But ask an Israeli whether the Palestinians want peace and they"ll say, "No. Don"t talk to us about settlements and occupation. We got out of Gaza, we took our settlers with us, and we got Hamas and rockets." You can play the same type of conversation back, with a Palestinian about the Israelis.
The point is the outside party do not just help negotiate and mediate: they act as a buffer, a messenger and, crucially, as a persuader of good faith in a climate usually dominated by distrust. They also help define issues and indeed turning points. Northern Ireland provided a graphic example of this. In reality, there were two distinct phases to the peace process: the first was from the Good Friday Agreement up to the suspension of the a.s.sembly and the Executive in October 2002 over the IRA failure to decommission; the second was from the fall of David Trimble in 2003 through to May 2007. The intervening period of around a year was like an intermission, though much happened.
The first phase was the period of what we might call creative ambiguity, during which people moved slowly, warily (and occasionally not at all) from very entrenched positions. No one seriously thought that the day after the Good Friday Agreement the IRA were going to disband; they were going to wait to see if the Unionists delivered their side of the bargain, and until then the IRA would hold the use of force in reserve.
On the other hand, we had to pretend this was an orderly and structured transition. So there were fudges, things said and done that had little intellectual or political consistency except that of seeing us through each set of obstacles.
This was particularly true of relations with the Republicans. They had their history, even quasi-theology, to uphold as a revolutionary movement. They had to honour their dead and imprisoned. But they had also to conform to the language of a peace agreement they couldn"t be sure would be implemented. As with the decommissioning saga, there were a series of half-steps, all clothed in fairly obscure Republican-speak, with which they were trying to convince Unionists, without destabilising their own internal politics.
Additionally, as well as being a paramilitary force fighting the British, they were also a para-police force in Republican areas. I remember telling one of my const.i.tuents in Sedgefield about how the IRA would knee-cap drug dealers and beat up rapists, and I could tell that for the first time he might warm to the Republicans. Of course, none of this was going to stop overnight; yet none of it could possibly be reconciled with the rule of law as set out by the Good Friday Agreement.
For a time, the creative ambiguity around all this served us well. The terrorism stopped. The bombs stopped. No British soldiers died. No police officers were a.s.sa.s.sinated. But none of this was the same as saying the normal processes of law and order now ruled Northern Ireland. This was demonstrated by the murder of Robert McCartney in January 2005. He was defending a friend who was being beaten up in a bar by IRA men, who then dragged McCartney outside and stabbed him to death.
The killing was in many ways the final turning point. His family, all Republicans, refused to be silenced, and his sisters, fiancee and friends campaigned for his murderers to be brought to justice. The IRA didn"t quite get the point and issued a statement asking, in effect, if shooting the culprits would help, but it brought to the forefront the essential decision that the IRA had had to make since the suspension of the a.s.sembly and Executive in October 2002.
And here"s where the third party can also help. After the suspension in 2002, I went to Belfast to make the most important speech I had made on Northern Ireland since May 1997. This speech came to be known as the "acts of completion" speech. Essentially I said: Creative ambiguity was our friend in the initial phase; it allowed us to get the caravan moving; it helped us round the myriad impa.s.ses in the first stages. But now it is no longer our friend; it is what is holding us back, because until it is absolutely clear that violence in whatever form will be given up for good and if it is, power will be shared then we can"t make further progress. In place of "creative ambiguity" there now had to be "acts of completion" to demonstrate beyond doubt that the past was behind us.
It was a carefully worded speech, and it was also powerful because it was plain and unadorned. From then on, my constant refrain to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness was that the IRA no longer served any purpose but that of sustaining rejectionist Unionism they were now stymieing the very thing they said they wanted, namely power-sharing.
The same, of course, is true of the militant wing of Hamas today. They are the best friends of the "one-state" Israelis. Their adherence to violence provides not the justification for negotiation, but the excuse for exclusion.
However, spotting this, defining it in a persuasive way and using that definition to move the process on is something that often comes easier from a third party than from either of the main players.
6.Realise that for both sides resolving the conflict is a journey, a process, not an event. Each side takes time to leave the past behind. A conflict is not simply a disagreement characterised by violence. It has a history and it creates a culture, with traditions, ritual and doctrine. It has a mind and soul as well as a body. It is enduring, and it is deep.
Changing all of that is an undertaking of immense ambition and intense introspection. People can change, but people are also very set in their ways. The "ways" have to be "unset" so that the change can progress. The first time I met Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, they were not just hesitant or distrustful, they were sitting down with the enemy. For countless meetings at first, Martin would not simply want to negotiate, most of all he would want to explain his side"s purpose, its pain, its anger and its expectations. It took time before he came to regard me as a partner and even a friend. So if it was like that for him, imagine what it was like for an ordinary IRA volunteer, perhaps one personally abused by a soldier or RUC officer, or whose family had suffered and who had been born and bred to believe it was an injustice deliberately perpetrated by evil-minded people.
The two sides rarely see each other"s pain. Even the most progressive Israelis I know can seldom understand the humiliation of a middle-aged Palestinian man being searched by a young Israeli soldier at a checkpoint in front of his family (and let us a.s.sume not always with exemplary politeness). Palestinians will justly mourn the latest innocent Palestinian victims of an Israeli raid, but find it really hard to sympathise with the parent of an Israeli child blown up in a suicide attack.
Then there are att.i.tudes which, to us, seem absurd, comic even, but to them are defining. I remember before the 1997 election a leading Orangeman describing me as unfit to be prime minister because my wife was a painted jezebel who claimed her allegiance to Rome. When I first heard it, I puzzled over it, misunderstanding Rome as the seat of the Italian government rather than the Vatican and wondering what on earth Cherie had been saying to Romano Prodi, the Italian prime minister.
The notion that there is ever going to be one moment in time when peace occurs is an error. The peace has to mature, put down its own roots to displace the roots of conflict, and allow over time a different set of att.i.tudes to take shape and make their impact.
Sometimes I used to try to describe it by this a.n.a.logy: it was like a car driving away from a crash. The sight of the wreckage does not disappear straight away. It grows more faint over time. There is a constant look in the rear-view mirror even while the eyes strain to see the road in front. The pa.s.sengers are shaken up, and the memory of what has happened competes for s.p.a.ce in their minds with the hope that better times are ahead. There is no immediate release from the pain; it continues far and deep and only gradually diminishes before eventually disappearing.
What this implies for the process is that you have to work at persuading each side that the other"s faltering steps as they travel the journey are not born of a lack of good faith or a change of mind about peace, but are a natural consequence of the experience they have been through. It is an unavoidable feature of resolving the conflict.
7.The path to peace will be deliberately disrupted by those who believe the conflict must continue. Be prepared for such disruption. Do not be deflated by it. People often forget that the worst terrorist attack in the history of the Troubles came after after the Good Friday Agreement, not before it. Thankfully it was also the last. the Good Friday Agreement, not before it. Thankfully it was also the last.
On Sat.u.r.day 15 August 1998 at 3.10 p.m. a ma.s.sive bomb went off in the market town of Omagh and twenty-nine people died. Many others were badly injured. Still more will bear the mental scars for life. Among the dead was a woman pregnant with twins, whose mother and daughter also died, and four youngsters from Spain and their escort who were on an exchange visit. The bomb was the work of the dissident group the Real IRA, formed in protest at Sinn Fein"s embrace of the peace process. In the event the Catholics killed outnumbered the Protestants. The terrorists had given a warning, but for the wrong place, and the police had unwittingly moved the crowd right into the path of the bomb.
I was on holiday in the south-west of France at the time, in a little village called Miradoux. We were staying with our friends Maggie and Alan, he having been secretary to the PLP and she an old friend who gave Cherie and me a billet in her house in Stoke Newington when we searched for our first home as a newly married couple.
I was informed around 3.30 p.m. By 5 p.m. the savagery of the attack was clear. I gave a short press statement on the steps of the village church in a suit borrowed from one of my security people, my emotions a mixture of shock and anxiety as to the consequences for the process.
The next morning I went to Northern Ireland and visited the injured. Even now I cannot think of it without tears. I met a girl who had lost her sight but was determined to make the best of her life, as she later proved, and I met the father of the pregnant woman. If the families had been angry or taken it out on me "If you hadn"t started this, they would still be alive", a sentiment voiced by some I could have kept my composure; what completely broke me down was their quiet dignity, their limitless sadness for the loved ones they would never see or hold or speak to again.
Even at that point of supreme human tragedy brought about by evil beyond understanding, I had to think politically. We were faced with a choice: either to throw our hands up in horror and say, "These people will never make peace", or to use the horror as the reason to go on, to say, "These people want this process to stop, and our response is to drive it faster and further."
In the event, and to the great credit of all (helped by another presidential visit by Bill Clinton), the key partic.i.p.ants in the process chose the latter course. What could have been a turning back, was a turning point. The Real IRA never recovered. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness condemned the attacks unequivocally. David Trimble rose to the occasion. And most of all, so did the people. One of the bereaved said to me, even as he mourned the loss of his wife: "Don"t be put off, carry on, and make my wife"s memorial a lasting peace in Northern Ireland so that no one ever again feels as I do this day."
This att.i.tude is in contrast to the Middle East where, unfortunately, the opposite usually happens when a terrorist attack occurs. The response there is often to clamp down in a way that alienates the peacemakers as well as the terrorists, and to see violence by a faction as showing the futility of trying to make peace with those not part of the faction. The problem is the moment such a course is taken, the keys to the process are put in the hands of the terrorists. Their purpose is to lock up the process. That"s the sick rationale behind the terror. Once you concede that terror does indeed lead to possession of the keys, they"re in charge. Keep the keys firmly in the hands of the peacemakers.
Terror is the starkest example of the extremes trying to block progress, but pressure to lock up the process also comes from perfectly respectable and democratic elements on both sides who accuse their own party of selling out. David Trimble was subject to an unrelenting barrage from those in the DUP and elsewhere who saw each concession as a betrayal, and the process as a whole as a sell-out of their community. To the outsider, this seems unreasonable and unpersuasive; not so to the insider. David, I think, took the view that I did too little to a.s.sist him; I took the view he never quite stood up for the positive, tending rather to share and sympathise with the Unionist propensity to see plots and conspiracies against them. But he had an extraordinarily difficult hand to play, and if he didn"t always play it as I would have done, he played it with a courage that rightly won him the n.o.bel Peace Prize.
8.Leaders matter. Any peace process calls for political risks, even a sense of political adventure and certainly political courage, sometimes even personal courage. The quality of leadership matters; it is a sine qua non sine qua non.
The point is: the easiest thing for the parties in any conflict to do is hold firm to established positions. An ideology, even a sort of theology, will have grown up around the conflict, reflecting the partisan nature of it. Everything is seen through the prism constructed by such partisan ideology. To hold to it is to tread a familiar path, which may lead nowhere, but whose surface is well worn, whose landmarks produce instant recognition, and where the leaders" followers feel most comfortable.
By contrast, like Moses with the Israelites, striking out in a new direction whose destination is uncertain, whose obstacles are formidable and unfamiliar and when at least some of the followers will accuse the leader of betrayal, is tough; and it requires the quality that motivates the best political leadership: a desire to do good.
We were very lucky in the quality of leadership we had. David Trimble was instrumental. He began it when it seemed impossible, kept at it when it was most difficult, and paid the ultimate political price (though I have no doubt that his reputation in history is fully secure).
Then in the most unlikely of roles, Ian Paisley for years the wrecker, the spoiler, the scourge of all in Unionism who sought accommodation took over and completed the process.
Ian Paisley was definitely a strange political figure, a product of the unique concatenation of political circ.u.mstances in Northern Ireland. He is a genuine and committed Christian, a true G.o.d-fearing man; he is a pa.s.sionate Unionist; he is clever, shrewd, occasionally even sly. He had a great grasp of strategy and tactics and could spot the difference between the two.
The unanswered question is: did he change or did the situation change? He would say the latter, and that he was always prepared to make peace if the IRA forswore violence. But I think two things also happened to change him. First, after a long and debilitating illness which, as he used to remark, he knew he would survive (though many hoped his wish was misplaced), he had a sense of impending mortality, political and personal, and wanted to leave behind something more profound and enduring than "no surrender". There was a really rather moving moment during the course of the talks at St Andrews in October 2006, when it was discovered that he and his wife Eileen were celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. At the end of the meeting, there was a little ceremony at which each party congratulated him, including Gerry Adams, and Bertie then presented him with a piece of wood from a tree at the site of the Battle of the Boyne. He made a gracious and benign reply (and Ian was perfectly capable, even when being congratulated, of being neither of these things) and I felt this was a man looking into his own soul and feeling differently. He hadn"t exactly matured; but he had in some indefinable sense broadened.
The other change was that Ian was nothing if not a politician with his ear firmly tuned into the people. In the course of late 2006 and early 2007, he heard the people telling him it was time for peace, and even, in particular, time for him to make the peace. During those meetings, time and again it was Ian who wanted to push forward, Ian who was prepared to seek creative solutions, Ian who took care always to leave the door open. He and I would often meet alone in the Downing Street den. Jonathan used to be highly amused when I described the meetings, which almost always dealt with the issue at a spiritual rather than temporal level. It"s true: we were both fascinated by religious faith as well as being people of faith. He gave me a little prayer book for Leo.
Once, near the end, he asked me whether I thought G.o.d wanted him to make the deal that would seal the peace process. I wanted to say yes, but I hesitated; though I was sure G.o.d would want peace, G.o.d is not a negotiator. I felt it would be wrong, manipulative, to say yes, and so I said I couldn"t answer that question, that only he could and I hoped he would let G.o.d guide him.
People could never understand it when I used to say how much I liked him. But I did. I think my granny"s reverence for him made me have a soft spot.
On the nationalist side, too, there were leaders of real calibre. John Hume was, is, a great political figure and genuine t.i.tan. He had vision and imagination and foresight when others were resolutely still in blinkers. Seamus Mallon and Mark Durkan, the leaders of the SDLP, were moderate and reasonable, and felt both qualities counted against them. They were always in a difficult position. The trouble was Sinn Fein had to be brought in from the cold, and so inevitably more time, energy and focus were given to them. This caused deep resentment; but it was an unfortunate and inevitable consequence of making peace. Nevertheless both Seamus and Mark were significant figures in their own right. Both, incidentally and I don"t know if the SDLP have a special training school for this were masters of the sound bite, really first-cla.s.s speakers, who outside of Northern Ireland"s politics would have been major players in any political party.
Of Bertie and his contribution, I have spoken. Then there are Gerry and Martin. They were an extraordinary couple. Over time I came to like both greatly, probably more than I should have, if truth be told. Again, either would have been a big political leader in anyone"s politics. They did not merely understand, they were supreme masters of the distinction between tactics and strategy. They knew the destination and they were determined to bring their followers with them, or at least the vast bulk of them.
A lot was written about the Provisional Army Council and their membership of it and thus their relationship with the IRA. Many people, including a large part of British intelligence, thought Sinn Fein and the IRA were indistinguishable. When Gerry and Martin would say they would have to talk to the IRA about something, the joke was always they could look in the mirror and ask.
I always thought the relationship was more complex than that. The idea that they could just instruct the IRA never felt right to me. I don"t doubt that on many occasions the difference between Sinn Fein and the IRA was an artifice, a divide used for tactical reasons. I know that both could be clever and manipulative; but so can I. And my sense was that, in certain situations, they were persuading and negotiating with others, not giving orders. I came to the view that the SF/IRA relationship was a bit like that of the Labour leadership and the Labour Party NEC: yes the leadership is powerful, yes it usually gets its way, but not always and rarely without a lot of persuasion and negotiation.
Throughout, Gerry and Martin feared a split, as had happened before to Republicanism, with disastrous consequences. This meant taking their people step by step, leading them, cajoling them and not always being totally upfront as to what the destination really meant. It was a tough task and they performed it with immense skill.
Ultimately, they understood that the IRA"s existence had become not the way to a just settlement, but the barrier to it. It took real political courage to implement that insight, and whether you like them or not, and no matter how strongly you disapprove of their past actions, they had courage in abundance.
Then there were the leaders of the minor parties, often the odd ones out in the conflict but whose leadership, when there was nothing in it for them, was rather inspiring. People like David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party, the Alliance leaders, and the marvellous women"s coalition whom I used to see just to remind myself there were normal people in Northern Ireland.
There were Ronnie Flanagan and Hugh Orde, the two chief constables I dealt with, whose very special position as head of the Northern Ireland police meant they had a role to play which was of the essence. They played that role not in an overtly political way, but with political sense.
I also like to think that, in this instance, at least, I chose well in the people I appointed. Secretaries of State and ministers performed really well. They were very different, mind you: Mo Mowlam, Peter Mandelson, John Reid, Paul Murphy, Peter Hain were all unusual people in their own right, but really talented, and each made a significant, even crucial, contribution.
Whether they were already in place or were appointed later, leaders mattered. Every step required decision-making that was complicated and a political sense that was acute. But it is not just the leadership internal to the key parties that matters: external circ.u.mstances must also be propitious.
9.The external circ.u.mstances must militate in favour of, not against, peace. I have described how the changes in the south of Ireland helped create the context for progress. Such a change is almost invariably crucial in a conflict. These conflicts rarely invoke strong feelings only in the immediate zone of dispute. Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Kosovo: in any of these cases, external players also have a role to play, for good or ill.
The cla.s.sic example is the IsraelPalestine dispute. The ramifications are region-wide, even global. The external players, especially in the Arab world, are vital. Actually, there"s a potential change in their att.i.tude to peace: for years the Palestinian cause was used and often abused, but now they, like Israel, fear Iran and its influence in the region.
Starting with the Crown Prince Abdullah Peace Initiative in 2002, the Arab nations no longer want to exploit the dispute, but to settle it. It offers an enormous opportunity to Israel. Likewise, a world troubled and threatened by a global terrorism based on a perversion of Islam needs the dispute resolved. The objective conditions are today benign. That is why grasping the possibility and pushing on to peace is so self-evidently right. But it will take perseverance. Which brings me to: .
10.Never give up. Simple but essential; never stop working on it and never give up on it. This is not just about gripping the conflict; it is about refusing to accept defeat. As we used to say in Northern Ireland: if you can"t solve it, manage it until you can solve it; but don"t walk away and leave it untended. A peace process never stands still it goes forward or back. You have to believe a solution is possible even when others don"t, even when conventional wisdom is against you, even when those most intimately concerned the parties themselves have given up hope. And remember: it is better to try and fail than not to try at all.
These are my ten principles. More or less, we applied them to Northern Ireland. There were many times it did indeed seem hopeless, but fortunately something or someone kept hope alive.
The historic day came about on 8 May 2007, just over nine years after the Good Friday Agreement, when I went to Stormont to witness the reinstatement of the new Executive government of Northern Ireland. Ian Paisley was the first minister, his deputy was Martin McGuinness.
That day I saw things that had you predicted them ten years before, people would have laughed, ruefully maybe, but still laughed. The meeting I had with Bertie, Peter Hain, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, the two of them sharing jokes, the three of us sitting there a trifle dumbfounded, wondering if we were in a dream; the ceremony itself, where up in the balcony previously sworn enemies were sitting together exchanging pleasantries as if the previous decades had never happened. People who had wanted to kill each other were now wanting to work together. Remarkable, moving and satisfying.
At the gates of Stormont there was another protest. Every time we set foot in Northern Ireland there were protests large, small, peaceful, violent, some Unionist, some Republican always showing how divided the politics of Northern Ireland was from that anywhere else. That day for the first time there was a protest not about Northern Ireland, but about Iraq. When I saw it, I felt that Northern Ireland had just rejoined the rest of the world.
SEVEN.
"WE GOVERN IN PROSE"
"You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose," the former governor of New York Mario Cuomo once said. In the summer of 1998, after just over a year in office, an uneasy feeling gripped me.
I had come to power believing the Labour Party was its own worst enemy. I looked back on a century of existence and saw a party that was essentially Her Majesty"s Loyal Opposition. The periods of government were intermittent, and the psychology was not that of the decision-maker but that of the protester.
However, we had come on an incredible journey of change. The party had accepted things that would have been unimaginable even a decade before. I had always thought if you led from the front, bold and striking out in a perpetual advance, they would stick with the leadership; and so they did. It wasn"t merely the product of eighteen years of Opposition; there was a cadre of people who believed in New Labour and understood it, instinctively and emotionally as well as intellectually, but they were small in number, uncertain in influence and still feeling their way, as in a sense I was.
The body of the Labour Party, and particularly the older generation not all, but most were for a Labour Party modernised from the ways of the 1940s, but they stopped around the 1960s. Roy Hattersley was typical of this group: absolutely solid against Militant, in favour of a private sector alongside the public sector, and knowing Labour had to be sensible on defence. In other words, for him and many others, the Labour Party had to stop being extreme and go back to its proper set of positions. This was a mindset away from the destructive nonsense of the Labour turmoil of the 1980s, yet there was still a long way to go in terms of the way the world had changed. To cease being extreme was necessary, but it was also insufficient.
For most of this older generation old right, as well as old left it was enough that New Labour had taken us out of the darkness of Opposition, but they didn"t believe in it. Actually they thought New Labour had no beliefs, and bought the then conventional Tory press opinion that it was in essence a marketing construct, a PR creation; head without heart. They were convinced a winning formula had been discovered which was clever, but not sincere.
In order to circ.u.mvent the party, what I had done was construct an alliance between myself and the public. Throughout 19947 and certainly in this early period of government, the alliance was firm and unshakeable. The party had little option but to accept it. Any sign of indiscipline invoked the memory of all those years of Opposition. Now we were on the up; why on earth go back? It was a simple, crude, electorally perfect argument to keep the party in line, and it meant I could go out on the end of a branch, knowing that the strong and steadfast trunk of public opinion was supporting me.
But it was high-risk. I knew also that as time pa.s.sed, the branch would get longer and thinner and the trunk ever more likely to be shaken and its strength tested.
One of the roots of my unease was that, in Opposition, the public will support a leader taking brave decisions because they are taken in respect of the leader"s party, and the public are to some extent spectators; in government, however, decisions are taken in respect of the people. They are partic.i.p.ants. Their lives are in play.
I had studied our party history closely, and concluded that to win, the party had to move beyond itself, and the leader had to be more than a party leader; but I also derived an appreciation of the danger which all progressive parties face, when instead of the alliance being one between leader and people, it becomes one between party and people against the leader.
You might ask why that is a danger; surely the party simply ditches its leader, finds a new one more in tune with what the public want, and marches on to electoral success. The danger is that while the party and the public may be in common opposition to the leader, they can be opposed for very different reasons. With progressive parties, the public can become disillusioned for all sorts of reasons in our case it was to do with insufficiently rapid progress on public services, the cost of fuel, taxes, crime and immigration, often centre-right concerns; but the progressive party is itself more likely to be disillusioned because it thinks the leadership is insufficiently radical in a traditional leftist sense spending and taxing too little, sacrificing cherished positions and doctrines, doing too much for the middle cla.s.s and not enough for the poor. Nonetheless, the party convinces itself that the public dissatisfaction vindicates its own dissatisfaction. The result is not electoral success but disaster.
I remember back in the early 1980s, in the course of one of my many failed attempts at becoming a parliamentary candidate, being harangued by a questioner as to why Labour had lost in 1979. His basic pitch was that we had trimmed to the right, betrayed our cla.s.s, forgotten our left roots, etc. I was trying desperately to keep hold of myself, knowing it was crazy in party terms to dispute this thesis, while also knowing that the thesis was crazy in public terms. I mumbled something vaguely conciliatory and cowardly. Another person started up; then another; and I couldn"t help myself. I erupted: "If the public thought Labour wasn"t left wing enough, why on earth would they vote Tory?" I said, "Are they stupid? Did they think the Tories under Margaret Thatcher were going to be more left wing than Labour under Jim Callaghan? Are you really saying they are that dumb?" And of course they were were saying that. saying that.
As we completed the first Comprehensive Spending Review in mid-1998 which would put an end to the tough self-imposed public spending constraint which applied for the first three years after 1997 I was also uneasy because something wasn"t right with the way we were governing. The rhetoric and intellectual a.n.a.lysis were fine investment plus reform; hand up not handout on welfare; rewarding the good, getting rid of the bad in teaching; cutting waiting lists in the NHS but there was a gap between the quality of the rhetoric and the quality of the reforms themselves.
We still had 1.3 million people on waiting lists as inpatients, most waiting over six months. However, the waiting didn"t start as an inpatient, it started with the doctor"s appointment. At the time there were no minimum standards in terms of getting to see a doctor. After the doctor, the waiting began to get on the consultant"s outpatient list. That could take months. Only after waiting on the outpatient list could you get on the inpatient list. The six months waiting often wasn"t six months at all; it could be twelve or eighteen or even more.
The NHS was great, heroic even, in terms of dealing with emergencies and the chronically ill, but as a service, it was uneven, good when good, truly appalling when bad. It was certainly underfunded, but money was not the only problem; and more money was therefore not the complete solution.
Across the piece it was the same. We were starting to cut cla.s.s sizes for infants. It was what we had promised. It was what we were delivering. Some extra money was flowing into school buildings. But the truth was that we still had 40 per cent of eleven-year-olds leaving primary school without being able to read or write properly. David Blunkett"s literacy and numeracy strategy was starting to take hold and, again, making a difference. But we both knew the real challenge lay in secondary schools. There were only thirty London secondary schools that got over 70 per cent of their pupils to five good GCSEs. In my heart of hearts I knew I wouldn"t send my own children to most inner-city secondary schools. Discipline was variable, sometimes awful. Teachers were often, unsurprisingly, demoralised. There was often no organised school sport in the inner city, and sometimes little out of it.
In welfare, we were getting people off the dole. With the economy in reasonable shape and after Bank of England independence, there was a sense of macro-stability for the long term. So naturally, unemployment was falling. We took this as a sign that our tougher welfare policies were working. But, again, I felt the rhetoric was considerably ahead of the actual measures.
There was another question that dogged my thoughts in those days still relatively halcyon in the summer of 1998, one to which I returned over time with increasing anxiety and impatience. It was about the quality of our social a.n.a.lysis. I could see that society was fracturing into elements that defied traditional centre-left theory. There was a middle cla.s.s, to be sure. It was growing. It encompa.s.sed the solicitors and the bank managers and middle executives. It also drew in the higher-end skilled workers, the technicians, the new computer a.n.a.lysts, the creative industry middle-rankers.
But to talk of a "working cla.s.s" just seemed odd, correct but somehow uncomprehending. The term encompa.s.sed those on the minimum wage, the casual or temporary workers, the lower-paid nurse even, the shop floor. But it was also used to describe those at the bottom of the heap, the "non-working cla.s.s" if you like in a phrase we coined for government, the "socially excluded".
In time I began to realise you couldn"t and shouldn"t lump these two categories together. The right-wing phrase "the undercla.s.s" was ugly, but it was accurate. These people at the bottom didn"t have dysfunctional working lives. They had dysfunctional lives, full stop. Their children were disruptive at school, if they attended at all. Their parents were often separated or abusive or just plain inadequate.
The consequence of this was felt also in crime and antisocial behaviour. As I said earlier, I had come to prominence around the time of the James Bulger murder in 1993, when I drew the easy but ultimately flawed conclusion that our society had broken down; but of course it hadn"t as a whole, only in part. I was to come to the right conclusion only at the very end of my premiership: instead of focusing general social policy on this cla.s.s of people, they need specific, targeted action. In the summer of 1998 I could see the symptoms of such breakdown very clearly: in the schools, on the streets, in the statistics for law and order.
That wasn"t all. We had come to power with a fairly traditional but complacent view of immigration and asylum. Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, was greatly influenced by his own heavily Muslim const.i.tuency of Blackburn, where these issues were live and real. On the other hand, Jack was sensible and no softie on lawbreakers. We were unprepared for the explosion in asylum claims through 1998 and 1999. Within our first three years, the number of claims trebled, quadrupled even. I"d thought we had a pretty tight framework, but we sent a few placatory signals and this, together with a growing economy and the English language, set off an influx of claimants. Added to that, worldwide immigration flows were increasing. We weren"t the only ones with a problem, but we were virtually the only ones with a set of statistics that were even roughly accurate and so were quickly dubbed the asylum capital of Europe. Suddenly from a manageable 30,000 claims per year for asylum, we were looking at 100,000. Moreover, the backlog of claims was scary and getting scarier. The system was utterly incapable of processing the claims.
Essentially, Britain, like all European countries, had inherited the post-war, post-Holocaust system and sentiment on asylum. The painful stories of refugees fleeing from Hitler and the n.a.z.is and being turned away produced a right and proper revulsion. The presumption was that someone who claimed asylum was persecuted and should be taken in, not cast out. It was an entirely understandable emotion in the aftermath of such horror.
Unfortunately it was completely unrealistic in the late twentieth century. The presumption was plainly false; most asylum claims were not genuine. Disproving them, however, was almost impossible. The combination of the courts, with their liberal instinct; the European Convention on Human Rights, with its absolutist att.i.tude to the prospect of returning someone to an unsafe community; and the UN Convention of Refugees, with its context firmly that of 1930s Germany, meant that, in practice, once someone got into Britain and claimed asylum, it was the Devil"s own job to return them.
And, of course, many thought it was indeed the work of the Devil to try. The first attempt at tightening the law in 1998 produced a hysterical reaction and compromises had to be found to steer it through.
But the reality was that the system for asylum was broken, incapable, adrift in a sea of storms, and required far tougher action. The Civil Service machine charged with putting it right wasn"t greatly inclined to the radical action the system needed.
Here, too, there was a gap, which was between what we thought the Civil Service problem would be, and what it turned out to be. In Labour mythology, the Civil Service is made up of closet Tories, snakes in the governing gra.s.s, lying in wait for the naive Labour minister whose radical policy is strangled before it can perform. In this fantasy and it is fantasy they are the Establishment"s ideologues and the Establishment is the Tory Party, the true party of government, the fuddy-duddy repository of the old Britain of colonies, aristos and fox hunters. In this scenario, the senior mandarins are forever poised to strike down the progressive action a Labour government wants to take and propel forward the heinous plots of the right wing.
G.o.d, if only. The reality was not they were poised to strike, sabotage or act. The problem with them, as I indicated at the beginning, was inertia. They tended to surrender, whether to vested interests, to the status quo or to the safest way to manage things which all meant: to do nothing.
Wholly contrary to the myth, they were not the least in thrall to the right-wing Establishment. They were every bit as much in thrall to the left-wing Establishment. Or, more accurately, to a time and a way and an order that had pa.s.sed, a product of the last hundred years of history.
The Sir Humphrey character in the TV series Yes, Prime Minister Yes, Prime Minister was a parody and a fiction, but he was the closest parody could get to fact. Sir Humphrey wasn"t left or right; he just believed in managing, in keeping things upright, in the status quo, not so much because of the status but more because of the quo; a quo he knew and could understand and one that to move from was a risk. And risk must at all costs be avoided. was a parody and a fiction, but he was the closest parody could get to fact. Sir Humphrey wasn"t left or right; he just believed in managing, in keeping things upright, in the status quo, not so much because of the status but more because of the quo; a quo he knew and could understand and one that to move from was a risk. And risk must at all costs be avoided.
This Civil Service had and has great strengths. It was and is impartial. It is, properly directed, a formidable machine. At times of crisis, superb. Its people are intelligent, hard-working and dedicated to public service. It was simply, like so much else, out of date. Faced with big challenges, it thought small thoughts. It reckoned in increments when the systems required leaps and bounds.
They didn"t think New Labour too left wing on the contrary, they thought us sometimes too right wing but crucially they thought we were iconoclastic and recklessly so, when they were the keepers of the high places, the temples of inherited wisdom.
They also, along with the judiciary, bought the idea that New Labour"s and my preoccupation with antisocial behaviour, family breakdown, asylum, etc., was a preoccupation born of our driving desire for the right levels of populism to get and retain power. They didn"t see it as born of a genuine wish to improve lives in a world in which the old ways of doing so wouldn"t work.
So in 1998, I began with Sir Richard Wilson, the new Cabinet Secretary, the first stages of Civil Service reform. And to be fair, he got behind them thoroughly. But and this is a criticism of me, not him or the Civil Service they were like many of the other reforms: talking the right language but shying away from the really radical measures.