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<< back to Update Materials listUpdate 10: July 2006: Blair’s Crises
- 10.1: The Crisis of Standards
- 10.2: The Crisis of Delivery
- 10.3 The Crisis of Iraq
- 10.4: The Crisis of Succession
In previous briefings I have provided updates on a number of different topics at each briefing ‘round.’ But the first half of 2006 domestically in Britain has been so dominated by a single subject that on this occasion it seems appropriate to devote a single extended briefing to what I will call ‘Blair’s Crises’. In Update 2, on the outcome of the 2005 General Election, I highlighted how the election campaign, and outcome, had weakened the Prime Minister’s authority over his Party and Government. But few would have predicted how rapidly that authority could drain away. The dominant story of the last six months is the sustained crisis of the Blair Premiership. I deal with it under four linked headings.
New Labour came to office in 1997 promising the highest standards of conduct in public life, exploiting the atmosphere of sleaze that surrounded the final years of the Major Government. Almost from the beginning it failed to live up to these promises: both of the resignations of Peter Mandelson from the Cabinet, and one of David Blunkett’s two resignations, were due to questions marks about their judgement in business-related matters. But little of this actually implicated Mr Blair personally.
Only the single episode of the Ecclestone Affair drew him in. Bernie Ecclestone, head of Formula 1 racing, gave a secret donation of £1 million to the Labour Party in January 1997. After Labour’s landslide election victory Mr Blair had a confidential meeting with Formula 1 Chiefs, and the Government unveiled proposals to exempt the British Grand Prix, the main domestic Formula 1 event, from a ban on receiving sponsorship from tobacco companies. When a row erupted Labour hurriedly returned the money, and the episode led to a reform of disclosure rules for donations to parties. It is the effort to evade these disclosure rules which lies at the heart of the present standards crisis.
In order to avoid disclosure, over £14 million was received by Labour from a select group of business figures as ‘loans’, which were not disclosable. The Conservatives too had adopted the ‘loans’ tactic as a way of avoiding disclosure, but the issue has proved explosive for Labour for three reasons. First, senior figures in the Party other than Mr Blair – such as the Chancellor, and the Labour Party Treasurer – claim not to have known of the loans, and since their claims have not been contradicted by Number 10, this is probably true. The episode is thus closely connected to Mr Blair personally in a way earlier scandals were not. Second, four of those who lent money were nominated for peerages – a fact not disclosed at the time to the House of Lords Appointments Commission, which scrutinises nominations. Third, and most damagingly, these failures of disclosure have prompted a police investigation, still in progress, into allegations that honours have been offered in return for party donations and for financial support for key controversial Labour policies, notably the establishment of business-backed ‘city academies’ in the school system.
In 1997, on entering office, 34% of voters thought Mr Blair more honest than most other politicians. Even by 2004 that figure had fallen to 11%. But by May 2005 he was the most unpopular Labour Prime Minister of modern times: his poll approval rating was actually below that of Harold Wilson in the aftermath of the humiliating devaluation of sterling in 1967.More corrosively, the protection from the failings of those around him provided to Mr Blair by his reputation for honesty had worn away. Episodes which earlier in the life of the New Labour might have been successfully subjected to damage limitation were now contributing to an atmosphere which echoed the dying days of the Major Administration: they included the strange affair of the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, who publicly separated from her husband following revelations about his complicated mortgage arrangements on their home; and the farcical adulterous affair of the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, which was retailed in graphic detail in both the ‘red top’ and ‘respectable’ press.
Labour entered office in 1997 with cautious public spending plans, determined not to provide ammunition for opponents who wished to portray it as the party of high taxes and high public spending. But after the Chancellor’s first public spending ‘round’, and especially after the 2001 General Election, it embarked on spectacular increases in public spending in selected areas, notably education and health. A key concern – which the Labour Leadership shared – was how far these large increases in allocated resources would translate into improved delivery. Mr Blair has since 1997 been a continuing advocate of virtually perpetual revolution in public service management; Mr Brown’s chancellorship has seen a great centralisation of Treasury control, notably through Public Service Agreements designed to tie down spending departments to measurable targets. Problems of delivery are identifiable right across the public sector, and they take many different forms: for instance, the Home Secretary Charles Clarke was forced by Mr Blair to resign in May 2006 after it was revealed that over 1,000 foreign nationals jailed for criminal offences escaped subsequent deportation because of administrative failings in the Home Office. His successor John Reid more or less immediately denounced the Home Office as ‘not fit for purpose’. But the most serious delivery problem has been in the National Health Service, because it crystallised the problem of ensuring delivery in return for increased resources. By June 2006, despite historically unprecedented increases in the size of the NHS budget, the total deficit of hospital trusts in England was £1.27 billion for the financial year 2005-6 alone (i.e. excluding accumulated deficits from preceding years). The Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt was widely ridiculed in April 2006 for responding to the crisis by announcing that the Service had had ‘its best year ever.’ But in important ways she was correct: the increased resources had delivered sharp falls in waiting lists for key operations, and sharp increases in the quality of care. The Government’s problem was that in health, as in many public services, the reality for voters is most effectively conveyed, not by graphs of waiting list times, but by the immediate human stories generated by health policy. For decades politicians in office have been damaged by these human interest stories of patients denied treatment because of scarce resources or administrative failures. But in the years immediately after 1997 Labour could plead that it was remedying historic deficiencies. After the boom in spending from 2001 it proved much more difficult to explain why hospital trusts were in deficit, junior doctors were finding it hard to find jobs and facilities were being closed. Whether these conclusions are ‘fair’ is irrelevant to Mr Blair’s crises, for their political consequence was to rob him of a critical advantage over his opponents. Poll data in May 2006 showed that more people now believed in the competence of the Conservatives than believed in the competence of Labour successfully to manage health and education policy – two ‘core’ areas where in the 1990s New Labour had established an enduring lead over its Conservative opponent.
The decision to invade Iraq now looks like the key event in the Blair Premiership – a key destructive event. After the publication of the Butler Report in July 2004, which investigated whether intelligence material had been manipulated to strengthen the case for war, polling data showed that 55 per cent of those responding believed that Mr Blair had lied in making the case for war. This is the background against which the government has sought to manage the continuing crisis in Iraq. By June 2006 the ‘headline’ casualty figure was of 113 British deaths in Iraq, but behind this lay a much larger figures: for the UK alone, over 6,700 casualties, 4,000 of these serious enough to require hospitalisation back to the UK. Since the case for war had rested not only on the external threat posed by the Saddam regime, but on the argument that the war was justified by the need to create stable democratic institutions, the virtual state of civil war within Iraq made extremely difficult what even the Prime Minister probably now wants: a rapid withdrawal. In February 2004 the then Defence Secretary John Reid laid down four conditions for a phased withdrawal. They are chiefly remarkable for the extent to which they are open to widely different interpretations.
"First, we need to see a manageable level of threat from insurgents, be they criminal or political. Second, the Iraqi security forces must be more able to deal with this threat themselves. Third, local government bodies need to be effective, while central government supports them. And finally we must be confident that we can provide support and backup to local forces if needed.’ (quoted in The Scotsman, 8 February 2006.)
By June 2006 over 60 per cent of those polled believed that the Iraq war had made the world a more dangerous, not a safer, place. Although no systematic data is available, it is almost certain that the continuing fall in total Labour Party individual membership (now below 200,000) is due in substantial part to internal opposition to the war: by March 2006 Labour Party total membership in Scotland, a Parliamentary heartland, was just over 18,000 – the lowest recorded figure in modern time.
10.4: The Crisis of Succession
Political Issues 7.1 (p. 135) of Politics and Governance in the UK documented the ‘Blair/Brown’ soap opera. In the period since the text was written the saga has moved close to a concluding episode. As I explained in Update 2, Mr Blair was obliged in the 2005 general election campaign to commit himself to departure from office before the next general election. Initially, this still seemed to leave scope for a sustained further period at Number 10. The Prime Minister has partly used the language of seeing through his revolution in public sector management as an argument for remaining in office. His reshuffle of the Cabinet in May 2006 was unusually radical – Mr Blair had previously been a generally timid Cabinet reshuffler. Although in the short term interpreted as a way of surrounding himself with Blairite allies, more significant was the way the reshuffle was accompanied by published letters setting out a distinctively Blairite reform agenda for each department of state. (The letters can be read at http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page9465.asp , while a list of Cabinet members at end June 2006 can be accessed at http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page1371.asp ). This attempt to manage a succession in which Mr Blair goes at his own time has come under increasing attack, for three reasons. The first is the background provided by every other problem discussed in this update: the draining away of public trust and confidence from the Prime Minister compared with the heady days of 1997. Every piece of bad news – and even at the best of times government spends most of its time trying to manage bad news - is viewed through the lens of the Blair departure. The second is the dynamics of power at the top of British politics. Once it became known that the Prime Minister was to go, even at an unknown date, his ability to command the support and obedience of followers, especially in the Commons and Cabinet, declined sharply. The third is that what the Prime Minister is attempting is virtually unprecedented. Orderly retirement is common in most occupations. But at the top of British politics brutal and swift expulsion from office – either at the hands of Parliamentary supporters, or at the hands of the electorate – is the norm. Since the end of the Second World War there has been only once such ‘orderly’ succession, that of Sir Anthony Eden to Sir Winston Churchill in April 1995; Eden in turn was gone by January 1957 (the only other voluntary departure, of Harold Wilson in 1976, amazed everyone, including his successor). Mr Blair is attempting to overturn what is virtually a law of British politics.
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