The Blair Years (not)
Anthony Barnett (London, OK): My immediate reaction on watching the Blair Years on BBC1, scripted and presented by David Aaronovitch, was to feel slightly soiled, contaminated even, as if the mere act of my watching was a form of collaboration with the odious atmosphere of bad faith and dishonesty. The programme started and ended with clear falsehoods. The first, that the decision to make the Bank of England independent was in any way instigated by and belonged to Blair. The last, that Lebanon was just a minor background to a small rebellion of second-raters. Did I hear Aaronovitch say "he got into trouble over the Lebanon", as if in passing? In fact Blair's support for Israel's appalling invasion and then his slavish refusal to separate himself from Bush in any way and call for a cease-fire was a breaking point that ran through New Labour supporters as well as traditionalists. Thanks to Gordon's unhealthy desire for absolute unity, Blair got a generous farewell ticket which included no public recognition of the differences, no "throwing the saucepans" as Mandelson put it. More is the pity.
But on second thoughts, the fact that this film presented the case for Blair was very revealing indeed. Asked for his core purpose as a leader Blair told us,
"My single aim is for us as a country to understand the scale, intensity and speed of change."
What a load of bollocks.
But very revealing in the way only bollocks can be.
There is no such thing as "change" in the singular. Change is contradictory, irregular, not to speak of unequal, It can be emancipating as well as crushing. The role of a leader is to bring a country a view of how to understand change: what aspects of change to be with and what against, how to shape it and to what ends. It cannot be an "aim" simply to "understand sale, intensity and speed" - as if these qualities are in themselves its meaning.
However, they are the meaning of Blair. I have written before about Blair's personification of the media torrent, the great gushing, self-referential, narcissistic force that has become public consciousness.
For Blair right and wrong are forms of future and past, the ability to do something itself the justification of its rightness. At least Machiavelli argued that Princes had to do immoral things to achieve the virtue of success. For Blair if they succeed this means they cannot have been immoral.
With Tony Blair, the media torrent was in power. This is why he spent so many of his working hours talking with journalists and reporters or working on spin and presentation: the energy and the vacuousness are part of the same thing. If what he was attempting had had more weight he could never had had the energy for it. Lightness, speed an addiction to moving on, this was Blairism!
The second revelation was the utter personalisation of leadership now. Never for a moment was there any sense that Blair led a team (see Peter Oborne's new column on this with respect to Brown). Or that he represented any kind of intellectual, cultural or political or even national tradition. This, of course, is an aspect of the media torrent. Everything is personalised, any force that might represent a fixed point of resistance is seen as 'old' or 'hidebound'.
Nothing was more out of date than the constitution as was. Right at the start, the film showed Robin Butler telling us how New Labour was a "revolutionary cell" made up of Blair and Brown. When he expressed a concern that the decision to make the Bank of England independent was important enough to warrant a Cabinet decision because "we have Cabinet government in this country", Blair dismissed the idea. He justified this on the programme by saying that there could have been disagreements (there would have been) and leaks. It was a coup. The prime mover was surely Brown. But why didn't Robin Butler, as Cabinet Secretary, resign? Or speak up sooner and not wait until it no longer matters? Or raise it as a clear concern when he investigated the conduct of Iraq war decision taking and had the chance?
The uninterviewed ghost in the programme was the rotten old system too weak to resist, already mere flotsam and jetsam in the torrent. One felt it creaking in the furniture as John Birt described how he had plotted to break up the Treasury and create a presidential style Office of Budget Management rather than having a powerful finance ministry. It was a secret plan to smash Gordon if Blair had been able to win the 2005 election on his own steam. I doubt very much if that would have gone to the Cabinet either.
What are your responses to the programme? Did you feel, like me, 'what kind of a country could let itself be ruled in this way?'
Guano (not verified) said:
Wed, 2007-11-21 14:25A good post, Mr Barnett. A big problem with Blair has been his belief in change in the singular - such as modernisation, globalisation, everything changed on 9/11, forwards not backwards. Much that he tried to do has been justified by the need to change without leaving room for discussion on the complexities of phenomena such as globalisation or whether Blair's proposed response is actually the best response or a necessary response.
David Aaronovitch wrote a long column recently about the Iraq invasion, in which he reported on Blair's meeting with Chirac where Blair came out, rolled his eyes and said that Chirac didn't get it. The implication was that Chirac was in the past, Blair was up to date. Aaronovitch didn't mention what Chirac said at that meeting, which is now well-known: Chirac pointed out that starting a war is a risky business with the likelihood of unintended consequences. Chirac was right and Blair was wrong. Not everything changed on 9/11. War, even for the large USA military, still can have unintended consequences. Aggression is still aggression. International law still exists.