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Blair's Flawed Legacy
Blairism comes into perspective: Radical, ideological, extreme
It was once said that outgoing British prime-minister Tony Blair was like a cushion, always reflecting the imprint of the last person who sat on him. Not quite fair, some would say because he has, over his ten years in office, displayed quite a flair for sticking to his own brand of controversial policies to the end. The cushion metaphor, however, goes some way to demonstrating the frustration of dealing with, putting up with or defining Blair, the arch bamboozler.
Blair’s legacy is one of huge confusion both to his detractors and supporters alike.
To try to define Blair one has first to understand his natural ability to confuse opposition and supporters alike by cutting across traditional political lines and playing on words allowing him to say one thing and do the opposite. Media manipulation and his ability to convey boundless optimism in the face of stark reality is also an overriding trait. The result is that nobody has ever landed a serious blow on ‘Teflon Tony’.
Blair leaves office, having anointed his heir like a Roman emperor, turned the Tory opposition party into a pathetic bunch of imitators, and left media commentators firing blanks when trying to define him and his legacy.
How did he do it and what were his motivations? What, if anything, was Blairism?
To understand Blair, one must get rid of two accepted fallacies.
The first is that Blair is a centrist. The second is that his premiership was not ideological.
There is a peculiarly British trait which denies the exist of ideological politics. To subscribe to one or another ideology is seen as a continental affectation; British politicians paint themselves as pragmatists. Blair excelled at this. Ten years before Nicolas Sarkozy claimed the phrase as his own, Blair was "interested in what works."
However. Stealing the clothes of Opposition parties does not make you a centrist. In everything other than domestic economic policy and Iraq, Blair has embodied a form of progressive socialism that is anything but centrist.
Blair is and always was an ideologue who formed his outlook in the radical world of 60’s university left-wing politics. He recently cited a book on Leon Trotsky as the most influential book of his life. Almost every minister in his successive cabinets were former Marxists, Trotskyites, radical activists or cold war unilateralist appeasers in the form of ‘-CND as Blair was himself. His highly influential wife was also an ideological left-winger to the end.
Blair has never been a centrist. His government has been radical. It's not because he dropped the socialist plank of the state "owning the means to his social revolution" that his social revolution has not been extreme. Karl Marx only came up with the economic half of his social revolution after contemporary critics wondered how it could be financed. He never pretended to be an economist and saw the money element as secondary.
Blair inherited Thatcher’s legacy of a booming economy and a galvanized public, hell bent on creating individual capital through home ownership and entrepreneurship. It was simpler for Blair and Gordon Brown to ditch the state ownership side and to finance their revolution through stealth taxes targeted at their least favourite classes.
The revolution, however, took place and it is well on its way to becoming “irreversible”, always Blair's stated aim.
Far from the mismanagement and incompetence that Blair’s detractors complain about, Blair has been highly effective in carrying out his reforms and has pretty much succeeded in imposing the kind of society he and his colleagues set out to put in place.
The first assault has been upon the institutions that uphold traditional British society and define it as a country. Far from being modern social & reforming as the mantra ‘New Labour’ suggests, classic Marxist doctrine insists on destroying the institutions that maintain the bourgeois capitalist status quo. Blair set out to deconstruct everything from the union of nations that made up the United Kingdom, to the house of Lords to the office of Lord Chancellor, the Privy Council, the legal system in general and in particular the courts, from presumption of innocence to automatic trial by jury.
The increased role of the state and its now overbearing role in private lives has been ruthlessly implemented, making the British the most spyed-on people of any free country in the world. CCTV cameras festoon every street: the latest models can bark orders at the public like a nightmare from a sci-fi movie. Teenagers are rounded up and forced to submit DNA samples for a national database. The right to gain entry into people's homes has been given to unprecedented numbers of officials, councils, bailiffs and police without the tedium of recourse to the courts.
Public servants have been politicized by diversity training and political correctness to the point that they see their role as the front line troops in re-educating and re-engineering society.
Any minor civil servant, hospital worker, social worker, teacher or council worker has an array of weapons at their disposal in the form of health and safety laws and legislation to wield against anyone or any business that does not conform to the ideological doctrine handed down from their political masters.
No parent is safe from being accused of abusing ones own children. A visit to the hospital or doctor means form-filling and suspicious questioning, which seems designed to put the burden of proof on parents to show that they are not responsible for their childrens illness or injury. Taking children into ‘care’ is a particular favourite of the Blair state and according to the Daily Mail there are over one thousand questionable cases of families being broken up every year.
No issue is too minor or petty for the police, if you are part of what the newspapers call “middle Britain” (whatever that is). The police federation admitted this week that Brits are targeted simply to meet the quota-related police methods that Blair’s administrators have imposed. Meanwhile real criminals receive piffling sentences and the streets are full of thuggish, knife -wielding youths who seem free to mug and rob and generally intimidate the public at will. Thousands of criminals and illegal immigrants are on the run with little prospect of ever being caught.
Letting criminals out to intimidate the public is not incompetence. It is motivated by a particular ideology that demands to know “what is a criminal anyway?” In this analysis, if you’ve got a fancy house, nice clothes or a mobile phone then you probably deserve your fate and anyway, “A criminal is only someone who reacts naturally to deprived circumstances, so it's not their fault.” The fact that Blair's left does not appear to belive in prison or punishment is another insult to victims.
Having criminals bullying the public is destabilising and a degree of this appears to have been an acceptable or even a desirable outcome for Blair’s government.
Like any good old-fashioned Marxist, Blair and his government are dedicated to creating a permanent vacuum where there used to be a country, politicized bureaucracies where there used to be impartial institutions and control in place of liberty.
Above all Blair’s state does not trust its own people. This is why citizens are considered fair game for manipulation of the truth through propaganda (which the tame press labelled spin) and the drive to take national democracy out of the public hands through supranational government in Europe.
Blair and his ideologues particular irk is reserved for the English. England is the country that for centuries has been at the hub of what is known as Britain. New Labour hates the English, partly because many of its politicians are Scots, but mainly because they believe that by some accident of history the English have an inbuilt aggressive, colonial instinct.
This instinct, they believe, has to be curtailed along with what they consider to be the institutionalised racism of the English. The ideological effort of Blair's regime has been to make England a non-country.
Paradoxically the English have always seen themselves as British, it is only since every effort has been made to devolve Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland at their expense have the English began to see themselves as a nation.
How will Blair be remembered? It is ironic that his last act as Prime Minister was to agree on a final formular for the Treaty Formerly Known As The EU Constitution. This agreement extends EU powers into dozens of new areas and seals a deal on the political Europe that enemies of Europe's nation states have demanded for decades.
The "get-out clauses" Blair claims to have secured are nothing of the sort: British lawyers will have to argue each one in the European Courts every time it is challenged. Blair might be exiting, but those who want to see national power whittled away to nothing are unlikely to rest until this goal is achieved.
The question, then, is not "how will Blair be remembered" but will there be an England left to remember him?
