Tony and Bill Share the Same Primal Instincts

LONDON —  Tony Blair, the man odds-makers reckon almost sure to be Britain’s prime minister by the time midnight strikes next May 1, is often compared to Bill Clinton, indeed fosters the parallel himself. You can tot up the similarities, starting with ambitious political professionals, many of them with a foot in journalism, mustered round Blair. Avid admirers of Clinton’s 1992 campaign, they stress Blair’s masterful rescue of a party lost in the past, hostage to the “special interests,” lurching from one ignominious defeat to the next.

Then there’s Blair’s eerie knack for the straddle phrase, designed to keep him out of political trouble, starting with his most famous one, to the effect that he would be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” Or on the role of welfare: “A hand up, not a handout.” Remind you of anyone?

Like Clinton, Blair is a consummate trimmer. If there’s one thing the British Labor Party stood foursquare on, it was full employment. Not Blair. He wants “high and stable levels of employment,” proclaims that he doesn’t believe in demand management and that in Labor’s economic strategies there has been “too little concern for the gradual buildup of inflationary pressures.”

Tossing off such code phrases designed to reassure the bankers and kindred pillars of capital, Blair races to appease the natural foes of Labor. His most notorious venture in this department came in 1994 and 1995, when he dined with the world’s foremost media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, and then flew to Australia, where he was invited to reassure the senior executives of this rabid supporter of Margaret Thatcher that he too was a fervent admirer of the baroness’ “radicalism.”

Blair has been duly rewarded. Right after Conservative Prime Minister John Major called March 17 for an election came the big news that despite pleas from Major and Thatcher (who may have been less urgent in her request), Murdoch is throwing his battery of newspapers behind Blair, on whom Murdoch’s mass-circulation tabloid the Sun now lavishes exuberant flatteries.

Both Blair and Clinton had soaring apprenticeships in political parties dazed by a spate of defeats, both offering an alluring, Intellectual Public Offering: to wit, that with sufficient adroitness, readiness to discard the dead ideologies of the past, etc., etc., the powers of capital and the ravages of the free market could be checked, and furthermore checked in a manner that somehow would not arouse in these same powers of capital any implacable spirit of opposition. In other words, allocations of wealth and poverty are not a zero-sum game, and with sufficient education, training, policy tweakings, reinventions of government, infrastructural reforms, etc., etc., the equitable society can be attained.

With Blair this proposition takes its sleekest shape in what he calls the “stakeholder economy,” a conceptual package he first displayed to Singapore’s business leaders in January 1996.

This stakeholder economy turns out to be a blend of 19th-century Christian ideas about property and social obligation and the modern employee stock ownership plan, as for example incarnated in the ownership structure of United Airlines.

There really are two relevant questions here. As was not the case for George Bush in 1992, Britain’s economy is, by orthodox measures, doing well. The markets are buoyant, unemployment low and the once-fabled German economy laggard by comparison. So why wouldn’t those same swing voters who sank Neal Kinnock’s Labor Party in 1992 against Major do the same again, similarly fearful of disruptive expansion of public spending? As with Clinton in 1992, Blair’s main campaign plank here is simple time: the Conservatives have been in power too long and have become irredeemably corrupt.

And if Blair eases his way into Downing Street on the “time for a change” plank, what then? Clinton certainly posed no peril to the powers of capital and has survived in the polls because of a strong economy. Capital has rejoiced in Blair’s careful distancing from the big labor unions, and is tolerant of his Singapore lingo so long as it doesn’t add up to anything substantive such as exchange controls, bans on outsourcing, plant flight or whatever.

For Blair, as for Clinton, surviving and winning are primal instincts, honed to such sharpness that in their ascent they are formidable tacticians and campaigners. Theirs is the skill of arousing hopes and allaying fears. But the shelf life of this skill is brief, as Clinton found in 1993 when he succumbed in an instant to the business interests. There’s scant evidence thus far that if he prevails on May 1, Blair will turn out any different.