We Are the Masters Now

The British honours system is a corrupt farce, but it serves to indicate who the establishment values, and also who it thinks that the public should admire. The New Year's list has provided a predictable mix of undistinguished entertainers, City financiers, obscure civil servants and military brass, but the award that has proved the most divisive - and therefore the most interesting - is the knighthood for Tony Blair. This is a routine award for former Prime Ministers, and will almost certainly be upgraded to a peerage in time, but it has proved contentious because Blair has so far refused to quit the public stage. He remains a political actor, albeit one unconstrained by an electoral mandate, and he also remains unrepentant over his record and in particular the disaster of Iraq. This tweet caught my eye because of the "You shag one sheep ..." joke angle, but it also occured to me that it neatly encapsulates the problem with Blair: that Iraq has come to dominate our judgement to such an extent that it either obscures his true role in British history or it leads his defenders to downplay the severity of that particular "bad decision" and its ramifications.

The judgement of history is already in and it pretty much echoes Margaret Thatcher's claim that Blair, and New Labour more generally, was her greatest achievement, a bon mot that prompted him to frankly admit that he built upon her legacy (while still implausibly claiming to be "of the left"). In other words, he consolidated the systematic gains that she made for capital and was happy to continue her policy of restraining organised labour. That he ameliorated many of her government's most socially-regressive policies, for example introducing the minimum wage and investing in the NHS and education, isn't in doubt, but it's also indisputable that the secular trends of growing inequality, household indebtedness and precarious employment that started under the Conservatives continued throughout the New Labour years. Perhaps the most striking example of Blair's curation of Thatcher's legacy was in housing: the failure to stop council house sales, the under-investment in new social provision, and the determination to keep private asset prices appreciating beyond inflation. 

This means that future historians are likely to frame Blair's time in Number 10 in terms of continuity rather than change, despite the hyperactive commitment to social regulation and league tables (in many cases a distraction from actual change). It was a filling-out and entrenchment of the neoliberal state after the decimation of British industry and the introduction of new public management to public services in the 1980s and early 1990s. Historians will also note that the failures of New Labour were often the result of Thatcher-era time-bombs that Blair chose not to defuse, notably City deregulation, NHS marketisation and the Private Finance Initiative. While some cast Iraq as an unforced error, it can be argued that this was also a legacy of the Thatcher years, specifically her decision to cleave unconditionally to the US after the Falklands War and the invasion of Grenada (which she had privately opposed). Even the triumph of the Good Friday Agreement was the product of the spadework laid by John Major. Again, more continuity than change.

The one area where Blair sought to diverge from Thatcher (or at least her views in later years) was over the European Union, but he was never prepared to risk real political capital in doing so, hence monetary union bit the dust while the Human Rights Act, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, was sold as "taking back control". Europe is emblematic of the many opportunities that Blair passed up. Had he decided to proselytise for closer integration, rather than marginalising the issue to avoid antagonising the eurosceptic press, he might plausibly have shifted the dial in public support sufficiently to have produced a different outcome in 2016. Even if you think that counterfactual unlikely, there is no question that Blair did not make the most of the decade-long window of opportunity after 1997 to detoxify the Maastricht Treaty. Likewise, his half-hearted approach to devolution both fuelled the independence movements in Scotland and Wales and gave rise to resentment in England, which was probably another element in the 2016 mix.

Iraq didn't just reveal the UK to be a paper tiger in geopolitical and military terms. The debacle of Suez in 1956 had already done that, and the "close run thing" of the Falklands War confirmed it, despite the revived jingoism. Its more profound effect was to confirm the popular suspicion that the government was not merely economical with the actualité, but that it thought nothing of deliberately lying to get its way and regarded the public as gullible fools. Together with the decline in political engagement that New Labour oversaw, and the evidence of the incompetence and venality of the financial sector in 2008, this produced an abiding cynicism about the political class and the wider establishment that first bubbled to the surface with the 2009 expenses scandal and would eventually inform the 2016 EU referendum. While Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell have provided caricatures of New Labour's corruption, they are just the supporting cast. Despite the best efforts of friendly journalists, the popular impression of Blair is that he is a narcissist, possibly a sociopath, who thinks honesty is for little people. In other words, he is an aristo and was long before a title was ever considered.

The clues for this were evident as soon as he took office. Blair single-handedly headed-off the republican upsurge after the death of the Princess of Wales in 1997, and has been more than happy to associate with members of the Windsor clan even since. For all his claims to youthful dynamism and progress, he has consistently been a staunch defender of the British establishment, something that has become ever more obvious since he left office to become a freelance defender of establishments from the West Bank to Kazakhstan. That the Queen feels a degree of gratitude towards Blair is made clear by his knighthood being in the Order of the Garter, which is nominally in her exclusive gift rather than an appointment sanctioned by the current Prime Minister. We can dismiss the more lurid conspiracy theories about Blair going out to bat for Prince Andrew. This is clearly an acknowledgment of his work in preserving the firm, not a quid pro quo for services rendered to an individual. At a time when Labour is currently led by a knight of the realm dedicated to extirpating the left, the message is clear: the establishment no longer fears the judgement of the people.