Bournemouth, England
Britain’s Labour party gathered last week for its annual conference at a small town on the English Channel. A few short miles from continental Europe. Which is where British prime minister Tony Blair sees his country’s future.
Halfway through what he hopes will be the first of many terms in office, Blair has finally begun to define his “Third Way,” the path down which he (like Bill Clinton) claims to be taking his nation. We Americans had better pay attention, for the foreign policy part of this self-styled “radical” politics will affect the conduct of our foreign policy in a profound way.
It has been a staple of our foreign policy that we can count on the Brits to be at our side in times of crisis, lending such support as a nation of Britain’s size can be expected to give. Indeed, ever since its empire disappeared and its resources shriveled, Britain has ambitiously aimed to “punch above its weight” in the world. And it has done just that, providing more help to America than we had any reason to expect from a small nation. During the Cold War, Clement Attlee’s Labour government stood firm against Russian bullying; in the Gulf War, Britain was the one European nation to commit significant resources; in Kosovo it was the Brits who stood with us while most of Europe dithered; in the U.N., it is Britain that fights alongside America to hold back French appeasement of Saddam Hussein.
All that may be about to change. Britain’s wildly popular prime minister says that his country’s “destiny is with Europe.” No longer must it be Britain’s role to serve as a direct ally of America, and to hell with the French and the Germans if they won’t go along. Henceforth, the United Kingdom will become a “bridge” between Europe and America.
A Britain seeking to act as such a bridge will have to give equal weight to the wishes of the forces on both sides, rather than unambiguous support to one or the other. Add to that Blair’s desire to forge a common defense policy with the French, and you have — from America’s point of view — a lost ally. A nation that under Margaret Thatcher allowed us to use bases in Britain to launch an attack against Qaddafi’s terrorist Libya will, under Blair, seek French agreement before proffering such assistance. A nation that once courageously held off Hitler until America could get its act together, will now be in bed with the nation that surrendered to the German dictator even though it had more troops in the field than he did. France, to be blunt, has long had as its principal foreign policy goal the containment of American culture and power. The offspring of the Franco-U.K. mating is unlikely to be as reliably pro-American as was pre-Blair Britain.
In Blair’s defense one might point out that America has not exactly proved a rock on which Britain can realistically construct its own foreign policy. Faced with the resistance of what can hardly be termed a modern fighting force, America fled Somalia; in Kosovo, Blair was introduced to Bill Clinton’s no-casualty notion of warfare; and the prime minister cannot help noticing that when Australia, which risked the lives of its soldiers alongside America in five wars in this century, asked for American help in East Timor, Clinton hesitated — and then promised a derisory 200 troops, and those for logistical support only.
So much for the foreign policy of Third Way Britain. Its domestic aspects were also made clearer by Blair to careful listeners at Bournemouth. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Bill Clinton, were he capable of embarrassment, would be blushing.
Start with Blair’s stated primary objective: reelection. With a general election still as much as three years away, Blair announced that his radical goals for Britain cannot be achieved in one term. Or indeed in two. In order to serve his nation and to help his party achieve its goals, he must concentrate on being returned to office for a second full term, something no Labour prime minister has ever achieved. So the perpetual campaign has come to Britain, an American import that many political analysts feel Britain would have done well to leave in its country of origin.
Now consider what Blair has taken from Hillary Clinton (an idol of Labour’s rank-and-file, if my unscientific sample is to be credited). The goal of all public policy must be to improve the lot of children. Not the traditional family, although Blair’s own is probably among the most admirably traditional in Britain — scrubbed children seen off to school by a loving mother, who returns from a hard day at the office to oversee their homework, with weekends devoted to games with father. No, the prime minister’s sympathy is reserved for the child of a single mother, a child born in poverty with no knowledge of its father.
It is to such a “family” that the bulk of the nation’s resources must be devoted. Never mind that such a policy has proved self-defeating in the United States. Or that directing resources to such “families” in Britain has only made its illegitimacy rate the highest in Europe. Or that, as Blair well knows, encouraging the formation of such families, which is what open-handed public assistance and moral legitimization by government combine to do, eventually boosts truancy, delinquency, crime, and poverty rates.
Add to all of this a deep belief in equality. The prime minister is at his best and most persuasive when he attacks the class system that has denied opportunity to those with the wrong accents or the wrong parents. Until Margaret Thatcher came along, a cockney accent or a Jewish name was likely to mean exclusion from many of the opportunities reserved for their betters, hyphenated names and titles preferred. Blair would like to tear down the remaining barriers to equal opportunity. Although he told his followers that, for him at least, “the class war is over,” he nevertheless relied on its language: “People are born with talent, yet everywhere it is in chains”; “a spectre haunts the world: technological revolution” that will further deprive the under-educated of an opportunity to advance.
Good stuff. But it is a quick and easy leap from this beguiling radical idealism into a crude egalitarianism that expects government to produce equal results, not just equal opportunity. Perhaps a conference of delegates who are not really certain that this smooth, well-educated politician is at one with a party that has its roots in the mines and factories of yesterday’s Britain is not the place for declaring that, having made opportunity more available to all, the government should rest. Or perhaps Blair believes that equality of opportunity will produce equality of results. Whatever . . . as a former Republican presidential candidate famously said. The fact is that Blair drew his loudest applause when he reminded his audience that he had eliminated what was known as the assisted places scheme, which financed a private-school education for gifted but poor children — a form of “elitism” that the Labour party has long found a thumb in the eye of its belief that all children are created equal or, if not, should at least end up equal in income.
Well, maybe not the loudest applause. That probably came when Blair promised a moral crusade aimed at “the salvation” of his country. This would involve a full-scale assault on “this libertarian nonsense masquerading as freedom.” Drug dealers and muggers are to be swept from the streets. The DNA of all offenders is to be kept on file and evidence from crime scenes matched against it. Indeed, immediately before Blair’s speech one of his top ministers told me that he has been set the task of profiling — yes, profiling — those who might commit a crime, so that they can be incarcerated before they have an opportunity to strike. As for the civil libertarians who worry about these measures, Blair reminded them that the pensioner has a civil liberty to stroll home of a summer evening, and the parent a civil liberty to drop a child off at school without fear that he or she will fall into the clutches of a drug dealer.
Meantime, the stroll toward this more equal and less crime-ridden Third Way Britain will be financed by economic growth. Chancellor Gordon Brown, who Concorded in to the party conference from the G-7 meeting in Washington, gave a rousing speech, promising the party faithful that his careful management of the nation’s finances would eventually produce “full employment,” the grail of the British Left since the end of World War II. Brown then rushed from the conference hall and Concorded back to Washington for further meetings with the world’s bankers and finance ministers before the applause died down.
The self-styled Iron Chancellor, Brown is given considerable credit for Britain’s strong economy. True, he did build on the foundations laid by Margaret Thatcher, who among other things broke the power of the trade unions to paralyze and bankrupt the country. But he did have the courage to grant semi-independence to the Bank of England, which seems to have gotten monetary policy about right. And he did resist pressure from the unreconstructed left wing of his party to tax and tax and tax and spend and spend and spend.
So the economy grows and the Treasury’s cup runneth over. Like Bill Clinton, Brown plans to spend this flood of tax revenues on health (free dentistry for all) and education (more opportunities for higher education and cut-price movie tickets for 16-18-year-olds who stay in school). A small tax cut for low-earners is probably in the cards, but only a small one: If the economy continues to grow, so, too, will public spending. This, in a country already suffering from a flight of innovators to America, where risk capital is more lightly taxed (the bleats of those who would lower capital gains taxes in this country to the contrary notwithstanding).
Still, there is no question that Brown has proved to Middle England — those voters who were once fearful that Labour’s profligacy would produce spiraling taxes, inflation, and ruin — that New Labour (Blair’s name for the party) is competent to manage the economy. That assurance, plus Blair’s sensational campaigning skills and disarray in the ranks of a Tory party that is trying to figure out which of its principles to scuttle in search of a softer, kinder image, might just give Labour the multiple terms that Blair says he needs to complete the “reform” and “modernization” of his country.
Which is more than Tony Blair’s people think is in store for the New Democrats across the Atlantic. One cabinet minister told me that he had just returned from a trip to America, during the course of which not a single Democrat in the White House or on the Hill told him that Al Gore could beat George W. Bush. Indeed, this Blairite has sent his boss a memo urging that discreet contacts be made “with Austin,” by way of preparing for a personal Blair-Bush relationship different from the frosty one that existed between Bush the elder and Blair. All of this, of course, if it can be done without antagonizing Clinton.
Irwin M.
