THE most important thing should come at the beginning, and he as brief and to the point as possible. Download the Labour Party (other island) web site and the first thing to meet your eye will be a blackboard style poster which reads:
Labour's Five Year Pledge. No Increase In Income Tax Rates (signed) Tony Blair."
Scroll down just an inch or two and you'll see the next most important thing, Tony himself, handsomely snapped and expertly photoshopped, firm jawed, not in his more usual beaming, apprentice vicar, mode, but statesmanlike and serious. Read his lips: here is a man who can be trusted, not just with the future of Britain but with the money in your pay packet, bank account, personal, investment plan or offshore account.
If, as expected, Tony's New Labour trounces John's Old Tories on May 1st, that victory will be largely attributable to two factors, the growing unspeakability of a Conservative Party which has become fat, stupid and fractious after 18 years in office and Labour's clear message to the electorate that, when it is in government, nothing essential will change.
Tony Blair first made his name as a clever young shadow Home Secretary with a fresh, line in soundbites. One of his best, you'll remember, was: "New Labour: Tough on Crime. Tough on the Causes of Crime." This is not just a good slogan; it is good policy. The same can be aid for NL's "big idea" on poverty and welfare dependency (borrowed from The Big Issue). "A hand up, not a hand out.
Ideas still cost
Fine ideas, and in the context of the British Labour Party, perhaps necessary revisionism. But ideas, or the policies which should flow from them, are not, free of charge, as soundbites are. A hand up for the poor will be just as costly in the short term as a hand out, while the bill for a concerted assault on the causes of crime might have as many noughts as you care to add.
Labour lost the last general election, says the conventional wisdom, because of its tax policies more specifically because of the unwillingness of a vital segment, say 10 per cent, of the electorate (sometimes known as Essex Man), to countenance the prospect of sacrificing even an extra quid a week out of their pay packets for any purpose whatsoever. The word since then from the polls and the focus groups is that these convictions have not changed. Since Basildon would not come to Labour, therefore, Labour has come to Basildon. It is a wise shepherd who knows his flock, and there are few under the firmament wiser, or cuter, than Tony Blair.
Labours electoral strategy is, of course, primarily based on fear of failure, a fear which has bred a policy of safety first, safety second, safety last. Barnsey and Bootle, Hackney and Hartlepool, Stepney and Sunderland are in the bag. Blighted Britain will vote Labour no matter how blue the colours in the New Labour paintbox. What else can it do? It's the others who count, however, not just our old familiar Essex Man, but Worcester Woman now too, and it is this fine pair of pollsters totems who have been writing Labour policy over the past three years.
Bad old days
There was a time when it was, otherwise, when Labour leaders sought guidance, not from "focus groups", but from their own heads and hearts (yes) and from the traditions of their movement. That the Mr Blair has referred to as the bad old days". Bad days indeed, when unemployment was below a million, there was a functioning health service, education promoted social mobility and a low paid, worker might conceive of engaging in collective industrial action with a reasonable hope of arriving over time at a half satisfactory conclusion.
As Paddy Ashdown has moved his party cautiously to the left, Tony Blair has, chosen instead to chase the galloping rightward progress of Toryism, settling eventually in what he calls, somewhat oxymoronically, "the radical centre". Social democracy, the settled political practice of British labourism for 50 years whatever rule book or Tribune group may have said, has never been the sexiest of political creeds. But it has always known what it stood for providence, planning, investment, solidarity, redistribution. It is, no doubt, a somewhat old fashioned philosophy, representing the values of teacher and town clerk to Toryism's Rover dealer and reinsurance man. But centrism? Centrism, I'm afraid, will get us nowhere, having neither structure, shape nor substance. It is a non philosophy, a spiritual and ideological void, the no meat in the sandwich, the hole in the Polo mint.
The Sun, a new friend to Labour but no less cherished for that, was described by Mr Blair own the day of its conversion as a strong campaigning newspaper", an assessment with which thousands of gays, lesbians, Paddies, Argies, Frogs, Krauts and Liverpool supporters will be bound to concur. A visibly moved Peter Mandelson, New Labour's chief strategist, stressed on television that such an upheaval could never have occurred without the changes that Tony Blair (and his good sell, he might have added), has forced on his party over the last three years. Few could disagree.
Labour's history damaged
It is sad to see a decent remnant like John Prescott daily forced to go through the Mandelsonian drill - "New Labour this, Tony Blair that ...."
It is sadder still, however, to consider the damage Blair and his acolytes have done to the popular perception of Labour's history by their cynical use of the pejorative "Old Labour" to stand equally for the antics of the Useless, Tendency, Messrs Benn, Skinner, Livingstone etc and the solid achievements of Atlee, Bevan, Gaitskell, Wilson, Healey, Callaghan and Kinnock.
Peter Mandelson's grand father, Herbert Morrison, argued in 1945 that Labour should seek to appeal not just to its traditional electorate, but also to the middle classes or, that section of them not irretrievably wed to the narrowest definition of their own self-interest: To make his point, he left his own safe inner city constituency and fought and cap lured another in the London suburbs. He did not, however, tell his new target voters they could salve their social consciences merely by relaxing in a warm bath of "caring" phrases, any more than he and his colleagues could build a national health service without imposing appropriate income tax on those who could afford it.
As Toryism bows out and Tonyism breezes in some time on May 2nd, what changes can Mr and Mrs Briton expect to see? Changes of style, certainly: a little less graft and arrogance no doubt perhaps even a European policy somewhat less maimed by delusion and saloon - bar prejudice. But what else? Well, we must wait and see.
There is, of course, the rather far fetched theory - disseminated chiefly by Conservative Central Office that all we have seen since 1994 has been pure illusion, and that behind the "New Labour" facade and the Blair smile still lurk all thee natural instincts of Old Labour. Properly sceptical as one has learned to be of all the works of that Palace of Lies, there will be more than a few desperately praying that this time they are right.