Not entirely.
Blair and New Labour have been extremely efficient at government as total social management. They have avoided provoking any constituencies. Their social base has been the state intelligentsia who had to manage a more flexible market-orientated model of not-for-profit enterprises under the years of Thatcherism.
The fact that the opposition to Labour is coming from someone like Ken Livingstone who has denounced international capital in the capital of the oldest imperialist country in the world, is a mark of how politics have shifted underneath Labour's consensus. The Conservative candidate actually believed in the repeal of a law limiting discussion of homosexuality in schools.
The foremost Labour councillor who has just been elected to the assembly, Trevor Philips, is black and a very able New Labour man. He has been associated with the project of the new London Assembly for some time. It will be a new experience for England in that it has proportional representation. It will require deals and negotiation. Importantly it has given 3 seats to Green candidates, with whom Livingstone is likely to ally. There will be some radical socially responsible measures in London in the coming years, despite the fact that Livingstone's powers are very small.
London financial circles have decided to make a play of courting Ken today, and appealing to his reasonableness.
In fact the assembly overall with 9 New Labour members and 4 Liberal Democrats will be very much more New Labour type of consensual politics. The Mayor has little power, and the assembly, which also has little power, will constrain it.
The defeat of the Tory candidate in a by election in a strong Tory consituency is a signal of how tactical voters have become.
The success of New Labour in governing efficiently for middle England is evidenced in the lack of enthusiasm for New Labour. The core Conservative voters are more dogged about voting, but the party is having to shift its stance to little Englanderism with prejudice against migrants and the Euro, both of which England needs for economic reasons.
The Clinton Blair model of total social management (including the management of spin) has been so successful that it will be impossible for the right to undo these gains even if it wins a future election.
If you believe in the ice-cream vendors on the beach theory of the bourgeois two party system, you have to pay more attention to the dimensions of the beach than the skirmishing between the two vendors. New Labour has shifted the beach to a more transparent and more democratic form of opportunist politics.
All this is not a purely subjective achievement. It is a function of changes in the means of production, not least computerisation. The system of proportional representation that became technically possible (apart from a few hitches) yesterday means that the radical analysis of bourgeois democracy can and should change. Tactical voting in a proportional scenario permits a calculation about how to use votes tactically, without any implication of idolatorous devotion to any one bourgeois party. If the Greens could get three seats yesterday, a sustained radical left campaign could get at least one seat.
The evenly balanced assembly result in London yesterday may produce a renewed sense of fire in election campaigns and a somewhat higher turnout at the general election that these figures would suggest. Blair will have to fight for it, but is still odds on to get a second term. New Labour was designed to cope with the consitutional reforms that these elections have taken a step further forward.
Chris Burford
London