The 'which Blair?' project -Oct 12, 2004
Faced with continuing political flak from his ill-fated Iraq adventure, wavering opinion polls, and a May 2005 election as still the most likely option, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is having another makeover.

In a recent speech at an event organised by two leading think tanks, Demos and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), Blair gave the first signals of an adventurous agenda for a renewed Labour administration.

Top of his policy list is overhauling the welfare state. The talk is of combining quality (rather than basic) services, market funding and strong social values. As in his military stance, Blair’s promise is of proactive strikes at a crumbling system.

We have been here before. Immediately prior to the May 1997 election that swept the Conservatives from power after 18 years, the Labour leader gave an interview to The Observer newspaper. In it he promised to be ‘more radical than some seem to be expecting’.

Two days later, in a surprising and little publicised move, the PM-in-waiting turned up virtually unannounced at a small East London meeting of the Jubilee Group, a network of Christian socialists in the Anglican Catholic tradition.

Galvanised around Kenneth Leech, an inner city priest and theologian whose writings had apparently inspired a younger Blair, the Jubilee Group remained as suspicious of New Labour’s ‘modernising’ stance as they were astonished at its architect’s appearance in their midst.

They listened politely as the charismatic politician talked of abiding principles issuing in far-reaching change. His theology seemed opaque, his vision was rhetorically inflated, and his political instincts remained firmly focussed on grasping power.

At the election many were prepared to suspend their scepticism. But after nearly two terms in office, the question about what the most overtly Christian PM in living memory really stands for remains.

Tony Blair has successively adopted (and quietly abandoned) the creeds of ‘radical centrism’, ‘communitarianism’, ‘progressive individualism’ and ‘the third way’ between neo-liberalism and traditional social democracy.

Gurus (David Marquand, Will Hutton, Anthony Giddens, Charlie Leadbetter) have come and gone. Even the ‘New’ appended to Labour has been somewhat back peddled.

And what of the controversial religious dimension? In private Blair’s Christian convictions are seen as foundational; but in public he has lived with the ‘we don’t do God’ stance, while occasionally employing dubiously messianic language to bolster a political stance rather evidently bereft of a power critique inherent in the Gospel.

So why did Blair turn to the Jubilee Group just before he entered Number 10? Was it one last genuflection to the ideals that had moulded him? Or one last attempt to carry the votes of those he admired in principle but disavowed in practice?

Tony Blair is not a deep thinker, but he is a canny political operator. What was once talked of as ‘the Blair project’ is, in reality, a complicated combination of apparently contradictory instincts honed by different elements of his public persona. In shorthand, these could be described as the pragmatic, the principled, the prophetic, and the pre-emptive.

The pragmatism, seen in his willingness to borrow tighter political clothes when the situation demands it, has echoes of Reinhold Neibuhr, the US Christian socialist turned ‘Christian realist’, whose writings were known to the student Blair.

For principle, the PM wears a broadly humanitarian approach to life rooted in the personalism (but not the traditional socialism and pacifism) of an alleged early mentor, the respected Quaker philosopher John Macmurray.

This intellectual debt came to light when one-time Blair chaplain, Peter Thompson, briefly moved back from Australia to London to guide him. The renewed acquaintance did not last long.

More recently the PM’s outlook been influenced by the progressive Catholic theologian Hans Kung, whose recent project has been to seek to common religious ground in the global affirmation of human rights issuing from the Western liberal tradition.

But in practice it is Francis Fukuyama’s style of ‘liberal interventionism’ which has given his agenda practical expression; a twist well beyond Kung.

This pre-emptive instinct, a daring-do that also saw Blair steal a march on political rival Gordon Brown, has been strengthened post 9/11 by his military alliance with US President George W. Bush.

Bush’s Manichean division of the world into good and evil is one Blair also seems to share, albeit in a way more complex than that enshrined in the simplicities of the American religious right.

This connects with his ‘prophetic’ stance: the adoption of apocalyptic rhetoric to endorse a secularised version of hope. Any likeness to the real Jewish and Christian prophets is strictly superficial, however. Shopping was never their path to paradise.

Before he rose to power Blair did indeed admire the spirit of radical Christianity embodied in the likes of Kenneth Leech (for whom the attraction was never mutual). But he believed that such aspirations were rendered ineffective in ‘the real world’.

So what became New Labour was, in part, the attempt to translate a boiled-down social vision into hardheaded politics. But along the way its founding ideas were absorbed beyond recognition.

So it is no surprise that R. H. Tawney, the founding father of modern Christian social democracy, is all but absent from Blair’s purview.

What we are left with, it appears, are private convictions that do little to shape public policy; a semi-Christian language linked to increasingly problematic militarised humanitarianism.

Whatever his personal qualities – and I have no reason to doubt that Tony Blair is a decent person – this disjuncture is ill suited to the threats and opportunities that surround us.

Talk of wholly separating religion and politics (in Blair or elsewhere) is wildly optimistic. It is a global reality, made worse by denial. The question is, how do we keep the wrong sort of beliefs at bay – those that promote hatred, division and injustice?

In order to address that issue, serious public conversation is needed. Not the attempt to impose imperial convictions (Islamism, Christendom, Zionism) on the body politic, but a genuine argument about competing convictions in a plural age.

To have that, it is helpful to know where you stand. Tony Blair talks tough, but says little. His party’s ‘Big Conversation’ about values turned out to be little more than PR hype. His strong-arm tactics, as in Iraq, are rebounding.

The PM may well still be with us after the next general election. He may even remain the least-worst winnable proposition. But when his attempts to impose himself on the world finally falter, what will be left?

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) works for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, but is writing in a personal capacity. His background is in journalism, adult learning, politics and theology.