1997 And All That

In the tenth anniversary year of the 1997 Election, it is high time to get over Tony Blair. He has only ever been the central character in an Ealing comedy about a thick but personable minor toff. Our hero is wandering aimlessly on the fringes of London "society" when he unexpectedly falls for the left-wing girl at work.

In order to impress her, he gets involved in the Labour Party. Then, over 20 years, a series of accidents makes him Prime Minister. However, his political interests do not develop in any way at all, not even during the further 10 years of his Premiership. Hilarious yet poignant stuff from the golden age of British cinema.

To be serious, after the death of John Smith, those who seized control of the Labour Party erased the fact that the combined Labour and SDP votes had been larger than the Conservative vote both in 1983 and in 1987. Such people still deny outright that the opinion poll rating that was the 1997 result had not varied since Golden Wednesday, 16th September 1992. There were swings of 1997 proportions in the European Elections just after John Smith’s death, i.e., under the leadership of Margaret Beckett.

But do not try and tell that to these people, who include David Cameron and those around him. Several of them, including Cameron himself, even manage to hold degrees in Politics while knowing little, and caring absolutely nothing, about it. So, instead of the verifiable facts above, they would have us believe that the 1997 "victory" was all the work of their own archetype of those who did best, ostensibly, out of both the 1960s and the 1980s.

They are also insistent that General Elections are won and lost in the South East. The South East is the least conservative part of the country. And it is therefore the part with the highest level of support for the post-Thatcher Conservative Party. If General Elections really were won and lost there, then there would currently be a Conservative Government with a large majority. In fact, in the days when that party used to win Elections, it did so by winning considerable numbers of seats in Scotland, Wales, the North and the Midlands. These are all much more conservative places than the South East.

By losing first many and then most of those seats, the Conservative Party first nearly and then actually lost power in 1992 and 1997 respectively. In 1992, only the most obsessive political anorak had ever even heard of Tony Blair. And that was still the case on Golden Wednesday, when the Conservative defeat, and thus the Labour "victory" by default, became a done deal.
Furthermore, the Conservatives’ failure to regain power has consisted precisely in its failure to regain those Scottish, Welsh, Northern and Midland seats. By contrast, the Labour gains in the South East in 1997 were just a bonus, and the loss of most of them in 2005 has made no real difference. Indeed, only in 2005 did Blair finally influence a General Election result in any way whatever. Specifically, he lost Labour one hundred seats that any other Labour Leader would have saved. Thus he moved from being a mere irrelevance to being a positive liability.
However, the Conservatives, deprived of any significant parliamentary link with the areas that really matter electorally, entirely failed to register this. Instead, they installed as Leader a Blair clone, because he played well in the South East, and in polls with the 34% of determined non-voters dishonestly factored out.

What do those 34%, and the thoroughly disgruntled Conservative and Labour core voters who remain (for now) actually believe? They believe in national self-government, the only basis for international co-operation, and including the United Kingdom as greater than the sum of its parts. They believe in local variation, historical consciousness, and family life. They believe in agriculture, manufacturing, and small business. They believe in close-knit communities, law and order, and civil liberties. They believe in academic standards, all forms of art, and mass political participation within a constitutional framework. In short, they are conservative.

Therefore, they cannot be in favour of "free" market capitalism, which corrodes to nought all these good things and more. Rather, they see the need for the universal Welfare State (including farm subsidies), and for the strong statutory and other (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government. In a word, Socialism.

Since they rightly oppose the unregulated movement of labour, they rightly also oppose the unregulated movement of goods, services and capital. And vice versa. Since they rightly oppose the decadent social libertinism deriving from the 1960s, they rightly also oppose its logically inevitable, and not unwitting, development into the decadent economic libertinism deriving from the 1980s. And vice versa.

And since they rightly oppose the erosion of self-government and cultural distinctiveness by the European Union, they rightly also oppose that erosion by American hegemony and global capital, closely connected as all these three are. And vice versa.

Socialism is the only means of defending the conservative values against capitalism. After all, what other means are there? Correspondingly, those values provide the only grounds for needing or wanting those Socialist means. After all, what other grounds are there? If you have conservative values, then you can only want Socialism, even if you will not yet own the S-Word. Likewise, if you want Socialism, then you can only have conservative values, even if you will not yet own the c-word.

The British electorate at large strongly supports those means and passionately shares those values. A new political party in that vein could take at least a third of the vote, and probably much more. So what are you waiting for? But first of all, we all need to get over Tony Blair.