A Different Despotism?

A DIFFERENT DESPOTISM?

Parliament has risen for the summer recess, the Honourable Members have departed, so this may be the time to pause and wonder whether there are any we would rather not welcome back.

The one who, for some reason, springs to mind is our Prime Minister.

At the debate on the Butler Inquiry which ended this session of Parliament, Tony Blair, to all appearances, trounced the Leader of the Opposition who had tried in vain to give him an opportunity to apologise for certain mistakes and misleading statements that he has made. Mr Blair’s parting shot was to reaffirm his view that Iraq was a better place now that Saddam had been deposed and that anybody who said otherwise was a loony. That statement was significant in that, although the resounding phrase was delivered with a smirk of triumphant satisfaction, nobody was in fact saying anything of the sort.

Thus, simply by changing the subject with an irrelevant sound-bite, Mr Blair had deftly ended what could have been a serious debate and was able to close the session of Parliament on a note of triumph and with his public image intact. To see through that trick would call for an effort of attention which few casual listeners outside Parliament would be likely to make. Nor would it have been particularly noticed by listeners within Parliament, as they have got used to debates turning into cheap shouting-matches.

That is sad. In the past, if my memory serves me, politicians and parliamentarians seemed to hold to an honourable respect for the realities of a situation. They were willing, albeit reluctantly, to attend to the other side’s point of view, to discuss it honestly, and, in the light of common-sense and knowledge, to adjust their views before reaching a decision. Of course this flexibility was not due solely to the altruism of the participants. A single Party or grouping of Members has rarely held a sufficient majority to railroad its legislations through, and consequently has had no option but to seek some concensus.

That situation has now changed radically. Some years ago, with the help of his interesting associates, Tony Blair reinvented the Labour Party by giving it a new ‘Brand Image’ based on clever Public Relations schemes and craftily spun slogans calculated to appeal to the interests and desires of the largest possible number of electors.

Central to this process of re-creation has been the abandonment of any adherence to boring out-dated dogmas and traditional political beliefs. The Labour Party has not only had to abandon its founding principles but also any commitment to actuality. Absolute flexibility was essential because the single imperative purpose of New Labour was to maintain its Image and thereby guarantee its future electability. This has necessarily meant that veracity, common-sense, wisdom, compassion and fairness have become the poor relations of electoral expediency.

Strangely, although New Labour represents little that Labour once stood for, the ‘Old’ Labour Party seems to believe it must remain loyal to Tony Blair. This cannot be because he is said to have promised that, once it was made electable, New Labour would bring in true left-wing policies. That hasn’t happened. Perhaps they stay because, as Tony doesn’t hesitate to emphasize loud and often, unless they stand together Labour could lose electability and become nothing again. So now the old Labour slogan "Unity is Strength" could be expressed as "Obedience preserves Power".

Thus New Labour has become the creature of Tony Blair, and, in the nicest possible way of course, it has to do what he wants and has to support, as truth, what he has decided is true.

Mr Blair does not dispute this. He has repeatedly asserted that, as Prime Minister, it is his duty to do, and cause to be done, those things that he himself believes are right. In this he has shown courage, resourcefulness, firmness of purpose and absolute loyalty to his personal vision. In its service he has brilliantly fended off and plausibly diverted fierce criticisms of his policies and actions, with a frankness and eloquence which is disarmingly sincere, even lovable.

That is the most startling, and possibly the most dangerous, quality shown by our Prime Minister. We have seen that when faced with the various accusations currently being made against his actions and policies, the sincerity and genuine passion with which he has dismissed them has shown no glimmer of recognition of even the possibility that any part of them could be well-founded. His confidence in his own rightness appears to be impregnably complete. How he sees things is how things are.

So let us look, for a moment, at the situation in Iraq.

Mr Blair has told us that the job in Iraq is all but done. He sees that torn country as progressing towards a future of peace and security in true democracy. He knows that the remaining WMDs will in due course be found, and he has decided that now is the time to draw a line under a task well done, time to turn away, and attend to important matters at home. It is a very understandable view, and everybody should respect it, were it not for the fact that it is radiantly untrue.

A weaker man might allow himself to be affected by the reality of the situation there, might perhaps allow himself to notice the end-effect of the sequence of events. He might see that by arrogating to themselves the right to act in defiance of the will and wishes of the United Nations, he and Mr Bush may indeed have valiantly removed a despot, albeit at the expense of uncounted thousands of Iraqi dead. But he might also allow himself to notice that in that process, which collaterally caused the destruction of the infrastructure of the country, the collapse of any remnants of social order and the crass degradation of its people, he and Mr Bush have lavishly fired up a far greater monster of hatred, one that no military might can locate, let alone defeat, and that they have also, by their example, tacitly legitimated the tactics of terrorism.

As a direct result of their action, any country, disparate group or self-righteous zealot can now say: "If Blair and Bush can fancy to go for ‘regime-change’ by force, what are we waiting for?" They have, as one U.S. ex-intelligence officer put it, given al-Qa’eda the greatest recruiting boost it could ever have hoped for.

A weaker man than Mr Blair might have been able to say: "Oh dear, I may have boobed a bit there." But the awesome truth seems to be that, for whatever reason, our Prime Minister appears not to be able to take on board the possibility that things are the way they are. He may have been so convinced by his own vision that he believed it was his duty to, as Hans Blix put it, allow the question-marks of the accurate uncertainties in the received Intelligence reports to be taken out and replaced with the exclamation marks of fake certainties – and so commit the country to what was far more than a war.

Even now, amid the dead and dying in Iraq, he seems to be standing, smiling with satisfaction, oblivious to the car-bombs going off and deaf to the ever-growing growl of anger that is rising throughout the Muslim world.

Has he not seen, somewhere in his heart, that he and his buddy may already have lit the fuse that could one day destroy life as we know it?

Who can say?

But others have, and, on mature consideration, I, for one, would rather Tony Blair did not come back to Parliament. Not so much because his internal policies are necessarily bad (they come so glossily packaged that it is hard to tell). Nor necessarily because he is ill-intentioned, but because he has become ‘the Boss’, a man who has treated public opinion and obvious facts with such transparent contempt that it is clear that, if allowed to, he could lead the country by the nose into another international folly. That is not democracy, that is a sort of despotism, and it is dangerous.

In Parliament we need people who are big-hearted enough to be able to see that there could be another point of view, and know that they could, just sometimes, be mistaken.

Oliver Postgate

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