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Tony and his supporters , particularly Mandy, have tried to create the myth that he won the centre ground of Labour, built a middle-class Labour coalition to broaden our appeal and turned us into a party of government.
Balls. Tony Blair`s achievement has been to wreck an emerging liberal majority. We were gaining ground among the liberal middle-class, appalled by Thatcherism, the women who’d traditionally voted Tory, the manual workers suffering from the destruction of the unions, and the manufacturing economy and the public sector workers repelled by meanness and cuts. Here were the makings of a new Labour majority to replace the mass manual worker vote of the forties and fifties.
Yet instead of furthering these process Blair ***** off all the component parts of the new majority coalition and left Labour back in the doldrums of decline.
His strategy wasn’t coalition building but vacuous emptiness, policyless policy and an eager grin. He didn’t even have the sense to make the third way into something or to use Clinton’s triangulation because unlike the First Laddie he didn’t have a firm policy position from which to triangulate. The truth is he won a 1997 election which Labour would have walked if Neil Kinnock had still been leader. Blairism was in fact a galloping inferiority complex, a timidity and a nervous desire to replace policy by pandering. So his only achievement was to emasculate us, abandon everything we stood for just in case it might frighten the City, the media, Rupert Murdoch or any passing millionaire. He chucked what we stood for overboard before we even got into power and sold every available pass for PFI pottage.
Far from building a coalition he ruined the emerging liberal majority. He alienated the intellectual middle-class with Iraq, the women by endless war, the stolid working-class by giving them nowt much and the public sector workers by endless reforms which involved diluting and weakening the public service and throwing everything into chaos by perpetual reform.
This lost him and Labour the opportunity to change Britain’s sullen reactionary public mood by showing the benefits of public spending and public service to bring out the case for more of both financed by higher taxes on the rich and bigger borrowing to rebuild our stingy welfare state and invest in those areas like Housing, Transport, Local Government and Social Services which had become so deficient. This would have built a new progressive consensus behind public spending, fairness and proper regulation of the type which exists not only in Scandinavia but in Europe and Canada. Instead of building this he denounced all of it, discounted the state and community effort and turned the market loose.
Which leaves Gordon now with the task of starting all over again to rebuild the liberal consensus and relegate the Tories to irrelevance. He has to bring the alienated back, deliver to the coalition partners and face the future with a liberal programme for advance together rather than cowering before capitalism. He can do it because he believes in it even though he’s not practiced all of it. Provided he now learns that the people want to go further and faster than he has conditioned himself to do.
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I`ve given Gordon permission to call the election while I`m away. I`ve even told him that I hope he will.
I`m ready. Grimsby’s ready, and however bankrupt the party may be he can even finance an election on a PFI basis with the unions putting up the money and running the show afterwards. Or, more seriously, by seeing that we’ll win because ideals are more important than dosh.
John Spellar opposes this rush to give power to the people. He says people will suspect bad news to come - balls. We’ll be asking for a new mandate for a new leader.
He also thinks the people don’t like being inconvenienced by early elections. Double balls. They want more say these days. We’re giving them it.
I sense he’s weakening under the strength of the case though his strongest argument is one I share. Gordon is cautious. He comes to decisions only slowly. He’s no impulsive initiative grabber like Tony. True.
Yet the alternative to go now inwardly downwardly pulsating is the long slide to a hung Parliament. You can calculate a loss of l2 to redistribution (which we should have held up) l5 to Tories, perhaps a few to the Liberals in the North while the rest are fought out between Libs and Cons. That would still give us a majority big enough to govern, though not as powerfully as we could now if we had a mind. But it could be worse than that. All five books about the last election predict a hung Parliament from the next. It`s likely but far from certain. Either way it will be fun but not of the kind Prime Ministers and Ministers like because they’re deprived of their steamrollers, poor things. Give them grief counselling. Or better still go early.
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British American group meetings with the senate in Washington and Vermont. First impressions:
1) The terrorist threat in the US is imported, ours home grown. Contrary to what the Home Office rep. at the Embassy told us Moslems in the US are not in deprived ghettos but spread out, higher status and more anxious to integrate. So like 9/ll Al Queida would have to come in from outside. The nagging worry seems to be a nuclear weapon on a utility vehicle driven across the border from Canada. Which may explain why they’ve put the price of petrol up.
2) The Fed and the Treasury are quietly opting for benign neglect on the fall in the dollar. Why not? Foreign trade is a far smaller proportion of the economy and US borrowings are in dollars as the Far Eastern economies invest their huge surpluses in US Treasury bills. So if the dollar falls the pay back doesn’t rise as Britain’s would. They should just let the dollar fall – as it did in the Eighties (by 40%) boosting home production and reviving the economy. Worriting at the Chinese to upvalue the remimbi as they did at the Japanese and Germans in the sixties is useless. All want a low exchange rate to continue exporting powerfully. So redress the imbalance by letting the dollar fall, something which incidentally would be very damaging to the Euro because all the funny money would flow into it for a safer haven than a declining dollar.
3) The Fed seems unworried about the state of the economy. Good growth, more jobs, the sub prime lending crisis, will be coped with by the market. No worries.
4) Rove’s deputy was particularly optimistic, though it could be the state of mind of someone who`s out of touch with reality. In his view the President still has a strong programme (though he`s been beaten on social security and immigration) and there’s no point in deserting the base so the Republicans in Congress won`t allow the Democrats to bring the troops back. Nor is there any point in undermining the party by attacking the President. So hold to the faith and it will come right. Though Tony Blankley of the Washington Times later told me that Rove is losing touch with reality.
That’s the fate of the great presidential advisers. Attwater, Cartville, now Rove. They all bust their own flushes and disappeared from the scene. So will the turd-flower.
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Our Meeting with the Senators was in Vermont - beautiful state with two Senators, one Democrat and one Independent which is surprising because traditionally New England is Republican territory - indeed the only ones to remain loyal to the GOP when Roosevelt swept the land and the saying was changed to As Maine goes so goes Vermont. Its population is enough for only one Congressman .
The state is almost as lovely as New Zealand. We went to the top of Mount Mansfield in a cable car. At least I`m told we did. I saw nothing in the mist and the rain and it was completely dark at the top and even darker on the way down.
The remaining two days at the Trapp Family Lodge (the wives called themselves the Trapp Slapppers) was brilliant. Conclusions here:-
1) Senators are wise and wily old birds. Older and better preserved physically than us. All trim and matey and much more prone to embrace, pat and fondle each other than we poor, inhibited English would ever dare. But boy do they ramble. William Hague took control and chaired the meetings brilliantly, but when they chaired it was all over the show.
Our sample were of an age to be considering retirement. Indeed the second oldest, Senator Colby, was born in the same year as me (1934 - a good vintage) but a few months earlier, while Thad Cochrane is 75. But none of the wives want them to. What on earth would I do every day with him under my feet? Must be the pattern for political wives all over the world. They’re so permanently neglected that they get used to it and regard hubby at home as an imposition.
2) There`s a strong tide to protectionism to stop the job losses and takeovers. Yet paradoxically they`re hoping for big things from Sarkozy. Little do they know. He’s anti-globalisation and for the French America is globalisation personified.
3) Hopeless divisions on Iraq. The Democrats don`t really want immediate withdrawal while the Republicans don`t want to stay much longer, though they`re having to hunker down and back Bush. The State Department Coordinator argued that it should be downgraded after these get a holding position which will go on several years. Krauthammer in the New York Times argued that the US should arm the Sunni 20% and they may well be doing this.
My impression was that it needs someone in charge to decide what to do or to achieve anything. Bush isn’t, Congress isn`t. The parties are divided. Who’s running the show? They’re waking up to the reality that it`s been a Cheney Presidency all along, but now even he’s not in control any more.
4) They`re grateful for British support though I don’t see how we can keep it up. Our troops in Basra are sitting chicks in a turkey shoot. Even if we abandon Basra palace and pull out to the airport we’ll still be picked off by mortar fire and all for no achievable purpose except being there.
5) Talk of diluting the effort in Iraq and increasing it in Afghanistan in compensation Lots of people said the war on terror now has to move to Pakistan. So a transfer of the 5000 British troops in Basra to join the 8000 in Helmann could be Brown’s way out. It’s certainly the intellectual bolt hole for the Lib Dems. But it`s meaningless. British troops are more exposed and losing more in Afghanistan than in Iraq and the Canadians who are in the south with us are contemplating pulling out.
The British public doesn’t see why we`re there and we’re in a part of the country where we can`t win. Pull out on the Pashtoons, who don’t want us in any case, rebuild the rest of Afghanistan where reconstruction is going well to show them what they`re losing out on, and shut up on the rhetoric about how we`re there to protect women, educate girls and stop a Taliban takeover. That may salve Lib Dem consciences but it`s still crap. Of the same order as Anne Clwyd poured out when she supported the invasion of Iraq. Let`s face it, Pashtoon is an ungovernable suicide trap for troops until the Pakistanis control the cowboy country on the other side. Which they can`t.
The Republicans have given up on their Flustered Bush Boy, President Bush, who never grew up, and Cheney is never even mentioned. They`re left with eighteen wasted irrelevant months of presidential rigor mortis to sit out.
I argued that most of the problems of Anglo-American relations are due to Bush and the visceral dislike his cowboy routine produces everywhere except in the heart of our Tony.
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There’s an attempt to restore the old impartiality and balance requirements to radio and TV. The FCC under Colin Powell`s son got rid of them, and the result is an amazing proliferation of right wing raving lunatics and political abuse directed mainly at the Democrats.
I tuned into Michael Savage (Savage Nation). He described Obama as Barak Hussein Obama, the Democrats as the socialistic communist and anarchist Democrats (presumably affiliated) and Edwards as a fraudulent lying trial lawyer, so perverted he drags his cancer-ridden wife out to campaign for him. Hillary, “half man half woman” got it kind and considerate by contrast.
At least he abuses both sides. He quite likes Bush but said if he`d been in charge in World War Two “We`d all be speaking German. Or turned into lampshades”.
Amazing. I turned to Air America for the left’s antidote. But it was a boring series of lectures mixed with abuse of Bush.
That won`t sell but think what you could do with radical talk interspersed with radical songs. That would be a potent mix of the type Bernie Sanders, the only independent Senator (who`s been given visiting rights in the Democratic Caucuses because he’s their majority in the Senate) uses. Willie Nelson comes and gives a concert for him Then he makes a speech Just like the fifties.
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Marvellous article by Thomas Powers in NY Review of Books sets out how we got into the Iraq mess.
Immediately after 7/11 David Manning urged Tenet of the CIA that they should concentrate on Afghanistan “and not be tempted to launch any attacks on Iraq”. But back home Blair decided that he was going to back the American response to 9/11. Whatever it was.
What it was, thanks to Cheney and the new Cons, was Iraq, an invasion prepared by raising fears of WMD, a process facilitated by Tenet’s CIA and Blair who plighted his troth to war in April 2002 at Crawford. He had no objection to overthrowing Saddam, however illegal, but wanted Saddam cast as a villain in the eyes of the world by forcing him to defy UN resolutions. Awkwardly he didn’t.
September 2002. Under pressure from Powell and Blair, Bush agreed to try the UN and in November the UN demanded inspections. Saddam shot that fox by complying and Blix went in. To find nothing. Disaster, the troops were ready and had to go by March.
February. Powell presented the CIA’s evidence (a”slam dunk”case according to Tenet) to the UN. “It was a great presentation” says Tenet “but unfortunately the substance didn’t hold up”.
March 2003. Both Blix and the International Atomic Energy Agency reported to the Security Council that Saddam was clean. Both asked for more time to inspect.
March 16. Bush met Blair and Spanish PM in the Azores to give the go ahead for war without any UN resolution. George Tenet remains thoroughly hurt. Blair and Aznar are out. Several hundred thousand Iraqis are dead. QED.
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Tony Blair’s mission in the Middle East is doomed before it starts and he won`t even have the benefit of a Campbell to claim that failure is success, war peace and festering hatred a rapprochement.
His record as an American stooge condemns him. His approach: 48 hour flying visits where Paddy Ashdown took up residence dooms him. His flibbertigibbet nature, unable to concentrate on any one issue for long and preoccupied with initiatives rather than achievement undermines him. He has no power, no support structure, no authority and no goodwill, and, so far as I can see no pay. Why on earth did he take the job on? |
