Blair: Flair for failure
Yesterday I offered myself to the people of the Anglo-Irish city of Liverpool as an Irish nationalist candidate, arguing that the people of that city had been betrayed by the Labour government and that things could only get better if the city became part of the Irish Republic.
I don’t think the people of Liverpool are alone in being betrayed by Blair’s government.
It’s pretty fashionable to say that Blair is a man who’s totally out of his depth running a major industrial nation, that he’s delegated the real running of the country to Gordon Brown whose work he takes all the credit for, that he runs the country in an undemocratic presidential style, that he’s incapable of admitting that he’s made a mistake, that he’s a stooge for neo-liberal globalistation, that he lets his ego get in the way of important foreign policy decisions and that his skills as a campaigner and presenter of policy aren’t matched by his skills as a leader.
He has his defenders as well. In Sunday’s Observer David Aaranovich launched a blistering attack on his critics, like John Lanchester I never saw that coming.
Tony is married to a catholic, so he ought to know that we sin both in our thoughts and in our words, in what we have done and in what we have failed to do. If I’d been writing this piece eight years ago, I’d be criticising the Thatcher and Major governments for the things they had done, like Smashing the Unions, destroying the public transport system and health care system, selling arms to Saddam Huessein and the House of Saud and a miriad of other things.
But just as Robert Rubin, Clinton’s first trade secretary criticised his former boss for not taking advantage of his eight years in power to do something about the massive inequality in the country and the time bomb that the country’s dependence on petrochemicals was fuelling; critics of Blair mostly argue that someone with such a huge majority shouldn’t be so satisfied with such minor victories. It’s noticeable that both Clinton and Blair’s most passionate defenders on the left can never come up with anything better than minor initiatives like Sure Start in the case of Blair or being able to come up with catchy one-liners like “I feel your pain” in the case of Clinton.
Of course their were obstacles for both of them to do anything positive, in Clinton’s case the Republican majority in both houses and in Blair’s the massive power of the Murdoch press.
The “Forces of Conservatism” of which Blair spoke in a famous early speech aren’t entirely mythical, but the sinister thing is that it’s archaic institutions like the House of Lords that have taken some of the nastier edges off some of his policies, like the Orwellian anti-terror bill.
The key to explaining paradoxes like this is that is that many people rightly associate the term conservative with being right-wing while it literally means being resitant to change no matter what side of the political spectrum it comes from, so when Blair accuses people of being conservative for opposing the removal of ancient liberties that have existed since the time of the Magna Carta he’s right on one level but there’s a cunning piece of prestigination going on that clearly goes over the head of people like Aaranovich.
Maybe I should cut his defenders some slack as they want to believe that democracy really works as it’s practiced in countries like the UK as, in theory democracy is a beautiful and noble concept. But I’m on the side of the people who scrawl on lavatory walls that if voting really changed anything they’d abolish it.
Many of the people who work within the Blair administration might think they’re genuinely forcing change, but I don’t think history works like that, that it’s really determined by social forces that politicians are powerless to effect and it’s often scientific innovation that pushes society ahead, or in the case of some recent inventions, back.
Religious types like Blair might believe in a notion of progress, indeed Blair’s own party used to sing a song about creating a shining city on a hill at their party conference. Others like myself see it as being cyclical, and argue that for the last 25 years the Anglo-Saxon nations have been moving in the direction of authoritarianism and inequality. When Blair talks about removing any vestige of Thatcherism that might be left, that’s all he’s doing: talking. He’s really the third part of an unholy trinity that began with the vindictive Thatcher herself who cast down plagues of oppression on her enemies, and continued with the meek, conciallitory, forgiving Major. This, neatly, makes Blair the Unholy spirit, which is pretty apposite as he’s kind of slippery and no-one really knows what he stands for.
Almost everything that the so-called Labour government has done is characterised by continuity with the previous administration. One of Thatcher’s most fervent beliefs was that the private sector did things better which led her to farm out many of the things that governments had taken a hand in since the Victorian era to people who had no concern other than making money, a process which Labour has mostly continued. It’s true that they did renationalise Railtrack, but that was more to do with pragmatism than ideology. Some will say that pragmatism isn’t a bad policy for a government, but when one party is ideologically right-wing and has no interest in compromise and compromise is all the other party does, the pendulum will continue drifting to the right.
This is more or less what’s happened. If you look at the figures for the gap between rich and poor they continued to widen for the first two years of Blair’s government, but then merely stabilised. When the tories get back in power, they’re going to start widening again.
People offer many different explanations for why Blair supported George Bush’s war in Iraq and gave us the bizarre spectacle of the most right-wing American president in a lifetime boasting of his friendship with the leader of the British Labour party. The Aaronovichs of the world will tell you that he really believed the universally discredited “evidence” of the existence of WMD in Iraq and yearns for the people of Iraq to live in a democracy just like the people of Britain, though he never talked about it that much before Bush got elected. Others cite Britain’s so-called “special relationship” with the US and Blair’s own massive ego, and the interests of British Oil companies.
To a history student like myself, the spate of wars that the US and UK have got involved in in the last seven years are the inevitable result of the downsizing of government over the last twenty years. When the modern state developed first in the 12th and 13th centuries, war was it’s only function and it wasn’t until after the French Revolution that governments took an interest in social affairs. After all, the French monarchy didn’t go broke because they spent all their money building hospitals for needy orphans, but on losing the 7 years war and helping the US to free itself from the British monarchy which Americans seem to have forgotten, but that’s a whole n’other story.
If you read Anthony Sampson’s book on the Arms trade, you’ll notice that before the Second World war European nations spent most of their money on arms while the US spent most of it’s money on building the country’s infrastructure, but the war completely inverted this process, with the Atlee government bringing in the golden age of Big Government in the UK which led to almost thirty years of you’ve-never-had-it-so-good social stability which broke down in the 70’s with various explanations, my favourite of which is that M15 thought the country was going socialist and engineered some catastrophic strikes.
But here’s the rub: Blair is a man with no sense of history, which is why he can’t see that he’s a merely a conduit for larger social forces. It’s this naivite that led him to think he could be the man to end the troubles in Northern Ireland and by extension the whole sorry history of Anglo-Irish conflict. In 1998 Blair came up to Belfast and all but pushed Mo Mowlam out of the way and took the credit for all her work, telling the world that the hand of history was on his shoulder.
Yet 7 years later, where has the Good Friday agreement got us? There haven’t been any more attacks on Britain by the IRA but then there was only one between 1994 an 1998. But many of the freed prisoners from both sides of the political divide have got involved in honest-to-god crime with tragic results for many people here. Then a clause in the agreement meant that anyone born on the island of Ireland could claim citizenship, which gave Micheal McDowell an excuse to bring in a raft of anti-immigrant legislation. Worse still, it means that Ireland can import toxic waste from Britain (Literally; I don’t mean the Daily Mail ) and much of it will be incinerated in the Ringaskiddy area. Thanks for poisoning me, Tone.
But Blair’s biggest failure has got to be the Fox-Hunting debacle. The Labour government devoted over 600 hours of parliamentary time over almost 8 years to this issue, and, in spite of the fact that most of them are lawyers, still totally fucked up the wording of the bill so that it’s still legal to shoot a fox and feed it to dogs.
Eight Fucking Years! In that timespan Alexander the Great conquered the known world and Napoleon made himself emperor of the part of Europe that was worth being emperor of. But Blair couldn’t even get the better of a bunch of bloodthirsty aristos.
He’ll still get re-elected of course, as the electoral system is so heavily balanced in his favour and they have the media stitched up so much that most genuine liberals are afraid to vote lib-dem because they think Charles Kennedy is a flaky alcoholic. Yet that’s the democratic system that people fought for centuries to achieve.
Right, Tone?
I don’t think the people of Liverpool are alone in being betrayed by Blair’s government.
It’s pretty fashionable to say that Blair is a man who’s totally out of his depth running a major industrial nation, that he’s delegated the real running of the country to Gordon Brown whose work he takes all the credit for, that he runs the country in an undemocratic presidential style, that he’s incapable of admitting that he’s made a mistake, that he’s a stooge for neo-liberal globalistation, that he lets his ego get in the way of important foreign policy decisions and that his skills as a campaigner and presenter of policy aren’t matched by his skills as a leader.
He has his defenders as well. In Sunday’s Observer David Aaranovich launched a blistering attack on his critics, like John Lanchester I never saw that coming.
Tony is married to a catholic, so he ought to know that we sin both in our thoughts and in our words, in what we have done and in what we have failed to do. If I’d been writing this piece eight years ago, I’d be criticising the Thatcher and Major governments for the things they had done, like Smashing the Unions, destroying the public transport system and health care system, selling arms to Saddam Huessein and the House of Saud and a miriad of other things.
But just as Robert Rubin, Clinton’s first trade secretary criticised his former boss for not taking advantage of his eight years in power to do something about the massive inequality in the country and the time bomb that the country’s dependence on petrochemicals was fuelling; critics of Blair mostly argue that someone with such a huge majority shouldn’t be so satisfied with such minor victories. It’s noticeable that both Clinton and Blair’s most passionate defenders on the left can never come up with anything better than minor initiatives like Sure Start in the case of Blair or being able to come up with catchy one-liners like “I feel your pain” in the case of Clinton.
Of course their were obstacles for both of them to do anything positive, in Clinton’s case the Republican majority in both houses and in Blair’s the massive power of the Murdoch press.
The “Forces of Conservatism” of which Blair spoke in a famous early speech aren’t entirely mythical, but the sinister thing is that it’s archaic institutions like the House of Lords that have taken some of the nastier edges off some of his policies, like the Orwellian anti-terror bill.
The key to explaining paradoxes like this is that is that many people rightly associate the term conservative with being right-wing while it literally means being resitant to change no matter what side of the political spectrum it comes from, so when Blair accuses people of being conservative for opposing the removal of ancient liberties that have existed since the time of the Magna Carta he’s right on one level but there’s a cunning piece of prestigination going on that clearly goes over the head of people like Aaranovich.
Maybe I should cut his defenders some slack as they want to believe that democracy really works as it’s practiced in countries like the UK as, in theory democracy is a beautiful and noble concept. But I’m on the side of the people who scrawl on lavatory walls that if voting really changed anything they’d abolish it.
Many of the people who work within the Blair administration might think they’re genuinely forcing change, but I don’t think history works like that, that it’s really determined by social forces that politicians are powerless to effect and it’s often scientific innovation that pushes society ahead, or in the case of some recent inventions, back.
Religious types like Blair might believe in a notion of progress, indeed Blair’s own party used to sing a song about creating a shining city on a hill at their party conference. Others like myself see it as being cyclical, and argue that for the last 25 years the Anglo-Saxon nations have been moving in the direction of authoritarianism and inequality. When Blair talks about removing any vestige of Thatcherism that might be left, that’s all he’s doing: talking. He’s really the third part of an unholy trinity that began with the vindictive Thatcher herself who cast down plagues of oppression on her enemies, and continued with the meek, conciallitory, forgiving Major. This, neatly, makes Blair the Unholy spirit, which is pretty apposite as he’s kind of slippery and no-one really knows what he stands for.
Almost everything that the so-called Labour government has done is characterised by continuity with the previous administration. One of Thatcher’s most fervent beliefs was that the private sector did things better which led her to farm out many of the things that governments had taken a hand in since the Victorian era to people who had no concern other than making money, a process which Labour has mostly continued. It’s true that they did renationalise Railtrack, but that was more to do with pragmatism than ideology. Some will say that pragmatism isn’t a bad policy for a government, but when one party is ideologically right-wing and has no interest in compromise and compromise is all the other party does, the pendulum will continue drifting to the right.
This is more or less what’s happened. If you look at the figures for the gap between rich and poor they continued to widen for the first two years of Blair’s government, but then merely stabilised. When the tories get back in power, they’re going to start widening again.
People offer many different explanations for why Blair supported George Bush’s war in Iraq and gave us the bizarre spectacle of the most right-wing American president in a lifetime boasting of his friendship with the leader of the British Labour party. The Aaronovichs of the world will tell you that he really believed the universally discredited “evidence” of the existence of WMD in Iraq and yearns for the people of Iraq to live in a democracy just like the people of Britain, though he never talked about it that much before Bush got elected. Others cite Britain’s so-called “special relationship” with the US and Blair’s own massive ego, and the interests of British Oil companies.
To a history student like myself, the spate of wars that the US and UK have got involved in in the last seven years are the inevitable result of the downsizing of government over the last twenty years. When the modern state developed first in the 12th and 13th centuries, war was it’s only function and it wasn’t until after the French Revolution that governments took an interest in social affairs. After all, the French monarchy didn’t go broke because they spent all their money building hospitals for needy orphans, but on losing the 7 years war and helping the US to free itself from the British monarchy which Americans seem to have forgotten, but that’s a whole n’other story.
If you read Anthony Sampson’s book on the Arms trade, you’ll notice that before the Second World war European nations spent most of their money on arms while the US spent most of it’s money on building the country’s infrastructure, but the war completely inverted this process, with the Atlee government bringing in the golden age of Big Government in the UK which led to almost thirty years of you’ve-never-had-it-so-good social stability which broke down in the 70’s with various explanations, my favourite of which is that M15 thought the country was going socialist and engineered some catastrophic strikes.
But here’s the rub: Blair is a man with no sense of history, which is why he can’t see that he’s a merely a conduit for larger social forces. It’s this naivite that led him to think he could be the man to end the troubles in Northern Ireland and by extension the whole sorry history of Anglo-Irish conflict. In 1998 Blair came up to Belfast and all but pushed Mo Mowlam out of the way and took the credit for all her work, telling the world that the hand of history was on his shoulder.
Yet 7 years later, where has the Good Friday agreement got us? There haven’t been any more attacks on Britain by the IRA but then there was only one between 1994 an 1998. But many of the freed prisoners from both sides of the political divide have got involved in honest-to-god crime with tragic results for many people here. Then a clause in the agreement meant that anyone born on the island of Ireland could claim citizenship, which gave Micheal McDowell an excuse to bring in a raft of anti-immigrant legislation. Worse still, it means that Ireland can import toxic waste from Britain (Literally; I don’t mean the Daily Mail ) and much of it will be incinerated in the Ringaskiddy area. Thanks for poisoning me, Tone.
But Blair’s biggest failure has got to be the Fox-Hunting debacle. The Labour government devoted over 600 hours of parliamentary time over almost 8 years to this issue, and, in spite of the fact that most of them are lawyers, still totally fucked up the wording of the bill so that it’s still legal to shoot a fox and feed it to dogs.
Eight Fucking Years! In that timespan Alexander the Great conquered the known world and Napoleon made himself emperor of the part of Europe that was worth being emperor of. But Blair couldn’t even get the better of a bunch of bloodthirsty aristos.
He’ll still get re-elected of course, as the electoral system is so heavily balanced in his favour and they have the media stitched up so much that most genuine liberals are afraid to vote lib-dem because they think Charles Kennedy is a flaky alcoholic. Yet that’s the democratic system that people fought for centuries to achieve.
Right, Tone?
posted by seamus @ 3:56 pm
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