“I have always believed that politics is first and foremost about ideas,” Blair declared in 1998. At the time, it was probably meant as a dig at the grey-toned, sleaze-riddled Tory administration that had clung to power, seemingly without vision or principles, for a full eight years after Thatcher’s defenestration. But Blair’s invocation of “ideas” wasn’t just about sharpening the contrast between him and the stuffy rump Conservative administration.
I was born the year Margaret Thatcher came to power, 1979, and cast my first vote the year the man she called her “greatest success” scored his first landslide victory. Over my lifetime the contours of respectable politics have been defined by the joint trajectory they set. Now, 25 years after Blair’s landslide victory, it’s clear that his legacy is best understood in conjunction with hers.
Like Thatcher, Blair was animated by a powerful vision. His was also, like hers, a politics of the ideal: of elevating the abstract over the material world. And together, they’ve delivered a politics in which the ruling class has withdrawn en masse from engaging with the world as it is, preferring the world as they think it should be. Today, we live with the monstrous offspring of their combined economic and cultural politics of abstraction. Blending Thatcherite callousness for the politically weak with the providential self-righteousness of Blairism, their legacy has fused in a politico-commercial basilisk that proposes to rule us all: woke capital.
Many of those who, unlike me, remember the Seventies will tell you Britain’s economy wasn’t in a happy place back then. Britain was “the sick man of Europe”, all crumbling public services, sclerotic nationalised industries and rolling strikes. Thatcher’s leadership transformed this Britain, forcing the economy kicking and screaming away from earning a living by making stuff toward earning a living by manipulating ideas.
Deindustrialisation was brutally swift: between the second quarter in 1979 and the second quarter in 1981, manufacturing employment fell by 17% and manufacturing output fell by 20%. During her tenure, financial services rose from 15% to 24% of the economy, while manufacturing slumped from 21% to 17%. The impact was, as is now well-documented, not evenly felt. Knowledge-industry hubs such as London, Cambridge and Milton Keynes boomed, while those dependent on manufacturing languished. My childhood in the Home Counties was comfortable; my Liverpool-born husband remembers a graffiti slogan in the Merseyside of “managed decline” that read: “WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS”.
The Old Left served as the political voice of workers in the real economy. But with the unions broken and industries privatised, that Labour Party was permanently crippled as a cultural force. Blair, though, carved out a new role for the Labour Party by transposing the politics of de-materialisation from the economic to the social domain.
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