New Labour faces task of rebuilding old social order

GEOFF MULGAN has never been a Tory, but when he looks at the Conservative Party these days, memories of youth come flooding back. In the early years of the Thatcher revolution, when he was still a teenager and working as a hospital porter, he was a member of the ultra left Militant Tendency in the Labour Party. "That's a terrible confession to have to make," he laughs.

Even for man in his early 30s, those times seem like another age. Amid all the changes, the one thing that seems strangely familiar is the present state of the Conservatives.

Back then, he was infused with the sense of an ending. The National Front was on the streets. The old, smug Labour Party that was, to people of his generation, the Establishment, was obviously on its way out. Bitter divisions were replacing the old consensus in British society.

But, while the feeling that something was about to collapse was correct, people like him were utterly mistaken about who would rule amid the rubble. Instead of a socialist revolution, there was a conservative coup.

"We had completely misread the political mood," he remembers, "and I think there's a very interesting parallel between what happened to Labour then and what's happening to the Tories now. A generation of younger activists, highly educated and highly politicised, moved at a particular moment in time in precisely the opposite direction to their natural political constituency.

So just when most of the other people of my age were becoming switched off or consumerist, the minority of politicos went hard left. Just as at the moment, all the Tory activists in their 20s in Britain are going violently Euro sceptic and so on, while most of their peers are going in the opposite direction. It's fatal for a political movement when that happens."

If, as head of the left of centre think tank Demos, Mulgan is now in a good position to diagnose the ills of the Tories and to help to set a new agenda for Labour and the Liberal Democrats, it is because he has learned some painful lessons. From his days as a canvasser for Labour candidates in London, he knows what it's like to be out of touch.

"Almost my first political memories are of the cultural gap between working class electors who were obsessed with crime, back to basics morality and so on, and us. We were talking at them in a foreign language. That gap was immediately apparent, and you couldn't just explain it away as a false consciousness that resulted from the Sun framing their minds.

Something had to give. "The 1983 election was in many ways a defining moment. The flat I was living in was the committee room of a very traditional Labour seat. But we had such difficultly getting people out to vote.

"There was a real sense of absurdity. The Labour manifesto was just a list of policies that didn't convince anybody, being presented on television by rightwingers having to pretend to support a manifesto they didn't agree with. It was clear that this was a movement on its way to rapid oblivion."

Like many on the Left in the early 1980s, he took refuge in local government, getting a job under Ken Livingstone at the Labour controlled Greater London Council. He still believes that there was much of lasting value in the way the GLC tried to redefine politics by including cultural and environmental issues on the agenda, but he found many of his own colleagues much more depressing than the Tory enemy.

"I was pretty horrified. Lots of old veterans of 1968 were brought in and were not only totally incompetent, but also totally unaware of their own incompetence. They were completely politicised, but couldn't run anything at all. They wasted incredible amounts of money. It had become a very indulgent culture."

When Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC, he went to America, to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"The place was full of high tech revolutionaries and capitalist revolutionaries. There were all sorts of awful things about them but they were much more convincing as successful revolutionaries than their equivalents on the Left in Britain. They had reason to be optimistic that the grain of change was on their side."

IT STRUCK him that if the new Right was working with the grain of change, then it made no sense to go on believing that Thatcherism was merely some kind of blip in British history, a mere temporary aberration that would soon run its course. Might it not be, rather, a coherent response to a changing world, a way of dealing with the complex changes in technology and economics that are summed up in the idea of globalisation?

Most left wing activists, says Mulgan, continue to see the success of the Conservatives over the last 18 years as a perverse reflection of British peculiarities, rather than, as he believes, "a response to capitalism which has a logic to it". Partly under the influence of Demos, the old Left has been transformed into New Labour, but Mulgan warns that there are three big questions for which a would be left of centre alternative to the Conservatives has yet to find agreed answers.

The first is about the recent past and "whether the changes which have taken place, however brutal, were a necessary coming to terms with the reality of a global economy, or whether they led Britain in the wrong direction, towards inefficiency and under investment."

The second is about the immediate future, and the approach that a Labour led government should take. Should it go for a "soft centred" project of merely presiding more humanely over the Britain that has been shaped by 18 years of Conservative government? Or should it set about transforming the British class system by "opening up all the old elites of class power - the public schools, the universities, the judiciary - which are as strong as ever"? Even those at the heart of New Labour are, he says, "absolutely unclear about those things".

His own view is that a new government has to be both realistic in its view of the last 18 years and radical in its agenda for the next five.

"I think on the one hand a lot of what Thatcherism did was a necessary adaptation in all sorts of ways. But I also believe that class is still the most important issue in Britain and that governments still have immense powers to deal with it. Government is the only institution which can break the incredible grip of the old ruling class."

The third question that a new left of centre government will have to face is how much of its energy should be devoted to constitutional change.

One school of thought is that hereditary power, as represented by the monarchy and the House of Lords, is central to Britain's problems, and that real economic and social change will be impossible unless those institutions are tackled. Mulgan strongly disagrees.

"There's been," he argues, "a strange diversion among the leftist intelligentsia. Partly because many of them are historians, lawyers and cultural people, they see government in terms that would have made sense in the 19th century but don't in the 20th when the great majority of what government does is running systems of provision. They have never been very interested in, and are actually quite bored by, government as a machine.

"If a government of the left was to come to power and put its main energies into the formal high constitution and not have a strategy for low government, prosaic government, that would be disastrous. I would turn the priority around and say the top priority is shifting those big systems of government towards left of centre goals and delivering on those prior to spending enormous amounts of time and energy on things like the monarchy and the House of Lords. There's a real danger that the public would see that as a strange indulgence.

By contrast, he says, one of the strengths of the Tories has been their understanding of the fact that government goes all the way down to the local school and GP's surgery. But if the Tories are so smart, how is it they seem to be on their way out?

His answer is that Britain is in a lot more trouble than appears on the surface, and that there is a sense of disaffection that goes much deeper than the pound in the pocket.

"In terms of public perceptions," he says, "there has been a very, very sharp decline of public trust and confidence in all the institutions except the army.

"Public trust is now down to 10 per cent in parliament, a quarter in the judiciary, 10 to 15 per cent for the monarchy and the civil service. The judiciary was seen to be convicting innocent people, the government lost credibility over the currency crisis, parliament over sleaze, the monarchy for obvious reasons.

"So it's a bigger crisis than it looks, because the institutions are carrying on quite happily. There are no marches on the streets. Parliament is not about to be stormed. It's one of the things about revolutions. They're nearly always implosions, not explosions. There's a loss of inner confidence before anything happens.

"So on the one hand, there's great apparent stability, with the prospect of a change of government not resulting in any great change at all. And on the other, there are the symptoms of some much deeper shifts that are not really being expressed by the political system.

That, he says, explains why the dominant mood in Britain right now is one of fatalism. And behind this fatalism lies the fact that the Tories have actually been no good at doing what conservatives are supposed to do - protecting a recognisable way of life.

"For a seminar with Tony Blair", he says, "I did an audit of which of Thatcher's projects actually succeeded. There was a clear pattern which kind of surprised me. All of the policies which went with the grain of libertarianism broadly succeeded, but all of the conservative agenda failed.

"Her three core social projects were strengthen the traditional family, strengthen British national identity and pride, and cut crime. All of them failed by any possible indicator of success. Crime went up three times over. National pride, in terms of people identifying with public institutions, fell steadily after the Falklands war. And divorce rates rose and rose."

IF POLITICS was only about economics, the Tories should be re elected. But people also measure governments by much more intangible criteria. They ask questions about whether the society they live in is better than it used to be.

One of the odd lessons of the Tory years, indeed, is that there is such a thing as society, and that families cannot be made into small businesses, calculating their success only in terms of profit and loss. Mulgan points, for instance, to the fact that Tory success in getting more ordinary people to own stocks and shares has made far less differences to the it valued than it ought to have done.

"There are now nearly 10 million share owners, but it just doesn't have that much cultural significance. The policy has been successful, but it hasn't changed people's perceptions. The political significance of privatisation has been much more as a great clanger in terms of contempt for the customer and outrageous rates of pay for the bosses.

"It's been one of the big corroders of Tory support. People can quite easily hold a share in British Gas and when they see that the head of the company is getting an outrageous salary still think `they're greedy bastards, I'll vote Labour next time.'"

Because of factors like these, there is no simple correlation between money in the pocket and hope in the heart.

"Somewhere in the mid 1970s," says Mulgan, "the link between economic growth and happiness broke. And ever since, although the economy has been expanding, people's real well being, by every indicator we have, has been at best stagnant, at worst in decline. Thatcherism just accelerated the pedalling to keep economic growth going, while real life was getting worse.

"And in all the big currents of historic change - the liberation of women, the greening of society - it was on the wrong side. Some things I think they did right, but the balance sheet is overwhelmingly negative. The Conservative project came to be seen as disruptive of social order rather than conducive to it."

Odd as it may seem, it may now fall to the traditional forces of change on the British left to try to rebuild a shattered social order.