A year after Labours election landslide, Philip Gould, Tony Blairs apparently trusted advisor on public opinion, published The Unfinished Revolution. It was not greeted with dancing in the streets. The revolutionary flame was snuffed in its subtitle: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party. The use of the term revolution was advertising-speak: more the revolution in lipstick than a new Guevara-Castro alliance. It was a trick, a piece of verbal radicalism, designed to attract the gullible reader into buying the new product at last, the inside story of Labours ongoing revolution. Goulds use of the word revolution symbolises two central aspects of the Blair government, and especially key figures in the group around Blair himself. They regard the public as credulous and themselves as all-seeing. They are the plotters, we are the manipulated. They know the score, we are the suckers.
Goulds extended revolution is haunted by a ghostly presence who incarnates this attitude towards the public: Worcester Woman. He is too partisan to borrow a term which was directly the creation of the Conservative Party Central Office. However, her influence lingers like perfume through his pages. No more so than in a chapter documenting the run-up to the 1997 general election, which in his sage-like manner he entitled Reassurance, Reassurance, Reassurance.
Looking back to the election, most of us recall the moment of hope that flowered afterwards. A mixture of relief and joy led to a tremendous sense of goodwill and even gratitude towards a Labour leadership that wanted to clean up and renew Britain. It was a decidedly non-revolutionary sentiment. But for precisely that reason it looked forward to possible, realistic and therefore real change.
Lowering expectations, gaining trust
We can now see that this rare post-electoral moment was in part also a compensation for an uninspiring campaign in which Labour lowered hopes. The Labour leadership, it now seems, did not believe that the voters really wanted change. The lofty promise of a new Britain was engulfed in a polished and professional campaign, designed to be as boring as possible. They wanted a low-expectation change of regime. After all, the revolution was theirs. The coming election in 2001 seems set to produce a repeat approach, this time organised out of Downing Street itself.
The designers of this polished dullness were also the builders of a new party that promised to lead Britain into a progressive century. The Tories sensationalised, claiming that Blair was the devil incarnate and his government would mean the end of prosperity, sovereignty and even Britain itself. New Labour reassured: theirs would be a clean deal but not a big one. New Labour was determined to present itself as a brand that was corporate friendly and representative of the tax-hating middle-class. The inspiration came from America: the pollsters, the focus groups and the Im just an ordinary guy populism.
At the start of the campaign, Tony Blair called upon the electorate to trust him, and made his trustworthiness Labours central story. But behind this strong image there was and there remains today a feeble reality. He never trusted the voters. New Labour, or at least the core group around Blair Gould himself, Peter Mandelson, the chief spin-doctor, and Alastair Campbell, Blairs press secretary understood this as a two-way mistrust. The voters never trusted Labour. They searched for a symbol of proof and found one in a character known as Worcester Woman.
There were about 23 million actual women who were eligible to vote in 1997. The Labour Party courted one more than any other a virtual one. Worcester Woman was a construction. A specific demographic. She was the creation of desperate Conservative pollsters the woman the Tories could not afford to lose. Labours pollsters soon discovered the validity of this: Blair was less popular with women than men.
Worcester woman: a crusader
But she was not original. America had their very own Worcester Woman. It was in Worcester, Massachusetts (the twin town of Worcester, Worcestershire), that the First National Womens Rights Convention had been held in 1850. In 1851 her influence hit British soil: inspired by his reading of the Proceedings from the Worcester Convention, John Stuart Mill wrote The Subjection of Women. And there was reciprocity. An article in the same year by his wife, Harriet Taylor, in the Westminster Review influenced the resolutions adopted by the 1851 Worcester Convention.
In the United States to speak of Worcester Women is to talk of crusaders and reformers, of organised movements for change. Worcester Women were the first to link the issues of racial and gender equality. The 1850 Convention resolved to support equality for all, without distinction of sex or color. To this day, Worcester, Mass. remains the focal point for the ongoing movement for womens rights in the United States. Annual conferences are still held there, keeping the campaign alive and honouring the women and the place that gave birth to the dream of womens suffrage.
Worcester woman: a demographic
But in Britain, Worcester Woman meant something very different. A month before the election she was described by the BBC as somewhere between the C1/C2 social category, aged 35-44, earning around £18,000 per year working part-time, successfully wooed by Thatcher, having voted Tory in 1992 but tempted by Blair in 1997, with two children, a husband who was a skilled manual worker, and a liking for holidays in Florida.
Perhaps, for her own sake, she should have stayed in Disneyland (where Peter Mandelson was to arrive within a year of the election for guidance on how he should select the notorious contents of Britains Millennium Dome). The American connection remains, offering a clue to the birth of Worcester Woman that is a far cry from organised movements for the rights of women. One of the earliest, pollster-style creations of her kind was a mantra of the clique around President Nixon. Their first reaction to any policy proposal was to ask whether it would Play in Peoria.
Peoria is a small city 200 hundred miles south of Illinois surrounded by the central prairies of the mid-west. In the same way, Worcester is regarded as remote, small-minded yet at the centre, this time of the English Midlands. Her suitors in Conservative Central Office convinced themselves that she was loyal. How could they not? Their prospective candidate for the seat of Worcester in 1997 was Nick Bourne, and he was sure that Worcester was quintessentially English. It has always been loyal to the crown. (And by association the Conservatives.)
Labour had to prove him wrong. Tony Blair had already pinned his hopes on the support of the so-called Mondeo Man, characterised as an aspirant guy who cared for his Ford Mondeo car. Mondeo Man had to be willing to suspend disbelief and trust, if not in Labour, then at least in Tony Blair. But there was a greater problem. Mondeo Man had a wife: Worcester Woman. She was more cautious, less easily swayed. It was to neutralise her opposition above all that Labours campaign required Reassurance, Reassurance, Reassurance. For Worcester Woman was seen as having distinctly conservative instincts and, for all her support for Margaret Thatcher, was easily frightened by anything purporting to be radical.
Britains electoral system
Worcester Woman told us more about New Labour and Britains electoral system than about British women. It was with Worcester Woman in mind that Labours high command set up a Key Campaigns Task Force in Millbank, to focus on the marginal seats that would have to swing to Labour the only seats that mattered. It is a fair guess that because of her, Labour printed five million copies of its manifesto in the format of glossy magazines, entitling them Because YOU deserve better!, before slipping them through the letterboxes of houses whose postcodes indicated marginal constituency status. Then there was the decision to use Elgar in Labour TV broadcasts, presumably on the assumption that this Worcester-born and most patriotic of composers dominated Worcester Womans CD collection. Something she could turn to in those moments when she needed reassurance.
Twenty-eight days before the election, Tony Blair claimed, Trust is the single most important commodity in this election. I can almost reach out and feel the sentiment among the public. By this he meant they had been reassured. Trust, Blairs commodity, had been gained by his party thanks to a programme that he felt was utterly in tune with the times and instincts of todays Britain.
When journalists complained, Alastair Campbell half-taunted them, and, as an ex-hack, half-sympathised with their plight. Youre bored, he told the Press Corps. But when they asked why Labour refused to stir the passion of voters with some important issues, such as, for example, the commitment to devolution and altering the nature of the UK with new parliaments, Campbell was scornful. You think Mrs. Woman-in-Worcester is interested in constitutional reform?
Worcester Woman was the soul of Middle England a place you wont find on any map, but a place that exists in the pollsters mind. Its a place where upwardly-mobile families mow their lawns and take the labrador with them in the back of the car. In 1997, they were thinking of a new kitchen and why not? while still fearful that the Labour Party would stop them having it. They had to be reassured.
A telling little insight appeared in the Times during the 1997 election campaign. Outlining the possible movers and shakers around a victorious Blair, the paper made reference to Anji Hunter. Hunter is head of Tony Blairs private office. According to the Times, Anji is no intellectual but Blair has come to trust her cool judgement and direct line to Middle England she is uniquely valuable, having friends who read the Daily Mail for pleasure. The message was that Blairs not prejudiced; some of his non-intellectual friends have friends who enjoy the Daily Mail. Like all such proclamations, it reveals the bedrock prejudice that it denies Blair and co. hate Worcester Woman.
The contempt lives on. In October 2000, a fringe debate took place at the Labour Party Conference on How Green is Worcester Woman? Listeners were warned that after four apparently contented years under Labour, the marriage between Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman was under severe strain. Differences over eco-matters could prove irreconcilable. Divorce was anyway on the increase. The country was dividing between gas-guzzlers and environmentalists. Alan Simpson, the Labour MP for Nottingham, declared that, Worcester Women have become among the cohorts of modern revolutionaries and have discovered political action. That Gould word again, this time from a left-wing Labour MP.
Puncturing the stereotype
Once more, a singular stereotype is summoned up in an age of pluralist flux. It is, I feel, an insult to women, to their husbands, partners, children, families. Leaving gender aside, it is an insult to our individuality, to our connectedness, to our concerns, our loves, our interests, our hopes, our minds, our democratic values. It is born of a form of representative politics in which votes are conglomerated into unsophisticated outcomes. A process made far more damaging by the first-past-the-post electoral system, still preserved in Britain and the United States. At the heart of this process is distrust. Voters notoriously distrust politicians. But this is nothing to the private distrust of the voters by the politicians and the contempt for both by many journalists, editors and media proprietors.
So we have decided to go and listen to women in Worcester and ask them to reflect on the issues that concern them. This is not born of a naive decision to trust them. It is an attempt to get past the infantile simplicities of these kinds of terms. A political judgement is involved. Whatever their complicity in the shortcomings of Britains particular political system, the Labour leaders had been wrong to assume, as they did in 1997, that the British public remained well to the right of the new government. There was an opportunity for the renewal of Britain. But this opportunity went up in spin.
This, at least, is the starting point of the investigation which follows: the belief that voters in general, and women in Worcester in particular, will be capable of thinking for themselves. That they want and deserve to be treated like adults, and not the childlike voter who is assumed to decide matters, not just by New Labour but it seems, by all of Britains political leaders.
