LOW TAXES, CRY THE HIGH SPENDERS

Bruce Anderson thinks that Mr Blair's conference speech was a

piece of cynical effrontery. It may also have been an effective means of vote-garnering

Blackpool ONE question always elicits an ambivalent response from Mr Blair's courtiers. They are not good at answering it and when they try to do so, their normally confident expo- sition drains away into incomplete sen- tences, pauses and circular hand signals. But this does not necessarily alarm them. Some of them undoubtedly think that the question, 'What do you believe, what does Tony Blair believe?' is best left unan- swered.

John Rentoul, a left-wing journalist sympathetic to new Labour, spent two years writing a biography of Tony Blair. After all that time, he was still unsure as to what Mr Blair's core beliefs were or whether he had any. 'I think the revealing thing is that I don't know. I'm not sure whether he has a bot- tom line. The screen is always up.' That assessment will please Peter Mandelson and the rest of Labour's image-makers, who want the screen to stay in place. They are constantly studying the data garnered from focus groups of target voters, now the main source of Labour policy formation. What they think they have learned is that the British electorate wants Whig men and Tory mea- sures.

A lot of voters are fed up with the Gov- ernment and would like new faces, but they have also grown used to distrusting the Labour Party. These are the people Mr Blair is desperate not to frighten. He will offer them any amount of inspirational rhetoric, as he did on Tuesday, and he will assure them that he believes in education, environment and health; that he is commit- ted to the young, to the elderly — and to the middle-aged: that he loves everybody except Tory MPs and the chairmen of pri- vatised utilities. Mr Blair wants to give the British people a simple message: anything they support, he supports, anything they dislike, he dislikes.

It would be hard to overestimate the sheer cynical effrontery of Tuesday's speech. Mr Blair was happy to use any argument, however bogus, as long as he thought that it would play well with the public. He and his speechwriters have had an important political insight: that most people have no conception of the magni- tude of the public spending budget; all those noughts make their eyes glaze over. So there is no need to pledge additional billions which the Tories would immediate- ly cost into tax increases. Millions will do, because to ordinary voters, that will sound like a large sum of money.

Mr Blair promised £100 million for schools, £100 million for hospitals and another few million from the Lottery fund to help education and the environment. But he knows perfectly well that these additional sums would add a mere fraction of one per cent to the various budgets involved, and that it is risible to suggest that this could make a significant differ- ence. He knows it, but he thinks that the voters will not see through him. He is prob- ably right.

The cynicism also helps to explain the speech's weakness in performance terms. When a text has no moral structure, it is difficult to know when to stop. Once Mr Blair started talking about Old Testament prophets, a thousand days and a thousand years, and William Wilberforce, he went onto oral auto-pilot on a scale reminiscent of Neil Kinnock. Even Mr Kinnock might have known better than to refer to millen- nia; the precedents are not encouraging. At that moment Mr Blair became inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and as a result the speech was a thousand years and 20 minutes too long. Then there was Dunblane. This was not the first time that Mr Blair had tried to turn tragedy into votes. There is one memorable passage in an otherwise unmemorable book by Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle which describes Mr Blair's reaction to the Jamie Bulger killing. He want- ed to mention it in a speech, but was afraid of pressing the wrong buttons; he did not want to sound like a member of the American religious Right. But he took the risk and it worked.

The Mandelson/Liddle account is remarkable for its complete absence of emotion; suffering is entirely sublimated into spin-doctoring. Mr Blair did not sound unemotional about Dunblane, but he did not sound uncalculating either. Yet again, he was determined to press the right but- tons.

Clearly, the murderer, Hamilton, should not have had a gun licence. There are also strong arguments for insisting that hand- guns should be stored at gun clubs, with one vital part kept elsewhere so that they would be useless if stolen. Lord Cullen is now considering these and other proposals; his report will no doubt be thorough, and will form the basis of early legislation. That is not enough for Mr Blair. There are no votes in Cullen or in thoroughness. But there is a great deal of emotion out there among the public, ready to respond to the cry of 'Ban all hand guns'. No matter that almost all the guns used by criminals have never been licensed, and that if Hamilton had wanted to obtain such a weapon, it would only have taken a couple of visits to the right pub in Glasgow; many voters are not interested in reasoned argu- ment.

Above all, they are not prepared to face the terrible truth: that there is no certain way of preventing monsters from murder- ing children. In the grip of grief and horror, they want to lash out at some target in the hope that it might do good. That is a groundless hope, as Mr Blair must know. But he still encourages it, because there are votes in it.

It is probably too early to make a charge of cynicism stick against Mr Blair. He is like the Liberal Party. They are never hap- pier than when indulging in negative cam- paigning, nor is he; the negative passages were the best bits in Tuesday's speech. But after trying their hardest to smear mud over the other two parties, the Liberals invariably go on to denounce negative tac- tics — and they always get away with it. Mr Blair has now taken over both the tactic and the impunity. He is not the most effective knocking- copy merchant in British politics; that title must go to Robin Cook. But there is a cru- cial difference. If during one of his destruc- tive speeches, Mr Cook were to denounce negative campaigning, everyone would laugh at him. Mr Blair can bring it off, just as the Liberals used to do.

When he was Tory chairman, Chris Pat- ten once said that attacking the Liberals was a difficult business, involving all the hazards of wrestling with a greased pig at a village fair, and then insulting the vicar. Mr Blair is an equally tricky mixture of oiliness and sanctimony.

Plus inscrutability. Never has an opposi- tion come so near an election with its lead- er's views so opaque, its policy proposals so lacking in specifics. A Labour front- bencher, Denis MacShane, recently gave his constituents the following message: `From now until the election, let's button our lips and get Labour in.' He could have been speaking for his leader. On Tuesday, Tony Blair boasted that Labour now has 400,000 members. But he would not like any of them to think that theirs is a speak- ing role. He will make the speeches, because he can then guarantee that the voters will not be alarmed by Labour's detailed policies. There will be no detail.

There are those who claim that this does not matter, arguing that whatever the vagueness conceals it is certainly not a return to tax-and-spend policies. Now it is true that the T-word causes more horror in polite Labour circles than the worst exple- tive would. Any mention of tax has the same effect on Blairites as a crucifix and a clove of garlic did on Count Dracula. When Tony Blair described Gordon Brown as an Iron Chancellor, he did not please all his front-benchers — for they believed him. Later, one of them was full of foreboding at the thought of Mr Brown in No. 11; a man just waiting to go native and bind him- self to the most rigid Treasury orthodoxy. That may well be an accurate account of Mr Brown's intentions.

This does not mean that the economy would be safe in his hands. It is interesting to talk to some of those who would be min- isters if Labour won the election. None of them has any idea how public spending programmes work. They seem to think that they would arrive at their new offices to find their departments in suspended ani- mation, with all sorts of interesting spend- ing decisions waiting for them. What they do not realise is that every spending pro- gramme is already under great pressure. Public spending is not a disciplined pro- cess; it is like floodwater, and the price of control is eternal vigilance.

Mr Brown may intend to exercise such vigilance, but could he succeed? For the past 17 years, despite all their endeavours, the Conservatives have hardly been able to reduce public spending as a proportion of national income. But Tory chancellors had one advantage which Mr Brown would not enjoy. At least in theory, almost all their Cabinet colleagues were in favour of curb- ing public spending — especially if the curbs were to fall on someone else's bud- get. But if Mr Blair were to look round a Labour Cabinet table, how many cutters would he fmd? Possibly Mr Blair, but no one else.

Nobody ever joined the Labour Party because they wanted to cut public spend- ing, except on defence. John Prescott, Robin Cook, Harriet Harman, Jack Straw — they are all instinctive taxers and spenders. Their lips may stay buttoned from now until the election, but they will still be salivating. For them and their col- leagues, the purpose of a Labour govern- ment is to spend more money.

It is equally true that no one ever joined the Labour Party because they wanted to cut taxes. Almost every Tory wants tax cuts, yet in 17 years the tax burden has hardly fallen. This shows how difficult it is to cut taxes, given the size of the modern state. Some senior Labour figures may use the language of tax cuts for electoral reasons, but there is hardly anyone in the party who would prefer a tax cut to a spending increase. Most of them would be happy to pay for the increases with a tax rise.

Over the weekend, the Revd Peter Thomson gave an interview; he was the man who converted Tony Blair to Christian socialism. He may also have given us a glimpse behind Mr Blair's screen. Asked how Labour would fund its spending pro- grammes, he replied: 'There's enough dough . . . to go round.' That is the only honest exposition of the fundamentals of Labour economic policy which we have heard all week. It tells us why, even if we accept that Mr Brown would try to be an Iron Chancellor — a bold assumption we should not trust him or his party.