Tony Blair has suffered an overwhelming defeat at the hands of his own conference over his programme of using private cash to run public services (Assinder 2002)
However, twenty-four hours after this ‘embarrassing defeat’ (Assinder 2002d), the same journalist clearly enjoyed a ‘defiant’ prime minister’s speech. Again, there was no acknowledgement of the debate, and the author celebrated the growing distance between Blair and a significant proportion of the Party:
In what all would agree was a powerful and defining speech…Blair set his sights on the horizon, pressed his pedal to the metal - and waved goodbye to a large section of the Labour movement (Assinder 2002c)
Later, in his review of the week, Assinder conceived the speech as ‘Blair’s turning point’ (Assinder 2002e), not because his arguments had prevailed, but because he had strengthened his reputation through dogged determination. The prime minister was ‘at the top of his game’ and he had told ‘delegates to like it or lump it.’ Blair was again credited for creating distance between himself and a disgruntled rank-and-file.
Indeed, ignoring the party membership was presented as a virtue and the union-led dissent was characterised as little more than anachronistic posturing. This was the Conference, wrote Assinder (emphases added):
…where Tony Blair finally took the step he has been hesitating over from day one. And it was a million mile long stride away from the old comrades who were trying to flex their muscles (ibid.)
Assinder’s admiration had echoes of an earlier article by Andrew Marr who described Blair’s speech to the TUC Conference as ‘masterful’ (Marr 2002a.) Marr’s preview of the Labour Party Conference conceptualised the debates as a spectator sport rather than serious politics: ‘Book your tickets now,’ he advised. Indeed, as evident in the article titles on the ‘Private Profit, Public Gain?’ index page, the arguments for and against PFI were secondary to the conflict. Furthermore, even when the debate was dissected, there were hints of trivialisation. For instance, the key explanatory article,
‘What is PFI?’ (BBC 2002b), began (emphases added):
The creeping privatisation of public services under New Labour is one of the main gripes of the trade unions, and is certain to sour the air at the party's conference this week. But does anyone really understand what a "public-private partnership", or a ""public-private finance initiative" is? Never fear: BBC News Online has the answers131
131 See Appendix 2.4 for the full article
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During the 2002 sample period, the BBC journalists strongly reproduced the narrative of the Labour leadership. The contest was framed as a battle of wills, rather than ideas, between New and Old Labour with the latter desperately hanging on to passé
‘ideology’. Private finance itself rarely featured in the analysis, and discussions about its merits and pitfalls were pushed to the periphery. Some BBC journalists expressed overt admiration for Blair’s tactics and rhetoric, which were seemingly more
significant than Conference’s rejection of Party policy. Furthermore, the light-hearted tone of some articles contrasted sharply with the serious and wide-ranging
implications of private finance to the general public.
There was no hint of levity in the Guardian’s coverage of PFI in autumn 2002.
Indeed, the newspaper published a focused and sombre leader on the day of the PFI debate - September 30 - and another before Blair’s speech a day later. The former wondered why, with the Conservatives in disarray, the Labour Party only had a single digit lead in the opinion polls. The reason, suggested the author, was:
…Labour's tin ear towards what its supporters are saying and the cracked tone in which it often addresses them. It is not enough to say that Labour is merely a victim of modern political disengagement. Labour is also the author of too many of its own worst problems (Guardian 2002a)
The next day’s leader unequivocally stated the Guardian’s position: ‘The PFI needs a review: Tony Blair must address party concerns’; and the final lines were equally direct and unequivocal:
The unions were right to want a review and ministers wrong to deny them.
The prime minister needs to seriously address delegates' concerns today (Guardian 2002b)
Two of the Guardian’s most prominent columnists were vehement sceptics. During the TUC Conference, George Monbiot wrote an impassioned article praising the union campaign (Monbiot, G 2002a.) The unions were not just fighting for better pay and conditions for their members, argued Monbiot, they were fighting for the future of public services:
(the unions) see part-privatisation as symptomatic of the corporate takeover of Britain, and … in turn, as symptomatic of its willingness to side with power against the powerless
Monbiot predicted that the unions would soon become ‘the United Kingdom's official opposition’ and looked forward to a time when ‘a revitalised union movement will encourage the rest of us to organise more effectively’ (ibid.) Like Monbiot, Polly
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Toynbee was in favour of a review and believed government accusations of union stubbornness were groundless and hard evidence of PFI’s merits was lacking. She also said there was a ‘gaping hole’ in Tony Blair’s pamphlet, Courage of Our Convictions (Blair 2002a), published on page six of the same newspaper. Toynbee used emotive language to describe this void which she perceived as (italics added):
... the convictions themselves. There is no understanding of the value of the public sphere just because it is public. There is no warmth that recognises the affection people feel for public institutions, the trust and pride felt by stake-holding citizens who are not mere customers (Toynbee 2002a)
The day before the debate, a comment piece in the Observer from TGWU general secretary, Bill Morris, was headed with a poignant and graphic title: ‘This knife in our heart… private profit will destroy our core public services’ (Morris 2002.) This stood in stark contrast with the title of Morris’ BBC’s interview: ‘Morris: Payback time for the unions’ (Davies, B 2002a) and, indeed, like Toynbee, Morris believed that Blair was blind to the political, moral and even spiritual arguments for public services remaining in the public sector: Public services are immiscible with the private sector, wrote Morris, because the former:
… define our society and are a measure of our humanity. They are the basis of our common capital and the embodiment of the contract between citizen and state (Morris 2002)
However, PFI-sceptics did not have a monopoly on the Guardian’s op-ed pages. On September 30, Digby Jones, head of the CBI compared union leaders to ‘latter day (King) Canutes’ (Jones, D 2002.) Jones said PFI was an part of a ceaseless ‘tide of change’ and the unions were only delaying the inevitable. Dissent was pointless because there was simply no alternative: the world is constantly changing and the unions risked being flattened by the: ‘impatient waves of public satisfaction.’ For Jones, the consumer was sovereign and unions had a patriotic duty to concur:
The tax-paying, voting customer must come first, not political ideology, power broking or vested interests. Business will play its part, the government clearly is - now it is up to the unions to put country first and do the same (ibid.)
This article’s distinct neoliberal discourse sat in sharp contrast with the Guardian’s other PFI-related content. Indeed, Jones’ language resonated strongly with Blair’s pamphlet (Blair 2002a), his Conference speech (Blair 2002), and an Observer interview (Rawnsley and Ahmed 2002), all of which were founded on the inevitability of change; the need for reform; and the centrality of the consumer-citizen. Some phrases were almost identical: Jones wrote of ‘politically motivated rhetoric’ and
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‘indulgent voices of the left’ and, in his speech to the TUC Conference, Blair condemned: ‘the "self-indulgent rhetoric" of his most vocal leftwing union critics’
(Maguire 2002b.)
Naturally, senior ministers’ PFI-related speeches and statements were covered in detail by the Guardian but the newspaper’s accompanying narrative was, unlike the BBC’s, generally neutral with no praise for resoluteness and certainly no barely-disguised admiration for Blair the performer, as displayed by the BBC’s Marr and Assinder (see above.) Like the BBC, the Guardian employed bellicose language for headlines and key explanations: Tony Blair, for example, gave a ‘full-blooded
defence’ of PFI (White and Walker 2002a), ‘unions square(d) up to Brown for fight on PFI’ (Maguire 2002c); and the TUC declared: ‘outright war on the private finance initiative’ (Gow 2002c.) Despite their widespread use, however, belligerent labels in the Guardian tended to be less prominent, and their timbre somewhat gentler than the BBC’s. For example, in the Observer there was a ‘union-led revolt’ and a
‘grassroots’ rebellion’ from ‘people parked well to the left of Tony Blair’ (Rawnsley and Ahmed 2002.) Elsewhere, ‘increasingly vocal’ critics (White and Walker 2002a.) were urged to ‘step back from confrontation’ (White 2002a,) while union leaders
‘toughened (their) criticism’ (Maguire 2002a.) The BBC’s grammar of division and conflict, by which, for example, militant unions ‘flexed their muscles’ (Schifferes 2002c) and Blair ‘waved goodbye to a large section of the Labour movement’
(Assinder 2002c), was absent in the Guardian’s reporting.
As essential reading for both the Labour Party and trade union leaderships, the Guardian was the most obvious forum for detailed, balanced and impassioned debate. The Telegraph, however, had a potential editorial dilemma: its preferred political party was effectively absent from the debate and traditionally, the Telegraph was antipathetic to both the Labour Party and the unions. Furthermore, with such a relative dearth of Telegraph articles in the 2002 sample, vivid examples of political discourse were fewer in number and yet no less illustrative of this newspaper’s position. This was most clearly displayed in a leader on October 1: ‘Blair’s day of judgement’ (Daily Telegraph 2002b.) The author awarded no significance to
Conference’s rejection of PFI – it was nothing more than a ‘symbolic ear-boxing’ for Blair – but there was unambiguous support for the prime minister’s
single-mindedness:
These motions and speeches have, of course, no power to change government policy - and a good job, too. The Prime Minister is right about