One cheer for Mr Blair

Now that Tony Blair will be in charge of Britain for a few more years, perhaps it behooves us to see where he fits into political history. His situation certainly seems a curious one: His party seems as Leftist as ever but he has always been to the Right of his party. So to what extent is he a conservative?

Many people have pointed to pragmatism and compromise as characteristic of conservatives and that is undoubtedly true as a statement about British political history (Norton & Aughey, 1981; Gilmour, 1978; Feiling, 1953; Standish, 1990) but it would seem to lead to the view that democracy is inherently conservative—in that any political party wishing to gain power in a democracy has to keep pretty close to the centre.

And a man who hews very much to the centre in his rhetoric is the electorally very successful Tony Blair. So much so, that the chief opposition to many of his policies seems to come from his own Labour party rather than from the opposition Conservatives. This has led some people to describe him as the best Conservative Prime Minister that Britain never had. And that, in a way is the point: A pragmatic centrist is rightly seen as conservative. But the reason why he is in fact the leader of a historically very Leftist political party is instructive. Note his own summary of his thinking here:-

“At the heart of my politics has always been the value of community, the belief that we are not merely individuals struggling in isolation from each other, but members of a community who depend on each other, who benefit from each other’s help, who owe obligations to each other. From that everything stems: solidarity, social justice, equality, freedom. We are what we are, in part, because of the other. I apply that idea here in Britain. I try to apply it abroad.”

I cannot help compare that statement with a similar statement by a very different Socialist:-

“The activities of the individual may not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the frame of the community and be for the general good.”

And contrast both statements with this summary of historic British Conservative party thinking:-

“They distrust general notions such as “the community” and would argue that the despotism of reason may cloak as much sinister self-interest and self-deception as any other tyranny.”

The summary of Conservative thinking is by Feiling, an historian of the British Conservative party. The second quote above is from Adolf Hitler.

I have no doubt that Mr Blair is a genuinely compassionate man (something I would say of few Leftist leaders, though it is true of many Leftist followers) but, in good Leftist fashion, he is in love with the community rather than with the individual and that endears him to his party. From the rest of his speech we also note that, also in good Leftist fashion, he sees government as the best way to accomplish his goals, though he also acknowledges the limitations of government—a rare thing on the Left and something again that marks him out as unusually conservative for a leader of his party.

That a Leftist party can give birth to conservative thinking is probably most clearly seen in the Australian case. Neville Wran, a Queen’s Counsel of working class origins, was Labor party Premier of Australia’s most populous state (New South Wales) from 1976 to 1986 and during his tenure introduced his party to conservatism (though not under that name of course). The electoral success of his approach was noted on the Federal level and was put into practice on the Federal level with the accession to power of Bob Hawke. Prior to his career in Parliament, Hawke was known as the king of compromises in the field of disputes between unions and business. As Prime Minster (1983-1981) he of course continued that approach and was in addition remarkably pragmatic on economic matters—largely traceable, no doubt, to his degree in economics. It was he who initiated large scale privatizations of government enterprises in Australia—very much akin to what Margaret Thatcher did in England.

So whether any given government can be identified as conservative or not is clearly a matter of degree—a matter of how much the individual person is respected, a matter of how much government is trusted and a matter of how much compromise and pragmatism is resorted to—but broadly conservative government can clearly arise from parties that are either nominally Leftist or nominally Rightist. In the Australian case matters have progressed to the point where the major choice on offer is between two conservative parties—though there are of course also various minor parties (Greens, Democrats) that lean well to the Left. In the case of Tony Blair one would have to say that his conservative inclinations have generally led to little in the way of conservative results because of his trust in bureaucracy as a way of achieving his goals.

References:-
Feiling, K. (1953) Principles of conservatism. Political Quarterly, 24, 129-133.
Gilmour, I.H.J.L. (1978) Inside right. London: Quartet.
Norton, P. & Aughey, A. (1981) Conservatives and conservatism. London: Temple Smith
Standish, J.F. (1990) Whither conservatism? Contemporary Review 256, 299-301.

Posted by jonjayray on Saturday, May 7, 2005 at 01:09 AM in British Politics
Comments (4) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by Fred Scrooby on May 07, 2005, 09:38 AM | #

“So whether any given government can be identified as conservative or not is clearly a matter of degree [...]” (—from the log entry)

George Bush is widely viewed, especially outside of the United States, as a conservative. Given that one of his policies is the deliberate transformation of the racial composition of the United States from white to non-white

against the will of the population

as that will has been expressed time and again in opinion polls, is that widely-held view of him accurate? Where does changing a country’s race against the people’s will lie in the “conservative”/“liberal” spectrum?

As for the log entry’s first quote from Blair, that particular very peculiar statement is obviously aimed exclusively at women voters, without whom no politician can hope to win elections: you can just see the gobs of estrogen dripping off every word and that’s no accident. When he uttered or wrote that (I didn’t click on the link to see which) he was being supremely cynical, as pure pandering to voting blocks always is: since the advent of women’s suffrage all serious politicians must keep the women’s vote “covered” with mushy pabulum exactly like that about “community” (community, Mr. Blair, means first and foremost preserving the community’s traditional race, and once that’s seen to, the rest follows largely without needing to be spelled out, so shut up about the rest and see to the first, please), “education” (means first and foremost sitting on one’s butt with a textbook, pencil, and paper and studying hard till you actually know something, which is where the “self-esteem” part comes in that women voters are always prating about: it comes from passing your algebra or French test), “gun control” (stop forcing white people to live in proximity to Negroes and the need for hand guns for self-protection against street crime and home invasion largely evaporates), and so on—the average female mind cannot represent to itself these kinds of connections which most men (most strong-wristed ones, that is ...) consider achingly obvious. Blair’s a limp-wristed pixie all right but not so much so that he actually believes the crap he spouts. He’s cynically after personal power and is pandering in order to get and keep it. Fundamentally, just as with Clinton, the man has no ideals and wouldn’t recognize honesty or integrity if he stumbled over them.

Posted by jonjayray on May 08, 2005, 05:40 AM | #

Fred
You have been bad again. The quote you refer to was addressed to a Christian group, not women.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on May 08, 2005, 10:41 AM | #

Every speech given by a politician, John, no matter where or before whom, is for the consumption of the voting blocks who are key to his electoral success. Blair, his handlers, and his speech writers all know very well women voters will find out what he tells Christians every bit as much as they would find out if he told Ku Klux Klanners it was OK to lynch Negroes. You aren’t talking in private or off the record when you make a speech. Furthermore, Christianity is going through a very unfortunate overly-effeminate phase right now. In a sense, talking nowadays to Christians amounts to sort of the same thing as talking to women, John. I wish it were not so, but it is.

Posted by Guessedworker on May 09, 2005, 07:56 AM | #

It was only the Old Labour of Clause 4 and “a show of hands outside the factory gate” that called Blair a Tory. He never was, or anything like it. Real Tories, meanwhile, didn’t understand him either. He clearly didn’t belong to the Old Labour tradition. But it is a peculiar weakness of Conservatives that so many still think in Soviet-era terminologies and just cannot see the cultural modernity.

So what is Blair? Well, a transnational progressive of the first water. He does not believe in the nation, either as a political entity or as the geographic homeland of a distinct and settled people. He says he is an ardent believer in fairness (equality), community (universalism or love ‘n peace, baby) and opportunity for all (blank slatism). All that’s only half-true. What he can never say is that he is a naked power-seeker-made-cultural marxist. New Labour - the invention, chiefly, of the metrosexual Peter Mandelson - offered him an open road to power via a programme of equality by race/gender/homosexuality. And he took it.

Economically, it suited transnationalists after the fall of the Wall for the economy to be, if not exactly excluded from politics in toto, at least excluded from the “struggle”. Nobody interesting thought in socialist terms anymore. So there was no cost to Blair in forgetting all that and, instead, using the economy as a cash cow for the funding of his programmes for equality. Nothing whatsoever Conservative about that.

No, first and foremost Blair is craven about power. He is no Conservative. He simply had to defeat the socialist left which made him sound Conservative. Ideologically he is an empty space, an opportunist for whom cultural marxism was a means to progress beyond socialism and Old Labour. He is not to be trusted and, finally, the people do not trust him.

Brown will present another problem ... stodgy tedium where there is now brilliant artifice, residual socialism where there is now gauche modernity. But the Tories have a better chance of understanding him - and beating him in 2009.

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