27 June 2007: Tony Gone

Mr. Tony Blair has announced that he will be stepping down as Prime Minister on the 27^th of June.

I can't say I'm sorry to see him go. Mr. Blair has always struck me as an intelligent man who genuinely wanted to do the right thing, but his idea of the "right thing" and what was right for Britain were two different matters. I once said that I thought Mr. Blair the most anti-British of any prime minister in history, but this is misleading. Mr. Blair is not hostile to Britain; he is merely indifferent to it. After ten years of New Labour I come to the firm conclusion that Mr. Blair never gave a toss for the history, needs, fears, hopes or aspirations of the British people. Instead, I believe that Mr. Blair sees the nation as literally nothing more than the instrument through which he could do "good" in its most abstract and antiseptic form-- one devoid of any sense of true duty or service.

He is also a worshipper of modernism to the point of a fetish that makes one favour the babbling of an infant over the pronouncement of an aged sage. If something was created on Tuesday, it has to be better than what came on Monday for that reason alone. The Millennium Dome had to be better than the dome of St. Paul's because the Millennium Dome was of the 21^st century and St. Paul's of the 17^th. Cool Britannia was better than Rule Britannia because Cool Britannia had just seen the light of day while Rule Britannia was the stuff of yellowed song books and scratchy gramophone records. Out with the House of Lords. Because it is broken? No, because it is old.

And Mr. Blair shares with Cromwell that frightening tendency to mistake his views with that of perfect reason and therefore disagreement to be the stuff of stupidity or willful evil. Why bother with parliament or plebiscite when the answer is so obvious? Those who are intelligent and of goodwill would agree anyway. Those who are not shouldn't have a say. Far better to abolish the centuries-old office of the Lord Chancellor from the couch than to debate it in the Commons.

If that "good" by way of the "modern" as expressed by edict meant that 1997 had to be declared the Year Zero before which history was irrelevant, the Union itself had to be knocked into a needless hazard, that sovereignty had to be handed over to a load of Continental technocrats, or that Britain's institutions and traditions had to be ruthlessly abolished, suppressed or changed out of all recognition, then that was the price that had to be paid-- by the people.

I think this is one of the reasons why Mr. Blair did so well in foreign policy, but was so abysmal on the domestic front. Mr. Blair understood the threat posed by the Jihadists and had the courage to face them down on the battlefield even though it cost him vital political capital at home and the ill-will of the tyrants and kleptocrats of the UN. His convictions sustained him, but I would contend that he did the right thing for the wrong reason. He did not go to war because it was in Britain's interests (which I believe it was), but because it was abstractly "right."

That may have worked on the battlefield, but at home it was a dreadful policy. Had Mr. Blair had Britain's interests in mind, he would have treated the Jihadist threat in Britain as part of the war and acted accordingly. Instead, he thought that the "right" thing to do was to treat terrorist attacks as a police matter without the need to fight the ideology behind the bombers. The result? Instead of targeting the Jihadists, Mr. Blair turned the screws on the entire population. This dovetailed neatly with his instincts on fighting crime, dealing with racism, homophobia, improper rubbish sorting, speeding, or whatever else bothered his conscience. The British were not a people sovereign in their ancient liberties who acted through their government. The government was an authority sovereign in their power who acted through the people. It was not for the people to decide what they wanted to be and the government to support and protect them. It was for the government to decide what was "right" and the people to do as they were told.

This attitude is not peculiar to Mr. Blair alone. Lord knows enough people in previous governments, Labour and Conservative, have shared it, but for Mr. Blair it is a matter of his basic personality made more fearsome because his motives are "good." It's this sort of devotion to abstraction and indifference that I believe marks much of New Labour. It's the reason why there has been ten years of unremitting reforms, high-minded initiatives and "modernisations," and why the results have been at best like pouring money down a rat hole and at worst the destruction of liberties that freeborn Englishmen have enjoyed since Magna Carta. In so many ways, Tony Blair reminds me of the quote from C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

As for Mr. Blair's successor? My opinion of Gordon Brown is that he is indeed a dour man and I doubt that he enjoys Blair's missionary zeal. For various political reasons I doubt if he'll change New Labour's policies in any fundamental way, nor do I see the alliance with America in danger, but Mr. Brown strikes me as more of a bureaucrat and a money counter who will rule by the ledger and the rule book. Whether that means we will see a better run Britain or a thoughtless, mechanical version of Blairism remains to be seen.

Certainly it couldn't be much worse.