Book reviews. Tony Blair: Making Labour Liberal

Citation

Ranking, A. (2001), "Book reviews. Tony Blair: Making Labour Liberal", European Business Review, Vol. 13 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2001.05413bab.012

Book reviews. Tony Blair: Making Labour Liberal

Book reviews

Tony Blair: Making Labour Liberal

David WellsRain PressBeckenham2000ISBN 0-907944-05-1

Keywords: Labour, Politics

This lively, refreshingly readable book is the first political work by a mathematical writer. Wells applies the logic in which he is trained to expose the shallowness and lack of direction which he sees as the heart of the New Labour "project". This lack of clarity, Wells argues, thinly masks an authoritarian disposition. Paradoxically this authoritarianism expresses itself through "making labour liberal". "Liberal" here does not mean traditional liberalism, based on the freedom of the individual under the rule of law. On the contrary, it combines a superstitious belief in market forces (market fundamentalism, as George Soros calls it) with a new form of authoritarian collectivism, characterised by sugary, evangelical piety. Even New Labour's pragmatism is ideological. Tony Blair has no "new" ideas, according to Wells, but expresses a dumbed-down form of utilitarianism.

There are only two problems with this excellent book. The first is that he cannot decide how much the book is an analysis of New Labour and how much a "psychbiography" of Tony Blair. On the former, he is strong and convincing, on the latter less so. It is tempting, and amusing, to portray Citizen Tony as an "authoritarian personality" on the model set out by Adorno, an inflexible man compensating for personal insecurity by a will to power. Yet this reductionism, which seeks to reduce individual experience to a few simple formulae, has much the same flaws as New Labour ideology. The real trouble for New Labour is that it fails to see individuals, only categories of people to be bought off with spurious "rights". Wells is aware of this, I think, but he is too influenced by the group-oriented "progressivism" of the 1960s to admit it baldly.

Second, Wells is too soft on "political correctness", which is where the totalitarian element in new Labour finds its truest expression. He condemns the pro-business bias of New Labour, and its managerialist approach to political problems. However he does not take on totalitarian "multiculturalism", which treats white, working-class people as a troublesome indigenous minority. Nor is there any reference to totalitarian feminism, with its misguided attempts to transform human nature and use force to impose "equality". Wells refers to the Blair government's peculiar obsession with homosexual law reform, but doesn't mention the fact that many homosexuals never asked for such changes and do not want them. When New Labour is "tough on crime", it is not so much dangerous as stupid and mean. The true danger lies in the unmanly, vapid "niceness" to which progressive thinking has been reduced.

Aidan RankingCo-editor of New European