Even the resignations are carefully controlled. When Robin Cook resigned as leader of the British House of Commons last month on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, it was the first big resignation from a Labour Cabinet since the party swept to power in 1997. It also represented Prime Minister Tony Blair’s most perilous political moment.
Yet unlike the dramatic resignations from the Thatcher and Major Conservative governments that preceded Blair’s — those of Micheal Heseltine, Geoffrey Howe and Norman Lamont — Cook’s was arranged so as to inflict only the minimum of damage on the prime minister himself. There were at least two meetings between Blair and Cook in the week before the resignation to discuss how it should be handled; the resignation and acceptance letters were exchanged in draft form; and upon resignation there were no dramatic photos of Cook striding down Downing Street — instead he agreed to enter and leave through the underground Whitehall labyrinth.
This is the control syndrome of the Blair administration and of New Labour generally. It helps explain the conundrum of Blair’s enthusiastic support for the American-led invasion. The conundrum being that while the cold-bloodedness of President George W Bush’s determination to attack Iraq is unsurprising, the depth of Blair’s support for it is, thus begging the question: why would a Labour prime minister risk so much to support a neo-conservative Republican president?
The control freakery derives from Labour’s political insecurity, which in turn derives from its period in the electoral wilderness between 1979 and 1997. Four electoral defeats in a row creates a particular sort of political psychosis. On the one hand, it encourages both caution and deference in the face of conservative ‘Middle England”.
On the other, it creates a reservoir of gratitude for Blair among Labour supporters and activists. Blair delivered electoral victory, ending 18 years of Tory rule. Moreover in delivering a second full term of office, he did what no Labour prime minister has ever done before with his second landslide victory in 2001.
This should not be underestimated. It is not that Blair can do no wrong, but that he can get away with a great deal because more Labour people now prefer to be in power than out of it, and credit Blair with the dramatic improvement in political fortunes. Hence, most soft-left opinion has stuck with Blair over the invasion.
Most of the commentary about the political ‘risk” Blair has taken, encouraged by Cook’s resignation, underestimates the depth of his support.
It also underestimates the happy synergy between Blair’s policy choice and the instincts of Middle England. Having asked every single person I know in the Labour Party, including those close to Blair, what drives his reasoning on Iraq, the outstanding winner of this informal poll is moral fervour.
The bottom line is that Blair has made a normative decision. He thinks, like much of Blairite left-of-centre opinion in the United Kingdom, that it is wrong to appease tyrants.
As one of his advisers put it to me last week, ‘he just can’t bear the thought of someone like Saddam torturing his people and getting away with it”.
This is the fault-line that now divides left opinion in Britain. It plays out in the pages of the New Statesmen. John Pilger writes against a ‘piratical war — a crime against humanity”, while on the same pages former editor and self-proclaimed Blairite John Lloyd explains why the weekly magazine’s anti-war stance has driven him to the point where ‘I can no longer write for the New Statesmen”. Lloyd believes that the left should fight for those who are repressed by their own rulers and has thrown away the chance to do so with their opposition to Blair’s stance on Iraq.
The defining characteristic of Blair’s career has been to challenge the sacred cows of Labour’s belief system. First, with one member-one vote he shattered the power of the unions. Second, with the re-writing of Clause IV of its constitution, he removed Labour’s socialist foundation stone. Now, he is set on ‘modernising” Labour’s approach to war and peace.
Beneath the rhetoric about the need for United Nations approval for the war is a contempt for the UN that is not so far short of the Rumsfeld/Cheney view. At the end of a tough week in South Africa, during which first Pallo Jordan then Mosiuoa Lekota had softened her up ahead of her meeting with President Thabo Mbeki, Blair’s Minister for Africa, Valerie Amos, said in a speech in Cape Town two weeks ago ‘that the UN can’t just talk and discuss — it also has to take action and the world must learn the lesson that weakness in the face of a threat of a tyrant is the shortest route to war not peace”.
This is pure Blairism; he is as frustrated by the UN as he was by the old Labour Party and the old trade unions. Bogged down at home, his domestic policies wallowing in a sea of postmodern, third-way public-private partnerships and other ornate policy prescriptions that offer neither clarity nor progress in the provision of public services, Blair has turned to international affairs to etch out his place in history.
That in so doing he should add a veneer of credibility and civilisation to the cynical and murderous intent of Bush’s administration is simply tragic.
Blair is fond of presenting himself as a student of the Christian Socialism of RH Tawney and Matthew Arnold, but time and again has shown that his Christianity is no less elastic than his socialism.
Fully backing the Palestinian cause would be the Christian Socialist thing to do; and until Britain does so, its foreign policy towards Iraq and Zimbabwe will lack any credibility. Although Amos tried to argue that Blair was extracting progress from Bush on the Palestine front, this is either disingenuousness or naivety on hers or her prime minister’s part. The men behind Bush are fiercely pro-Zionist, as Michael Lind’s new book, Made in Texas: George W Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics, makes clear.
The political history of the Labour Party means that Blair will not only survive, but continue to prosper, drawing succour from the war-like instincts of Middle England. Yet, with the blood of thousands of innocent Iraqi women and children on his hands, he has proven what as a former member I have always known: he is as unfit to head a Labour government as he is to lead the Labour Party.
Archive: Previous columns by Richard Calland