The trouble with having a public relations man as Prime Minister is that when focus groups fail to give him a clear instruction, he has no idea what is right. If you want to know why Tony Blair stood by and did nothing as the country descended into paralysis last weekend, there seems to be only one plausible answer. Philip Gould, the Downing Street pollster who is the true Prime Minister in all but name at a time like this, was getting mixed messages from his focus groups about the petrol crisis.
People like a strong leader who sticks to his guns in a crisis; they despise the pusillanimity of French politicians who surrender to strikers at the drop of a hat.
But people also resent high prices. They dislike a Government which they increasingly see as meddling, bureaucratic, incompetent and overweening. They despair of the Tories and therefore of any constitutional Opposition. And their contempt for the French people is exceeded only by their envy of France’s comfortable, feather-bedded and cheap lifestyle. So the focus groups warm instinctively to a plucky rabble of ordinary middle-class yobbos just like themselves, but more energetic in their determination to give the Government and its voracious tax-collectors a bloody nose.
Because of these ambivalent feelings among Mr Gould’s “target constituencies” and “floating voters”, the focus groups have not been much use in deciding what to do about the present crisis. When focus groups fail to give straight answers, Mr Gould normally turns to those oracles of public wisdom, the Daily Mail and The Sun. But this time, the tabloid oracles are as ambivalent as the focus groups - demanding “firm government” yet openly supporting the protesters’ cause.
Focus groups have deterred Mr Blair from taking serious action to stop anti-paedophile vigilantes, to protect scientific researchers from animal rights fanatics, to guard private property against hunt saboteurs, to defend the City of London against anti-capitalist protesters. Focus groups have also tempted him into making costly and unnecessary concessions on fuel prices to special interest lobbies ranging from pensioners to heavy industrial polluters. It is hardly surprising, then, that road hauliers and farmers now demand similar favours, nor that the general public is starting to accept economic sabotage as a reasonable way to pursue such demands, nor indeed, that Mr Gould’s focus groups and the tabloid leader writers are confused.
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What then is Mr Blair to do? The first and toughest decision he must make is to stop taking instructions from Mr Gould and the tabloids and to start thinking for himself.
Everything else would follow easily from this terrifying act of self-liberation. If the Prime Minister could free himself from the focus groups, if he could only stop pandering to what he is told is the will of the people (at least those who live in Basildon and Luton), he would begin to see the real significance of this crisis.
This crisis could be a truly historic event. This could be the moment when Britain forgets all the hard lessons it learnt under Margaret Thatcher about economic realism, market incentives and social rigour and drifts back into the complacency, delusion and self-indulgence of the 1960s and 1970s. This could be the moment when the British public decides that prosperity and full employment can be taken so much for granted that they can casually ignore the laws of economics, that they can always squeeze the Government for another handout, that the self-discipline created by the economic insecurity of the 1980s can finally been thrown away like an unfashionable frock.
Like the strikes and upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this is a crisis of prosperity, not of hardship. This is a crisis that reflects the overconfidence of a nation starting to take economic growth and full employment for granted, of voters, workers and oil company executives who assume that the world owes them a living.
Of course, some of the road hauliers and farmers are finding their businesses squeezed by higher fuel prices - although they face much bigger and more intractable problems, above all intensifying competition, the opening up of the European market and the strength of the pound. In any flexible market economy, there will always be losers and winners, and the losers will quite legitimately try to defend their interests as best they can. But for most of the prosperous people who support the protesters, this issue is just self-indulgence.
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Motorists would obviously prefer cheaper petrol and lower taxes, but they are not really suffering. They are better off today by almost any economic measure than they were a few years ago. So why do they back the protesters? Because it is tempting to believe that the way to defend living standards in the face of challenging economic conditions, such as the recent trebling of the world oil price, is to squeeze a little unexpected tax handout from the Government, instead of working a bit longer, changing one’s lifestyle, or buying a smaller car.
If Mr Blair can understand the historical significance of what is happening - and his televised press conference yesterday finally gave the first indications that he might - his next steps would become perfectly clear.
He would go on television again to explain in somewhat greater detail than he did last night some of the salient facts about petrol taxes, oil markets, transport economics and the constitutional right to peaceful protest.
He would point out that petrol prices in Britain have leapfrogged those in France because of the strength of sterling, not because of taxes, and he might add that the strength of sterling has also resulted in Britain’s income per capita overtaking that of France. He would suggest that crude oil prices are likely to fall rather sharply in the next few months as Opec increases its production and America opens up its strategic petroleum reserve. He would explain that road haulage firms, which operate in a fiercely competitive market, would gain little or nothing from cheaper fuel, since this would simply intensify the inexorable downward pressure on their prices. The real reason that road hauliers are in trouble, in Britain and throughout Europe, is competitive pressure from countries with very cheap labour such as Spain, Portugal, Turkey and Poland, in an increasingly unified and deregulated European market. But is this not a principle of which the British public supposedly approves?
At the end of this brief lecture, Mr Blair should come to an ultimatum. This should be directed not at the farmers and truckers, who may be misguided, but on the whole seem to have done nothing wrong. It is the the oil company executives, the local police chiefs and the protesters’ unthinking supporters in the media who bear a more direct responsibility for this crisis.
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It is pure hypocrisy for newspapers that demanded draconian laws against secondary picketing and backed strike-breakers in the great disputes of the 1970s and 1980s suddenly to declare their support for the protesters. It is grossly opportunist of oil companies to use these scattered protests covertly to promote the objective they failed to achieve in a decade of costly lobbying - to discourage European governments from raising energy taxes. It was a gross dereliction of duty by policemen to cite “wider public order considerations” as a reason for turning a blind eye until yesterday to the few protesters genuinely causing trouble.
Mr Blair’s ultimatum to the oil companies and police should be quite simple. Either all Britain’s petrol tankers resume normal working within 24 hours or he will use emergency powers to take control of Britain’s oil stocks and order army drivers to move the tankers wherever required.
For Mr Blair to do anything less would be to take a colossal risk with Britain’s economic and political future. It was perhaps inevitable that Britain would forget the lessons and disciplines of the 1980s after a long period of prosperity and full employment. But it is alarming that this amnesia seems to have arrived so fast. After the Second World War, the Western world enjoyed more than two decades of full employment, before the lessons of the 1930s were forgotten in the breakdown of social discipline that began in 1968. Is Britain about to forget the lessons of the 1980s before full employment has even been restored?