Lest We Forget

LEST WE FORGET

A week, they say, is a long time in politics. So a month or a year is almost certainly oblivion. This means that unless they are kept in the public eye by being revived as news, the things that happen just wash away, never to be brought into account.

For instance: do you remember the Millennium Dome?

That spiky bubble thing beside the Thames. The brainchild of some Labour Lord. I remember it cost many millions of our money and it was – Oh yes! It was always going to be, wasn’t it? – an utter flop. What happened to that Lord? Did he pay for it? Was he put out to grass? Is he cleaning the loos at the Lords? No, I’m sure that, after a while, he was quietly promoted; given an important responsible government post – something legal wasn’t it?

("Tut-tut, dear boy. We don’t mention the Dome.")

Sorry. I was only mentioning it as an example of the power of forgetting. Used cleverly, the people’s tendency to forget is one of the most powerful tools in politics, perhaps the chief weapon in a government’s armoury.

Just watch our Tony now he’s back from his humble holiday. Is he going to be spending time convincing his critics that he did act honourably over, for instance, Iraq?

Not on your Nellie! Iraq has been hidden under a paving-stone marked "We got rid of Saddam and that’s all that matters." He won’t be looking under that to reveal the uncounted dead, the on-going chaos, and those yet to die. Nor will he allow himself or us to glimpse the acres of lovely poppy-fields growing apace in liberated Afghanistan. Oh dear me, no!

Nor, it must be said, would he see it as his job to do so. Actually, it is his job, but he wouldn’t see it like that. Tony will most likely be being sincerely passionate about lots of important issues and projects, all new, all forward-looking, virtuous and so subtly suspect that the full attention of his political opponents will be diverted into dissecting and denouncing them. For him the most valuable effect of this process will the fact that attending to them will ensure that there will be no time, or space in the media, for remembering unwelcome aspects of the recent past.

The government sincerely and passionately wants its past to be forgotten, and the media, understandably, only wants new news. Consequently there is likely to be no ‘outlet’, no way of making public the list of dishonest manoeuvres, some verging on betrayal, that Tony Blair and his cronies have perpetrated and foisted on to the world in our names. So remembering these is essentially down to us. We ourselves have to remember what has happened because nobody else is going to do it for us.

There is, incidentally, a rather interesting longer term side-effect of this process.

It is this: in the past Tony Blair’s astonishing genius for plausibility has been very useful to the Labour Party, indeed its appeal to the generality of the electorate is what made the revamped Party electable. But, plausibility alone has a short shelf-life and there are strong signs that the very people who in the past were charmed into automatically believing him without thinking too much have now, as the truths have come home to roost, begun, equally automatically, to disbelieve him. This is a problem faced by dodgy second-hand car dealers everywhere, and, as ever, the only solution is to disappear. If, as seems likely, few people are now going to believe anything Tony says, it does seem to be time for the Parliamentary Labour Party to consider whether, in purely electoral terms, Tony Blair has now become more of a liability that an asset.

However, setting electoral considerations aside, the basic lesson of the recent past is that whichever political party you or I may belong to or support, it is imperative that somehow or other the country must prevent Tony Blair remaining its Prime Minister. That is not a criticism of the Labour Party, Old or New. Nor has it anything to do with the legislation that has been passed under his leadership – some of that has been sensible. This is something much more simple, fundamental and important.

Tony Blair must go for Parliamentary reasons. He must go because he has shown that he is not fit to be trusted with high office. He has made assertions to Parliament that were not true and, on the basis of the alleged perils inherent in those assertions, he has caused Parliament to take the people into to a war that it hadn’t decided it wanted to take part in.

That act is, in itself, sufficient to disqualify him from office. Parliament, acting as an entity, has the right and the duty to dismiss him – by whatever procedure is appropriate.

Later, if you remember, in order to make good his escape from the accusation of having lied to Parliament, the Prime Minister set up two ‘Independent Judicial Inquiries". Their terms of reference were ‘interestingly’ limited and their Conclusions were transparently partial towards him, even to the extent of recommending that a BBC reporter be blamed and sacked for not having ensured that his statements were reliably founded, while at the same time exonerating the Prime Minister from any blame for having done exactly the same thing. The only difference being that, unless he was deaf or unable to read, the Prime Minister must have already known that what he was saying was unsound when he said it, whereas the unfortunate Mr Gilligan, the sacked reporter, has since been able to show that his statements were in fact reliably founded.

However, ‘Downing Street’, the source of Tony Blair’s opinions, has announced that as the Inquiries have ‘fully exonerated him’ from any blame for misleading the country, that is the end of the matter.

That again is not true. Anybody reading the report of the Hutton Inquiry will have noticed that although his Lordship’s Conclusions may favour Mr Blair’s innocence, it is clear that the evidence on which the Conclusions purport to be based definitely does not. That is where the truth lies.

But truth does not last unless it is remembered. While Tony Blair remains in Downing Street his version of events will be doggedly proclaimed as proven fact and, possibly, eventually, ‘history’ will absorb it as the truth.

If history should find him innocent, (and Tony has already told us that it is going to), if he should remain in office and his version of events become, by default, part of our country’s record, if Parliament allows him to go on treating the House like a cage of monkeys and to go on leading the country by the nose into international follies of his own fancying, then we shall have nobody to blame but ourselves.

So let us not allow him to get away with it.

Let us not allow ourselves to forget.

Oliver Postgate

HOME