It hardly seems a decade ago that Tony Blair stood on the steps of Number 10 while the country celebrated a fresh mood of optimism.
All the rhetoric of the time spoke of reform, delivery and the creation of a new Britain. So where are those great hopes now and what are the prospects for reform over the next decade?
Putting aside Iraq and issues of trust for a moment, the key tests for New Labour — as measured against its own original pledge card — should not have been foreign affairs or the conduct of political communications but its ability to make substantial reforms to our quality of life. These are the big issues affecting everyday life in the UK: namely education, health, crime and pensions.
Polly Toynbee and David Walker have analysed Blair’s public service reform legacy in detail in their two books auditing New Labour’s achievements, but what of the tests that Blair might have set for himself — namely whether public services would be sufficiently reformed to introduce what he has called ‘personalised services’ with a degree of competition and consumer choice?
One can argue about the statistics, and one can also argue about the public perception of them, but voters’ views became clear at the ballot box in this week’s local elections.
However, what is undeniable is that New Labour has fundamentally changed the territory upon which public service reform is now discussed in the UK.
Ten years ago, talk of choice, competition, vouchers or the private sector was Tory turf. It was pretty much unthinkable for Labour to be associated with breaking up public sector monopolies.
But that is what Tony Blair has done. He has associated Labour with a pragmatic approach to building new schools, cutting waiting lists and getting the unemployed into work. He has encouraged the independent sector to mean more than just the private for-profit sector so that voluntary bodies, citizens and churches are included, too. In doing so he has brought the idea of privatisation and of the ‘enabling state’ into the mainstream of political debate.
By investing substantially more money in the NHS and taking us closer to the European Union spending average, he showed critics on the Left — who argued that the NHS’s problems were all about under-investment — that money was only part of the problem, and that reform was needed, too.
Critics on the Right, meanwhile, have not so much argued with his underlying approach to choice and competition as protested that the reforms have not gone far or fast enough to make a real difference.
It is true that public services still need substantial reform to reflect the desire for a good quality of life that a wealthier Britain now demands. The extra money spent on the NHS has not led to a consequent increase in productivity.
On the contrary, the Prime Minister’s own Strategy Unit and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have both found falling productivity of up to 20% since 1997.
Extra schools and hospitals have been built under the Private Finance Initiative but choice still largely depends on being able to live in the right area and afford an expensive house.
The pensions deficit has been dissected ad nauseam of late and one can perhaps lay the blame for this at the door of the chancellor rather than the prime minister. But the ‘pension crisis’ also reflects changes in the UK’s social structure, with many middle-class people now choosing to invest in property rather than in traditional pensions as a source of long-term investment.
Will Britain’s next premier continue the New Labour legacy? Well, whoever takes over from Blair, the challenges remain broadly similar.
According to recent polls, Gordon Brown is strongly associated in voters’ minds with the overall failings of New Labour — and voters tend to remember and punish what went wrong rather than reward what went right. And yet, perversely, whatever has gone well in public services will be seen as Blair’s achievement, not Brown’s.
As for David Cameron, he is now pulling ahead in the polls and his views on the NHS suggest that Blair’s own statements on his legacy — that all parties must now respect the balance between economic prosperity and social justice — will remain as true for the Conservatives as they will for Blair’s successor.
No-one talks about 1997’s infamous ‘third way’ any longer — but they don’t need to because the middle ground is the space in which politics is defined and the battleground on which the Labour leadership race, and indeed the next general election, will be fought.
As Blair contemplates his departure, that must count as some kind of a personal achievement.
