Blairism: an apology

[T_i_B]

Nick Cohen appears to have finally made the transition for left-wing demagogue to Blairbot.......just as Blair is getting ready to leave Downing Street!

http://www.newstatesman.com/200609180017

What is striking in retrospect is that, by the standard of what few positive leftish ideas were around in 1997, the Blair government hasn't been all bad or all right-wing. The middle-class left of the day went on about constitutional reform, and they got it in Scotland and Wales. Everyone on the left said the answer to whatever social question was raised was more money. There aren't enough good teachers: pay them more. Waiting lists are too long: spend more on the NHS. There is too much poverty: increase benefits. All this has happened. Between 1997 and 2005, Britain had the second-largest overall increase in public spending of any advanced country. At Blair's insistence, spending on health was raised to the European Union average.

The edginess of much conversation on the left today may be explained by the fact that, far from being new Labour, this administration's tax-and-spend policies have tested old Labour ideas to the point of destruction. All the justified complaints about management consultants and the wasteful private finance initiative, and all the undoubted improvements in, say, healthcare, can't hide a gnawing doubt that the public has not got a big enough bang for its buck. The next generation of politicians, from whatever party, will look at this and be less inclined than ever to pour resources into state monopolies.

The opprobrium that followed Iraq may have finished Blair off, but it misses the point that here, too, he was behaving like a man of the left. The idea that you should confront dictatorial and genocidal regimes was a reaction against John Major's Tories. Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind made me and many others ashamed of our country as they manoeuvred through the foreign ministries of Europe to stop effective action being taken against the Serb ethnic cleansers in Bosnia. Sometimes by accident and sometimes design, Blair has been the standard-bearer of the ideas of post-cold war humanitarian intervention that developed at the time. British troops were used not only in the checking of Slobodan Milosevic's armies in Kosovo, but in the ending of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor (a good old cause of the left), the overthrow of the psych opathic religious right in Afghanistan and the removal of an Iraqi regime that was responsible for one of the last genocides of the 20th century (and whose overthrow was also once a good old cause of the left). You may not like the consequences, but my point is simply that Blair's behaviour is not necessarily as aberrant as it seems.

Just as I'm sure his successor is going to be less willing to put money into public services, so I'm certain he will be less willing to commit troops to battle. Harder to change, I guess, is the expansion in liberty of the Blair years. This may seem an odd compliment to pay a government noted for its intolerance of everyone from fox-hunters to hecklers, but the Human Rights Act has had its effect, and the best memorials to this strange time are the gay couples kissing in the register offices, the shop girls who can't be fired for asking to spend more time with their children and the prisoners who can't be given punishment beatings in the cells.

[intaglio]

1. My apology for "Blairism"

It is the fashion to assign to the usual political manoevering of the dominant political figure in a country the dignity of a political philosophy. Hence in the United Kingdom Thatcherism, Majorism, Blairism have all been accepted as terms and give the names they are derived from a status alongside the real movers and shakers of the world of political philosophy.

This is a false status for these people do not bear comparison to the true giants such as Marx, Lenin or Keynes.

These Prime Ministers are all politicians; they have cut and trimmed their actions for maximum political advantage and be damned to any underlying principle. The ignorant commentators, seeking to make something special of a false idol, ignore this perfectly normal politicking and sought some underlying theme. This theme was to make the fairytales they pedaled seem logical and acceptable.

There is no such thing as Blairism. Blair like every Prime Minister, from David Lloyd George onwards has fought to be elected. In general this has meant appeasing the major power in the world; ie the USA. In turn this has meant claiming a special relationship with the incumbent of the Oval Office; be it WW, FDR or GWB.

Money flows from this as does business opportunity, for the USA is still the biggest english language market in the world and to a degree the UK regards the US as a brother (or in our hearts possibly, still a colony). Media ownership and revenues are tied to the US: therefore to gain, at a minimum, the neutrality of the Media toward a political party the party leader must be alligned to US thought. UK party leaders will compliment, re-assure, stroke, kow tow and brown-nose for that advantage; in return they hope to have some little effect upon the more extreme actions of a President in the guise of a trusted counsellor.

For the past six years this has meant that Tony B.Liar has had to suck up to a man with the less integrity than almost any other "democratically" elected politician - less even than dear Tony. TB has granted legitimacy to a Presidency that has ignored or defamed treaties, science, peoples and religions, Our Prime Minister has opened up the heart of our co-operative society to the worst excesses of Corporatism and in almost all cases these foolish experiments have failed.

In exchange we have gained nothing from the US administration except the regard one accords a pet and, largely, the contempt of the rest of the world.

Because I am a Brit I therefore apologise for the legitimacy our country has leant to your current President

/end rant

[T_i_B]

4. Lenin? A giant of political philosophy?

:rofl:

Ah well, I suppose it's easier to decry political leaders in western democracies for having "cut and trimmed their actions for maximum political advantage and be damned to any underlying principle" when your man Lenin was more interested in establishing a dictatorship where the people never had the chance to get their leaders to compromise, the result being many millions of deaths.

Now personally, I'm no great fan of Blair and I was hoping to be able to use this thread to pick apart the article. However, I'll gladly take a slippery democratic politician over a dictator posing as a philosopher king who brooks no dissent any day.

[CJCRANE]

2. Afghanistan and Iraq

were NOT humanitarian interventions.

[T_i_B]

3. Interestingly enough

The author of this article was a staunch opponent of the war in Afghanistan, but then bizarrly decided that the invasion of Iraq was a just cause, and has set about not so much arguing in favour of what we have done in Iraq as simply calling opponents of that war names. And now with this article it appears that Nick Cohen's journey to the neo-con side is nearly complete.

[LeftishBrit]

5. I've never cared for Nick Cohen's work

For a long time, he's seemed fairly 'flaky', and, like some other journalists, more concerned about being quotable than about being right.

'Blairism' could be roughly defined for me as a combination of extremely right-wing foreign policy, somewhat authoritarian management-driven domestic policy, and (as Cohen points out here) a few liberal social policies. The latter have been a good thing, but don't make up for the general disappointment of his rule.