The listening Blair
The Week reports from Labour's conference in Brighton. Blair's big hurdle was to convince the press that he was 'listening', as criticism that his government was out of touch had accelerated during the petrol blockade. In the event, a mistake with the air-conditioning gave the picture editors all the evidence they needed that he was working to win back the public's confidence as Blair drenched his shirt in sweat: listening and glistening.
Blair's government is defined by its distance from a distinct social base - which is the condition under which Blair has created the room for manoeuvre in an apolitical age. The demand that Labour should 'listen' is itself an expression of the lowered expectations of government. Any notion that a radical party exists to advance people's interests and ambitions is forgotten. All we want, apparently, is to be 'listened to', irrespective of whether our views are acted upon.
According to the spin-doctors this was a party conference that reasserted that Labour was a 'party of values', such as 'solidarity' (but not 'socialism'), that were the 'irreducible core' of the Prime Minister's speech. In the event the listening was reduced to an acknowledgement that the Millennium Dome was not a success (an issue that only ever motivated the miserablist critics in the chattering classes), and that the 75 pence pension rise was probably an error.
The 'irreducible core' of the Prime Minister's speech proved to be fairly conservative. Blair's five 'hard choices' were for economic stability (no 'boom and bust'), for a government that 'helps people through change' (getting them into work with the 'new deal' and guaranteeing their minimum wage), for an investment in public services (principally education and the NHS), to 'build strong communities' and to govern in the world (in Kosovo and Sierra Leone).
The commitment to an increased £43 billion for public services in the Comprehensive Spending Review recommended the leader's speech to his more radical critics. But even this should be treated cautiously. In the main the money is directed less towards making real resources available to people, in favour of regulating their lives and behaviour. Britain's increased NHS spending has enlarged the health bureaucracy that regulates people's behaviour, monitoring diet, drinking and other habits - information that is made available to employers and insurance companies. The expansion of education has not increased people's job opportunities either, it has only delayed the average age at which people enter the jobs market, but increased the time spent under supervision by quasi-official college authorities. The growing caste of professionals associated with the job of regulating people's health and educational careers are the only true beneficiaries of the Chancellor's largesse.
Barely commented upon was the extensive raft of directly coercive measures Blair promised under the heading of 'building strong communities'. These included police powers to close pubs, ban drinking in public, impose curfews on young people up to the age of 16, on-the- spot fixed penalty crimes, a threat to offenders with a drug problem that they 'must get treatment or lose your liberty', and extension of the provisions for seizing offenders' assets, even where these are not got criminally. Blair also put victims of crime on a pedestal, the better to get tough on offenders. Victims will get more compensation money (effectively paying people to lay charges), be informed of offenders' release dates (with all the danger of revenge attacks), and present statements of the impact of the crime to be taken account of in sentencing. Victims are to get their own special ombudsman, as Labour turns back to the medieval vendetta as a model for criminal justice.
Pensioners revolt
The Labour leadership was reported to have suffered a revolt at the hands of delegates who supported a resolution tying pensions to earnings. Though Chancellor Gordon Brown let it be known that the resolution would be ignored the revolt was more artificial than at first appeared. By raising the two themes of core values, personified by the presence of old Labour stalwarts like Michael Foot in the limelight and a willingness to listen over pensions, the platform created a ready-made avenue of acceptable protest by the rank and file. Former Unison leader and pensioners campaigner Rodney Bickerstaffe even left a deliberate loophole in his motion (link pension to pay, or some other comparable arrangement) so that it would not offend the leadership. Bickerstaffe even made it clear that he would drop the motion if asked, but was overruled by the Trade Union Congress leader John Edmund, who, realising that the presses were ready for a revolt, saw the chance for a headline. The intervention of the ninety-one year old conference-darling Barbara Castle ensured the revolt succeeded. But the truth is that the leadership had established the authority of the argument without there ever being a movement of any weight demanding the restoration of the pension-pay link.
Saint Mandela
The Labour delegates high-point was the blessing conferred by President Mandela, who promised them immortality for their role in opposing Apartheid. The involvement of the party's rank-and-file in such radical activism is mostly a distant memory, but the conference organisers saw the emotional charge of a blessing from the one political leader with any standing in the world today. Overplaying their hand, they played Gabrielle's video of her Mandela song for nearly as long as the speech itself. Elsewhere leader Blair saw good his military campaign in Sierra Leone, saying that troops were 'standing up for Britain' in Sierra Leone. 'And I say to Milosevic, Go! Your country and the world has suffered enough,' - a reference, presumably to the aerial bombardment of Serbia by British forces.
-- James Heartfield
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