Los Angeles Times Interview : Anthony Blair : The Fair-Haired Boy of the Labor Party--and Britain

Just across Parliament Square from the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben is a nondescript building of small, cramped offices. Among them is the office of Britain’s Shadow Home Secretary. It is almost comically narrow and claustrophobic. But this is how Britain treats its opposition leaders--which is why winning power here is everything.

For four consecutive national elections--almost 16 years--the Labor Party has been out of power. But now its supporters have hope, and the reason is Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, known to all as “Tony.” At the young age of 41--and after only 11 years in Parliament--the personable and articulate Blair appears the Labor’s leading choice to become its next leader in the July 21 balloting--replacing John Smith, who died suddenly of a heart attack in May.

A Scot with an English accent, Blair attended a private school in Edinburgh, graduated from Oxford University and was elected to Parliament from the mining country in Durham. In 1984, barely 30, he became a member of Labor’s “Shadow Cabinet.” He and his wife, Cherie, a lawyer, have three children.

If elected party leader, Blair would be in position to be the next prime minister--unless the persistently flagging fortunes of the Conservative Party under John Major improve markedly. Blair is the opposition party’s leading “modernizer”--intent on attracting not just working-class voters and intellectuals but mainstream Britons who ordinarily vote Conservative or Liberal Democrat. At least this is what supporters fervently hope--that Blair is the man of the future whose centrist policies appeal to a wide spectrum. His opponents, however, say Blair is just a glamorous new face on the old Labor Party, with its militant leftist tendencies and scary collectivist policies.

Yet, even his most severe political critics take Blair seriously, knowing he may be the brightest young man in the opposition today, and the brightest Labor leader to appear in many a day. That man in the cramped office bodes to someday occupy a far grander space--at No. 10 Downing Street.

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Question: The impression one has of the Labor Party is that it’s part and party to socialism, of nationalization of industry, of the large welfare state, with high taxation and lots of centralized government. Is this view wrong?

Answer: I think that view is fairly out of date. The Labor Party--in common with most left-of-center parties in the last 20 or 30 years in Europe--has undergone a considerable amount of change. Not changing its basic principles but updating those principles for the modern world. The argument between public versus private sector is really a dead argument within the Labor Party.

Socialism is a word I know that has a particular meaning in the United States, (but) socialism to most of us within the Labor Party is a basic set of values, it’s a view of society and the individual and the belief that individuals prosper best within a strong and cohesive society and community. And that value system is what the modern Labor Party is about rather than economic prescriptions that may have been fine for particular generations or have some historical connection with certain perspectives about socialism but don’t really represent the Labor Party as it is today.

Q: Bill Clinton moved his party to the center and won the election. Is it your view that the only sensible political ground these days is the middle?

A: I don’t think the governing ground need be the consensus of the lowest common denominator, and the least offensive to people. But we do have to break through some of the stereotypes around left and right. For example, it’s interesting that people in the Soviet Union who are old statists and who want state control are regarded as right wing. Left wing, to me, means radical, and I think we do need a radical party, but it should be a radical party for today’s world--not the world of 40 or 50 years ago.

Now the great historical change this century . . . was the acknowledgment that as the state grew in power, so there were vested interests that could grow up around it that could be every bit as powerful and occasionally every bit as oppressive as the vested interests of capital. And, therefore, what we require for today’s world is a notion of the public interest, society’s interest as a whole, where you set certain key objectives in an attempt to fulfill them--but don’t have an ideological predisposition that they must be fulfilled by the public sector or the private sector. That notion of partnership--of working together, public and private sector--is much more where it’s at for most left-of-center politics in Europe now.

Q: Your critics say your modern Labor politicians might make a good speech or have a good non-threatening image but break through that imagery and behind it you have the old burnt-out socialism.

A: Yup, well, they would say that (laughing). No, what has burnt out, in the same way that 19th Century liberalism has burnt out, is the notion of socialism as a form of state control and ownership of everything. Socialism a la the Soviet Union--yeah, that’s burnt out.

But socialism, for most of my generation in the Labor Party, never meant that. What it meant was a set of values--a basic set of beliefs. And there are two different types of beliefs in politics. One is a very strictly individualist view--which is the sort of Thatcherite view; and one is a view that places the individual in the broader community, which is the social view of human beings . . . .

In a sense, you can say that the huge ideological battles of the earlier part of the century--the notion that there would be one governing ideology that took the world over, whether of right or left--those days are gone. The right has had to accept the existence of public provision and public services, and the left has had to accept the existence of a market economy and enterprise. To that extent, there’s been some coming together . . . .

The most extraordinary statistic of the Thatcher years is that, at the end of her reign, public spending, as a proportion of our national income, was higher than it was under our last Labor government.

Now you can draw one or two conclusions from that. You can either say she was a closet socialist--which is unlikely; or you can say any modern society will have a significant public-welfare provision. The arguments should transfer much more toward what are the key objectives that we want to meet as a society, and how you rebuild social cohesion in our country, rather than focusing on whether it’s public or private sector or some argument about the state versus the market--which is an intellectually dead argument.

Q: But is your party prepared to take the position that if the rate of taxation had been any greater under Thatcher, it would have had a stifling effect on the economy?

A: There’s clearly got to be a balance struck there. But the great problem we’ve got with public spending in this country is the enormous bills for high unemployment. We are now living with a structural unemployment rate that is 8% to 10%. And that is massive, and that has huge social costs, and it has huge direct costs in terms of public expenditure. And one of the reasons why conservatives have had to put up taxes . . . is to pay the costs of economic and social failure.

The theme I have been developing is, in a sense, rebuilding this country as one nation, where people have a stake in our society, particularly young people, but where we are demanding respect and proper conduct in return. We should give chances and expect people to take them. It’s a very important restatement of the left-of-center position--that you believe in society, but that it’s a two-way deal for individuals.

Q: But isn’t it religious leaders and educators who have the most legitimate role in building social cohesion?

A: Yeah, but government can assist the process, because its economic and social policies will either enable people to develop opportunity and self-reliance and enterprise, or occasionally they can stifle them. Or, simply by getting government out of everything and just leaving the market to rule, they can allow those who can do well to do well and, therefore, those who are deprived of the opportunities not to do well; and we just waste a lot of our talent and ability. We have 1 million people here under the age of 25 out of work. For us, that’s a helluva lot of people. Yet, we’re surprised at the crime and drug scene.

The reason why Labor has not been in power for 15 years or more is that, first of all, it took some really wrong turnings in the early 1980s. But then when it changed . . . it was never clear that it had changed and why it changed . . . . We weren’t explaining it to people in terms of our basic values and principles . . . .

You take the issue of crime. The issue of crime has just been sitting there as . . . a Labor Party issue for years, and we felt difficult about talking about it. There was a very strong civil-liberties lobby and that’s fine--the civil liberties of people are very important. But we had allowed ourselves as being perceived as people who were more interested in the civil liberties of people accused of crime than the civil liberties of those getting their houses broken into and beaten up and mugged in the street.

Now crime is a Labor Party issue. Why? Because it’s the poorest, most vulnerable, most disadvantaged people in society that suffer from it. It’s not people who can afford to put 10-foot perimeter walls around their houses and have the latest burglar alarm installed; it’s some poor woman living in the inner city . . . and when she goes down the stairs of her council house, she gets mugged.

I mean, if we’re the party that represents those people, then we represent those people by talking about crime and having policies about crime that are tough on crime and are tough on the causes of crime. We don’t ignore those social causes about crime, but we don’t start excusing people from responsibility when they commit crimes.

Q: Britain has always been America’s closest ally. But, right now, the two seem to be having problems with their foreign policy. How would a Labor government improve this?

A: If Britain could get its relationship with Europe sorted out properly, then I think it could then act in a central mode toward developing a better understanding between America and Europe. My appreciation of Britain’s relationship with the United States is that there are tremendous sentimental ties.

I’m struck everytime I am in Washington that if you come over as a dignitary of the European Community, then people really want to get to grips with what you are saying. But if you come from Britain . . . then there is this great fund of emotion, and all the rest of it, but people are aware that Britain in Europe is a stronger thing. . . .

(Fortunately) Labor has a clear position with regard to Europe. And, on the whole, with certain exceptions, because it is a pretty big issue, the party is united . . . . The party favors cooperation within Europe. And, I think, too, that, with the Clinton Administration, there will be clear ties between the two governments.

Q: Given the activist press, what will happen to your privacy if you find yourself in high office? Have you begun reconciling yourself to that?

A: Well, I’ve certainly had a taste of it over the past couple of weeks. It’s a very difficult issue, because I think, in the end, the public needs to ask itself what it wants of its politicians.

From over here, when you look across the water and see what is happening to Clinton, you do wonder what politics is supposed to be about. Whether he is a good President or not does not, in any way, appear to be connected to what most of which we appear to read about. And there’s got to be some fairly open debate about that.

. . . Politicians use the media, so they can’t really complain when the media comes after them. And this is the love-hate relationship between the media and politicians that always exists. But what does have to happen . . . in terms of an understanding is how politics can work if it is to be feasible and in the interests of the public, there has to be some sense of where the boundaries are . . . . Given the nature of the press, (you have to be aware) of the fickleness with which they treat politicians. If I was in any doubt, I could always cross the Atlantic . . . .

Q: You have to be a saint to be prime minister?

A: If you do have to be a saint, you won’t get a prime minister. What you’ll get is a prime minister who is a liar.*