Obscured by the war, the government's cautious radicalism at home has notched up significant successes in recent days. As the bombs dropped on Belgrade, Tony Blair secured Britain's totemic rebate at the Berlin summit for several years to come, the minimum wage was introduced this week, and reform of the Lords moved closer. The war has relegated these developments to the inside pages. More than that, the war's high-risk strategy, with no clear outcome, provides a grim contrast to the constructive pragmatism that is delivering significant change in Britain.
Let us briefly consider the domestic agenda before it disappears from view entirely. In Berlin, Blair did not have to struggle greatly to ensure that Britain's rebate remained untouched. Like income tax, the rebate is the subject of irrational interest, largely in the Eurosceptic media. Even so, Germany and others were supportive, recognising that Blair needs all the ammunition available in advance of the referendum on the single currency. A government opposed to a single currency would have faced much tougher and less rewarding nocturnal negotiations.
The minimum wage has progressed with little fuss to the statute book. It is a historic piece of legislation and will not be removed by a future Tory government.
Meanwhile, this week's debate in the Lords, in which peer after peer stood up to reflect on their own demise, underlined the degree to which Britain's constitution is being transformed in front of our eyes.
There are flaws in the government's cautious approach. Britain will not be a pioneer of crusading reform in Europe while both eyes are fixed on public opinion; the minimum wage is still very low; and ministers seem to want only extremely limited change to a second chamber. But ministers are delivering complex reforms on a wide range of fronts. Famously, Blair is supposed to approach problems by asking: "What works?" Previous Labour governments had to take into account all kinds of factors before considering whether a reform would work or not.
Why, then, have Blair and other similar-minded pragmatic politicians become embroiled in a military conflict that shows no sign of working? Cautious at home, they have become risk-takers abroad.
The obvious answer, repeated relentlessly by ministers and others in recent days, is that no other option was conceivable. As far as I can tell, this has been the only argument advanced by supporters of the air strikes. More than once I have been reminded of a football fan sitting near me at Tottenham Hotspur who whispers persistently and fruitlessly, "Give him an option" to faraway players, amid the more obscene chants around him. Like the flawed footballers, Milosevic gave Nato no option.
This argument presents a valid justification for air strikes, but fails completely to address Blair's favourite, practical question. Hoping to be persuaded, I have listened to every ministerial speech and read every newspaper column in favour of the air strikes. None has explained how the strategy will succeed.
In the meantime, the consequences have been to strengthen Milosevic's position, weaken opposition forces in Belgrade, made the plight of Albanians in Kosovo even worse in the absence, now, of media scrutiny, and given fresh ammunition to the extremists in Russia, as well as rousing the dangerous hostility of the Yeltsin administration.
What works? The air strikes are not working.
There is also a grim answer to the "no alternative" argument. Milosevic did "give them an option". The other option was the position before the air strikes, which was horrendous, but less horrendous than the current situation. In other words, one in which fewer Albanians were being slaughtered, with journalists and aid workers still in Kosovo, where Russia was not so fiercely placed on one side of the divide, where opposition in Belgrade could have been nurtured and strengthened. Not much better, but less calamitous nonetheless.
When such horrors are being played out in the Balkans, Westminster seems more parochial than normal, but the conflict will have its unpredictable political ramifications, as all such conflicts do. There can be no "Falklands factor" or "Gulf war factor". Margaret Thatcher and John Major owed much to Galtieri and Saddam Hussein in terms of their own domestic political fates. Blair will never have cause to be grateful to Milosevic in the same way. He already enjoys stratospheric poll ratings - the only direction he can go is down. Indeed Blair, who has been a lucky politician in many ways, has been unlucky in facing such high stakes in foreign policy so early in his government.
This is why domestic politics is likely for once to have as much of an impact on the war as the other way round. There is no appetite in the British government, nor the American one, for sending in ground troops. William Hague has been unequivocal, also, in opposing their use. Politics in Britain and America would become as unpredictably bloody as the killing fields of Kosovo if the soldiers moved in. Apart from the logistical considerations, senior ministers admit privately that the prospect of soldiers returning in body bags presents a political nightmare.
So the aim of the conflict is to weaken severely Milosevic's military capability, a vague enough objective to provide some leeway for Nato's political leaders. Most likely this will be a "Third Way" war in which few, if any, soldiers will return in body bags but, as with Iraq, the demon who caused the conflict remains in power at the end of it.
That is the best we can hope for. In which case a just, but ill-thought-out, war would not have been worth it.
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