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PAUL WILENIUS: Failure turned to triumph
when Tony Blair became Labour's leader. The party at last believed it was
destined for power, Blair promised Britain a new type of politics. He
had a mission, a project, to change the way the country was governed.
TONY BLAIR IN 1997: We have been elected as new
Labour and we will govern as new Labour.
WILENIUS: Enthusiasm was matched
by swift action. Gordon Brown granted the Bank of England its independence.
The Cabinet and the country seemed united behind the new Labour programme,
which promised economic competence and social radicalism. But the early
hopes that this would usher in a new re-alignment of the Centre Left, soon
started to fade.
And for Blair when the
fall came - it was spectacular. Stealth taxes alienated the middle classes,
heartland voters and activists felt ignored and the Millennium Dome seemed
to symbolise a void at the very heart of new Labour. The slow hand clap
over Blair's Women's Institute speech presaged the fuel tax revolt. Patience
with new Labour was running out fast.
LORD TOM SAWYER: New Labour had a project for winning
an election and Tony Blair said we won the election as New Labour and we
govern as New Labour, but there wasn't really a plan for governing as New
Labour.
WILENIUS: The sureness of touch
demonstrated by Blair and his Number Ten team for so long seems to have
deserted them. Observers say control freakery has now been replaced by
confusion and panic at the centre of the government machine. Opinion polls
put Labour as much as eight points behind the Tories, the worst since Blair
became leader. There are tensions between senior Ministers and allegations
of lying over the Ecclestone affair. The government seems to have lost
its way. For some in the party the circumstances demand that Blair must
say what he really stands for.
TONY LLOYD MP: Finally we've got, you know,
the government experiencing some genuinely rough weather - no question
about it - but I mean governments, you know governments do that. The test
for them is how they come through it; is how they respond - whether people
see and know what they're essentially about.
WILENIUS: Tony Blair is planning
his fight back from the government's deepest crisis and is plotting his
tactics for the next election. It's brought into sharp focus the battle
over the future direction of the Labour government. He needs to choose
between old style confrontational politics which means taking on Labour's
traditional enemies, or instead rebuilding the new Labour coalition of
voters, which swept him to power in 1997.
Those closest to Blair
are urging him to stick to his guns. To keep the faith, to follow the
new Labour path. The Prime Minister went to a recent meeting of the Progress
group. It helped create new Labour, now it's trying to plot a new direction.
They aim to maintain the electoral coalition which secured an overwhelming
victory at the last election. Tom Sawyer was the General Secretary who
masterminded it.
LORD SAWYER: The New Labour project wasn't
exclusive. The New Labour project was always about a big tent and it was
always about including people and you know we tried to include in the New
Labour project and we did include you know two million people who had previously
voted Conservative, so I would say, that you know, you don't define your
enemies except through the political parties, as in the wider society you've
got to listen and you've got to govern for all sections, you can't just
govern for one section.
TONY LLOYD MP: The arguments about Labour,
about New Labour, as I say I think are the arguments of a previous political
generation almost, now Labour has got a track record in government, people
know what Tony Blair stands for, people know what the Labour government's
done and they will judge it both in terms of things they approve of and
of course the things they disapprove of.
WILENIUS: And they disapprove of
high fuel taxes. The fuel revolt has knocked the government off course
and it stands accused of returning to Labour's high tax ways. While there
are calls to appease the protesters, one former Minister believes Labour
should stand firm.
GLENDA JACKSON MP: I'm not a big fan of conspiracy
theories I must say, but it was undoubtedly the case that on some of those
picket lines the issue was expanded very quickly beyond the issue of the
price of petrol, to opposition to the right to roam for instance; opposition
to the proposals to ban hunting. So there many have been an element of
just having a go at the government, from a political standpoint - I mean,
it may have even been a party political standpoint.
LORD SAWYER: Well I think the fuel tax
protesters were part of our society, I mean they don't share Labour Party's
politics and they are probably all Conservative supporters and they're
not exactly part of traditional Labour values and so forth, but they're
not, they're not neo-fascists, they are ordinary people who live ordinary
lives and what they did most importantly was they tapped into a ground
swell of opinion that was held by the vast majority of the population.
So what the government mustn't do is kind of make martyrs of these people
I don't think. They've got to recognise that they were the kind of mainspring
for a wide range of public opinion that the government has to listen to.
WILENIUS: The re-emergence of the
tax debate is dangerous. There was always a groundswell of support for
the view that Gordon Brown should be more open about the impact of his
tax plans.
WRIGHT: This talk about having
banished tax and spend is a nonsense; it's the heart of what any government
has to do. I think what you can't do is to think that you can negotiate
your way through this through, through smoke and mirrors exercise, as though
people won't know what's going on, or won't notice what you're doing.
And I think, in this case, the only good politics is honesty.
WILENIUS: Policy on pensions has
been even more damaging . Despite extra help for the poorest, the 75 pence
a week rise in the basic pension was seen by the elderly as insulting.
Traditional Labour activists want a clear policy now, to either restore
the link with earnings, or be even more generous. They're opposed to any
moves to favour means tested benefits.
SIR KEN JACKSON: I think the 75 p on pensions,
obviously people took their eye off the ball, they didn't look at the consequences
of what might happen. I personally believe we could have been more generous
in terms of pensioners. Pensions is the key issue at this moment in time
- it is the issue and there is no doubt that people feel very strongly
that pension, pensioners should have a fair deal.
GLENDA JACKSON: I always tend to run issues that
affect pensioners, even though I am one myself, through the sieve of what
would have been my mother's response to that. And I know perfectly well
that if she had still been alive and had been, received 75p, she would
have returned it to the Chancellor, and told him precisely which orifice
he should have placed it in.
WILENIUS: Buoyed by Blair's speech
to the Progress Group, modernisers still talk of their dreams of a new
type of politics. They had hoped for a mass membership party and less
union influence, co-operation with the Liberal Democrats to produce a century
of power for the Centre Left and proportional representation for Westminster
elections. But the modernisers have run into bitter opposition.
SIR KEN JACKSON: PR's dead - let's be quite
honest - we've got bigger issues than PR; we want to make sure that the
Labour government is re-elected with a majority to carry out its manifesto;
and at the end of the day you've got to go back to the people, you've got
to say this was our manifesto, this is what we've delivered .
WILENIUS: Blair has now publicly
welcomed back the party's traditional paymasters - the unions. The failure
to build a mass membership means he needs union money to fight the next
election. The government has already promised more rights for workers and
a higher National Minimum Wage. And now Blair has offered the unions formal
consultations every three months at the top table.
SIR KEN JACKSON: Well I don't think there's
any doubts at all that he recognises that he needs the trade unions. At
the end of the day we're always there; we were there through the 20 years
of the Conservative government; we put our resources in, we put our finance
in - and at the end of the day we're here again; we will be financing the
party, we'll be supporting the party. They're looking for something like
for the election in January about twenty million; they're looking for whatever
the trade unions can contribute to that. We would certainly hope that
the trade unions would consider, you know would contribute a great chunk
of that. Certainly my union would be looking to support in whatever way
we could.
WILENIUS: Tony Blair is facing
the greatest test of his Premiership. He needs to reverse the collapse
in the polls, in time for the election expected next year. But influential
figures say he can only do that if he shows the strong leadership and vision
which first forged the new Labour project .
WRIGHT: Tony Blair was the person
who told the Labour Party, and told the centre left, that it had a future
if it followed him. Tony Blair was the person who told the Labour Party
that if it got itself together it could for the first time in its history
have more than one full term in office - that it could be in office long
enough to do good things over a long period. That was the Blair promise,
to the Labour Party; and those of us who attached ourselves to the New
Labour enterprise are signed up, signed up to that - so there's a lot at
stake here.
WILENIUS: Until recently Blair
was heading straight for another journey through the corridors of power.
But the prospect of a cherished second term seems to be receding. Now
he needs the money and help of the Labour Party's activists and traditional
supporters more than ever. Yet that appears to mean leaving the new Labour
brand behind.
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