government to an extent greater than any previous Prime Minister did, including Mrs. Thatcher; he is its raison d'etre; his personality is its philosophy."

So far as the public face of Labour is concerned these comments are true. Mr. Blair entirely dominates his government. He is lucid, and he is perceived by a large proportion of the population as principled and able. The more extreme figures that stand behind him, such as Mr. Jack Straw and Mr. Gordon Brown, would be likely to have little similar appeal if they stood in his place.

The Foreign Secretary, Mr. Robin Cook, also is a politician who would have little appeal and whose survival is dependant on the political success of Mr. Blair. It is difficult to determine to what extent some of the more criticised measures of foreign policy originate with the one or the other, although in this as in other areas Mr. Blair exercises careful control. In particular there has been criticism of the Blair government's policy of shutting its eyes to continuing grave breaches of human rights in China. China remains by far the most unpleasantly repressive of the larger totalitarian countries. It might have been expected that Mr. Blair would be concerned to support international criticism of China accordingly. Inexplicably, despite his sustained moral tone he has failed to do this. As Mr. Colebatch has noted:6

"With the Government obsessed with the significance of style, symbols and attitudes, it was also notable that in January 1998 Foreign Secretary Robin Cook refused to meet China's leading human rights campaigner, Wei Jingshen, shortly before he himself was due to visit China. The indifference to human rights this behaviour indicated was compounded by the excuse offered: that there was 'no time' for a meeting which need have taken only a few minutes. In February 1998 the European Union, of which Britain held the presidency, decided not to table or co-sponsor a draft resolution condemning civil rights violations in China. Britain ceased the practice of the preceding nine years — dating from the Tienanman Square massacre — of supporting a resolution on human rights in China at the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Blair told Parliament, without other explanation, that: 'We did not feel that this U.N. Resolution was the right way to proceed.' Cook had previously emphasised to an unprecedented degree the need for an ethical foreign policy. When the question was raised of Rupert Murdoch having allegedly interfered to prevent the publication of Chris Patten's book, which apparently criticised China, a matter the subject of Page-One furore in the broadsheet press and enormous television coverage, Blair contemptuously told Parliament that he 'was not aware of the incident to which you refer'."

These incidents demonstrate a selectiveness in the ethical approach claimed by the Blair government. They are more serious because the moral claims made by it are put forward with continuing emphasis. If the Blair government had conceded itself to be as pragmatic on ethical questions as is the case there would have been less surprise.

The Cultural War

The perception that the Blair government seeks the dismantling of Britain's existing culture so as to enable a new Labour culture to be imposed is supported by a large number of actions intended to have a compounding effect.

Mr. Blair has assumed personal responsibility for approving the appointment of Church of England bishops, and the Lord Chancellor promoted the appointment of more "Labour" judges. Ms. "Mo" Mowlam, the Northern Ireland Secretary, said that the Royal Family should move out of Buckingham Palace and advised Prince Charles "to adapt to what Blair represents as part of our culture". Once Peter Tatchell, head of the homosexual pressure group Outrage, was called in to advise the government on new punishments for "hate-motivated" crimes.

In its first months in office the Blair government awarded five peerages to large financial supporters. The derriere-garde Stalinist academic Eric Hobsbawn received the high and exclusive award of Companion of Honour. Mr. Gerry Robertson, who had personally donated $25,000 to the Labour Party, was appointed Chairman of the Arts Council, in charge of giving out government and lottery cash to cultural bodies, probably the most politico-culturally important position in the country. Although many participants in the new grunge culture received grants, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company was told, "The Arts Council couldn't care if you disappeared off the face of the earth". Conversely Mr. Blair claimed that the film The Full Monty, a story of unemployed men in Northern England who became male strippers, reflected a new mood and celebrated "a great sense of confidence and adventure, and greater ease and comfort with ourselves", and that "[our] rock music is taking both America and Europe by storm".7

It is not appropriate to set out further examples here of Mr. Blair's offensive against traditional culture, but many more are provided by Mr. Colebatch. His analysis of what has been taking place in Britain is penetrating, and Blair's Britain is a work that should be read with attention.

Lessons for Australia

Both the British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party are perceived as opportunistic parties of the left, in the sense that they have nominally at least abandoned socialist principles and are intent upon both obtaining and keeping power and substituting new cultures. However as to the cultures to be substituted there is no general agreement, save in regard to such politically correct causes as feminism, homosexuality and environmentalism.

But even in regard to these matters differences are emerging. After feminism's many victories increasing numbers see the militant feminists of today as unreasonable and often as suffering from personal psychological difficulties, based on lesbianism or on an inability to form satisfactory relationships with men.

Likewise the so-called gay movement has engendered increased opposition as its members seek aggressively inappropriate objectives, such as the acceptance of oxymoronic homosexual marriages. And the apparent irrationality of many greens and environmentalists, and their unconcern with the economic consequences of their more extreme policies, have lost them support.

A first lesson from Mr. Blair's Britain is that one should beware confident, messianic politicians who promise to transform their country into something new and better. Mr. Blair has succeeded in damaging English culture, but it is by no means clear that he has improved it in any single respect. To attack tradition, on the one hand, and to promote pop artists and uneducated entertainers is not to perform an evident benefaction. And in economic and fiscal matters the Blair government has been criticised for the old Labour fault, which seems to re-emerge eventually, however modern the party, of excessive government spending.

A second lesson, of equal importance to Australia, is that the politicisation of public servants and others of authority or influence is not salutary. Unfortunately it is not possible under any system to eliminate entirely bias in public servants. But bias should be minimised as far as possible.

In Australia a practice of politicising the public service has been carried out principally by the governments of Messrs. Whitlam, Hawke and Keating. It should be recognised that this practice is wrong, and that if not abandoned it may eventually lead to a system where a powerful government and a powerful public service, the Nomenklatura, combine to overbear all protective mechanisms.

A third lesson is a somewhat discouraging one about the nature of modern parties of the left.

Whilst it must be accepted that from time to time it may be appropriate that radical parties should take office, to remedy what other governments have not remedied, the modern experience at least is that parties of the left adopt indiscriminate and sometimes vengeful attacks on traditional structures and attitudes.

Since much that is traditional is valuable, much damage is therefore done. In Australia it appears that Mr. Beazley and other members of the Labor Party have not shown adequate leadership to suppress these undesirable tendencies. It is important that they should do so.

National Observer No. 42 - Spring 1999