The Blair Which Project?

Written by Adrian Watts and published in Challenge on Sat 1st Jan 2000

Editorial

"You're a fool if you don't realise this is going to be the reactionary's century, perhaps their thousand year reign. It's the one thing Hitler said which wasn't completely hysterical." Those are the words of General Cummings, a character in Mailer's WWII novel The Naked and the Dead, describing the hundred years that have mercifully just ended. Their record of fascism and of the triumph of the 'forces of conservatism' must have been in Charles Kennedy's mind in the peroration to his first Leader's speech at our Harrogate Party Conference last September: "The 21st century could be a Liberal Democrat century," he concluded - perhaps more in hope than expectation.

Charles is in an awkward position right now, having inherited a strategy from Paddy which was all too successful in 1997 in dividing and defeating the Tories. The Labour government's majority is so big as a result that the prospect of a 'balanced' parliament and reform coalition disappeared with the dawn of that memorable May Day - even if the memory lingers on thanks to Paddy's leaked diaries of the period through to that October. In reality Britain's elective dictatorship still rules OK, having banded absolute power a la Thatcher to New Lord Protector Blair.

Charles Kennedy makes clear in the interview on page 11 that we are thus in new territory. The conditions that created Lib Dem/Labour cooperation before 1997, and made the defeat of the Tories possible at last, no longer apply - not least because of the persistent disarray of William Hague's party. Charles may have every reason to consider withdrawal from the Joint Cabinet Committee, and concentrate instead on a greener political strategy that really differentiates us from Labour - over transport policy, for example, or WTO reform - in order to maximise Lib Dem votes and seats at the next general election.

And yet, could there be more to be gained in the long run - in terms of building environmental sustainability - by dividing and ruling the large Conservative minority of the British people not just in one general election, but in every general election, for a couple of generations at least? That might not be a good thing if the Tories ever began to offer a serious and substantial contribution to good green governance, but they show no signs of doing so, and may well be congenitally incapable of positive green politics. For more than twenty years the Conservative Party has been the biggest environmental hazard in the UK, and neither Hague nor Portillo seem likely to alter that sad fact.

Tony Blair's 'project' may not, however, be quite the same as the one envisioned by Centre Left strategists ever since the 'Gang of Four' led the SDP breakaway from Old Labour. His approach to Lords reform exemplifies this. As with Lords Protector throughout English history, Blair's 'project' may have started out very respectably, only to end up as little more than a way to monopolise power for himself and his cronies for as long as that can be sustained. New Labour, New Cromwell?

That's not quite the kind of sustainability Green Liberal Democrats have in mind as a sensible goal for the new century.