What does Tony want? A puzzling prime minister.

A puzzling prime minister

I have an ingenious acquaintance who is convinced that Tony Blair's New Labour regime provides sinister parallels with the Fascist dictatorships of prewar Europe. He publishes letters in the press giving his reasons, some of which sound disconcertingly plausible; he has warned Blair's intellectual guru, the sociologist Anthony Giddens, to beware the fate of Martin Heidegger, who once supported Hitler.

It's nonsense, though. Blair is a good democrat, leader of a party which last year swept to power in one of the greatest electoral victories in British history. But power is the key word; in modern British politics a prime minister with a disciplined cabinet and a solid and docile majority in the House of Commons (docile because many of the members have hopes of preferment), backed by popular support, can get his/her way on practically anything. Eighteen months after coming into office, Blair remains extraordinarily popular in the country, as shown by opinion polls. He dominates the government, the Commons, and the Labour party, which has not yet officially changed its name to New Labour, though you might think it had if you listen to Blair and his ministers. Something similar was true of Margaret Thatcher, whom Blair admires, when she was at the peak of her popularity.

But Thatcher believed in division and exclusion, openly regarding not only the left in the nation but much of the center right as her bitter enemies; as a result, she provoked hatred as well as devotion. Blair, on the other hand, wants to include everyone in the New Labour project, such as middle-class home owners who usually vote Conservative and businessmen who always do, and is making his pitch accordingly. He knows perfectly well that a prime minister, however dictatorial his impulses, can always be removed by the voters, as happened to John Major, and occasionally by his colleagues, as happened to Margaret Thatcher. Many of Blair's political aims remain obscure but one is already very clear: to win a second full four- or five-year term of office for Labour, something which has never happened in its occasional periods in government.

I found Blair fascinating and puzzling before the election, and do even more so now that he is in office and so evidently enjoying the exercise of power. He has made many changes, not all of them agreeable, even if they are claimed to be necessary; he has turned the Labour party, once an engagingly ramshackle structure that sometimes managed to win an election, into a super-efficient machine manned by sharp-suited spin doctors and image burnishers. A columnist has complained of the "broad streak of silliness" evident in Blair's liking for the presence of pop stars and media personalities on official occasions (though one has heard less of that lately). More worrying is his naive regard for prominent businessmen, and particularly the egregious Rupert Murdoch. He wants to keep the support of Murdoch's newspapers, which he currently has in a tenuous way, but if Britain enters the European Monetary Union (EMU), which looks likely in the end, they will turn against him.

Blair has made many things happen. Scotland and Wales have voted for devolved government, and there is a firm commitment to reforming the House of Lords and removing the hereditary element, a notorious anon anomaly in a modern democracy. Above all, there is the settlement in Northern Ireland, an extraordinary achievement, which I never expected to see (though its future is still precarious, hanging on the question of decommissioning weapons, which will involve the IRA in handing over a few guns, at least). Though the government is maintaining the Tories' strict fiscal policy, more money has been found for health and education, though not nearly enough, according to critics on the left and professionals in the field. Reform of the welfare system, like entry into the EMU, is going to involve Blair and his government in harder and more potentially unpopular decisions than he has so far had to make. And the difficulty will be all the greater if the tidal wave of global recession hits the economy.

Sooner or later, Blair will encounter real difficulty, of the harsh, character-building kind that he has so far been fortunate enough to avoid; I think it will be good for him. He can then expect serious criticism, which dictators can suppress but democratic politicians have to endure. He will hardly be worried by the official Conservative opposition, a demoralized and divided rump after their electoral disaster, under a youthful, balding leader, William Hague, a stopgap figure whom no one expects to see as prime minister. Blair's real opponents are all on the left, and some of them were recently voted into the party leadership, as a token warning that Blair cannot have everything his own way. Then there is the senior, respected figure of Roy Hattersley, a sometime Labour minister who is now a prolific journalist and political commentator. Hattersley represents old Labour, still an active force despite the efforts of the Blairistas, which believes that a left-wing party should aim at the redistribution of wealth and be prepared to tax and spend in order to achieve it. Farther out are the pure old-time Socialists who believe that the market economy should not be regulated, as New Labour wants, but abolished in favor of a better and fairer system. They are utopians, but the party would be poorer without any trace of a utopian vision. Even Blair seemed to hint as much in his recent impressive speech to the party conference, which was charged with communitarian rhetoric about the need to say "we" rather than "me."

In totalitarian societies there are portraits of the leader in every home. Sometimes Blair seems always to be on the television screen; but one can turn it off, which is a concrete sign of a better system. If pressed, I would say that I admire him, notwithstanding the intermittent daftness and emptiness in his pronouncements, and still give him the benefit of the doubt about his aims and ideals for the country, vague though these are. I do not, however, trust him; not for any defects of personality, but because power corrupts and it doesn't do to trust politicians. As Chesterton remarked, one must learn to love the world without trusting it. I won't actually love Blair, but I will probably vote for him again.

Bernard Bergonzi writes frequently for Commonweal from England.