Jonathan Freedland: Blair left Downing Street years ago, but his ghost haunts all Britain's politics
[Jonathan Freedland writes a weekly column for The Guardian. He is also a regular contributor to The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, and presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series, The Long View.]
Is this the coalition's 10p? That's the question Tories have been anxiously asking each other in Birmingham, fretting that George Osborne's abolition of child benefit for the better-off might soon stand alongside Gordon Brown's scrapping of the 10p tax rate as a gross political error, one that hits the governing party's core vote where it hurts. And yet if this is a mistake on a par with Brown's, its genesis belongs elsewhere – in the legacy of the man who has haunted this conference season, looming large over the Liberal Democrat, Labour and Tory gatherings even though he has attended none of them: Tony Blair.
To see the connection, take a quick glance at today's front pages of the right-leaning press, a bucket of ordure poured over the coalition's collective head – with the Mail and the Telegraph sent into righteous fury by the child benefit move. That's a new experience for a government that has so far escaped the feral beast in full wrath.
It isn't just the press. After five years assiduously spent cultivating female voters, Cameron has suddenly found himself under attack from that most sought-after demographic: mothers of young and teenage children.
But is it a mistake? It certainly looked that way, as the prime minister felt compelled to add an unplanned afternoon round of interviews – trying to hose down the fire his chancellor had started – to the circuit he'd already completed in the morning. The series of confused statements, retractions and half-clarifications from a variety of sources, including the children's minister – culminating in the promise of a barely compensatory tax break for higher paid couples – only added to the sense that the policy had not been thought through and that, when it came to damage control, a panicked government was winging it.
And yet isn't Osborne the Tories' demon strategist, the man whose 2007 conference speech scuttled an expected general election and scuppered the Brown premiership? Surely he can't have walked into such an obvious trap. Unless this originated in a conscious tactic, aimed at deliberately provoking the ire of higher earners. That way, when Osborne hits the poorest with cuts in the spending review of October 20, he can say he's already whacked the well-to-do – and that, truly, we are all in this together. (Though it always remains possible that by 2013, when the child benefit cut is due, the public finances will have improved so dramatically he won't need to make the move after all.)
If this did indeed begin more in conspiracy than in cock-up, a calculated attempt to provoke the Tory base, then it comes straight from the Blair playbook. Nearly three and a half years after he left Downing Street, the former prime minister still exerts a gravitational pull on British politics. His spirit is everywhere, from the conference bookstalls briskly selling his autobiography to the conversations in bars and coffee shops, where talk soon turns to the Blair book, quoted as if it were a sacred text, full of unquestionable electoral wisdom...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
Is this the coalition's 10p? That's the question Tories have been anxiously asking each other in Birmingham, fretting that George Osborne's abolition of child benefit for the better-off might soon stand alongside Gordon Brown's scrapping of the 10p tax rate as a gross political error, one that hits the governing party's core vote where it hurts. And yet if this is a mistake on a par with Brown's, its genesis belongs elsewhere – in the legacy of the man who has haunted this conference season, looming large over the Liberal Democrat, Labour and Tory gatherings even though he has attended none of them: Tony Blair.
To see the connection, take a quick glance at today's front pages of the right-leaning press, a bucket of ordure poured over the coalition's collective head – with the Mail and the Telegraph sent into righteous fury by the child benefit move. That's a new experience for a government that has so far escaped the feral beast in full wrath.
It isn't just the press. After five years assiduously spent cultivating female voters, Cameron has suddenly found himself under attack from that most sought-after demographic: mothers of young and teenage children.
But is it a mistake? It certainly looked that way, as the prime minister felt compelled to add an unplanned afternoon round of interviews – trying to hose down the fire his chancellor had started – to the circuit he'd already completed in the morning. The series of confused statements, retractions and half-clarifications from a variety of sources, including the children's minister – culminating in the promise of a barely compensatory tax break for higher paid couples – only added to the sense that the policy had not been thought through and that, when it came to damage control, a panicked government was winging it.
And yet isn't Osborne the Tories' demon strategist, the man whose 2007 conference speech scuttled an expected general election and scuppered the Brown premiership? Surely he can't have walked into such an obvious trap. Unless this originated in a conscious tactic, aimed at deliberately provoking the ire of higher earners. That way, when Osborne hits the poorest with cuts in the spending review of October 20, he can say he's already whacked the well-to-do – and that, truly, we are all in this together. (Though it always remains possible that by 2013, when the child benefit cut is due, the public finances will have improved so dramatically he won't need to make the move after all.)
If this did indeed begin more in conspiracy than in cock-up, a calculated attempt to provoke the Tory base, then it comes straight from the Blair playbook. Nearly three and a half years after he left Downing Street, the former prime minister still exerts a gravitational pull on British politics. His spirit is everywhere, from the conference bookstalls briskly selling his autobiography to the conversations in bars and coffee shops, where talk soon turns to the Blair book, quoted as if it were a sacred text, full of unquestionable electoral wisdom...