When New Labour took office in 1997, it was with the most unprecedented popular mandate for a Labour government since 1945; but the Labour landslide owed as much —if not more —to popular discontent with the Tories as it did to Labour’s own agenda. Sleaze, corruption, cash for questions; such were the leitmotivs of the outgoing Tory government. Yet, such public distrust did not extend to politicians as a whole; New Labour’s approval ratings rose rather than fell after they took office.
Yet at the end of New Labour’s first 10 years in government, the issue of trust in politics has become controversial as it seldom has before. Whether it be standards of ministerial conduct, manifesto promises or the role of spin doctors not merely in communications but also in policy-making, trust is again at the forefront of public debate.
But the collapse of public trust — in individuals, institutions and organizations — is not limited to the political sphere alone. It is a phenomenon prevalent throughout the Western world, a retreat from community to individualism caused by a decline in what social scientists call ‘social capital’, and others call social trust. The BBC, for example, has recently been the focus of a series of media stories highlighting public distrust of the corporation, ranging from the Blue Peter competition scandal to misleading journalists over a recent documentary featuring the Queen.
In this climate, it is tempting to claim — as Tony Blair did on leaving Downing Street — that the media is a ‘feral beast’, solely concerned with human interest stories to the exclusion of all else. But this would be to downplay the degree to which we — as politicians — have been architects of our own demise in the eyes of the public over the course of the last 10 years.
Gordon Brown’s first steps as Prime Minister have been anchored in the idea of restoring trust in politics: reducing the power of the executive, granting Parliament sole authority to declare war and promoting open government. The promotion of ‘open’ government is hardly a new concept, but its restored emphasis is directly related to the collapse in public trust that marked the later years of the Blair government. Ten years ago, the concept of ‘spin’, of professional political communicators manipulating media coverage in their favour, was a phrase for the Westminster village; now, it has permeated deep into popular culture.
In the recent blockbuster movie V for Vendetta, a totalitarian Britain of the future is dependent on what one fictional character describes as ‘spin coverage’.
Under New Labour, spin appears to have become ubiquitous, even to the point where the very existence of such techniques of news management have backfired upon the practitioners.
It was not long before Tony Blair’s statesmanlike response to 9/11 was submerged in a controversy over spin and spin-doctors; in this case, the emailed edict of a government press officer (Jo Moore) that ‘today would be a good day to bury bad news’. As Nick Jones noted early in the government’s life, the likes of Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell were only too aware of the damage spin-doctors could do to their own side if their roles became open to public scrutiny; hence their dismissal of enquiries into their work as journalistic self-indulgence.
Labour’s obsession with media management had of course much to do with the consistently unfair treatment they had received at the hands of the tabloid press. However, as Jones noted, their paranoia was such that they continued their media-responsive style out of opposition and into government. Labour in power have often seemed obsessed less with concrete policy but with the rhetoric of the tabloids. As John Denham, a former Labour Home Office Minister remarks with regard to terrorism legislation:
"There must be concern that the Government agenda is sometimes driven by public and media pressure in this area, rather than a concern for what is most effective." (The Independent, 15 February 2006)
The concept of spin is integral to popular discontent with politicians, but it is not — by a long way — the sole impetus for dwindling public faith. The roots go deeper and owe as much to New Labour’s political philosophy as to their practice of power.
The Role of Neoliberalism
In his resignation speech as Labour Leader delivered at Trimdon Labour Club in May 2007, Blair alluded to public expectations of his 1997 government, expectations that he now felt had been ‘too high’ — yet 10 years earlier, the new Prime Minister had been quick to make grand claims for his ‘new’ politics, placing his government at its citizens’ disposal. Famously, he told a meeting of the new Parliamentary Labour Party that: "We are not the masters now. The people are the masters. We are the servants of the people. We will never forget that."
As Andrew Rawnsley noted, "it was not true. From the moment Blair became leader of his party in 1994 and rebranded it as New Labour, he was the undisputed master of the people" (Rawnsley, 2001).
This pointed out the inherent contradiction in the new Prime Minister’s philosophy of government; the belief in inexorable — and incontestable — political and economic forces such as neoliberalism and globalization, married with an avowed intention to place the institutions of government at the behest of the people. On the one hand the logic of inevitability intrinsic to neoliberalism limited the realm of government to that of management while, on the other, the encouragement of consumer liberalism — of a supplier–customer relationship between state and citizen — fostered a series of demands on the part of the public that New Labour’s political paradigm could not meet.
In one sense, this was an aspect of Labour’s intellectual schizophrenia, which was hardly new. The conflict between the party’s democratic impulses and its natural tendency towards technocracy had characterised Labour’s political development. This had been a traditional battle between the Bevanite left and the Gaitskellite right; but it was a dilemma that retained its power even under the ‘Third Way’. While New Labour might on the one hand trumpet the value of devolution, on the other it promoted a conception of politics as a form of science; an alchemy that only such trained practitioners could divine.
New Labour was not alone in this. In particular, the rise of globalization theory and neoliberalism since the early 1970s had affected all three main parties’ views of economic policy and development. All of us, for better or worse, began to import the rhetoric of globalization into our politics.
In so doing, modern politics has become the province of an intellectual oligarchy resting on shared mutual assumptions about the necessary trajectory of society and the economy against a background of globalization. The language of policy debate is not a publicly accessible lingua franca, and all these elements conspire against public engagement in political debate. De facto, the public are disenfranchised, a combination of political considerations and social theory marginalizing the ‘big issues’, and strictly delimiting the available options despite the much-vaunted rhetoric of choice.
‘Political considerations’ is a euphemism for avoiding trouble, or at least avoiding issues that won’t win votes; for example, Trident and Europe, to name but two. The consequence is that the two issues have been ‘fudged’, which is a charitable way of saying relegated once again to the margins of public debate. So when we as politicians are not taking issues ‘off the table’ entirely, we are guilty of offering very few choices. There are times when ‘they’re all the same’ is a legitimate jibe.
But this was not the case with the war in Iraq. Labour used its traditional rhetoric — as with public service reform, so too with civil nuclear power, so too with the war in Iraq; the rubric of ‘there is no alternative’ was deployed with gusto. Although a choice was offered to the House of Commons in respect of the war, Blair’s invocation of the unknowables of secret intelligence and his own personal integrity were enough to marginalise the opposition and carry the day — even in the face of massive opposition in the country, as evidenced by the growth of the Stop the War coalition and many other protest groups.
As Prime Minister, Tony Blair had been keen to portray himself as a ‘conviction politician’, principled and worthy of public trust. This aspect of Blair’s political persona was tested to destruction in the controversy surrounding the Iraq war and its aftermath. The role of political ‘spin’ in the presentation of the case for war — particularly with regard to the manipulation of supposedly objective intelligence analysis — threw into relief fundamental questions about honesty in politics that seldom are associated with such profound, and tragic, consequences.
In the build-up to war, Blair began to seem more distant from public opinion than he had ever been previously as Prime Minister. Confidence in parliamentary democracy was severely shaken as it seemed unresponsive to the feelings of the nation as a whole; the Stop the War marches held across Britain, but most especially in London, which I addressed, testifying to the public’s rejection of the government’s case for war. The authorities’ attempts to contest that two million had marched nationally — in spite of supportive polling data — further heightened the sense that the people’s wishes were to be ignored, irrespective of their legitimacy.
In some ways, the aftermath was even more damaging. The suicide of Dr Kelly, the absence of WMD and the revelations over the ‘dodgy dossier’; all were trumpeted as evidence of Tony Blair’s dishonesty. The Economist, a tub-thumping supporter of the war, even went so far as to produce a front cover featuring the Prime Minister’s face and the headline ‘Bliar?’. The New Statesman preferred ‘THE COVER UP’ along with a picture of the scene of Dr Kelly’s death. For the record, I never doubted the Prime Minister’s sincerity. I have never thought Tony Blair a liar; I have always believed him to be a decent, honest man. I just thought, regarding Iraq, that he was wrong, that his government had underestimated the challenge ahead and misunderstood the ambitions of the United States in this arena.
Nonetheless, the perception rather than the realities were what mattered in political terms. The issue of the first dossier in particular pointed up the role of media managers within government, especially that of Alastair Campbell.
Amidst all the furore over the claims made within it, and the allegations made by Andrew Gilligan that these same claims had been ‘sexed up’, the essential point was lost — that a professional media manager’s presence necessarily compromised the objectivity of what was, after all, supposedly a fact-based, intelligence-led case for war.
Another document, issued as the preparations for war had accelerated in early 2003, had relied on plagiarising a 29-year-old Ph.D. student’s journal article, with, as John Kampfner notes, the following alterations:
"‘Monitoring’ had become ‘spying’, ‘opposition groups’ became ‘terrorist organisations’. One official admitted later: ‘It had not been fact-checked. We did not expect it to be treated in the same way as a dossier.’ This was a classic New Labour tactic of the 1990s, playing fast and loose with the facts for what it believed to be the greater good." (Kampfner, 2004).
This sense of hubris — that politicians alone knew what the greater good was, and should be allowed to manipulate the truth to achieve it — was key to the disaster of Iraq, and the collapse of public support that went with it.
Conclusion
As politicians, we are all guilty of fanning the flames of expectation higher than we can reasonably expect to satisfy. It is the more unpleasant side of our business — the desire to create public needs that only we — so we claim — can fulfil. But today, more than ever before, this is a dangerous game for politicians to play. In a society of affluent, individualist consumer liberals whose expectations of politics are similar to their expectations of the consumer goods and entertainment industries — that is to say, instant delivery and immediate response to wants and fears — it is increasingly difficult for politicians to deliver when we live in a divided society ever less tolerant of compromise. Women and men, gays and straights, Liverpudlians and Londoners, Scots and Welsh — all have different demands, but each party must strive to represent all of them.
In an era where affluence has reduced the patience of individual constituencies and rendered compromise an anathema to many of the public, this eternal political dynamic has become more destructive than in the past. The Third Way was never much more than an electoral sticking-plaster over this reality; Blair’s failure to tackle this head-on in the afterglow of his 1997 victory may well go down as one of his greatest domestic failures.
This trend has run alongside the increasing drive by politicians — of all parties — to manage the news more effectively. As I have discussed, this has had profound — and undesirable — consequences, but no one individual is solely responsible; after all, Labour professionalised its media handling largely in response to consistently unfair treatment on the part of a predominantly right-wing press. Ultimately, Labour was to lead the way in media relations, and in the communications arms race that characterises modern British politics, the other main parties inevitably followed suit.
Worse still, and never more so than in the case of the Iraq war, our leaders have been guilty of hubris; it has not been possible to provide listening government when by its nature that government is committed to centralization and top-down administration. The end results have been to impoverish our politics — to drive politicians away from big issues (such as Europe) for fear of a media backlash. All three groups — politicians, press and public — have a share in the blame for this. Politicians consistently call for ‘mature debates’ on issues — all the while knowing that in contemporary Britain this is precisely what cannot be allowed to happen.
By contrast, scandals over sex lives, peccadilloes, passports or home loans have little purchase on the public imagination. Sleaze — ’twas ever thus. Politicians are human too. But in a climate of growing expectancy, with less ability to deliver, disenchantment breeds distrust.
Do the British have even less trust in their politicians than in 1997? Probably. Was it all Tony Blair’s fault? Probably not.
References
Kampfner, J. (2004) Blair’s Wars, London: Free Press.
Rawnsley, A. (2001) Servants of the People: The Inside Storyof New Labour, London: Penguin.