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Knowing when to quit

2 August 2004

In 1997 the British people wanted a new politics, but the failed gestures of the intervening seven years have brought them back to precisely the disillusioned state from which they sought to escape at that time.

It was argued here, a fortnight ago, that the artificially adversarial nature of two-party politics created by the first-past-the-post electoral system does not reflect society, which is neither bi-polar nor adversarial, but essentially co-operative in nature. The adversarial system is sustained by the desire of both main political parties to gain and exercise uninhibited power.

But although parties are the vehicles travelling the road towards power, it is not the parties themselves that wield it. The vehicles convey the political leadership, which, having reached their destination, leave the conveyance in the garage while taking possession of the smart mansion for themselves. So ministers wield power while their party foot soldiers, chafing at their own impotence, have nothing to do but to file through the lobbies to keep their leaders in office. This is frustrating for the foot-soldiers, while giving ministers - and particularly prime ministers - an inflated sense of status and invulnerability.

Because of this, a British prime minister with a healthy majority is a type of elected dictator. He or she knows this, and plays upon the responsibility to good effect. The constant refrain of Tony Blair as he has sought to defend himself against criticism of his policy in relation to Iraq has been the almost plaintive reminder that he was the one in the hot seat - the one who had to use his judgement and make the call. Right or wrong, he had no choice: he had to decide.

But did he? The question turns on the importance of decisions in the evolution of events. To listen to the prime minister defending his decision to go to war with Iraq one might imagine that he had found himself at a fork in the road, with one way signposted to chemical, biological and nuclear terrorism and the other to freedom, liberal democracy and the rule of law. After the events of September 2001 Mr Blair clearly felt that he had a choice, a right/wrong decision to make of precisely this nature. The choice he made was to back America, his decision to do so reflecting the polarisation of those times in endorsing, by implication, President Bush's "Those who are not with us are against us".

For a politician this is all part of the game. To pitch the rhetoric towards leadership and decisiveness, to associate oneself with the policy most likely to bring the appearance of authority and success, is good for a politician’s reputation and his hold on power. But the true test of a politician is the ability to go beyond the rhetorical gesture into effective management of the governmental issues that affect people’s lives.

For government, management is the administration of the state, the machinery of government, the what-makes-it-happen; it engages millions of people as consumers and administrators of government activity. It needs stable conditions to function effectively, making changes only incrementally and responding to challenges in an evolutionary way. For a citizen, or consumer of government, the experience of it rarely changes overnight. When change happens it is slow, disconnected and often only to be recognised some time after the event. Compare this with the blizzard of policy statements, restructurings, targets, innovations and reviews that pour out of the political side of government every week of the parliamentary year and it can easily be seen that the ambition of politicians in government and the capacity of the administrative machine to make sense of them are not easily reconciled.

It is clear that many more things are "decided" or initiated by politicians than are ever achieved. So the question as to whether the prime minister did need to make a policy decision in relation to Iraq by committing himself to the U.S. government's desire for "regime change" in that country is a real one. Was the aftermath of 9/11 the moment for a "big decision" or would a series of small, incremental decisions have served both Britain and the Middle East better? To put it another way, was the prime minister right to see himself as a custodian of geo-political destiny, or would a closer management of the detailed picture relating to international terrorism and Iraq's weapons programmes have been a more useful and effective rôle.

For prime minister and president merely to decide that war against Iraq would be a good thing did not make it so. But after the prime minister took the decision in 2002 to join in the overthrow of the Iraqi government every subsequent action and decision had to be tailored to that object, whether it fitted or not. One big, strategic decision that turned out to be wrong took away his freedom to decide in many smaller matters. He would have done better to emulate Harold Wilson's approach to the Vietnam War, which was to keep his options open until the situation became clearer. When the situation became clear in Vietnam it was evident that there was nothing to be gained from Britain taking part in the adventure.

Were these Wilsonian wiles a "cop-out" in the terms of the Blairite political lexicon? Only if it could feasibly be argued that British participation in that war would have left to a different - and better - outcome. Such an argument would be difficult to sustain, and yet Blair’s determination to decide and dictate is undimmed with, on the domestic front, a policy blizzard of five year plans for essential services that are calculated to create the impression of semi-permanent Blairite revolution - that the prime minister is a fixture at number 10 until the happy day arrives when everything is finally sorted, and that his departure before the arrival of this state of nirvana would unravel all the progress that had been made up to that point.

For Blair, this has become an object of faith, justifying an important feature of his political philosophy, which is the importance of staying in power. Like all benign dictators he sees this in pure and selfless terms, believing it to be a service to the country that he carry on. In reality, however, he has attached so much importance to the decisive gestures of politics that he has failed to get much done in the meantime. It has been justly noted that most of the lasting achievements of the Labour government since 1997 have been in the redistributive fiscal and investment policies of the Treasury. This department is superintended by Gordon Brown as a semi-independent fiefdom, and this master of micro-detail has fully grasped the incremental principle of doing good by stealth and in unremarkable stages. So effectively has he set a ball rolling that he is no longer indispensable to its continuing momentum. That is his lasting achievement, and when he is gone from public life his monument will be in the alleviation of poverty and the improved public services that no successor government will wish to undo.

By contrast, Mr Blair's belief in his own indispensability has much to do with his need for a big political achievement that may never happen. By neglecting incrementalism he has presided over the biggest missed opportunity in British politics there has possibly ever been. In 1997 the British people wanted a new politics, but the failed gestures of the intervening seven years have brought them back to precisely the disillusioned state from which they sought to escape at that time. It is Blair’s good fortune that there is now no opposition to displace him, but that does not make him worth keeping. He has made himself part of the problem, but like a losing gambler he holds on for the next throw. It is time to quit the game, and in some part of him he knows it. But just because he knows it, that doesn’t mean to say that he will...