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Blair says he wants "an efficient market economy coupled with social justice." Unlike Thatcher, Blair thinks the government does have a role to play in helping people and assuring social justice. He is spending $4.33 billion on a welfare-to-work training program for young unemployed. The program is not unlike Bill Clinton's welfare-reform plan and assumes that the best thing for the poor and disadvantaged is education, so that they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
The welfare state is being reformed, not dismantled. Blair has put a stop to the attempts to privatize the National Health Service begun under Thatcher. He poured an extra $3.3 billion into the NHS, which provides free universal care for all Britons. During the election, Labour pledged to reduce the number of people waiting for elective medical procedures, but despite the new money, the waiting lists have actually increased in his first year.
Blair is succeeding by governing from the political center rather than from the left or the right. His youthful enthusiasm and energy add to his popularity. He has a canny sense of the nation's moods. When Princess Diana died last summer, Blair instinctively knew when to speak, the right thing to say (he called her "the people's princess") and when to keep quiet. He privately offered advice to members of the royal family on how to make amends to a public annoyed that the royals were not sharing in the outpouring of grief that followed Diana's death. Blair's people helped organize the funeral. They put up loudspeakers in parks and along the route traveled by the funeral cortege so that the people could feel they were part of the funeral of the people's princess. It was a classic Blair touch.
Blair is not a confrontational politician, preferring to build coalitions across class and traditional political divides. He has enlisted top business executives to serve in his government and has gained respect in a constituency traditionally hostile to Labour. In addition to working to blur the ideology divisions in British politics, he has begun to smooth down the sharp edges of class warfare so destructive in Britain. He has worked hard to win the loyalty of middle-class voters in England, who have always been leery of the socialist agenda of the Labour Party. For years the party was dominated by working-class politicians, often from Scotland, and raised most of its money from contributions by the unions. Blair broadened the party's membership base and funding. Today union money makes up only 30% of the Labour Party's budget, down from 50% three years ago and from 80% in the 1960s.
While Blair has a fine instinct for finding the middle political ground, he has been willing to take risks, as he did in the Northern Ireland peace talks, and to pick some real fights. A mini-revolt broke out on the left of his own party when he pushed through a reduction in welfare benefits for single parents. Forty-seven Labour M.P.s voted against the bill, and four Labourites resigned junior positions in the government. But with his massive majority in the House of Commons (the bill passed, 457 to 107), this was no real threat to his leadership. Similarly, some Labour M.P.s were appalled when the government imposed a $1,600 tuition fee on state-university students. "I really despise what Blair has done," says an old-line Labour M.P. "I do not want a Tory as leader of the Labour Party."