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Finding reverse gear

8 December 2003

At the onset of hubris, can schadenfreude be far behind? But it's not too late for Tony Blair to acknowledge that his Labour critics have a point of view, too.

Margaret Thatcher's most celebrated utterance, "The lady's not for turning", was a pun on the title of a play from the 1940s by Christopher Fry. Credit for this must go to her literary speech-writer Ronald Millar, for whom it was probably rather a private joke. It must be questionable how many in her audience recognised the reference, if she did herself. Even so, it was a great line, delivered with unwavering conviction. No wonder they loved it.

Twenty-three years later, Tony Blair's version of the same theme was decidedly more workaday: "I've not got a reverse gear." This is the rhetoric of Mondeo man; a banal, mechanical metaphor possibly well suited to a banal, mechanical age of targets and league table and political bean-counting. But hang on a minute! Surely Mondeo man knows a thing or two about second hand cars. Would he buy one that wouldn't go into reverse? What would happen if he took a wrong direction and found himself up a dead end? No, a car without reverse sounds much more the sort of thing that has just been stolen by a fifteen-year-old and is careering up the street at thirty-five mph in second gear screaming like crazy and scattering the wing mirrors of parked cars like confetti. Whether or not it has reverse gear is irrelevant, because the youth has no idea how to engage it. The functioning of the brake is a little obscure to him, too.

The difference between Thatcher and Blair goes deeper than the cut of their metaphors. Thatcher was less than two years into her administration. Her refusal to compromise may have been her undoing in the end, but there aren't many parliamentary parties that will throw out an election winning leader after eighteen months just because the water has got rather choppy. Blair has been in office for six years and for most of that time has been spending liberally in the goodwill department. What the Falklands War did for Thatcher in the middle of her time has just been done to Blair in Iraq, only in reverse.

The other big difference is that Thatcher used her iron image as a cover for compromise when the politics required it. The fact that she lost it over the poll tax merely illustrated that it was time to go. Despite appearances, she never really had Blair's messianic edge, that none-too-complicated tinge of Christian self-belief that he shares with George W Bush and which causes him to confront his opponents with the same attitude of "bring 'em on". When Blair is frustrated - and possibly the only person to have frustrated him completely is Gordon Brown - it sharpens his appetite for the fight where the opposition is not as formidable. If the Treasury is impregnable, the House of Lords is decidedly less so, and the Parliamentary Labour Party not impregnable at all.

Blair did not like to compromise with the Lords over foundation hospitals and he does not at all intend to do so with his own people over university top-up fees. When it was announced that the vote on this issue was to be postponed to late January, sane people questioned the wisdom of timetabling it for just after the publication of the Hutton Report. But for true believers the timing was not inadvertent at all. Labour backbenchers, they argued, would rally behind their leader in the wake of Hutton and would not seek to defeat the government in a vote at this moment of need.

That's all very well, but the old adage about living by the sword should not be forgotten. Whether or not Blair survives Hutton and the top-up fees, his propensity for conviction over compromise will get him in the end. And then there will have to be a lengthy un-picking of the pieces before the whole cycle begins all over again. And for what? For one part of one of forty different options that the government considered for university funding.

It was understandable that a prime minister would put his job on the line for a war that he believed in. But the fact that Tony Blair has now done so for an obscure health service reform that almost nobody understands and is about to do so for the principle of variable top-up fees for universities suggests that there is something going on that runs deeper than the mere policies themselves. Something to do with a principle that Blair holds dear, a principle rooted in the triumph of excellence over mediocrity that requires a competitive framework that is at odds with the egalitarian principles of many of his MPs. In the competition between these two principles it is perhaps unsurprising that the one that favours competition has prospered. The modernising, New Labour agenda has cut a swathe through Labour's traditional values, starting with clause 4 and still going strong, and it has done so on the pretext of reinterpreting those values for the modern age.

There is no doubt that the exercise has been successful in many ways. It made its way by virtue of its success, which was based on the idea that the means of achieving something mattered a great deal less that the thing itself. Thus, if private money meant a better health service for all, what did it matter if the owners of the money were getting a handsome return on their investment? A better health service for all was, surely, a core Labour objective.

The problem, as always with this sort of approach, is who really benefits? The Blair philosophy of public services is based on establishing a benchmark of excellence and trying to get every institution to pull itself up to that level. It reflects directly, therefore, the widening of the gap between rich and poor that has dogged British society for the past twenty years and more. Unshackle those with the potential to prosper, the theory goes, and the fruit of their success will trickle down to the less successful. If everyone ends up better off, the fact that those at the top are relatively more better off than the others doesn't matter at all.

The "creeping privatisation" of public services is not really the point in this context. The fact that private corporations and their executives do well is insignificant compared to the society-wide entrenchment of advantage that is one of he side-effects of the Blairite pursuit of excellence. Whether in schools, hospitals or universities, not every institution can reasonably aspire to be the most successful. You cannot have the best consultants, teachers or research departments everywhere at once. If you create centres of excellence, the best people naturally gravitate towards them, which drains the pool of talent available to the rest.

The question then becomes one of access. Provided the best establishments are genuinely accessible to all, the risk of ending up with a two tier society of excellence and also-rans is reduced. Part of this is social mobility, which allows people to cross between the tiers on the basis of ability. But the other, more potent part, is that one of the effects of genuine openness to institutions of excellence is that the successful, well-off and articulate middle classes will sometimes have to settle for second best. That, alone, ensures that the interests of the second tier are protected.

The row about variable top-up fees is primarily on this question of access. The assumption of the critics is that less well-off families will settle for cheaper courses and colleges, and this will institutionalise two tier standards. Underlying this practical consideration is the appreciation that access is not, as ideally it should be, something that is given, but is something that generally has to be demanded. The people who are most effective at demanding are rarely the ones with the greatest need.

Trickle down only works if (1) there are holes in the floor and (2) someone is tipping something worth having onto the floor in bucket loads. The other approach is to put the goodies on the floor below in the first place. The logic here is to prioritise the worst performing institutions and give them the money that they need to improve. That puts them on the tails of the ones doing better, which then have to run harder too. In theory the whole enterprise moves forward, since the resources always go first to whoever is the furthest behind.

This top-down bottom-up debate goes to the heart of the New Labour project. As a top-downer to his fingertips Mr Blair is taking a determined view. The key question is whether the project has become so ideologically blinkered that it no longer knows that there is another viewpoint, or whether there is room for a constructive compromise. If there is no such room, that determination could come to look like hubris. Then, when the downfall follows, the schadenfreude may be hard to contain.