You've heard the reaction, now find out what Blair said

PARADOXICALLY - or, as people say these days, "ironically" - it is becoming harder and harder, during the revolution in information technology we are supposed to be living through, to establish precisely what anybody said. We are familiar with the phenomenon on television. A politician may be delivering a crucial speech: say, the Leader of the Opposition's reply to the Budget. After he has been going for a couple of minutes, his voice will fade away, to be supplanted by a few broken sentences from the presenter, who will then hand us back to Mr David Dimbleby and his guests in the studio.

Newspapers are just as bad. Parliamentary reporting is a thing of the past, though the Independent has a brave try at summarising the day's proceedings, while the Guardian has a weekly "Best of Hansard" feature. As for Hansard itself, I fear for its future under a privatised Stationery Office. Already it is priced beyond the means of most citizens. Reports of speeches speculate on whether they will cause a storm. The opinions of politicians of the opposing parties are earnestly solicited in an attempt to effect this change in the weather.

Thus we know what Mr John Monks of the TUC and Mr John Edmonds of the GMB thought Mr Tony Blair meant about "stakeholding". Likewise we have been given the views of Dr Brian Mawhinney of Central Office and Mr Michael Heseltine of the quite ridiculously large office. All agree that Mr Blair was being friendly towards, perhaps even promising to restore some powers to, the unions. Mr Monks and Mr Edmonds think this is a good thing; while Dr Mawhinney and Mr Heseltine, for their part, consider it to be entirely bad. This is precisely what one would expect them all to believe.

There is, however, one difficulty. Mr Blair never said anything of the kind. Indeed, in so far as I can make them out, his proposals are antipathetic even to that reformed trade union movement which Mr Monks and Mr Edmonds are supposed to represent.

In Tokyo on 5 January he said he had argued that we needed a new contract between society and the individual in which rights and duties were more closely defined. We should grant each citizen a stake in our society but demand from each clear responsibilities in return. What would this mean in practice? Company and country alike would place a high premium on flexibility, mobility and adaptability. But these qualities needed to be developed. They arose only when the self-interest and full talent of all employees were engaged.

Labour believed in minimum standards at the workplace for employees. They should have basic rights to fair treatment, to proper health and safety legislation, and to protection from abuse by employers. That must not lead us to "rigidity" or "inflexibility" in labour markets. Social costs were part of international trading conditions. Often the best form of job security would come with the skills that made a worker indispensable.

Mr Blair said he had already laid down that there would be no repeal of the main elements in the union legislation of the 1980s. Ballots before strikes and for union elections would remain, as would restrictions on mass and flying pickets. Trade unions would be treated with "fairness" but with "no special favours". He did not see the role of a Labour government as one of "switching the clock back to the 1970s". The party had admitted that it had taken far too long in the 1980s to "face up to the need for change".

The Singapore speech of 8 January received more publicity, presumably because it contained the phrase "a stakeholder economy". In the Tokyo speech he had used only the word "stake", as he did again in Singapore. But it is the one word "stakeholder" which seems to have caught the fancy of my colleagues in the commentating and reporting trades. I cannot see the attraction myself. But there it is.

In Singapore Mr Blair said that Britain's future lay in producing "goods of quality". Try telling that to the unemployed engineers of Derby! He said that the creation of an economy where we were "inventing and producing goods and services of quality" needed the "engagement of the whole country". It had to become a matter of national purpose and pride. We had to build a relationship of trust not only in a company but in a society.

By "trust" he meant, he said, the recognition of a "mutual purpose" for which we worked together and from which we all benefited. "It is a stakeholder economy, in which opportunity is available to all, advancement is through merit and from which no group or class is set apart or excluded." We needed a country where we acknowledged an obligation "collectively" - this is the only small piece of support for the Monks-Heseltine interpretation - to ensure each citizen had a stake in it. "One Nation politics" was not some expression of sentiment, or even of justifiable concern for the less well-off. It was an "active politics", the bringing of a country together, a sharing of the possibility of power, wealth and opportunity.

I should like to point out here that "One Nation" was never used by Disraeli. In his novel Sybil, or, The Two Nations, one of his characters talks about the two nations, the rich and the poor. One Nation was the title of a pamphlet published in 1950 by a group of Tories that included Iain Macleod, Angus Maude and Enoch Powell. The title was suggested by Maude, though some think the phrase was supplied to him by Macleod. The group, chiefly members who looked up to R A Butler, took their name from the pamphlet, rather than the other way round.

Today the phrase, so recently denounced by Lady Thatcher, has been taken up by Mr Blair. The economics of the centre and centre-left, he said at Singapore, should be geared to the creation of the stakeholder economy which involved all our people, not a privileged few. If we failed in that, we squandered "wealth-creating ability" and denied the "basis of trust" on which a cohesive society, One Nation, was built.

On 18 January at Derby Mr Blair returned to the theme, in a speech entitled "The Stakeholder Economy". Business leaders, he claimed, recognised that what new Labour was saying fitted exactly with "current thinking" in industry. Some of our great companies were "stakeholder firms": John Lewis, Rover, Marks & Spencer, British Petroleum. Business advisers were agreed that "competitiveness and success" came from a "stakeholder approach".

Trade unions are certainly prohibited at John Lewis; nor would I vouch for the zeal on behalf of the brothers from the branches at the other concerns which Mr Blair mentions. He seems to be moving more in the world of the staff association than of syndicalism or workers' control. Now to support the latter really would be a change or, rather, a reversion to an older, suppressed tradition in Labour's beliefs. As it is, I think Dr Mawhinney and Mr Heseltine can continue to sleep safely in their beds - or even in their large offices.