There is an Irish tendency to catch up with bad ideas just when they have been discredited. It is not too surprising that Blairism is tempting the Labour Party here just as Tony Blair is leaving the stage in Britain. writes Fintan O'Toole.
Anyone who still sees Blair's "modernisation" as a panacea for the ailing left should pay more attention to the EU summit over the weekend. It provided a neat but damning summary of the final effect of Blairism - the abandonment not just of old-style socialism, but of any systematic commitment to basic equality.
While most of the attention was focused on Poland, much less was paid to the astonishing fact that a British Labour government had a non-negotiable position of its own.
It fought its own war against the charter of fundamental rights which is annexed to the proposed new EU treaty.
The charter is a fairly watery document, containing little more than a diluted summary of the mainstream western European social consensus. It is, nonetheless, important as a statement of what the citizens of a European democracy should expect from their governing institutions.
It is against the death penalty, and in favour of a right to education and continuing training, against child labour, and in favour of a high level of environmental protection. It sets out rights to gender equality, to preventive healthcare, and for both employers and workers to "conclude collective agreements at the appropriate levels and, in cases of conflicts of interest, to take collective action to defend their interests, including strike action".
It is so basic that, were it not for an extraordinary anomaly, there would be no great urgency about having it at all. The anomaly, though, is highly significant. All member states of the EU have had to sign up to the European Convention on Human Rights. But the EU itself has had not just no obligation to do so, but no power to do so. A decade ago, the Council of Ministers asked the European Court whether the European Community (as it then was) could become a party to the convention. The court ruled that "no treaty provision confers on the Community institutions any general power to enact rules on human rights or to conclude international conventions in this field".
So we were left with the bizarre situation in which the EU insisted that member states apply basic human rights, but was not itself bound to respect those rights. This is where the charter came in. Its sole purpose is to state that the EU has essentially the same obligations to citizens as the member states already have.
Back in 2004, when the British government ratified the abortive EU constitution (with the charter attached), none of this was a problem. But Blair's Labour Party became so craven, so terrified of offending business groups and the right-wing press that it went into the summit with the charter as a "red-line" issue. It demanded, and got, an opt-out stating that the charter is not legally enforceable in Britain. The party of Keir Hardie and Nye Bevan, of Jennie Lee and Barbara Castle, now sees it as a matter of fundamental principle that the right to strike, or to equal pay, or to education and healthcare - rights that are accepted even by right-wing parties in Europe - be kept out of British law.
As it licks its wounds and contemplates its future, the left in Ireland needs to understand how this kind of grotesque reversal could arise.
It is rooted, I believe, in a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between pragmatism and principle. Left-wing ideology has been shaped by a belief that stern, revolutionary commitment is hard and gradualist compromise is easy.
If that was ever true, it is now the opposite of the truth. If, like the rump of the revolutionary left, you believe that capitalism is incapable of being reformed, then your only duty is perennial opposition. If, on the other hand, you accept that a market system is the only game in town and that the job in hand is to shape its energies towards justice, democracy and sustainability, then you have to be smart, tough and, above all, principled. You need to be even more sharply focused on your goals and even more committed to the pursuit.
The lesson of Blair's ultimate failure is that a left without ideology is not really an option. The left exists because of high aspirations for humanity. If you take those aspirations out of social and economic policy, they will surface somewhere else: in Blair's case, in neo-conservatism.
Blair stripped the necessary trace of utopianism from social policy and shoved it into foreign policy. Having lost faith in the idea of reordering British society, he decided to take the easier option and reorder the world instead. Principle morphed into reckless disregard, hope into fantasy, anger at injustice into the naked violence of invasion. Iraq was not an aberration of Blairism, but a consequence of it. In that sense, Tony Blair, the most talented politician of his generation, should be taken not as an example, but as a warning.