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Trust
Yorkshire Post - 23
April 2007
Tony Blair has lost the trust of the British people!
This proposition has become a Tabloid Truth - the stock-in-trade of political commentators as the local elections and elections to the Scottish Parliament looks set to deliver a revengeful valediction to the Blair era.
Before we buy into it we need to be sure what we mean by “trust” and, indeed, what we mean by the British people.
David Miliband, the resolute non-candidate for the Labour leadership, recently opined: “Politics requires many virtues- organisation, ideas, resolution, luck. But chief among them is the hardest to define: that elusive sense of being in tune with the times.”
Tony Blair came into power in 1997 positively radiating the sense of being in tune with the times. He had ditched the baggage of socialist and invented “New Labour.” His party embraced Conservative spending plans in order to reassure Middle England that there was no danger of a tax-and-spend old style Labour administration. He looked young, fresh, uncorrupted. He had an extraordinary power of persuasion and an ability to empathise with people.
This came together in his reaction to the death of Princess Diana. His tribute to the “people’s princess” caught the popular mood to the tee.
So what has gone wrong and for whom? Not everyone in the Labour movement, of course, digested New Labour. In Scotland and in the North of England in particular the mind-set of looking to the state for succour was deeply entrenched. The appeal of the Scottish Nationalist Party and the socialist rump in Scotland is in part based on the values of old Labour.
The public sector workforce also supplies another disaffected part of the electorate. The most frequent complaint even among people who acknowledge the huge funding increases directed to the NHS is about constant re-organisation. The “modernisation” of public services – which is shorthand for the replacement of the state monopoly in providing public services by arrangements in which the private sector plays a growing part, whether in health of education – has alienated unions and a significant section of Labour MPs. The vote on foundation hospitals took Blair to within a whisker of a Commons defeat.
Trouble in the Commons communicates itself the electorate as a government under challenge.
And how about the Middle England of legend, the Tory core vote ruthlessly and expertly poached by the Labour party in 1997, sticking with it in 2001, and splitting between uneasy loyalty, erosion to the Liberal Democrats and returning to the Tories in 2005? Middle England is, of course, a huge beneficiary of the Welfare State. But it wants its welfare benefits without tax-and-spend excesses. University tuition fees; bussing of pupils to equalise admissions to good schools; above all, the increasing pressure of taxes from Council Tax to national insurance, have eroded the party’s standing with this key electorate. In 2001 the Tories won the most votes in England, piling them up (not always usefully) in the South-East, East and South-West.
Yes, the economy has sustained a high level of growth and jobs and house price rises for home owners (whose children, of course, would like to be home-buyers) and, until recently, low inflation. But the charge of wasted investment in health and education is persistent and corrosive.
But the real blow to the Government has been the impression of simple incompetence. The succession of Home Office fiascos concerning prisoners and asylum seekers provide a daily headlines about a government which is not in control in areas like immigration and law and order where the electorate presents a huge soft under-belly of alarm. In a more minor way the problems in introducing tax credits for poor families and running farm payments heighten the impression of a government not on top of the job. To make matters worse the Government’s response to security issues has laid it open to the charge of riding rough-shed over civil liberties.
And then, of course, Iraq. It is a far cry from Blair’s triumphal appearance before the cheering crowds in Kosovo to the daily tally of terrorist attacks in Iraq. The belief that Blair misled the country over weapons of mass destruction and that he has turned himself into a lackey of the President of the US is the single biggest factor in destroying Blair’s unique freshness and integrity in the eyes of the country.
So do these issues aggregate to a destruction of trust? Yes, provided we acknowledge that Trust is shorthand for many different sorts of disaffection, some specific, some much more general. And the nation is not one primal political force – it is a mass of differing interests and outlooks. When sufficient of these come to the view that there is a better alternative then a Government’s time is up.
The times are no longer in tune with Tony Blair.
© Yorkshire Post
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