The first Blairite

I’m going to stake my claim as the first Blairite. Not only that, I was a Blairite long before anyone, including me, knew who Tony Blair was. You see, my politically formative years were spent in Bristol, specifically the constituencies of Bristol South East, which after boundary changes, became Bristol East. I was active, but only in the sense that I went to public meetings and demonstrations. If you wanted to be active, you needed to be a member, or at the very least a supporter, of the far left Trotskyist grouping, Militant tendency. I was neither, just an ordinary young person who wanted to Labour government and didn’t want a Tory one, or a rising fascist movement like the National Front. Oh and my MP, until 1983, was Tony Benn.

Benn was no ordinary Labour politician, yet in some ways he was. He attended various elite private schools, including Westminster School, and then went to Oxford University. Later, as he became more and more left wing, he even went to the lengths of removing his private schooling records from Who’s Who. By the time I joined Labour in the mid 1970s, I found that despite my tender age, my own politics were not being shaped by Benn. He campaigned strongly to stay out of the Common Market (EU) as did some on the far left and everyone on the hard right, incredibly, it seems now, regularly sharing platforms with Enoch Powell, whom he greatly admired. His politics, which even then I found simple, if not simplistic, appeared to be more slogan that detailed policy. They represented vague aspiration and were rarely accompanied by statistical evidence. Essentially, wish lists, which was how Militant operated. Benn and the comrades were convinced they knew what was best for the workers. I was not so sure.

Another thing I found about Benn was his curious fascination for what he saw a noble, romantic struggle of working class people. I saw nothing romantic about this when I was growing up, as my family struggled to put food on the table and lived in homes where ice formed inside the windows as well as outside. It might have read well in the elite confines of elite private schools and university which were not the destination of working class people. But not in my world.

I always saw the likes of Militant in the same way as I looked at weird cults like the Moonies and the Mormon church. There was a kind of religious fervour about what they believed in and wanted us to believe in. In place of God, they adored Leon Trotsky and the local Labour Party secretary came to my house several times in order to convert my best friend and I to Militant. That he failed was, at least in part, down to the careful research I had carried out on Militant but also because I had developed a set of beliefs that didn’t coincide with the socialism in one country they believed in. On the contrary, although I had no ambition or ability to make much of my life, I recognised that others did. Young people with ambition and aspiration who wanted to get on. The Labour hard left, it felt to me, was very much against people getting on, preferring to level down. There had to be a middle way and I believed in it right from the start.

I had things I believed in, like a well-funded, free-at-the-point of delivery NHS, well-funded public services that operated not first for profit but for the needs of the people, the equality of opportunity to everyone, regardless of where they came from. I also wanted my children to achieve more, to be better off, than me. How could any parent not? And at the same time, I wanted businesses to succeed, creating decent goods and creating quality well-paid jobs. I also wanted choice in what I bought and where I bought it from. Some things would be better if they were state-owned, others could be properly regulated. If it worked, I didn’t care which, except with essentials like health and education. They just have to be solely in our hands. Just because.

I didn’t like the expression “tax the rich”. That sounds like the politics of envy. No question that those who have the most should bear the heaviest load in terms of taxation but let’s not turn it into a bad thing for people wanting to do as well as possible, to afford a nice house, car and lifestyle.

Although Benn wasn’t a member of Militant, he was happy with the stranglehold it had in his constituency. He was no fool so he will have known that unless you were of the hard left, there could be no positions to be held in the constituency. And I didn’t find him to be a particularly nice person, either, specifically when he was with those of a different point of view.

I didn’t feel I was somehow on the right of the Labour Party, as the comrades call those of us who are not on the far left. To me, the NHS represents the very definition of socialism, as do comprehensive schools. My belief in the equality of opportunity for everyone is hardly a true aim of the Tories, even if they pretend it is. I don’t believe that in a rich country such as ours there should be a need for food banks. And dignity in old age, too. I could go on, but I’d say these were all left of centre points of view.

Years later, without giving me any credit, I might say, Tony Blair came along with New Labour, something I had essentially advocated for many years. The reason it worked was simple: Blair believed in New Labour and so did the population of a country worn down by an exhausted Conservative government. And, until the worldwide financial crash of 2008, New Labour was a success. Somehow, even though all I had done to bring it about was to vote for it, I was vindicated. It really was possible to have the best of both worlds. You really could have a well-funded NHS and businesses could still be profitable. Things got better, as I always knew they would.

In 1983, Tony Benn lost Bristol East to a resurgent Tory party and soon he found another parliamentary seat, this time in Chesterfield. Given that he never lived in Bristol, being an MP far from London had never proved to be an obstacle for Benn’s career. Yet 1983 was very much down to him and his brand of hard left socialism. Indeed, the late Labour MP Gerald Kaufman described Labour’s manifesto for that election as “the longest suicide note in history”. Not only had Labour lost, so had the British people.

Today, my views have barely changed. I’m still the Blairite who was there before Blair and now after. More than ever, in my humble opinion, we need a Labour government which embraces the centre ground, understands people’s ambitions and aspirations and, most importantly, remembers why it was formed in the first place: to enable representation of working class people in parliament in order to improve their lives. Labour losing elections doesn’t benefit working people, something that affluent chattering classes never much cared about, as long as they could remain pure in their dogma.

Gone are the days when I’d qualify every comment about Blair by saying “apart from Iraq”, because that episode is one area where I really have changed my mind. That’s for another day. I think I know what wins elections for Labour and I think I understood that long before most!