Clinton and Blair map a path of change (FT)

Clinton and Blair map a path of change

By Philip Stephens
Published: September 28 2006 19:51 Last updated: September 28 2006 19:51

It is not often that you hear the most accomplished communicators in politics speak from the same platform. It happened this week in Manchester. Tony Blair was saying goodbye to his party. Bill Clinton, the British prime minister’s long-time friend and mentor, gave a masterclass in how there can, after all, be life after high office.

Mr Blair’s final speech as leader to the annual gathering of the Labour faithful left many in the hall wondering why they were letting him go. True, there has never been great affection between leader and party. He has always been too dismissive of its ideological icons. In recent years, the relationship has been poisoned by Iraq. But his dazzling performance at the podium reminded the audience once again just why they have been in power for the past decade. “Thank God he is going”, was the reaction of David Cameron’s Conservatives.

Gordon Brown, Mr Blair’s most likely though not yet certain successor, has his own qualities, not least a solidity that many may find a welcome contrast to some of the celebrity spin of the past few years. But the chancellor will never match Mr Blair’s charm and charisma – nor his easy skill in weaving the myriad complexities of modern life into a persuasive narrative for change.

Mr Brown’s fear must be that he will inherit the crown not by acclaim but by default. There was no shortage of fellow ministers in Manchester ready to conclude that his campaign for the leadership looks unstoppable. There were almost as many voicing doubts that he can beat Mr Cameron, the youthful Conservative leader, in a general election.
The only person who can upstage Mr Blair these days is Mr Clinton. In Manchester, the former US president was careful not to steal the prime minister’s thunder. Instead, in the guise of the visiting kindly uncle, he offered a gentle sermon on the implications for progressive politicians of globalisation. The brilliance lay not so much in the rhetorical construction, but in the simple clarity of the thinking and the deftness of touch and timing.

Mr Clinton has his flaws. In the end, his presidency was defined as much by regret at what might have been as by its achievements. But every time I listen to him, I am reminded of the petty vindictiveness of the Republicans who sought to force him from office because of a tryst with a White House intern.

It was not all schmaltz. Far from it. Messrs Clinton and Blair remain the two leaders who best understand the crucial difference between ends and means in politics. Their electoral success was built in detaching the progressive values of their parties from the outdated and mostly unpopular policies with which they had become fatally entangled.
During the 1990s, the two men redrew the old left-right boundaries by embracing effective economic management as the route to a fairer society. That meant bullying Democratic and Labour colleagues alike into abandoning old shibboleths about the size and purpose of the state as well as positioning the two parties as allies of aspiration as well as compassion.

In those days, Mr Blair dared remind his party that respect for the law was as much a progressive as a conservative value. I seem to recall that Mr Clinton’s reform of the American welfare system to get benefit recipients back to work was excoriated at the time by many in his own party. Now it is lauded for helping to pull hundreds of thousands of Americans out of poverty and dependency.

There are plenty of Democrats, and Labourites, who think the switch from big to active government was change enough. They want a rest. The insight shared by Mr Clinton and Mr Blair is that change must become a permanent feature of centre-left politics. Globalisation has rewritten the rules of the game. In the former president’s description, the choice is not between change and the status quo but between managing change and being washed away by it.

This may sound something of a platitude. But look around Europe or, for that matter, at the Democrats in the US and it has yet to be grasped. Trade protectionism in Washington, a backlash about European Union enlargement in Brussels and defence of the existing social model in Paris, speak to the same delusion: that governments can throw up the barricades against the world beyond.

Only this week we have seen the EU’s decision to admit Bulgaria and Romania raise all sorts of alarms about organised crime, migration and the rest. The assumption is that by keeping them out, the rest of Europe could avoid such threats. But the Union’s borders are porous. By some estimates, fully 90 per cent of the heroin reaching western Europe from Afghanistan comes through Kosovo. Yet Kosovo is probably a decade from membership of the club.

The most interesting part of Mr Blair’s speech covered precisely this ground. The task in the 1990s, he said, had been to prove that sound economics and social justice did not stand in opposition to each other. The challenge now was to show that openness to the opportunities of globalisation can be combined with measures to ensure security, physical and economic, against its threats.

That will not be quite as easy as either of the stars at the Manchester podium made it sound. One of the big consequences of borderless trade and capital flows, instant global communications and mass migration has been a weakening of the nation state. Paradoxically, these same forces lead individual citizens to look to national governments for protection against the new insecurities.

The challenge to centre-left governments is particularly acute. Nine years of a Labour government in Britain has called a halt to rising inequality. But only just. And all the economic pressures of globalisation are pulling in the opposite direction. None of these circles is easily squared. But, in Mr Blair’s characterisation, the bigger mistake would be retreat to the illusory comfort zone of the status quo.

There is something wistful about Mr Clinton these days. It is as if the energy he now invests in efforts to combat disease in Africa and to promote international action on climate change is in part a penance for opportunities missed. For his part, Mr Blair is in no mood for apologies – for Iraq or anything else. That may change when he joins his friend on the international lecture and, I suspect, public service circuit. Either way, I can think of no other two politicians who better describe the realities of the modern world.

philip.stephens@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006