Ezra Klein: Blairism

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May 01, 2007

Blairism

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

With the news that Blair will be stepping down soon, I was planning to write a piece comparing the political fortunes of the Clinton/Gore team and the Blair/Brown team, noting that both New Labour and the New Democrats were correct to drag their parties towards the center, but neither knew when to stop tacking to the right, lest they alienate too many supporters on the left flank or generally sell progressive economics down the river.

But it turns out that Blair's major problem, perhaps unsurprisingly, hasn't been moderation on crime or the economy; it's been Iraq. A new poll by the UK's Independent shows that 69% of Britons think Blair will be remembered for the war in Iraq. Despite numerous other accomplishements,--a peaceful settlement in Northern Ireland, reviving the British NHS, quality economic stewardship, and acting as a de facto leader of the free world when it comes to Africa and global warming. On the plus side, Blair gets high marks as PM overall, so maybe the British public really does want Blairism with less war.

May 1, 2007 | Permalink

Comments

Not only has Iraq been spectacularly unsuccessful, I think a lot of Britons have resented the "Bush poodle" image. People don't like to think that their leaders are at the beck and call of someone else's, particularly when they dislike the other leader and/or fear his country's power (both of which apply here). This offends nationalistic sentiments, plus raises (legitimate) questions as to whose interests are really being served. I think Blair did a lot of things right, but his mindless following of Bush on Iraq was both a substantive and a political disaster. I'm still trying to figure out what his motivation for doing this was.

Posted by: beckya57 | May 1, 2007 5:33:55 PM

All of which makes perfect sense. Indeed, this is how it should be. Acts of grotesque incompetence with devastating consequences should overwhelm acts of everyday competence when evaluating political leaders.

Posted by: djw | May 1, 2007 5:54:25 PM

Today is the tenth anniversary of the election that brought [New] Labour to power. And Thursday may see it turfed out of power in local government, as well as in Scotland and Wales.

It's just hard to remember Blair pre-Iraq. If you add up the government's early achievements, and even some ongoing reforms, they're perhaps easy to take for granted: minimum wage, reduced unemployment, investment in public services, civil rights legislation. (Gay civil partnerships appear not to have destroyed the institution of marriage.) The ongoing mess in Iraq, combined with the authoritarian tendency at home, is in the foreground. Neil Kinnock says that Blair deserved better from Bush; perhaps so, but it's a little naive to think Bush ever cared about delivering.

If Blair had decided to stay on past Bush, then perhaps that sense of a mortgaged premiership would have been assuaged. But probably not: with an election pencilled in for spring 2009, the sour taste wouldn't fade, and even this elongated farewell has damaged Brown's chances.

Blair, like Bush, has made the irritating assertion that history will judge him. That said, I do think only historians will be able to judge whether his decade reflected a temporary blip of presidentialism in British politics, or the reinforcement of a trend away from cabinet government.

Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | May 1, 2007 5:59:26 PM

Acts of grotesque incompetence with devastating consequences should overwhelm acts of everyday competence when evaluating political leaders.

Really? I mean, between leadership on global poverty and fixing the NHS, Blair has done an awful lot of good for both Britain and the world. Plus peace in Northern Ireland, an act of great consequence with almost overwhelmingly positive consequences.

Posted by: Nicholas Beaudrot | May 1, 2007 6:19:17 PM

I, for one, have no problem remembering prea-Iraq Blair.

Posted by: Nicholas Beaudrot | May 1, 2007 6:23:17 PM

I think it's absolutely offensive how far the Democrats have tacked to the right.

For all of the political rhetoric, there are no liberals left in the US. There is a conservative and an ultra-conservative party. No one in the main stream is actively championing progress or advancement. No one is suggesting anything new at all.

It makes me want to move back to the UK. We'll see how '08 goes.

Posted by: Thomas | May 1, 2007 6:31:51 PM

As someone currently located in england I am sure that most british people would be surprised, if not amused, at your contention that blair "fixed the NHS".

Posted by: henry hazlitt | May 1, 2007 6:36:49 PM

Why wait for '08, Thomas? If there are no liberals here to win in '08, shouldn't you just go back to Britain now?

Posted by: Sanpete | May 1, 2007 6:45:49 PM

Plus peace in Northern Ireland, an act of great consequence with almost overwhelmingly positive consequences.

Well, that was a process begun by Major, and may rank as one of his few positive achievements. Not to downplay Blair's role, and it's notable that he's going to delay the announcement until after the NI Assembly reconvenes. And yes, it demonstrated that you don't need a nicely-wrapped political solution to instill peace: you just need people not killing one another.

To clarify: the minimum wage, Scottish and Welsh devolution, Human Rights Act and other first-term achievements are long-won battles. They're not going away, even with Cameron in charge. As such, it's easy to forget who put them in place.

Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | May 1, 2007 6:53:36 PM

As a Brit, as few comments (which should not be taken as definitive, obviously!)

First off, health policy is not my bag, but Henry Hazlitt is absolutely right in noting that the idea that Mr Blair has "fixed the NHS" would come as something of a surprise. Spending on health has doubled since 1997 and parts of the NHS seem to be operating somewhat better than they previously were. Waiting lists for operations are meant to be down, but there seems to be some evidence that the figures are being fiddled. Furthermore, while some areas have improved, other areas have declined - in some areas very seriously (NHS dentistry, for example, has virtually collapsed). Above all, there is general agreement across the political spectrum that while spending has increased by an order of magnitude, any overall improvement has been purely incremental and comes nowhere near to offering value for money as generally recognised. There are also signs that the government has actually been spending beyond its means and that they are going to have to start cutting funding fairly soon.

Furthermore, an aspect not widely covered is the fact that in the past few years there has been a middle class flight away from the NHS towards private care, especially for operations. As a result, the NHS is rapidly losing legitimacy in the eyes of middle England as more and more people find that, having paid fairly hefty taxes, the service simply isn't there for them when they need it (and I'm not talking about the wealthier end of the middle class here, I'm talking about teachers dipping into their retirement savings to pay for operations and taking out private dental insurance because there's no NHS dentist in their local area).

Erm, I was going to talk about some other aspects of the current government's record (where I am on more solid ground with the details) but this is getting scarily long, so I won't bother. Anyway, basically the clearest result of the government's health spending has been that we now have the highest paid health sector in the EU (the NHS has also swollen to become one of the largest single employers in the Western world). If putting huge numbers of people (many of whose jobs are dependent upon voting Labour in order to stay in place, for the more conspiracy minded among you) on the public payroll and paying them heavily inflated salaries is in and of itself a metric of success, then I guess it's a big success - but most of the rest of the British population are frankly pretty hacked off about it. In fact recent polls have shown that the Tories are now more trusted on health for the first time since... well, pretty much ever (in spite of the fact that they don't seem to have a health policy yet).

Posted by: Anthony C | May 1, 2007 7:10:26 PM

On the issue of Scottish and Welsh devolution - there's obviously a case to be made for them being good policies, but they've hardly been an unmitigated success. In the case of the Welsh there has been substantial disillusionment, which has turned into fairly widespread apathy (and there wasn't all that much support for devolution in the first place - turnout for the referendum on it was very low). In the case of the Scots, the policy has backfired badly. The idea was to forestall moves for Scotland to go independent, when in fact it appears that it may well well have entrenched and accelarated the movement. It has also been - and this is typical - somewhat botched in implementation. I'm not a big fan of the idea of an English parliament and I can live with things ticking over as they are, but there's no denying that enormous resentment has been created by the fact that while English MPs have been barred from having a say in various issues in Scotland, Scottish MPs can still legislate over the same issues for England. Given Labour's strong base in Scotland, this has repeatedly helped the government to force through England-only legislation on the back of Scottish votes, when the English can have no impact north of the border.

Of course, ironically in the long term if Scotland goes independent the Labour Party arguably has the most to lose, given that it draws a substantial chunk of its core support, parliamentary seats and party grandees from there. A key impact of the breakup of the Union is likely to be a notably strengthened Tory Party.

Minimum wage was a definite achievement. Gay rights too.

Posted by: Anthony C | May 1, 2007 7:19:52 PM

In fact recent polls have shown that the Tories are now more trusted on health for the first time since... well, pretty much ever (in spite of the fact that they don't seem to have a health policy yet).

I'd impishly suggest that your parenthesis explains the polling. The Duncan Smith review -- seems like a long time ago -- settled on ''different, but not like the Americans'. Cameron will need something a little more detailed by 2009, unless he's going with the 1950s-style 'we'll just run it better'.

Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | May 1, 2007 8:04:17 PM

I concur re: Tories and the NHS. I actually tend to defend the current Tory trend of not coming up with anything too concrete. First off, if they come up with anything decent, Labour tends to nick it. Second off, the situation may change between now and the election. But most of all, both the Hague and the IDS leaderships were characterised by back of a matchbook, seat-of-the-pants, badly thought out and sometimes plain ridiculous "policies" that were plucked out of nowhere according to the weekly headlines and vanished into a memory hole at the end of each news cycle (Portillo seems to have railed against the trend, but he wasn't a very good Shadow Chancellor and... well we all know how his career ended). The less of that the better. That said, if they now fail to come up with some genuine meat come the election, people will not be chuffed.

Anyway, as I say, when it comes to health policy I know enough to pinpoint some of the problems without knowing enough to come up with any positive alternatives. In terms of saving the NHS, though, I'd say at the very least we need to wait several more years before coming to a final verdict and that generally speaking a positive outcome isn't where the clever money is.

On defence, which is my area, the record is (with the exception of George Robertson's tenure) basically abysmal. The rub being that none of the other parties have a decent defence policy either (in spite of the fact that the Tories have some very good defence brains on their frontbench).

Posted by: Anthony C | May 1, 2007 8:58:19 PM

It's good to hear about this from actual Britons. I was under the impression that Blair had done this metric-driven transformation of the NHS to reduce cardiac deaths and wait times. Okay, so the wait times may have been fiddled; but are they so fiddled that they haven't gone down? And what about the big ticket items, namely people dying because of inadequate health care access?

Posted by: Nicholas Beaudrot | May 1, 2007 10:02:45 PM

Okay, signs I need to do better googling ... this telegraph article suggests that health professionals don't think things have gotten better. I don't know enough about UK's health infrastructure to know why that is, or if they're just wrong and things have gone from "unbelievably bad" to "really bad" or what.

Posted by: Nicholas Beaudrot | May 1, 2007 10:06:57 PM

On defence, which is my area, the record is (with the exception of George Robertson's tenure) basically abysmal.

I have a huge amount of respect for Robertson, both at MoD and NATO, and the rough treatment he received from the US in the latter role is a disgrace. A really decent bloke, too.

On the NHS, it's fair to say that the majority of professionals were glad to see the back of the Tories, and there's always going to be a reservoir of goodwill.

But PFI (Brown's accounting trick) will deliver a bite on the arse at some point; dentistry's a mess in the regions (though that goes back to 1948); the NPfIT is a massive cash sink (see Eyes passim) and there are a fair few management consultants who, I daresay, hope never to be recognised by a doctor treating them in A&E. But the NHS is never going to be 'fixed' beyond complaint: it's a health service. And I'd still take it over the American alternative, not least because I'm sick of clipboards, questionnaires, and internet self-diagnosis.

this telegraph article suggests that health professionals don't think things have gotten better.

Ah, but the Torygraph demographic uses BUPA.

Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | May 2, 2007 12:37:58 AM

"If Blair had decided to stay on past Bush"

He would have, if he had any choice in the matter.

Posted by: David Weman | May 2, 2007 3:49:27 AM

Blast ... I need a taxonomy of british newspapers to know the slant of what I'm reading.

Posted by: Nicholas Beaudrot | May 2, 2007 11:28:33 AM

My take on this, as a long-term American resident of the UK, is that the NHS is definitely better off than it was under the Tories, but that it's not nearly as well off as we all feel it should be. Blair's public sector management style is extremely command and control, and has rubbed nearly every health professional the wrong way, even those (such as GPs) who are financially far better off. The over-reliance on consultants (not the medical kind, the 'we'll tell you how to run your service even though none of us have ever actually done the jobs you do' kind, the incessant 'modernisation', and staffing problems have really irritated everyone, and have made for breathless and highly condemnatory coverage. That being said, Britian is a far better place to be sick or ill in than it was pre-Blair, and I have very strong doubts about the earlier comment that the middle class is abandoning the NHS. This strikes me as based more on chattering class anecdotes (of the sort that form the basis of most journalism) than on evidence.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned, I don't think, are the tremendous strides Blair made in reducing poverty - for the working poor, lone parents, those on benefits, and for children. That final one - child poverty - was one of New Labour's main planks, and they really have made great strides. But of course the Brits can't help themselves - Blair gets far more criticism for setting a bold target and not reaching it (but making a damn good effort) than he gets credit for coming pretty damn close.

On that final note, it seems to me that one of the things that might do for Labour in the next general election is the overwhelming love that traditional Labour voters (particularly the middle and - in american terms - upper-middle class ones) have for ideology. I can't tell you how many times I've heard or read traditional Labour supporters complain that there's now no longer any difference between tories and labour, so they're voting Anybody But Labour next time round. For middle class labour voters, their probably really isn't all that much difference in parties, at least in terms of the direct effects on their own lives. Getting nearly a million kids out of poverty doesn't directly affect the middle class, who, metaphorically speaking, live on a nice safe hill with a view of the seashore, too distant to to see that Labour's policies are helping the poor who live along that shore. Once the tories get back in power, the tide will rise again, and a lot of little poeple will drown, but all too many middle class Old Labour types won't even notice.

Part of this is Labour's own fault, because they've done most of their good works by stealth, for fear of putting the centrists and the tabloids. A lot of this is also the result of not being willing to forgive Blair for the war, but a good deal of it is down to selfishness, and even the desire of a lot of Labourites to have ideology come back in style - there are many who prefer it to social justice, because it's more exciting.

(Apologies for the length.)

Posted by: reuben | May 2, 2007 2:21:24 PM

"This strikes me as based more on chattering class anecdotes (of the sort that form the basis of most journalism) than on evidence."

I freely admit I ain't got statistics for you - it's a reflection of my personal experience and also that of some of my friends (none of whom fit into the "chattering class" envelope). That said, I think it is also a contention put forward by the press. I would point out that it's not a generalised flight from the NHS toward private insurance - it's purely with regard to individual operations.

I think that's a very fair point about the ideology thing.

Posted by: Anthony C | May 2, 2007 3:00:12 PM

Anthony,

Yes, apologies if that sounded more barbed than I meant it. My impression is that while what you describe is happening, the incidence is being grossly over-rated and over-reported by the press, who love it as a story.

I think your clarifying point about individual operations is a good one, and I'll put my hands up and admit that, if I could afford it, I could see myself doing this if I felt it were necessary. On the other hand, I think that the possible rise in this sort of activity (and the definite rise in dis-satisfaction with the NHS, even as objective health indicators are at their best ever), is due to the fact that public expectations are rising faster than public services can cope with. In Beveridge's day, patients were assumed to be just that - patient - and to have relatively minimal expectations. Now, pretty much all of us (and I include myself in this) expect wonderful healthcare and very limited waiting times - and lots of people (I don't include myself in this group) want to get these things while paying low taxes.

Posted by: reuben | May 3, 2007 4:56:06 AM

Reuben,

I think this is absolutely right. We live in a rather contradictory time. Faith in government's trustworthiness and competance is at an all time low, at the same time as the public at large demand more and more services be provided centrally by the state (I know very few people who actually notice the disconnect in their daily business). I think it is also worth noting that the health services face a string of structural problems quite apart from our attitudes. When it was created, the plain fact is that far fewer diseases were treatable, a number of ailments that would now be generally viewed as justifying NHS treatments were not viewed as such and furthermore, people lived shorter lives. One retired at 60, spent a couple of years playing the odd game of golf and winding your gold-plated retirement watch and then dropped dead. Now people go on and on and on and on. Obviously, this is fantastic on any number of levels, but in terms of the national finances it becomes problematic.

Of course, the bizarre fact that we are living longer and longer at precisely the point that there seems to be a national consensus among the Westminster and media classes that one is over the hill career-wise at the age of 45 doesn't exactly help.

Posted by: Anthony C | May 3, 2007 4:54:20 PM

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