With law and order, Blair s shadow Home Secretary, sought to end the perception of Labour as 'Soft on Crime'. He it was who introduced right-wing steel into the party's message, summed up by his slogan 'Tough on Crime - tough on the causes of crime'. With employment Blair when shadowing this portfolio, he succeeded in ending his party's commitment to 'full employment' in 1990, when the document Looking to the Future talked instead of the 'highest possible levels of skilled and rewarding employment'. In education Blair sent his son Euan to the Oratory School, a grant maintained school of the type Labour policy opposed.
In defence, Blair has consistently identified core ideas ever since he was an undergraduate at Oxford. Rentoul (John Rentoul wrote a biography on Blair) even suggests his sense of mission, to 'make a difference', preceded this and is closely connected with his youthful religious learnings when he even considered, quite seriously, becoming a priest before swinging to 'politics as the vehicle for his moral commitment'. He was already a natural anti-establishment undergraduate, attracted to leftish politics but cautious and certainly no extremist.
Blair did adapt the dominant political and economic philosophy of the day - but it has to be appreciated that: four successive elections had been lost by Labour and as leader he had to redirect his party into a position from where it could realistically challenge for office; there is little point otherwise in being a political party. A wealth of evidence showed that Labour's weakness was related to: its perceived closeness to trade union sectional interests; its high 'tax and spend' policies; its predilection for government interference in the economy, especially the discredited policy of nationalisation; and its identification with 'losers' and regulation rather than 'winners' and opportunity.
The shrinkage of the working class meant labour's natural voter base was disappearing following its heyday in the post-war years.
