Lynn Walsh: Tony & Bill

[Socialism Today, No. 19, June 1997, p. 15-17]

Tony Blair’s invitation to Bill Clinton to become the first-ever overseas head of state to attend a British government cabinet meeting is another example of the close ties between the New Democrats and New Labour – from policies to presidential-style campaigning. Lynn Walsh writes.

‚So much of what Blair has done was modelled on what we did with Bill Clinton in the early 1990s‘, commented Al From, director of the Democratic Leadership Council, the New Democrat caucus which backed Clinton’s presidential campaigns. More than any other previous Labour leader, Tony Blair fought a presidential-style election campaign, borrowing many of Clinton’s policies and campaigning techniques. A week before polling day, Labour’s election broadcast was a ten-minute personal portrait of Blair – personality rather than politics, individual ‚charisma‘ rather than party programme.

Right at the beginning of the election, Blair told a conference of ‚centre-left‘ politicians and academics that he planned to build ‚a coalition with the people‘, reaching ‚across and beyond traditional party-political boundaries‘. During the campaign Blair proclaimed the end of ideology and ‚tribal polities‘.

New Labour’s campaign tactics, orchestrated by the spin doctors, closely copied the tactics of the US presidential elections. Most of the party’s campaign spending went on opinion polls and focus groups used to fine-tune an incredibly expensive advertising campaign. Public meetings and door-to-door canvassing are now virtually extinct. The party relied on television and telephone canvassing.

If New Labour’s election campaign appeared remarkably similar to a US presidential campaign, it was no accident. Blair and his coterie long ago decided that their 1997 campaign would be a remake of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. The degree of copy-catting is quite astounding.

Shortly after Labour lost the May 1992 general election, Bill Clinton won the presidency in November of that year. This followed the two-term presidency of Ronald Reagan, and another four years of his former Republican vice-president, George Bush. To many people it had seemed that the Republicans were entrenched as the majority party, ruling out a Democratic presidency or majority in Congress. Impressed by Clinton’s victory, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown went to Washington to discuss with Clinton and his advisors. They studied – and later copied – not only Clinton’s campaign techniques but his political swing to the right.

Clinton was the favourite of the Democrats‘ right-wing. Under the Reagan/Bush administrations, a right-wing caucus, the Democratic Leadership Council, led by a group of Southern state governors, had been working to change the party into the New Democrats. They aimed to defeat Reagan by adopting key elements of Reaganism, and appealing to the skilled working class and lower-middle class electorate of the suburbs of the South and the Mid-west.

The Democratic Party was always a capitalist party. But since the New Deal period in the 1930s and 1940s, it had promoted social welfare measures and won its main support from the working class, the lower-middle class and minorities in the big cities of the North-east and the Mid-west. The New Democrats adopted the new agenda of big business. The free market is supreme, and all restrictions should be swept away. The massive federal government budget deficit (enormously increased by Reagan) should be rapidly reduced. Spending on welfare, inner-city aid projects, and programmes for minorities, should be drastically cut back.

The New Democrats would appeal mainly to the suburban ‚middle class‘, the skilled workers and lower-middle class who had moved out of the cities after the riots of the early 1970s. Unable to offer them new social programmes (which would mean more expenditure), the New Democrats offered them tax cuts (which Clinton failed to deliver). They also played on middle-class insecurities and anxieties, promising to be tough on crime and to cut back on wasteful big-city welfare spending. A big element of this was a coded attack on Blacks, Hispanics, the poor of the inner-cities, especially unmarried single parents.

Neither Clinton nor his vice-presidential candidate, Al Gore, so much as mentioned the word ‚inner-city‘, and hardly ever referred to the position of Blacks, Hispanics or the problem of racism. The strategy of the New Democrats for the presidential election was blatant: forget the poor, most of them don’t vote. Forget the big cities, most of them either vote Democrat anyway or don’t bother to vote. Go all out to win the middle-class, suburban voters who swung to Reagan during the 1980s. The parallels between the New Democrats and New Labour are obvious. The right-wing ‚modernisers‘ who have transformed Labour into New Labour have been following the American road.

Blair accepts the big business agenda. No more ‚tax-and-spend‘ – New Democrat terminology. ‚Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime‘ – another Clinton slogan. Like Clinton, Blair has turned his back on the inner-cities, on the working class, on black and Asian workers and youth, and on the poor of the inner-city wastelands. New Labour pitched its campaign overwhelmingly at the floating voters of ‚Middle England‘, the 40,000 or so voters in marginal constituencies in the Midlands and the South East, who were calculated to be numerically decisive to the outcome of the election.

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The extend to which the Clinton model affected Blair’s approach was spelled out in the pre-election issue of Fabian Review by Nick Bent, a former advisor to Labour MP, Paul Boateng. Referring to the Democrats as ‚our sister party‘, Bent waxed enthusiastic about the ‚invaluable lessons‘ provided by Clinton’s success. Clinton, he claimed, had ‚forged an unbeatable electoral alliance between the aspirant working classes and the insecure middle classes‘. True, Bent ticks off Clinton for some of his mistakes. For instance, ‚he was wrong not to tell the 1992 electorate cuts were his priority and tax cuts would have to wait‘. But New Labour has been able to learn from Clinton’s mistakes.

‚Crucially, Blair has drawn a clear dividing line between political rhetoric and policy commitments. He is masterful at articulating a positive vision of Labour Britain, a vision desperately needed after 18 years of Tory cynicism, greed and division. Yet he has been careful to specify a limited number of necessary but tax-neutral policy proposals for Labour’s first term‘. In other words, Blair has conjured up a wonderful dream of change, but concretely has promised little or nothing.

Even Bent has to admit that spin doctors call it ‚managing expectations‘, and critics call it ‚getting your betrayal in first‘. But in his view, it is honesty, clarity and maturity. Quite contradictorily, Bent denies that Labour has simply stolen Tory policies, in the way that Clinton stole Republican policies. ‚We had only to rediscover our core values … The philosophy we espouse is entirely our own‘. In any case, the US Democrats are not the only party which New Labour has stolen from. The Australian Labour Party and Paul Keating’s government are ‚the biggest single foreign influence on Labour policy‘, asserts Bent. Blair and Clinton ‚are not twins, but cousins, in the extended socialist family. Both are bright, idealistic baby-boomers who have succeeded in re-inventing their movements for changing times.‘

The real difference is that Blair had further to travel than Clinton. He had to complete the task, begun under Kinnock, of purging Labour’s socialist aims (Clause IV of the constitution) and increasingly separating the party from the trade unions, which originally created it.

Earlier this year Blair told the Financial Times (16 January) that ‚New Labour is pro-business, pro-enterprise‘. He went on ‚I want a situation more like the Democrats and the Republicans in the US. People don’t even question for a single moment that the Democrats are a pro-business party. They should not be asking that question about New Labour‘.

The modernisers, of course, are anxious to draw a sharp line between scandal-swamped Clinton in Washington and the snow-white Tony Blair over here. They are also anxious that Cherie Blair should not become another Hillary Clinton. ‚The president‘, according to Nick Bent ’still suffers from Hillary Clinton’s humiliating political defeat over health‘ – in reality, the result of Clinton’s cowardly retreat on his promise of universal health care – and has now reverted to the role of traditional, non-working First Lady. Over here it became clear during the election that Cherie had taken a vow of silence, loyally accompanying Blair on his campaign trail, smiling but saying nothing.

There is another parallel between the New Democrats and New Labour, regarding the left. When Clinton fought the 1992 presidential campaign, some on the left of the Democratic Party claimed that Clinton was a ’stealth social democrat‘. According to this, he was using right-wing rhetoric in order to win power – in order to return to a social democratic agenda. Needless to say, this did not happen. Once in the White House, Clinton prioritised deficit reduction, abandoned his health care proposals, and has recently slashed welfare. During the 1996 presidential campaign, the Democratic left opted for a policy of ’submergence‘ – that is, keeping quiet until Clinton was re-elected. And what then? They don’t appear to have resurfaced yet.

The left in the British Labour Party adopted a similar tactic in the run-up to the election. Ken Livingstone, reported The Independent (25 April), was ‚on a vow of silence‘. „They don’t directly send me any memos any longer“, said Livingstone, „but I am not going to say anything now, I don’t want to be blamed if anything goes wrong“. Tony Benn was adopting a similar approach. ‚I am a soldier in the middle of a war‘, he told The Independent, ‚I wouldn’t want to discuss my views of the generals‘.

Commenting on Blair’s victory, Al From said: ‚I think it’s terrific that the New Democrat and New Labour formula is clearly taking hold in all the democracies‘. Apart from being something of an exaggeration, this ignores the concrete differences between Britain and the US. For a start, Clinton only narrowly won re-election and the Democrats do not have a majority in Congress. In Britain, Blair’s victory was overwhelmingly the result of an anti-Tory mood, and an anti-Tory vote. It was not the product of the centre-left, pro-capitalist formula on which New Labour’s election campaign was fought. The victory was really in spite of the formula.

The seven percent fall in the turnout in Britain over 1992, however, is a move towards the much lower turnouts in US elections – where under half of the eligible electorate turn out to vote. This time, the turnout figure here was kept up by the much higher turnout by middle-class, formerly Tory voters, as compared to working-class voters who were offered very little by New Labour. In the future, when expectations in Labour are disappointed, we may well see a further decline in the British turnout.

Blair has now put the British working class in the same position as American workers – that is, they now lack a party which provides even a minimum representation for working-class interests. Nevertheless, a higher proportion of workers in Britain remain organised in trade unions, and there is a stronger tradition of working-class organisation and campaigning. Both British and US workers now face a common problem, however, the need to create a mass party, based on the working class, which will provide a vehicle for a struggle against the system and for a fundamental change in society.