Gordon Brown today walks taller than any previous Labour chancellor could possibly have imagined. Labour chancellors usually limp to the end of their terms of office, crippled by a succession of financial crises, cabinet splits and accusations of betrayal from party supporters. Mr Brown serenely commands both the economy and the party. It is all very well to mock his obsession with "prudence". But finance ministers of the left must be more, not less, orthodox in their approach to economic management and public spending, because they start from a position where the financial markets and the business community mistrust them. Kenneth Clarke has frequently observed that, in 1997-99, he would not have kept to the Tories' own spending targets. Mr Clarke, as a Tory chancellor, would have had no need to do so: Mr Brown, being Labour, had to observe them if he was not to risk a collapse of international and domestic confidence. By following the course he did, he has removed, probably for ever, the single biggest reason for not voting Labour. This was what new Labour was really about; all else was waffle.
But waffle is no longer enough. There was never much doubt, in 1983 or 1987, where Margaret Thatcher was taking the country: towards market solutions, privatisation, low taxation and uninhibited money-making. Tory think-tanks dreamt up ever more improbable wheezes for extending these principles; party debates were about how far they could go. The British never had much enthusiasm for this agenda but tolerated it as the price of what they saw (rightly or wrongly) as reliable stewardship of the economy.
New Labour now needs similar clarity. And some things are certainly clearer than they were two years ago. In his Budget speech on Wednesday, Mr Brown said: "Our priority is and has been Britain's public services." Just as Margaret Thatcher threatened in the 1980s that, if people voted Labour, they would miss out on promised tax cuts, so Mr Brown now threatens that, if they vote Tory, they will miss out on promised spending increases in schools and hospitals. That represents a dramatic change in the political weather. Then there is the determination to improve the Tories' shameful record on child poverty (by the time they left office, Britain accounted for one-third of all the poor children in Europe). To this and other ends, Mr Brown has abandoned Labour's opposition to means tests and started to dismantle the middle-class welfare state. It is clear, too, that Mr Brown will reward what he calls "hard-working families"; the unemployed scarcely feature in his speeches except as targets for stern homilies about cleaning up their act, coming off drugs and getting jobs.
This is where the picture becomes more blurred. How will new Labour cope in less economically stable times? Will it still make public services the priority if it needs tax increases to sustain investment? Will the unemployed be treated more sympathetically if a recession throws millions out of work? We don't know. On other issues, the picture is even more blurred. Does new Labour intend to curb car use? Pass. Does it favour more selection in schools? Pass. Does it, in principle, want people to take more personal responsibility for health and education costs? Pass. Does it see Britain in the vanguard of Europe? Pass. Does it prefer centralised state direction to diffusion of power? Pass. Does it even still want to be known as new Labour? Pass. We have a one-dimensional view of new Labour: over four years, it has dealt only with improving economic conditions and faced only one significant domestic crisis - the not very encouraging case of the fuel tax protests. There is neither sufficient case history nor sufficient doctrine to allow us to judge where, on the broader front, it is heading.
This may well be thought a virtue: Tony Blair has always argued that politicians should concern themselves not with what fits doctrinal preconceptions, but with what works. Perhaps this, as three Labour MPs suggest on page 34, is the age of small political ideas. Yet this does not prevent Mr Blair from pursuing his Third Way or seeking guidance from a succession of gurus, of which the American Robert Putnam (see page 18) appears to be the latest. Nor does it stop centre-left think-tanks (in sharp contrast to their gung-ho right-wing counterparts in the 1980s) from examining their progressive navels and pondering the meaning of life. Thus, Matthew Taylor, head of the Institute for Public Policy Research, agonises in the Political Quarterly about "contradictions and tensions" while Tom Bentley, the director of Demos, worries in the NS (page 25) that new Labour's technocratic emphasis on "delivery" may actually increase people's disengagement from politics.
No modern government has so dominated the political landscape as this one, reducing its opponents to little more than comic walk-on parts. Yet, for all Mr Brown's undeniable triumphs, few have generated so little passion or enthusiasm.
Meet the new Irish
Pity the Welsh. Every nation has a butt for its jokes: the polacks (Poles) in the US and the Tasmanians in Australia, for example. In Britain, it used to be the Irish. But Ireland's economy is now a Celtic tiger, in the forefront of IT; besides, some of its citizens seem to be rather smart at planting bombs and firing rockets. So the Welsh have stepped into the breach: Anne Robinson - to the fury of a Commons select committee - asks "what are they for?"; Jeremy Clarkson proposes to put their country in the microwave and the common Welshman, in films such as Notting Hill, is portrayed as slow-witted and accident-prone. Coal, chapel, sheep, rugby players less than seven feet tall, Michael Heseltine: everything Welsh is in decline. Even their prince is regarded as a bit of a twit. It's time for a rebrand. Call in the image-makers!
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