Tony Blair and the Ideal Type

By J.H. Grainger

The 'ideal type' is Max Weber's hypothetical leading democratic politician, whom the author finds realized in Tony Blair. He is a politician emerging from no obvious mould, treading no well-beaten path to high office, and having few affinities of tone, character or style with his predecessors. He is the Outsider or Intruder, not belonging to the 'given' of British politics and dedicated to its transformation. Here is a timely critique of Blair's political persona as he presents himself to the British people to be entrusted with a third term as Prime Minister.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imprint Academic
• Release date: Nov 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781845407421

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Title page

Tony Blair and the Ideal Type

J.H. Grainger

IMPRINT ACADEMIC

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2013 digital version by Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Copyright © J.H. Grainger, 2005

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

No part of any contribution may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic

PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic

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Foreword

The New Labour party that triumphed at the General Election of 1997 exhaled the lost promise of politics but steered clear of specific political promises. What it brought forth were not programmes but broad intentions. From the beginning it was presented as the lengthening shadow of one man, Tony Blair, possessed of superior ‘values’ and general ideas of all kinds. Grounded therefore neither in intellectual theory nor in history but in a longing for ‘things to be different’, dedicated to ‘modernity’ in culture, social and political structure and, above all, in the conduct of politics itself, the project of New Labour, with echoes from both the defunct Social Democratic Party and the small but extant Liberal Democrat Party, stood for co-operation not conflict among competing political parties, amity not enmity in society. In the arrangements of politics Blair despised the wisdom of the ancients, disparaged the ‘ages’ hard-bought gain’ or what Attlee, a very different politician, had once called ‘the mess of centuries’.

It is indeed, at first sight, surprising to find this passion for making things new - for pitting what turned out to be this simple political or utilitarian rationalism against what had been used and proved over time - by one who in some ways appeared to be a political romantic. For romanticism, we learn, lies not in the object contemplated, the individual, the age, the venture, the departure, the victory or the project, but in the subject himself using what ‘occasions’ are available or conjurable to create from wish or dream imagined ‘realities’, alternatives to those which diurnally persist. From such displacement politics moves to a higher plane on which harmony ensues. Whether or not in the Weltanschauung of, say, Blair all innovations, transformations and departures are reconciled within his romantic self or there persist anomalies, disjunctions and contradictions, there can be little doubt about the eclecticism of his conduct or politics. As prime actor and mover his states of mind observe no frontiers. At the same time it seems that he is utterly convinced of his own chameleonically derived insights into his own times and the validity of his political judgments. He is unlikely to concur with the perception of Hans Georg Gadamer that:

The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being.

‘Blairism’ was to consist of the development of a moment for renewal, political, social and spiritual. As in 1906 and 1945, ‘the people’ were persuaded that something was happening. Yet Blair was a leader qualitatively other than either Campbell-Bannerman or Attlee. Throughout his campaign from Labour leadership to the Election, his appeal was to the emergent; he was the chosen vehicle of what was to come. The historic purpose of Labour, writes Ben Pimlott, was sloughed off ‘like a snakeskin without growing another that is no more substantial than mere consumer responsiveness’. Ascriptions, labels, derivations and lineages - ‘New Liberal’, ‘Social Democrat’, ‘Christian Socialist’, ‘Ethical Socialist’ - fell away from him like leaves from a tree. Ideas, inert or ineffective, such as ‘Social-ism’ as a substitute for ‘Socialism’ proved to be unargued, unconcluded counters, rapidly consumed or left for dead in the flame of what John Lloyd called his ‘bombastic, emotionally promiscuous, hubristic’ platform rhetoric. Blair has no settled views even on ‘stake-holding’, that much bruited social democratic specific of European (and Singaporean) provenance in which the merits of the market and the virtues of the civic order were to be merged so as to yoke the energies and efficacies of commerce to the ends of social cohesion in Blair’s version of ‘one nation’. None of them mattered much to one deeply engaged in the projection of values rather than the prescriptions of an ideology.

It may be that Blair was wary of specific political action because it demanded both practical, effective knowledge about the workings of society to which we never seem to attain and conspiring circumstances which seldom turn up. Perhaps, despite his early rhetoric, he doubted his own prowess in the face of dire possibility of proof of the fact remarked by Andreas Schedler that ‘the capacity to act has migrated out of the political system’, that in the event fears would triumph over hopes. A vision that merely insists that things can be different and is intent on transcending the obstructive present by adversely comparing it with what does not yet exist, some ineffable future state, requires neither knowledge nor specifics. To invoke his dream, to move or bore us with it, the visionary needs only an ardent, tirelessly active personality, histrionic gifts and some inspiring language so that he may soar above the endlessly, tiresome repertory of routine politics.

At a time when the two ‘great parties’ seemed stale and earthbound in their stock hostilities such future-orientated high-mindedness enabled Blair eclectically to attract to his own untrammelled subjectivity such footloose allegiances (himself, he had none), edifications and tutelages from which there might be fashioned for the unpersuaded or uncommitted a new political centre movement or party akin to the former Social Democratic Party, but, on this occasion, developing not from deep within but as a revolution from above by a circle at the very apex of the Labour party. Through Blair the excluded middle would at last take on a formation capable of seizing and holding power. From whatever became detached from other formations he would yoke together what seemed useful to him.

As romantic, political emanation - perhaps only a fleeting essence - Blair was not predisposed to accept the limitations of politics. He was embarking on something that was ‘important to our future as human beings’. New Labour would ‘progress to explore new frontiers of human achievement’ - achievements to be shared by all nations, ‘just not our own’. Like earlier platform orators of Scottish provenance, Gladstone, Rosebery and MacDonald, he sought to move his audience not so much by argument as by ‘elevation’, by undetailed moral fervour. Within the darkness of the political theatre, they became prisoners of his grace. There, on the illumined stage, he gave moment and drama to political choice; for political artifice he conferred new ‘community’ on the serried stalls; they saw ‘a great man’ in the making, a politician strenuously playing the part so that he might become the part.

At the Labour party Conference in October 1996 he made a Covenant with Britain which, to editorial and arch-episcopal approval, ‘the People’ sealed at the next General Election. Thus he was pledged to deliver the realm by mighty acts from the encumbrance of the past. ‘I give you my word.’ So he committed himself against intangible, inimical forces to an infinitely broader and more ethereal field for action than any envisaged by Mrs Thatcher, owned as his leading mentor in ideas and practice. At the next party Conference, at last in power, he confirmed his transforming purpose:

Today, I issue a challenge to you. Help us make Britain that beacon shining throughout the world united behind a mission to modernize our country. Believe in us as much as we believe in you. Give just as much to our country as we intend to give. Give your all. Make this the giving age.

Not even Lloyd George loosed himself upon the country in so Messianic a manner. The great creative campaigns of Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain had been centred upon specific cause or issue. They were not personal ventures into the open future.

As covenanted promise-maker Blair bases the success of his enterprise upon public trust in his moral character and faith in the efficacy of his agency. He is the singular man: confidently, he assumes burdens that would break other politicians’ backs. To the speaking, exciting present belong the reconciliations of mind and heart, pledges of constructive engagements and settlements, removal of impediments and deadlocks in domestic, European and world politics. To the active, exacting future are consigned the equivocations, complicities, dissemblings and ‘hard choices’. For today, the familiar invocation of hope against fear, the insistence that there is a ‘vision within our grasp’.

This last shines not at all from ‘the lamp of experience’ but is lit rather by the religio-political discursiveness of the undergraduate. Like the animated undergraduate, he finds it difficult, without instruction, to take a political stance. So he strikes attitudes, climbs into pulpits and discovers his vocation as an evangelist, as a spell-binder: one who imbues others with enthusiasm and purpose while himself remaining without clear political identity. His language is attuned in accent, syntax and tone to both audience and occasion. All things to all men, he is indeed an ‘occasionalist’ making what he wills out of what is before him: an expectant party conference, a focus or pop group, a memorial service for the celebrated dead. The captive audience is always an opportunity for projecting himself, for ‘charm’ and persuasion, for charging others with his outflowing energy; he is indeed ‘the genial ego’. His grace ensures that there need be no argument, sometimes, perhaps, not too much sense. Thus Blair achieves leadership, office and power without resolving his indeterminacy, without defining either loyalties or enmities. There are no frontiers, external or internal. There is no motive but the achievement of his own réclame.

Out of this unclouded openness to both novelty and redemption, the leadership of New Labour, desperately seeking office, found itself obliged, despite its eschewal of ‘ideology’ to send signals of general aims and direction to the political nation - the crescent, unpolitical nation cared for little but presence and presentation - if only