Dec
25Tony Blair Speaks About Ideals, Reform, Opportunity and Equality
Tagged Under : Adherents, Advocates, Ambition, Artificial Environment, Aspiration, Character, Conclusion, Determination, Egalitarian, Face-Up, Family, Get Wise, Good Style, Govern, Grit, Hard Work, Insight, Intellectual Process, Labour, Leaders, Listen, Mainstream, Maintaining Morale, Meritocratic, Poor Education, Poor Health Care, Poor Housing, Progress, Progressive Movements, Ranks, Self-Induced, Social Action, Social Democracy, Speaking, Times, Tony Benn, Tony Blair, Tradition, Unions, Voice
Dear Reader: Warm Greetings to You,
In these cold, frosty, icy winter days, it’s nice to be able to relax with a warm drink and a book that provides a worth-while read, or to watch a movie that is truly gripping (and TV as far back as my child-hood days in this season is much more stimulating on the whole than the rest of the year) - and its always better with friends who share the same interests. So I have been away for a while, as you can see from the absence of blog posts over the last couple of months, but here is something I found rather interesting and wanted to share it with you; ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s understanding of what made the Labour Party when he first joined it and then grew within it..
From early on, even before my election to Parliament in 1983, I had realised the Labour problem was self-made and self-induced. We were not in touch with the modern world. We could basically attract two sorts of people: those who by tradition were Labour, and those who came to a position of support for socialism or social democracy through an intellectual process. Many trade union activists were in the first category; I was a member of the second. Neither group were what I would call ‘mainstream’, and together they did not remotely add up to a constituency large enough to be in a position to win and govern.
But all progressive movements have to beware their own success. The progress they make reinvents the society they work in, and they must in turn reinvent themselves to keep up, otherwise they become hollow echoes from a once loud, strong voice, reverberating still, but to little effect. As their consequence diminishes, so their dwindling adherents become ever more shrill and strident, more solicitous of protecting their own shrinking space rather than understanding that the voice of the times has moved on and they must listen before speaking. In happens in all organisations. It is fatal to those who are never confronted by a reckoning that forces them to face up and get wise. The new leaders of the unions tended to ape the old, but in a context so changed that it became increasingly pointless except in maintaining the morale of those who just wanted to carry on as they were.
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As I surveyed the wreckage of the Labour Party in the aftermath of the 1983 election, I knew change had to come about. The trade union base simply could not support a modern political party if it was to be a governing party.
In time I came to another conclusion, concerning the second category of people attracted to the party. The intellectual Fabian way of the Labour Party had deep roots and a venerable history. Its leading lights, often born relatively wealthy but who were indignant about inequality, were remarkable people. Like George Orwell, Hugh Dalton, Stafford Cripps and the members of the New Left Book Club and the Haldane Society, they tended to be erudite, committed, passionate and intensely intellectual in approach. Tony Benn was an example. Tony Crossland was another (indeed he has taught Benn at Oxford). As was the case with me, they had their first taste of left politics through university life. In that rather artificial environment, there had been an insight gained into the iniquity of the system; a conversion arising from a realisation that social conditions did indeed beget opportunity or the lack of it; an encounter of ideas that altered their life view. Once so altered, they became staunch advocates of social action and of the party of the trade unions and the working class whose lives had to be liberated from the conditions of poor housing, poor education, and poor health care.
It took me a long time to work out what the problem with this second group was: although they cared for people, they didn’t ‘feel’ like them. They were like the Georges Duhamel character who says, ‘I love humanity, it’s just human beings I can’t stand.’ I don’t mean, incidentally, that they were aloof or unpleasant – they were often charming and fun - but they didn’t ‘get’ aspiration. They were almost too altruistic for their own political good. When injustice and inequality were reduced – in part through their efforts – they failed to see what would happen. A person who is poor first needs someone to care about it, and then to act; but when no longer poor, their objective may then become to be well off. In other words, for such a person it is about aspiration, ambition, getting on and going up, making some money, keeping their family in good style, having their children do better than them. My dad’s greatest wish was that I be educated privately, and not just any old private school, he chose Fettes because he thought and had been told it was the best in Scotland.
The problem with the intellectual types was that they didn’t quite understand the process; or if they did, rather resented it. In a sense they wanted to celebrate the working class, not make them middle class – but middle class was precisely what your average worker wanted himself or his kids to be. The intellectuals’ belief in equality strayed dangerously into the realm of equality of income, not equality of opportunity. The latter was a liberator; the former would quickly become and be seen as a constraint. The impulse of many of those helped by well-meaning intellectuals was essentially meritocratic, not egalitarian – they wanted to be helped on to the ladder, but once on it, they thought ascending it was up to them.
As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s and the defeats kept coming, I became ever more convinced that there were crucial bits of a governing coalition missing for Labour. Where was our business support? Where were our links into the self-employed? Above all, where were the aspirant people, the ones doing well but who wanted to do better; the ones at the bottom who had dreams of the top? The intellectuals were right is saying social conditions determined success in life – but only in part. So did hard work, character, determination, grit, get-up-and-go. Where were those people in our ranks? Nowhere, I concluded.
Extracted from his recent autobiography “A Journey”, Hutchinson/Random House, 2010, pp 40-41, 42-43.
Many other parts of the book are revealing of the man who led the country, Great Britain, of which it was said, “Has an empire on which the sun never set”, for over 3 historical Labour terms. Time and opportunity-permitting, I will extract those parts that help highlight the leadership qualities of this man and how he handled conflicts such as the mysterious death of Lady Diana and her partner Dodi Fayed, as well as his decision to take the country for invasion of Iraq on the pretext of Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
For Success and Contentment,
Asad Khan
