The old left of the Labour Party has bitched that “Blair is a Tory”  since 1983, when he entered parliament at the age of 30.  Certainly, since the affair of the infamous “evil eyes” poster the real Tories have hardly quibbled with this analysis, and regularly complain that New Labour steals their clothes.  For his part, Blair the consummate professional certainly affects to command the political stage from the centre, though if pressed he will qualify it as the centre-left.  Whenever the opportunity arises he chides the Tories for being “right-wing” and, of course, nasty - that’s guaranteed to put them in a hell of a bind.

But there is a problem with this notion that Blair and his Party occupy the centre ground of British politics.  It is the appalling, long-term consequence to the English, in particular, of eight years of Labour rule.  If opening the borders and letting in an uncontrolled flow of Third Worlders is the politics of the centre I’m Adolf’s uncle.

One can quite see how it has come to pass.  The Holy Trinity of Blairism is capitalism, civic values and social solidarity.  A competitive economy requires a large pool of cheap labour, imported if necessary.  The subsequent diverse labour pool requires something other than blood to foster social solidarity.  The racial diversity which is slowly, ineluctably breaking England’s back is key to the Project, and the kinships which bind us are merely “old fashioned values” and “old fashioned attitudes and practices” which “we can safely, rightly leave behind.”

The man is so denationed it would scarcely make any sense to call him a traitor.  Most probably, he possesses no inner reference point against which to weigh the charge anyway.  How else could it be, for example, that he delivered the aforementioned treasonous thoughts on civic values in June 2001 to the non-political and deeply traditional, cake-baking Women’s Institute, of all people?

So who is this man and what, besides the desires of someone ambitious to save socialism for the country, are his politics?  After eight years and two wars it is still not a straightforward question to answer.  Others who have tried have come up with remarkably little substance.  The well-known sociologist Anthony Giddens has invested his time and energy in several books to try to provide a post facto intellectual foundation for Blairism.  But it is still very thin.  For a time – mostly between 1998 and 2001 - there was a lot of talk about the social democrat Clinton-Blair-Schroeder Third Way.  But that has long since dropped off the ideological radar.

True, the lack of a firm, explicable philosophy has not stopped Blair winning elections.  But he is winning with only a quarter of the electorate supporting him.  The British public, it seems, needs clarity to become engaged.  Blair’s cotton wool politics may be treasonous and expensive, but no one has found a way to capitalise on the fact and engage voters.

To illustrate the slipperiness of Blairite language and the challenges it sets campaigning Tories, consider the Blair buzz-word, “choice”.

I have been wading through the Department of Education and Skills’ Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners (Word doc).  It is a blather of impossibly ambitious as well as just plain impossible aspirations interspersed with sudden, socialist admissions of the way of things.

On page 3 it says of its exciting new plan for Britain’s state schools:-

The central characteristic of such a new system will be personalisation – so that the system fits to the individual rather than the individual having to fit to the system.  This is not a vague liberal notion about letting people have what they want [You can say that again – Ed].  It is about having a system which will genuinely give high standards for all – the best possible quality of children’s services, which recognise individual needs and circumstances; the most effective teaching at school, which builds a detailed picture of what each child already knows, and how they learn, to help them go further; and, as young people begin to train for work, a system that recognises individual aptitudes and provides as many tailored paths to employment as there are people and jobs.  And the corollary of this is that the system must be both freer and more diverse – with more flexibility to help meet individual needs; and more choices between courses and types of provider, so that there really are different and personalised opportunities available.

Doesn’t that sound exciting?  But on page 14 it says:-

We see greater personalisation and choice as being at the heart of better public services and higher standards.  This will mean different things for different services.  Choice within a compulsory service – like primary and secondary education – will be very different from choice for older learners, who can opt out if they want to do so.

Ah, y…yes OK, something not quite right there.  Which is it?  The wonderful world of consumer choice or the prescriptions of a centralised bureaucracy. Or is there really a Third Way, an alternative to both?

Here’s the answer:-

Our conception of independence is of freedom to achieve for all, not a free-for-all in which more state schools are allowed to ban less able children from applying and turn themselves into elite institutions for the few.  Independence, in our policy, will create far more good local schools from which parents can choose; it is not a means for successful schools to start choosing only the brightest children to teach.

So Britain’s schools must be engineered into being a “system of fair admissions and equality of opportunity” so “all” those who, apparently, are not “free” can achieve.  And now we are spiralling determinedly downward into socialist unreality.  Dear old, imperfect humanity does not play the game of fair admissions and equality of opportunity.  Dear old, imperfect humanity is irredeemably selfish, thus:- 

Even though it is a year away, anxiety vibrates the air like static. Secondary school transfer: is there a more dread phrase? Already some Year 5 parents are trailing round open days, downloading Ofsted reports, frowning at maps, getting into pole position for next year’s elbows-out scramble for places at halfway decent state schools.

And then, to keep the selective private school door open, there’s the never-mentioned personal tutoring, the non-verbal bloody reasoning, the tearful pep talks, the times-tables ultimatums.

Meanwhile, several families have shipped out across London to live outside the gates of a compre- hensive spoken of only with envy and awe. Divorcing dads seek flats in desirable catchment areas. And last weekend we visited friends who have uprooted to a county town, a 100-minute commute for the husband. As you skim a pile of glossy prospectuses, the reason becomes clear. Grammar schools: an education worth £70K a child in London, yours in Kent for free.

Most of all, middle-class parents wish to escape the very diversity Blair is forcing upon them.  They do not want their children to be afflicted with the kind of world he is creating.  They will, of course, be given NO choice at all in the matter:-

What about the children of parents who do not follow these things closely? What about those who are not part of the middle-class grapevine? And do those children whose parents fail to take a close interest lose out?

This week another school admissions system was in the news. A new City Academy is adopting a lottery, or ‘random allocation’, for its heavily oversubscribed admissions.

The idea is to avoid social segregation. The middle-classes tend to be astute at getting access to the best local schools, whether it is by attending church regularly, playing the entry requirements, or moving house. You cannot blame them.

Pulling names out of a hat overcomes the advantage some pupils have over others. Of course, it can also mean that some students do not get into their nearest school.

Sir Cyril Taylor, who now heads the new Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, says he has ‘a lot of sympathy’ with the lottery idea, although he says it can also be rather ‘disheartening’ for parents.

He has witnessed how it works in the USA where it does deliver a pupil intake that is representative of the community.

That article was dated 30th September.  They don’t waste much time in New Labour.  Yesterday’s Times article (linked above) takes the story forward:-

All are middle-class parents exercising the privilege of choice. No matter that it looks like hard work, sacrifice and compromise, this is very selfish and damaging to the government ideal of social integration. Ruth Kelly believes so, as does the Prime Minister. The tendency of better-off parents to bagsy places in the best state schools has recently been described as “a stranglehold” (the Education Network, which advises local councils) and “colonisation” (Sutton Trust, an education charity).

Therefore the Government plans to change the rules. Or rather replace them with a lottery. In a forthcoming White Paper, admissions policy is expected to be changed so that while some places at oversubscribed schools will still be allocated to those living closest, the rest will be handed out randomly to children within nine bands of ability right across a wider area. Which, laudably, will mean poorer children in distant council estates will have a better chance of attending a decent school.

But a child living in a house bought at a premium for its proximity to this school may not get a place. And what will his parents do then? What Ruth Kelly wants them to do is send their child to a less prestigious, even failing, local state school to help ramp up the SATS average and diffuse bad discipline.

So that’s that for middle-class parents living in urban areas.  Their singular “choice” is to exist for the promulgation of “freedom to achieve for all”.  It’s a special civic value of the middle class, whether they like it or not.  And if these damned civic values don’t hold true, and too many middle-class parents give two fingers to them and to social solidarity Blair will simply legislate against them.  In that he betrays his true socialist roots.  There is something real about him, after all.

So, what have we got here?  Blair, in the end, is engaged upon as massive a project of social engineering as any socialist in history.  It might lack the genocidal drama of Stalin’s collectivist “modernisations” but it is no less sweeping.  It is worth us bearing in mind what happens to all these great schemes.

They begin, always, with public policy goals which run contrary to human nature.  If one pursues the impossible in this way, things will inevitably take an unkind turn.  One will certainly be brought to the point of having to (a) concede defeat (which is as rare as intellectuals in Guinea) or (b) put off the dread day by redefining the goal and laying one’s failure at the door of some “reactionary element”.

Since in this little exercise one is a liberal, and liberals never choose (a), things will necessarily continue to go badly and the political price of concession will rise yet higher and higher.  One will be forced to conclude that the guilty reactionary elements must be “freed” so that all may be free.  A fateful point has now been reached.  One stands in direct opposition to human nature itself, and must either proclaim artificial limits to it or deny it in entirety.  Thereafter, when human nature does not dissolve as anticipated but obtains with the same stubborn vigour as before, the course is set.  All one’s fine, former displays of Reason and high principle will devolve downward into a willingness to abuse the legal process and “break a few eggs”.  And that, in turn, will slip by easy degrees into authoritarianism, a regularised state repression and, eventually, totalitarianism and judicial murder.

This has been the course of all societies which have given themselves up to the pursuit of impossible, outright liberal goals.  For us, of course, it’s supposed to be a disease of societies which have not embraced liberal democracy.  The presumption is that pluralism and the universal franchise render us immune from the excesses of the socialist utopians.  The mechanism exists, after all, to replace bad governments peacefully.

But bad governments don’t get replaced by bad oppositions, as we have seen in 2001 and again this May.

In any case, who says our times are normal enough for normal presumptions to apply?  Advanced liberalism, like utopia, is precisely the anti-natural - for Man is imperfectible by nature - and it is also perfectly undemocratic.  We are sailing uncharted political waters.  There is altogether too much complacency about the power of the state and about a government, like Blair’s government, following egalitarian-utopian policies in an advanced liberal milieu.

Complacency will not do.  Just perhaps John Major actually got something right, and there is a sense in which his “evil eyes” poster is nearer the mark than we knew.