Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one of the last in a long line of damaged ministerial casualties, articulated this clearly when he broke ranks after being ejected from the Cabinet. Clarke, a Europhile, stated:
‘The relationships with many of the European countries are really not good at all. His very personal relationships with Berlusconi and Aznar, going to weddings and holidaying in houses, have really damaged relations with the successors of Berlusconi and Aznar – [Romano] Prodi and [José Luis Rodríguez] Zapatero.’
Britain paid a price for Mr Blair’s conduct, a point that was reinforced when Mr Zapatero joined forces with Jacques Chirac, with the support of Mr Prodi, to develop a Middle East peace plan without telling Britain. It was a defining moment when the world could have had a counterweight to US hegemony in the region.
But Britain’s pact with Italy was for a reason. The key moment was when the leaders met in Barcelona for a summit on European economic reform in 2002. Blair and Berlusconi met and issued a joint statement to block further EU employment legislation. When John Monks at the TUC criticised Blair’s links with the Italian premier, a government spokesman replied: ‘His commitment to flexible labour markets is in no doubt. It is whatever alliances we can make in Europe to achieve the objectives we can.’
Last year as Silvio Berlusconi and David Mills faced money-laundering charges in Milan, it became clear that this was the end of an era, the denouement of the populist politics that we can now call Blairusconism.
Parallels
The parallels between the two leaders are striking. Berlusconi emerged after the death of the Communist Berlinger in 1984, while Blair moved (famously quickly) after the death of John Smith in 1994. Both rode high on the promises of constitutional reform; Berlusconi in an unholy alliance with the Liga Norde, Blair in a desperate attempt to stave off the growing popularity of the Scottish National Party. Both emerged to ‘clean-up’ politics after a prolonged period of sleaze and corruption, and both found themselves quickly mired amongst it. Berlusconi came to power after the Tangentopoli (Italian for bribeville) scandal which exposed decades of corruption and bribery at the very heart of Italian politics. Tony Blair came to power promising to be ‘whiter than white’ after the decade of Tory sleaze and corruption culminating in the Scott Report into the arms for Iraq scandal. The idea of being a cleansing force in politics was central to both Blair and Berlusconi, even if both goals were quickly exposed as being, at best, ‘unrealistic’.(2)
But the links between Forza Italia and New Labour go much deeper than having common roots, shared vision and reflecting growing trends in cultural politics. Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi were the highest expression of a political phenomenon which brought a combination of monied interests and media manipulation to power to form a new brand of elite rule. Their politics have transformed the political landscapes of Britain and Italy and profoundly undermined the democratic base of these countries.
From Murdoch’s global media empire to Bernard Tapie in Marseille, Michael Bloomberg in NY, Roberto Marchino in Brazil (with his candidate Fernando Collor de Mello in 1989), Cem Uzan in Turkey or Thaksin Shmawatra in Thailand – the telecommunications emperor who became PM in January 2001 just two months before Berlusconi – these ‘leaders’ represented a new form of politics in which patronage and media manipulation are central to their operations of rule. The legal furore over the relationship between David Mills and Silvio Berlusconi is only one aspect of much deeper parallel links between New Labour and Forza Italia as political phenomena. The Berlusconi-Mills connection (and the political reaction to it) is just a further expression of a malignancy against democracy, a world-view perpetuated by those who inhabit the same world as the super-wealthy, and who believe themselves (often rightly) to be entirely above the law. The G8 Summits at Gleneagles and Genoa – with Blair and Berlusconi arm in arm – were perhaps the ultimate public expression of this new form of governance. As Martin Jacques has written:
‘The Italian regime is a new kind of populism, which combines the tribal racism now on the rise throughout Europe (the Northern League), traditional fascism (the National Alliance, heirs to Mussolini) and authoritarian and unscrupulous corporate power (Forza Italia). If one wants to see the shape of new-style European fascism then one need look no further.’
Blair and Berlusconi were the most high profile and successful examples of this new form. Part of their legacy is the question: how did this highly personalised media-controlled politics arise at the same time as a collapse in popular belief in western democracy, and what is the correlation between these phenomena?(4)
‘New Europe’ had specific forms and intentions
While the world was transfixed by the relationship of Tony Blair and George Bush, a more lasting marriage of convenience was largely ignored. Blair and Berlusconi formed – then with José María Aznar of Spain – a triumvirate of right-wing populists which dominated the politics of the emerging European state.(5) At the heart of this was a new form of rule, and a British-Mediterranean axis which aimed to supplant the old Franco-German one.
As they wrote in a joint letter dated, 4 March 2004 to President of the European Council Bertie Ahern and President of the European Commission Romano Prodi:
‘Raising the level of competitiveness of business and enterprise is an indispensable condition to giving impetus to economic growth and employment; to assuring more streamlined procedures; to guaranteeing a flexible and dynamic employment market and to stimulating research and innovation.
A stronger European continent must also take into consideration the consolidation of other determining factors such as: the security of our external frontiers; an adequate migration policy; a firm defence policy able to respond to the changing international scenario; a common foreign policy that can strengthen Europe’s global role and that is fully in line with the Atlantic Alliance.’
Their common commitment to flexible labour markets and the privatisation of social services has stood alongside, and contributed strongly, to the collapse in credibility in democratic government.
When Blair won his ‘landslide’ in 1997 it was with the lowest voter turnout since 1910.(6)i Labour and Forza Italia are the not the sole cause of the death of the political party but their shared disregard for democracy, their subtle and not so subtle undermining of liberties and laws, and their own brand of crony capitalism has fed the wave of cynicism that sweeps western democracies.
As Tom Bentley and Paul Miller from think-tank Demos wrote in 2004:
‘The European parliamentary elections in June illustrated the critical state of popular politics in Britain, the world’s oldest parliamentary democracy. For those (few) paying attention, it became increasingly obvious that Labour and Conservatives were struggling to find enough activists to maintain a campaign. Soon after new figures showed that membership of the Labour Party had slumped again, shedding 25,000 in six months.’
Most historians of the Labour Party and of New Labour agree on several key facts. First, that Tony Blair has transformed the Labour party unrecognisably. Second, that much of this has been modelled on the Clinton experience, and third that he has created a new model of centrism and apparent fiscal prudence. Yet from 2001 on we can see a parallel phenomenon that sits oddly with this analysis and renders it obsolete. It is true that much of New Labour has been strongly influenced by the Atlanticist tendency, which nurtured right-wing Labour leaders for forty years after the war in a process of manipulation and patronage that has slipped from being about covert funding to overt flirtation and can be traced right through to Blair and Brown today. It is true that New Labour was strongly influenced by the Clinton team’s concept of ‘triangulation’, or what’s now being called ‘convergence’. But what is ignored in this analysis is (a) the rest of the world, in particular the rest of Europe; and (b) what impact convergence has, in line with the other societal shifts that have happened on democratic culture. Explaining the problem with ‘convergence’, the late Paul Foot wrote in The Vote, How it was Won and How it was Undermined:
‘Labour won the election by another massive majority. But their vote (10.7 million) was dramatically lower not just on 1997. It was three-quarters of a million down on 1992, when Labour lost the election. The Tory vote was down too, and so was the Liberal democrat vote. Indeed the most striking feature of voting figures in 2001 was the huge numbers of people who did not vote. With the single exception of 1918…there never was a time when fewer people used their votes than in 2001.’
And yet this is the apogee of New Labour
The result is that electoral politics is becoming the preserve of a shrinking percentage of the population, in some cases a little more than half. As the political parties have merged around common economic policies of neoliberalism and a social policies based on fear and manipulation, there is little to inspire the disenchanted. Those who bother to vote do so because they feel they have a stake in society; those who don’t are those who feel they have little stake, or that the process is meaningless, and the relationship quickly descends into an accentuated gulf of disinterest versus a growing elite of political and media experts. There seems to be no precise limit to this process and the political world becomes more and more detached from the society it purports to represent.
As business and state interests merge more fully and in a more systematic fashion, and spin and media manipulation of this convergence increases, public scepticism and disillusionment has increased. A cycle of exposure and ‘public inquiry’ only reinforces this process of disengagement. Inquiries like the Butler Report, the Hutton and Fraser Inquiries and the Budd Report (which investigated the accelerated visa for David Blunkett’s lover’s nanny) into the conduct of the Blair regime and the overturning of efforts to prosecute Berlusconi have fuelled such feelings of hopeless cynicism. The overall impression of a political class may be a timeless problem but it appears to have taken a leap during Blair’s reign. The mantra of ‘rights and responsibilities’ seemed to have been discarded under the blizzard of ministerial indiscretion and cronyism.
They shared the desire to become ‘beyond politics’, petty party squabbles or parliamentary restraints. As Leo Abse has written of Blair: ‘His wish is to become the leader of a party above party, representing society as a whole; Labour he told the 1995 Labour Party Conference, was a one-nation party, a claim that comes perilously near to acclaiming the ideal of a one party nation.’
Critics will complain that Berlusconi’s conduct of illegality and corruption far outweighed Blair’s misdemeanours, and that while Berlusconi is lavish, extravagant, arrogant even, Blair is a humble, emotive ‘people’s man’. They are too different in both style and content to be slung together so casually. Berlusconi – the argument is likely to be levelled – is an extreme character in a country of political extreme, and the notion of a new European right fell by the wayside with the political demise of Aznar in Spain and Haider in Austria, the personal demise of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands and now the demise of Berlusconi in Italy. Furthermore, the concept of manipulation of the media is hardly a new phenomenon; and since when did corruption or networks of the powerful become a big deal?
It is difficult to imagine Blair sharing office with the British National Party, as Berlusconi explicitly did with the neo-fascist New Force party; nor did Blair make the sort of diplomatic gaffes Berlusconi has made in the past.(9) And yet much of Berlusconi’s campaigning methods and core policies were modelled directly on the New Labour experience, and the cultural differences mask much common ground.
Others will maintain that Berlusconi is of the right and Blair of the left. Yet as Susan Watkins has pointed out they are part of a wider European trajectory:
‘The Centre Left governments that dominated the North Atlantic zone up to the turn of the millennium have now all but disappeared. Within six months of Bush’s victory in the United States, the Olive Tree coalition had crumbled before Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. The autumn of 2001 saw Social Democrats driven from office in Norway and Denmark. In April 2002 Kok’s Labour-led government resigned over a report pointing to Dutch troops’ complicity in the Srebrenica massacre. The following month, Jospin came in a humiliating third behind Chirac and Le Pen in the French presidential contest, and the Right triumphed in the legislative elections. In Germany, the SPD–Green coalition clung on by a whisker, aided by providential floods.’
New Labour’s Italian lawyer
The Mills-Jowell-Berlusconi scandal has its roots in the patrimonial style of leadership favoured by Blair. Its origins lie in the same obsession with wealth and fame that led to Geoffrey Robinson’s downfall, and drives to the heart of what is wrong with contemporary politics and the New Labour inner government. There is a zeal, a confidence and a contempt that, once added to the heady mix of emotionalism and celebrity, is enough to rock the judgement of even the most level-headed Blairite; and Italian connections are at the very heart of Blair’s dying days in office.
In 2004 Tony and Cherie Blair were guests at Berlusconi’s extravagant Villa Certosa on Sardinia’s Emerald Coast. Nick Cohen wrote of Berlusconi in The Guardian:
‘To many of his critics what is disturbing about his governments is that they have included the remnants of Italy’s fascist parties. But while it would be hilarious to hear the circumlocutions of the great human rights lawyer Cherie Booth as she defended her husband’s association with what is quaintly called “post-fascism”, the fact that the descendants of the men in black leather are in office is beside the point. Fascism is in the past while Berlusconi offers a vision of a dystopian future. He has shown what you can achieve in a European democracy when you combine immense wealth, control of the media and political power.’
Cohen is quite right that it was the shared futurism of Blair and Berlusconi that was the key. They created and inhabited political projects based on notions of hope and projection forward but were deliberately ignorant of and rejecting of any ties with the past – other than a blind and vague nostalgia to be called on at key moments: in Blair’s case, for example, at Diana’s funeral and the recent Scottish elections.
Mills and Berlusconi
David McKenzie Mills was Berlusconi’s London lawyer. He’s married to Tessa Jowell and was a good friend of Peter Mandelson and Alasdair Campbell. It was Tessa Jowell who was the health minister who tore up Labour Party policy for Bernie Ecclestone’s benefit, while husband David was a director of one of Ecclestone’s key companies. Tessa Jowell is currently pushing the Communications Bill through Parliament, which will allow foreign media owners to buy tv channels in the UK. They are part of the inner circle of the New Labour coterie. The values they espouse and their conduct reflect the world that New Labour inhabits and has, in part, created. Mills has been investigated by the Serious Fraud Office; and his sister-in-law Dame Barbara Mills was head of this office until just prior to his investigation. Mills was for many years an adviser to Italy’s billionaire former leader and faces two separate charges with him in Italy: he is accused of receiving 600,000 dollars for favourable testimony during two other trials in the late 1990s; and Berlusconi, Mills and a dozen other defendants stand accused, in a separate trial, of tax fraud in the 1999 purchase of film rights in the United States by Mediaset, the television group owned by the Berlusconi family.
Blair and Berlusconi ‘were seen by the Italian people as crusaders for efficiency, flexibility, enterprise, global capitalism and a special relationship with America’; were seen as so close that ‘the expression “Blair-Berlusconi Axis” became part of the Italian vocabulary. Some anti-Berlusconi politicians were so incensed that they proposed the expulsion of New Labour from the European Socialist Party.’(12) But Berlusconi and Blair have gone and the question is: will Blair’s going be followed by the kind of disgraceful legal proceedings which have accompanied the departure of his Italian alter ego?
Notes
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1873866.stm
- For example, shortly after Blair became Prime Minister, Labour was forced to return a £1 million donation from the Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone after it emerged that he had lobbied Blair to delay a ban on the sport being sponsored by the tobacco industry.
- Martin Jacques, ‘The new barbarism’, The Guardian 9 May 2002
- See for example the recent report by the Power Inquiry which noted:
‘the quiet rise of authoritarianism; the weakening of the mandate and legitimacy for elected governments because of plummeting turnout; and the weakening of political equality because whole sections of the community feel estranged from politics.’ <www.powerinquiry.org/report/index.php>
- ‘Europe’s labour markets,’ Blair wrote in Italy’s Corriere della Sera, ‘need to be more flexible. Businesses are still encumbered by unnecessary regulation.’ He was describing a new paper produced by Blair, Berlusconi and Aznar, which called on EU states to introduce ‘more flexible types of employment contracts’, to replace labour laws with ‘soft regulation’, and to increase ‘the effectiveness of public employment services……by opening this market to the private sector.’
- As one Fabian document put it: ‘Over the last five years the Labour Party has halved in size, with over 200,000 members leaving the party. If that decline were to continue unabated, the last party member would be turning out the lights around 2010.’ <www.fabian-society.org.uk/documents/ViewADocument.asp?ID=116&CatID=52?>
- Tom Bentley and Paul Miller, Financial Times 24 September 2004
- Leo Abse, The Man behind the Smile (London: Robson, 2003) p. 82
- In 2003 Berlusconi claimed that Mussolini had never killed anyone. It was an early example of a series of often bizarre and deplorable utterances. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3101198.stm>
- Susan Watkins, ‘A Weightless Hegemony’, New Left Review, January-February 2004.
- ‘Blair’s Italian Fiasco’, The Guardian 15 August 15 2004
- Various authors, ‘If he drinks vodka we’ll find a common tongue’ The Guardian 26 April 2002.