One of the storylines on the Channel 4 soap Brookside last week was about a woman going to the Labour Party conference in Blackpool. Of itself - because Brookside has disimproved drastically since its mid-80s heyday - the moment was insignificant. And yet, I believe, it provides evidence of the progress of the cultural thaw currently under way in British society, accelerating as a consequence of the Blair government, but also predating and prompting this.
For about 15 years now, the parallel fictional world of British soap opera has existed in a vacuum, removed from "reality" in the sense of recognising the formal political context of the day. Coronation Street and EastEnders, indeed, have never attempted to fill this vacuum. Political references are confined to mention of "the government" or twee storylines about local politicians of indeterminate persuasion.
Only Brookside ever tried to deal with the specifics of real political life, and suffered a backlash as a result. In the show's early days the character of Bobby Grant was the archetypal Labour Party activist; committed, passionate, angry and frustrated. But as a result of the cultural reappraisal following Mrs Thatcher's re-election in 1983, the programme's mood altered significantly, and it was diverted down the vague, unspecific road of other soap operas.
Until then, Thatcherism had been a sick joke, an aberration of the electoral system, at best a short, sharp shock to a bloated liberal establishment. But a deep sense of quiet crept in after the 1983 election. It began to dawn on the British consciousness that Thatcher's return to Downing Street made it obvious that many people were voting against their publicly expressed sympathies.
This began a deep moral crisis for British society, causing the unconscious suppression of things that reminded people of their duplicity and selfishness.
True political debate was frozen at that moment. The public discourse adopted all the assumptions of Thatcherism. Those who dissented were invited to marginalise themselves. Political debate was about the surface of politics and not its depth or content. This continued even after Mrs Thatcher was ousted at the start of the 1990s.
In fact, British society has yet to have a proper debate about the real, deep-set effect of Thatcherism on its psyche and morale. Public complicity created an inability to square up to the task of distinguishing those parts of the Thatcher revolution which were "necessary" from those which were gratuitously appalling.
The last significant cultural attempt to interrogate Thatcherism was Alan Bleasdale's The Boys from the Blackstuff, first transmitted in 1982. Nothing in British television, and nothing that has scaled the popular surface in other cultural forms, has added much to the truth of that series.
It was assumed at the time Bleasdale was writing about "unemployment", but he was really dealing with a larger form of redundancy: male obsolescence and despair. The spectre of Yosser Hughes, with his insistent mantras, has never been redeemed by British politics. In his long black coat, followed by the three children who are about to be taken from him, Yosser still haunts the landscape of British public life, pleading: "I can do that".
The Blackstuff boys were all products of Old Labour and Sixties idealism. Yosser was the embodiment of the man who believed that his own essential decency and desire to work, and the culture of solidarity and social justice which these ethics had forged, would see him through.
Having come to manhood in the surge of the Sixties, he was now stranded on the sandbank of his own optimism, staring at the limits of his own beliefs. Yosser marked the end of left-wing illusion, and anyone who took notice of him could not have been unaware that Tony Blair was both necessary and inevitable.
British society has remained culturally seized as a result of a failure to face either the selfish "ethic" of Thatcherism or the weaknesses in the previous culture which made it inevitable. When Tony Blair talks about his Third Way, he does not mean some fudge between socialism and capitalism, but the reintegration of the moral community of Britain to embrace both Richard Branson, the archetypal 1990s Thatcherite, and Yosser Hughes.
Blair does not follow on from Thatcherism: he goes back to the point where his generation came of age, at the start of the 1970s, in an attempt to put the dream back in place. But he acknowledges, too, the journey that has taken place since.
Blair has been much too subtle for the kind of punditry that developed during the Thatcher years. Sniped at from both ends of the existing spectrum, he had to struggle for every iota of grudging respect. But he is neither a free-wheeling Sixties liberal nor the snake-in-the-grass reactionary which most leftist opinion at first decided. He is a child of the Sixties, but in rather a different sense to the usual caricature.
His strengths can quite usefully be discerned by comparison with Bill Clinton. Both are products of the Sixties sensibility, but in different ways. They have things in common. For example, only leaders who chilled out under bedsit posters of Che Guevara would have had the breadth of vision to understand that you could not address the Northern Ireland problem without sitting down with the warring factions.
But, although the two are drawn together by a sense of fellow-feeling, they are utterly different in their deeper sensibilities. Clinton is of the individualist, hedonistic strain in Sixties culture, a man who has not until now had to face the redundancy of much of this philosophy. If you have been listening to some of the strained defences being mounted on Clinton's behalf by dues-paying feminists to whom he has given a free ride, you may have noted the frequency with which they describe him as a "sensual" man. This, essentially, means that he is putty in their hands.
Tony Blair, however, is not a "sensual" man. He is a sensible man. He is tough and critical and realistic, visibly passionate but also a deeply moral and dignified politician. Both Blair and Clinton are consummate actors, but it would be a mistake to draw the same conclusions from their performances, for instance that they are both fakes, and the same kind of fakes.
Clinton is a very good actor. But Blair is acting the part of an actor, creating a foreground of camouflage to cover his true intentions. His intentions, I believe, are virtually limitless in their potential for society. Tony Blair is not, like Bill Clinton, simply trading off the Sixties dream; he is seeking to resuscitate the useful parts of that dream with a view to restoring the public's faith in the possibilities of social action.