Irrelevance may be infectious

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If there is a single UK politician who should understand what political irrelevance looks and feels like, it is surely ex-PM Tony Blair, and it’s tempting to dismiss his critique of the way the UK is becoming irrelevant under the leadership of his own party on that basis. That would, though, miss the point, because for all the robust rebuttals of that critique by current-day Labour figures, the whole episode serves to emphasise not the difference between the Blair generation and the Starmer generation but the intrinsic similarities.

It is clear, for instance, that both what Blair had to say and what Starmer has been doing are predicated on an idea of the UK as a great global power, with influence way beyond its size and economic importance to the world. It’s a sort of post-imperial delusion on the part of people who can’t quite get their heads around the idea of the UK as a medium-sized offshore European archipelago, and expect the rest of the world to somehow take them at their own evaluation of their relevance.

Some have been surprised at the similarity between the responses of Burnham and Streeting, with their insistence that the idea of inequality is missing from Blair’s response. But both men, like Blair himself, are wedded to the neoliberal economic creed that ‘the markets’ can solve every problem and that governments must do, fiscally, whatever they interpret the bond markets as demanding. Increasing inequality is not only baked into that creed, it is its main driving force. In his failure to pretend that he thinks it important, Blair is simply being more honest than either. There is no great ‘battle of ideas’ going on between the Labour leadership hopefuls, just a beauty contest between two over-ambitious wannabe Messiahs. Irrelevant is quite an apt description.

Dictatorship is not the answer

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It seems as though Trump’s proposed ‘Peace Board’, initially mooted as part of the ‘peace plan’ for Gaza, is being given a much wider remit by its sole owner and proprietor, one Donald Trump. It looks more like an attempt to replace the UN with a handpicked core membership (to include a chair for life appointed because he’s called Donald Trump, as well as that well-known purveyor of peace, former UK PM Tony Blair, and Trump’s son-in-law, Secretary of State, and special envoy), and a wider membership to be invited to participate by the chair. This wider group includes one Vladimir Putin, a man particularly well-known for his love of peace, and that staunch defender of democracy, Lukashenko of Belarus. Those accepting membership can opt to upgrade to a premium membership in exchange for handing the chair a mere $1 billion (to be spent as decided unilaterally by the chair), whilst anybody who turns down an invitation can expect to be hit with further tariffs (such as the proposed 200% tariff on French wines and champagne which Macron has earned by politely declining. Like any good mafia don, Trump is making people offers that he thinks they can’t refuse.

That there are problems with the UN is undeniable. Reaching a consensus is a difficult and time-consuming task, especially when five permanent members of the Security Council have a veto. It’s not entirely clear exactly how Trump’s proposal overcomes that weakness, although he presumably expects all members to simply accept his ultimate authority on all decisions. Theoretically, that works, but practically it’s problematic even when he’s president of the US; if he remains as chair when (or if) he ceases to be president, by what power exactly does he impose compliance? That problem of seeking and achieving consensus, leading to painfully slow decision-making, isn’t confined to the UN, of course: the EU suffers from the same issue. The question we are faced with is whether we accept that as a cost of seeking consensus and agreement through negotiation, or whether we simply vest all power in an individual – or rather, in Trump’s case, allow an individual to vest all power in himself. For all the frustrations of dealing with a multitude of different parties with different interests and agendas, I’m sure that I’m not alone in rejecting the dictatorship which is what the alternative amounts to.

Here in the UK, another former UK PM has weighed in with his own take on the solution. It’s full of fine words, as in this paragraph: “The democracies of the world should draft a short values statement, echoing the UN charter’s starting point – “We the peoples …” – and this time showing we mean it. Its first section would assert our full support for self-determination and the mutual recognition of nation states*; for the outlawing of war and coercion; and for the primacy of law, civil rights and democratic accountability as the essential means by which human dignity is advanced. A second section would outline the rules that govern the cooperation essential to guarantee food, water and security, economic opportunity and social justice, and climate resilience and health for all, including pandemic prevention”. But it, too, is short on telling us how this can be enforced.

Both Trump and Brown have identified a real problem when it comes to taking international decisions, but only Trump has come up with a ‘solution’ – personal dictatorship by one D. Trump. The reality is that, if we reject the ‘might is right’ approach of Trump, there is no simple solution. Not electing people who are clearly deranged would help a little, but there’s no obvious way of preventing that either.

^* Obviously, Gordon Brown does not intend this to be taken as being in any way support for nations not currently regarded as states – Wales, Scotland, Catalunya etc. – having any right to self-determination. That would never do.

It's not just a game

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Most people are familiar with the game called ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’. Thee are variations on it, and whilst it was originally conceived as a two-player game, the theory can be applied to any number of players. In the game, the most rational action for any individual player is to compete with others (because (s)he doesn’t know whether the others are going to compete or co-operate), but the most rational approach for the group of players as a whole is to co-operate, and maximise the total rewards gained. That co-operation implies communication and trust, things which don’t always happen in real life.

Climate change can be represented as a version of the game, in which former PM Tony Blair participated yesterday. He is right, of course, when he says that people "feel they're being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know the impact on global emissions is minimal". For all the talk of taking individual responsibility or ‘think global, act local’, no one individual can make a significant difference to climate change overall. And it isn’t just individuals – no single nation can make enough difference acting alone, even the very biggest nations. We’ve seen people arguing on a Wales level or UK level along the lines of ‘our contribution to carbon emissions is so small that stopping it will make no difference’. It’s true. In a world population of 8 billion, 3 million Welsh people, or even 66 million UK residents can only make a minuscule difference. It follows that the rational thing for any group of 3 million (or 66 million), let alone any individual, to do is to ignore the impacts and carry on as usual. After all, 66 million is only 120th of 8 billion.

What the game also teaches us, though, is that if every player decides to compete rather than co-operate, we all lose out in the end, compared to what would have happened had we all co-operated. The first vicious twist in the game is that if some attempt to play co-operatively, whilst others attempt to play competitively, the co-operators lose out by even more than they would have done had they played competitively. It is, therefore, entirely rational to compete unless and until everyone decides to co-operate. That, it seems to me, is ultimately the argument of those who accept the reality of man-made climate change, but reject taking the necessary action to address it. (Those who reject the overwhelming evidence of man-made climate change are, of course, in a separate category entirely, where rationality at any level no longer necessarily applies.)

The second vicious twist is that, applying it to the question of climate change, we end up collectively taking the wholly irrational decision to make the world uninhabitable for humanity as a direct result of individuals and countries making entirely rational choices about their own actions and behaviours. How we get to a world in which acting for the good of all is seen as a better choice than pursuing individual greed and desires is another question entirely. Climate change isn’t the only issue where that question arises, but it’s not a question which the Blairs of this world seem to be capable of even considering.

Whatever happened to being tough on the causes of crime?

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In a post a few days ago, I referred to the post-war period when even Tory PMs took pride in the number of council houses built during their period in office. The two decades after the second world war saw the peak of council house building in the UK, and more than half of that time was under Tory governments. It all changed with Thatcher and the ‘right to buy’; there is no doubt that the decline in building new social housing since 1979, coupled with the large scale sell-offs of the 1980s and 1990s, is a huge factor in the housing crisis of the current day.

And yet… Thatcher did actually have a point; she understood the urge which many tenants felt to want to buy their homes, and I think she also (unusually for a Tory; they usually see property as an ‘asset’) understood the difference between a house and a home. I spent most of my childhood living in council houses, and can easily understand that people didn’t just want to own ‘a’ home (a desire which could have been fulfilled by buying a different house), they wanted to own ‘their’ home: the house in which those who chose to buy had often invested a great deal of their own time, effort and money. And it wasn’t just a desire for ‘ownership’, it was also a desire to be free of the paternalistic and pettifogging rules which councils often imposed, rules which didn’t apply to owner-occupiers. Worse, in some areas the allocation of houses was essentially corrupt, with ward councillors having an undue say in the process. I remember canvassing council estates in Merthyr during the 1972 by-election campaign and finding tenants who were genuinely afraid to say that they would support Plaid Cymru, let alone put a poster in the window, in case the local councillor found out. It was just one of the ways in which Labour maintained its hold on the population in parts of Wales in those days.

Wholesale sell-offs, let alone with huge discounts on the price, weren’t the only possible policy response. And sell-offs per se didn’t need to lead to such a huge shortage of social housing, but the sting in the Thatcher tail was the prohibition on councils using the funds raised from sales to build new houses. It also wasn’t the only way of responding to problems of corruption or clientelism in pursuit of political control, but it certainly achieved that. Or at least, I thought that it had, but it seems that old attitudes die hard.

In a classic throwback to those days, one Labour council leader has suggested that whole families of council tenants should be evicted from their homes if children do not inform on people committing knife crime. There can be few who would argue that those who know about knife crime (or indeed, any other type of crime), even if they are children, should not feel a moral obligation to divulge what they know, although the last time I looked there was still a right to silence when questioned by police, even as a witness, and fear of retribution is a powerful motive. But throwing their families onto the street if they refuse to co-operate – a punishment which can only be meted out to tenants, not to owner-occupiers, and therefore emphasises their perceived lesser status in society – is a return to some of the worst aspects of council tenancies of the past, quite apart from being a way of punishing people who have themselves committed no crime. It is not, apparently, official Labour policy, although espousing such a policy doesn’t seem to be a bar to being a parliamentary candidate, and it doesn’t exactly seem a huge jump from official policy which is to fine the parents of children perpetrating anti-social behaviour.

I seem to remember, though, in those far off days when Labour was merely Thatcherite rather than Farage-lite, one prominent leader talked about being ‘tough on the causes of crime’ (such as inequality) as well as on the crime itself. That’s been forgotten, as Starmer's Labour almost seems to be trying to make Blair and Thatcher look like bleeding-heart liberals.

Mistake - or simply disinterest?

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Blair told us over the weekend that he’d made a mistake over devolution, because he “failed to do enough to ensure Welsh and Scottish devolution did not undermine the UK's national identity” and “did not understand in the late 1990s the need to maintain cultural unity between the different parts of the United Kingdom”.  An admission that he might have ever got anything wrong is something of a departure for him, but it seems to me that what it really tells us is that he did not understand at the time, and still does not understand now, why people in Scotland and Wales wanted devolution in the first place.

At the time that devolution was enacted, he – like many others in his party – saw devolution to Wales and Scotland as just the first step in the regionalisation of the UK, to be followed by the creation of regional assemblies across England.  They saw it, primarily, as being about better governance and administration rather than having anything to do with identity.  The regionalisation plan got as far as a referendum for the North-East, but came to a sudden and abrupt halt when the idea was overwhelmingly rejected. 

One might have thought that a rational response would be to ask why the idea was so popular in Scotland, and managed a small majority in Wales, but was so clearly rejected in England – but that seems to be a question Blair never asked himself.  Had he done so, he would have understood at the time that identity was at the heart of the demand for the creation of national elected bodies for Scotland and Wales.  If it were purely about the regionalisation of the UK and good governance, why would anyone choose those particular boundaries, particularly in the case of Wales?  The answer is because they mark the boundaries of perceived nations containing within them people who identify with a nation other than simply the UK.  It doesn’t follow that all those who voted for devolution were or have since become independentistas, but had it not been for that sense of identity and belonging, and a desire to see that expressed in political terms, there would never have been a majority for devolution in either country.

It follows from that that it was always inevitable that giving political expression to that perceived sense of nationhood would lead to differences in policy (there’s no point otherwise), and a probable strengthening of those different identities.  None of that necessarily leads to a demand for independence, as the different paths trodden by the two devolved nations shows, but the belief that it would have no effect on the way in which people choose to identify (or not) with the UK, let alone that it could have been prevented by taking stronger action to promote UK identity, shows a surprisingly naïve side of Blair.  Or perhaps it merely confirms that he never saw the issue as important or took much interest in it.

The Blair quandary

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I agree with much of what Blair said last week – and there’s a sentence I never expected to write.  The response from the committed Brexiteers was entirely predictable, but he is right to say that in a democracy, people opposed to a decision, even one taken democratically, have every right to seek to change that decision, and to persuade others that they too should support a reconsideration of the question.

Given their professed great love for freedom and democracy, why are Brexiteers are so insistent in their demands that this one decision, uniquely, is something that can never ever be revisited?  I can only assume that it’s their fear of a different result.  I suspect that I’m not alone in thinking that one of the reasons that so many of them are keen on a quick exit and hang the consequences is that the longer the situation drags on the more obvious it will be that the outcome is not going to be the land of milk and honey that they promised us; and their real reasons for wanting Brexit had little to do with the promises which they made.

If the referendum decision had gone the other way, does anyone really believe that Duncan Smith, Farage and their ilk would have said “Oh well, that’s it then” and gone away to do something even less productive?  No, of course not – and it would be their right to continue making the case.  (In the same way, closer to home, those people opposed to the existence of the National Assembly – and indeed, in some cases, even to the existence of the Welsh nation itself – have every right to continue to campaign for its abolition.  I hope they fail, but I accept that the decision that Wales should become a political nation isn’t a once-and-for-ever decision; it’s something that we need to re-affirm continually.)

If, in either case – or indeed on any other issue – clear evidence emerges that public opinion has changed, then there is always a case for revisiting a decision.  And campaigning to bring about a change of opinion is a wholly legitimate form of political activity.  Blair wasn’t doing much more than making that simple point.  Merely asking for a second referendum with no evidence of a significant and sustained opinion shift seems to me to be futile; but working to bring about that shift is another matter entirely. 

On that point, it was obvious that Blair was deliberately avoiding the question of a second referendum - perhaps unwisely because it gave the impression that he believed the decision could somehow be changed without further reference to a democratic vote.  Whilst I too might prefer not to have referendums which reduce complex questions to a simple binary choice, in the case of Brexit that’s already been done and it is hard to see how those who voted to leave would consider a decision to remain after all to be legitimate without another vote.

Having said all of that, there is a problem with the personage of Blair.  I don’t understand how the man who took the UK to war in Iraq on the basis of an outright lie about weapons of mass destruction could stand there with a straight face and accuse the Brexiteers of having lied to get the result they wanted.  Pot, kettle, black – could he really not see the way that was going to be interpreted?  He has a serious credibility problem as a leader of any campaign given his history.

There is a ‘however’ to that, as well, though.  Given that the only debate which any of our mainstream politicians are prepared to engage in is about the nature of Brexit, who else is speaking out?  Most of the MPs who told us during the referendum campaign that Brexit would be a huge mistake for the UK have subsequently trooped through the division lobbies of the House of Commons in support of that which they told us would be a disaster.  And here in Wales, of the four party groups represented in the Assembly two are committed to full-on Brexit and the other two have decided to restrict themselves to whingeing about the detail.

So, this for me is the quandary.  For all my doubts about Blair as a leader of anything, who else is stepping up to the plate?  Is he really so toxic that it’s better to have no-one making the case than for him to do so?

Still spinning after all these years

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In his response to the Chilcot report, Blair said “I say to right-minded people: ‘Go and read the reports and tell me you wouldn’t have made the decisions I made’”.  It’s a clear statement going right to the heart of the problem.  Its whole meaning turns on an understanding of who or what are ‘right-minded people’.

The phrase is clearly intended to convey the idea of ‘most people’ or ‘a majority’, but in this case, it seems to mean little more than people who share Blair’s world view.  In essence the statement reduces to “those who agree with me agree with me, and those who don’t are simply wrong”.  Apologetic it is not.  It underlines the way in which he seemed incapable at the time, and still seems incapable today, of conceiving of the possibility that anybody wouldn’t share his world view.  It was that unshakeable conviction that he was right and anyone who disagreed was wrong that led the UK into war; and it doesn’t matter how many enquiries or reviews are held, people with that mindset will never learn from them.

Mythical centres

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Talking about the political centre is easy, but defining where the ‘centre’ lies is far from being a straightforward task.  Looking back at UK politics over the past seventy years, it is obvious that the centre has been more or less continually moving, pulled either to the right or to the left by the political forces of the day.  Insofar as ‘centrism’ is a political philosophy at all, it is first and foremost about winning elections rather than about what politicians do after winning them.  It’s an oversimplification, but perhaps not much of one, to say that there are times when strong politicians from the left or the right shift politics in one direction (Thatcher comes to mind); the ‘centrists’ (and Blair comes to mind) simply accept the new settlement and attempt to work within it.

So it came as no surprise to see Blair last week stressing anew that ‘Centre-ground voters still hold the key to winning elections’ in a story that appeared in a range of papers.  It’s no different from what he’s been saying for years.  What was more interesting, though, were the comments later in the piece, where he argued that “…I think if the centre is not muscular then the extremes gain”.  This is close to being the opposite position to that with which the article started.  Standing things on their head is something else to which he is not a stranger, but he’s more or less gone from arguing that elections can only be won from the centre to arguing that they can be won from the left or right if the centre isn’t strong enough.

The centre has moved from being an essential place for anyone wanting to win an election to a bulwark against those who might otherwise win.  It’s an attempt to turn the centre from a pragmatic tactical position into some sort of coherent political philosophy – a version of his infamous ‘third way’, I suppose. 

But that bring us right back to where we started.  The problem with his third way, and with political centrism in general, is that it can only be defined in terms of what it isn’t – as a rejection of what lies to either side of it.  In the immediate aftermath of the second world war, the UK ‘centre’ moved decisively towards the left, led by a strong and committed Labour Party.  There was a consensus around the welfare state, for instance, which lasted for decades.  There was some toing and froing in the Heath/Wilson years, but the decisive break with that consensus came in the 1980s. 

The great shame of the Labour Party is that it allowed itself to be taken over by ‘centrist’ careerists who fell into a new consensus with the Tories.  It suits those concerned and their successors – largely in the parliamentary Labour Party – to argue that the party’s current internal debate is a diversion from the important business of winning elections, and to close off debate about possible alternatives.  But as Blair has effectively admitted – and as UK political history has shown - elections aren’t always won from the centre ground, wherever that may be at the time.  It’s just that wining them from elsewhere requires a party to have a strong and clear commitment to an alternative view.  The problem is that so many in Labour really don’t want the party to do that – they’re actually happy to allow the Tories to continue moving the ‘centre’ in their own direction.

Blair, Brown, Major and Cameron. Really?

Tweet The original stated premise of Cameron’s promise of a referendum on the EU was that he would first conduct some sort of renegotiation of the terms of membership and then put the result to a vote.  Perhaps he genuinely intended things to work that way, although exactly what was to be ‘renegotiated’ was never very clear.

It’s increasingly irrelevant though.  Both the ‘in’ camp and the ‘out’ camp are gearing up their campaigns already.  The ‘negotiations’ have barely begun, but the results – if there are any – will have no effect on the make-up of the campaigns.  Cameron’s fig leaf is looking decidedly dodgy.

In a sense, it’s not really a bad thing that the debate centres on the principle rather than the detail; I find it hard to believe that many electors will make up their minds by looking at the details of any Cameron package and carefully weighing up the impact.  It’s much more likely that they will be voting on issues such as immigration, or even just a desire to give a kicking to a government mid term, which all serves to underline the folly of getting into this position for short term internal party reasons.

I do wonder though about the strategy of the ‘in’ camp in the names that they’re putting forward.  It looks like the product of some sort of bubble-think to me.  I fear that an unholy alliance of Blair, Brown, Major and Cameron might actually end up having quite the opposite effect of that intended.

Veterans and roadblocks

Tweet The Labour leadership contest seems destined to provide more fun for the spectators such as myself for the remaining days before the result is announced.  Last Saturday, we had the latest Blair attempt to assist stop Corbyn’s campaign.

It demonstrated yet again (not that we needed a further demonstration) Blair’s unerring ability to present his own opinions as incontrovertible fact and everyone else’s as fantasy.  He knows that he’s right; no evidence is therefore required (although if really pressed, he could probably find someone to draw up a dossier ‘proving’ his case).

He lambasts those who would fight an election on a manifesto similar to that of 1983 when Labour lost the election, demanding instead that members support one of the three candidates offering a version of the highly successful 2010 manifesto, on which Labour obviously won the election (although I must have missed that result somehow).

My favourite passage was this one:

“It is like a driver coming to a roadblock on a road they’ve never travelled before and three grizzled veterans say: “Don’t go any further, we have been up and down this road many times and we’re warning you there are falling rocks, mudslides, dangerous hairpin bends and then a sheer drop.”

The three ‘grizzled veterans’ are obviously Blair, Brown and Kinnock, but another part of history that I seem to have missed is the bit where all three of them in turn tried the Jeremy Corbyn route and found it wanting.  The tricks age plays with the memory, eh?  But in the version of history that I seem to remember living through, all three of the grizzled veterans ‘knew’ how bad the road was without ever needing to try it. 

I can understand his frustration though - why, oh why do these people not simply believe what they’re told by those who’ve never, ever been caught out making anything up?

Could Blair be right?

Tweet “…walking eyes shut, arms outstretched…”, as Blair put it last week, is the classic image of a sleepwalker.  I’m not sure that it’s really true, though – eyes shut maybe, but as far as I’m aware, outstretched arms is much less typical.  Whatever, the analogy was clear; Blair was accusing the Labour Party’s members of sleepwalking into making the wrong choice of leader.

The analogy of sleepwalking is one much loved by politicians to describe a group of people making a decision without really being aware of what they’re doing or what the consequences might be.  And in most cases, including this one, it’s deeply insulting to those making the decision – usually the electorate.

Blair is in effect saying that the members of the Labour Party could not possibly arrive at the decision which looks increasingly likely as a result of a conscious thought process after weighing up the options, so they must be arriving at their decision without thinking too deeply about it.  It’s not far short of saying that the members of his party are too stupid to be trusted to take the right decision.

In fairness, though, looking at some of the leadership choices the Labour Party has made in the recent past, perhaps he has, unintentionally, made a valid point.

Was he right or was he wrong?

Tweet Members of the Labour Party haven’t exactly been rushing to agree with Blair following his comments about the situation in Iraq this week.  And I can imagine that Miliband and chums aren’t exactly best-pleased to hear a voice from the past resurrecting a ghost that they have been trying to lay to rest.

In essence, Blair’s claim, which has astonished many (to put it mildly) is that the latest events in Iraq are in no way a consequence of the war which on which he and Bush so enthusiastically embarked, and that the situation would have been even worse had they not taken the action which they took.  He’s also calling for more resolute action now (a curious position for a ‘peace envoy’ to take, but let’s leave that to one side).

I suspect that history will ultimately judge Blair to have been wrong, even over the long term, but in truth, none of us can know for certain.  The point is that we can never run history twice to see what would have happened if different decisions had been taken.  If the latest events demonstrate anything, it is surely that the whole situation is far more complicated than most of us realise, and it’s extremely difficult to decide who are the good guys deserving of support and who are the bad guys needing to be dealt with.  Indeed, it’s increasingly the case that yesterday’s bad guys are becoming today’s good guys (or perhaps ‘not-so-bad guys’), and alliances are shifting, largely on the basis that our enemy’s enemies are now our friends, whatever we may have said about them yesterday.

What I do know is that it was always less than honest to try and present a very complex situation as a simple case of good vs evil, in the way that Blair and Bush did.  And what concerns me even more is the possibility that they might have genuinely believed that to be the case.  There’s something more than a little dangerous about any politician who has such unshakeable faith in his own rightness that he cannot even conceive of the possibility of being wrong.

Following, not leading

Tweet Tony Blair’s very public message to Ed Miliband not to turn left is a timely reminder of the way in which new Labour became the natural inheritor of Thatcher’s political legacy.  But I found his message both confused and confusing.

He seemed to be stressing the need to show leadership, but warning against taking a clear alternative position on just about anything – as though the question of leadership can and should be completely divorced from the question of direction.

There was one part of what Blair said in particular, which very much distanced him – albeit probably unintentionally – from Thatcher’s approach, although not from her ideology.  He said that British politics has not moved to the left and that there is no appetite for such a move.  It is most un-Thatcher like to seek to follow, rather than lead opinion.

When Thatcher led Britain to the right during her period in office, she didn’t do so on the basis of any pre-existing consensus of which she merely took advantage.  She did so on a proactive basis.  And I’m not convinced that her election in 1979 had much to do with any shift in political opinion; it was more to do with despair and desperation at the dog end of the disastrous Callaghan administration.  It was an election which it would have been difficult for any Tory leader to lose, regardless of ideological position.

Within the limited political spectrum of UK politics, what Thatcher showed was that a determined Prime Minister could create political change and shift opinion rather than merely responding to pre-existing opinion.  Yet, doing that in the other direction is precisely what Blair is warning against.

A point which I’ve made many times in recent years is that you do not change public opinion – on any issue – by reflecting current opinions rather than challenging them.  Reflecting opinion helps parties to win elections, but it doesn’t bring about change.  Following Blair’s advice is the best way of securing the Thatcher-Blair legacy; but then I suppose that’s what he was trying to achieve.

Unpicking the legacy

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I’m a regular user of the railway between Carmarthen and Swansea.  But for the last two weeks I’ve been unable to use that rail service due to work taking place to redouble the track at Gowerton.  (MH at Syniadau has a nice picture of the new bridge here).  Today, for the first time, I’m back on the railway using the new bridge and track.  The timing is somehow appropriate.

It was in 1986 in an act of short-sighted vandalism that the government of the day decided to rip up the other track on that particular route.  I’m pretty certain that Margaret Thatcher never actually did say the words attributed to her in 1986 namely “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure”, but it was certainly a reflection of the attitude of the government of the day towards public transport .

It is easy though, far too easy in fact, to blame one individual for taking particular decisions that we don’t like.  It seems to me that the real “triumph” of Margaret Thatcher, if such it can be called, was not so much in what she and her government did, but in the shift in the political climate which they brought about.  The wholesale adoption of many of the Thatcher government’s policies by Tony Blair and the rest of new Labour's 'modernisers' in the pursuit of power ensured that her legacy long outlasted her reign.

It has taken 27 years to unpick one small part of the legacy of that particular era.  How much more there is still to do. 

Friends like these...

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I’ve long-known that politics is a business in which friendship and loyalty count for little, but I was still surprised at the candour of Peter Hain’s description of the events surrounding the replacement of Ron Davies as Labour’s candidate for First Secretary.

Hain was completely convinced, he tells us, that Rhodri Morgan was the right man for the job; right for Wales and right for Labour.  However, instead of supporting Rhodri, he ran Alun Michael’s successful campaign.  He did this, he says, because Alastair Campbell told him that it was ‘what Tony wanted’.

Perhaps Hain expects Rhodri, Labour, and Wales to forgive him, now that he’s been so candid - the repentance of a sinner, as it were.  I suspect that it will just make his ‘friends’ – if he has any left – even more wary about their backs.  With friends like Hain, they hardly need political enemies.

The People's Party

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In a speech on Saturday, Labour’s new leader Ed Miliband proclaimed that he wants Labour to become once again the ‘People’s Party’.  Whilst I’m completely convinced that he would like people to believe that Labour can return to its roots to that extent, I’m rather less convinced that he really wants it to be true, or that it would be achievable if he did.

The British Establishment has always had a superb record of drawing discordant voices into itself and assimilating them without actually changing very much in the process.  I was re-reading parts of Bob McKenzie on British Political Parties the other day.  First time for years, but it reminded me of how different the origins of the Labour and Conservative Parties are, given how similar they’ve become.

The Conservative Party was founded in Parliament, of parliamentarians – indeed, if I remember correctly, until the 1980s, no-one who wasn’t an MP could actually join the party, they could only join the local ‘association’.  Labour, on the other hand, was founded outside parliament, with the aim of getting its representatives elected and securing radical change.

They’ve both changed.  People can now join the Conservative Party as ordinary members (although the party has never embraced the concept of democratic decision making!). 

Labour has changed far more; it’s become more top-down, less democratic, less open to serious debate on policy, and very much part of the establishment.  People sometimes suggest that Blairism was some sort of aberration; I suspect it was merely the latest manifestation of a very long set of processes.  The chances of Miliband (or Brown before him) reversing other than a few superficial policies were always negligible.

One could have an interesting debate about the causes.  Was it really the power grab by leaders and parliamentarians as which it’s sometimes been painted?  The problems certainly began very early in the party’s history, as entries in Beatrice Webb’s diaries reveal.  (One of my favourites was her description of Ramsay MacDonald as “a magnificent substitute for a leader”; her comments on others were equally acerbic.  I’d love to see what she would have had to say on Blair or Brown.)

I’m not convinced that what happened to the Labour Party was as simple as being the result of individuals pursuing their own interests.  I suspect that it was close to being an inevitable outcome when an initially radical party succumbed to the temptation to work entirely within the system, and fell under the control of the civil service in the process. 

The comparison between achieving something by working in and with the institutions and achieving nothing by being in perpetual conflict with them is a stark one; the temptation to do what they could to help people in the here and now must have been pretty much irresistible.  Given the social and economic conditions of the time, it’s harsh to be overly critical. 

But combining that sense of urgency in the here-and-now with keeping alive a radical vision was never going to be an easy thing for Labour to achieve; we shouldn’t really be surprised at the extent of their failure.  The surprising thing for me is more that so many people who do have a different vision have stuck with the party for so long.  

 In opposition, Labour generally have a tendency to sound rather more radical than their behaviour in government would suggest.  Miliband will, no doubt, follow that historical habit.  Somehow, though, I don’t see Labour ever really recapturing the idealism of the party’s founders.

Blair off-message

Tweet It's not unknown for me to read political memoirs written by members of other parties, but I'll be giving Blair's a miss. Paying good money for 700 pages of self-justification is surely too much to ask. It means that I'm relying on the press coverage of what he did or did not say, with the inevitable danger of selectivity implied by that.

But in his comments on devolution, he does seem to be uncharacteristically off-message in his use of terminology. Specifically, the quote about "You can never be sure where nationalist sentiment ends and separatist sentiment begins" is in direct contradiction to the usual approach of many members of the Labour Party in Wales which assumes that 'nationalist' and 'separatist' are one and the same thing.

Worse, in terms of tearing up the script, is his apparent assumption that devolution was about pandering to nationalist sentiment. It was always my understanding that devolution, from a Labour perspective, was supposed to be about improving the government of Wales (and indeed the UK as a whole), and that, insofar as it dealt with nationalism at all, the intention was to defuse nationalist sentiment, not to pander to it.

And actually, I've always feared that Labour's analysis on that was correct – a properly thought-through and worked out scheme of devolution could indeed have created a more stable long-term future for the UK, and frustrated the ambitions of those of us who think that not to be the best future for Wales. That line of thinking was part of the reason why two members of Plaid (the other being the late Dr Phil) argued in a Plaid National Council meeting in 1978 that Plaid should campaign for a 'no' vote in the 1979 referendum. (Not for the first time in my life, I was on the losing side in that debate...)

Fortunately for Plaid's long term ambitions, the Labour Party's inability to deal with its own internal tensions, misunderstandings, and disagreements on the issue led to a compromise which satisfied almost nobody. It now looks as though that confusion over what they were trying to achieve and why went right to the top.

The wages of spin

Tweet I thought that Alastair Campbell performed well during his grilling by the Iraq enquiry; but I wouldn't have expected otherwise. He's a master at his trade, and that came across. The question is, though, how credible is he? All those years as a spinner have destroyed his credibility for many people, even if he's actually telling the truth.

In principle, I've never had an issue with an attempt to present a decision, policy, or whatever in the best possible light. Faced with a 1 litre container which has half a litre of water in it, there's nothing at all wrong with trying to present it as half full rather than half empty (or the other way around, if you're the opposition). But there's a great deal wrong with trying to present it as 'almost full', let alone 'overflowing'. And far too often, the spinners cross the line between selecting the most 'relevant' facts, and presenting them in the best possible light, and inventing 'facts' which support the story that they want to tell.

A strong and confident performance may look good on the news bulletins; but if it's based on untruths, it will eventually fall apart. Given the underlying untruths which seem to have been at the very heart of Blair's decision to go to war, I don't think that any performance on the witness stand, however adept, will salvage Blair's reputation on Iraq.

Ultimately, the wages of spin is disbelief. Making statements which are not credible, or which are later shown to be simply untrue, destroys the credibility of those who make them.

Ex-future-president Blair

Tweet It's surprised me for a while that there's been so much speculation about the idea of Blair becoming president of the EU, but it seems that, at last, reality is starting to dawn.

Surely, only in the UK can anyone have believed that the other countries of the EU would really want as their leader a person who has both consistently tried to keep his own member-state closer to the US than to our European partners and at the same time worked to keep his own member-state out of two of the most important projects for the EU, namely the Euro and the Schengen agreement.

It seemed pretty self-evident to me that the major players would want someone who had demonstrated a degree of commitment to their objectives, rather than someone who would be likely to use the position to undermine those objectives. Diplomatic niceties prevented them from making other than generally complimentary comments, but their comments weren't meant to be taken seriously.