Tag: British Politics

Why am I angry? Lots of reasons. One: Charles Fucking Clarke gave the fascists a dozen seats because of his complacency and his arrogance and his inability to acknowledge that the foreign prisoners issue was a powder keg. Two: Tony Fucking Blair threw away dozens (a hundred? A hundred-and-fifty?) seats because he fired Clarke after the rout and not ten days ago when doing so would have had a political impact.

Three: Tony Fucking Blair (he made the list twice) half-fired John Prescott instead of actually firing him thus, inexplicably, turning the Prescott issue from a grubby private affair (with a nasty Max Clifford dimension) into a fully-fledged political crisis (with a constitutional twist) and: Four: Tony Fucking Blair (yes, three times) demoted a successful foreign secretary for reasons so impenetrable, so tribal and so self-destructive as to utterly undermine his successor. That’s why I’m angry.

Ask any leader, anyone who’s ever led anything. Sometimes you have to fire someone. Sometimes you have to fire them even if it doesn’t really make any sense to do so. This is elementary Machiavelli but also common sense. Blair should fire Clarke tomorrow (he should have fired him yesterday). He should do it publicly and with extreme prejudice.

Anyway, Clarke’s already entered the tertiary phase of ministerial paranoia. He just made the speech: the one about the media that you make after you’ve had a hard time from the media. He’s deep in his personal bunker and the only way out now is a good firm Prime Ministerial sacking. Go on Tony. Show us what you’re made of. It’ll cheer us all up.

Tony Blair ignored, neglected and ultimately abused the party that gave him power. He was right to do so.

In the early 1990s Tony Blair saw that the Labour Party in its fossilised 1980s form was not only unelectable but, worse, no longer an electoral force. The Labour Party was going the way of the Liberals: a one-time party of government reduced by dogma and an instinctive resistance to change to irrelevance and to sniping from the sidelines.

The Labour Party, though, was still a quite servicable vehicle, a political machine in good enough shape to get him (and his people) to power. Once there, as we’ve seen, his apparent interest in the party faded and his interactions with it were pared back to the absolute minimum. The party was told what it was necessary to tell it and that was it (Jack Dromey being only the latest elected official to learn that his post was more honorary than managerial).

The party’s conference, once Labour’s primary engine of policy renewal, became an annual chore, left to juniors (and the doughty, indecipherable deputy), just another diary engagement for the PM, really. The problem with marginalising a deep-rooted institution like the Labour Party, though, is that it just won’t lie down and die and now, over a decade later, it’s taking its revenge.

The thing is, Blair’s rejection of his party is more radical than even his critics think. They characterise Blair’s style of Government as ‘Presidential’ but, of course, even a President still has a party, still needs its machine to produce money and grassroots support and legitimacy. Blair’s vision goes much further, I think, to a political scene without parties – where parties, in fact, are irrelevant, where the idea of a party is absurd – to a ‘policy marketplace’ of shifting personalities and issues and platforms.

In this, of course, he is not only ahead of his time, he is probably right. Parties everywhere – in all the mature, democratic states – are fading fast – both in terms of membership and, of course, of authority. They’ve had their day. The parties will probably be the first real victims of politics’ almost universal legitimacy crisis. We’re learning that political parties are not up to the 21st Century job – they’re inefficient filters of the popular will and ineffective bearers of political authenticity.

In the modern world outside politics – in marketing and business and the media – it’s all about authenticity and directness these days. The winners in the post-party environment will be individual politicians who can tell their stories to electors without the mediation of the clumsy 19th Century clubs we call parties. Tony Blair will be their prototype.

I’ve been sort of vaguely expecting that Tony Blair’s troubles would fade with the arrival of the warm weather and that, by conference time, he’d be secure again and ready for at least another year of office. I’ve been blithely (and largely unconsciously, I think) dismissing each new crisis – each new horrifying misstep more like – as the exaggerated product of the malign anti-Blair media’s bitter campaign against the PM and only incidentally a result of anything he’s done himself. So I suppose I’m a loyalist. I’m not stupid, though and I think an important threshold has been passed

I’m now mentally preparing myself for a Brown premiership. If I’m honest I’d say that it’s Brown’s succession that I’ve really been blocking out, rather than Blair’s passing. I’m worried. I think Tony’s dour neighbour is so lacking in the PM’s preternatural charm and quite awesome ability to absorb criticism (Blair seems to soak up disapproval and convert it to pure, undissipated energy), that putting Brown in sole charge of the action will directly threaten Labour’s hold on power.

Of course this is ironic since it’s really Labour’s Constant Chancellor we’ve got to thank for the visible and positive change in our schools and hospitals and for the large and important improvement in the circumstances of poor families and pensioners since 1997. The last couple of days seem to support the idea of a managed transition, as if they’ve got their heads together and sorted out an orderly process. Blair’s speech at Reuters yesterday reads like a valedictory, like the speech of a man preparing for his next role, perhaps running a transnational body – or founding a new one – I think he may be too big or too politically unsuitable for all the current ones.

Maybe Blair’s the man to set up the institute (agency? Force?) designed to do all the intervening in local wars and against dictators and demagogues that his speech proposes: shall we call it ‘UN 2.0’? Brown’s budget, likewise, sounds final: expansive, bravura redistributive showbiz, a grand, confident, proprietorial gesture. “I’m ready for my close-up Mr De Mille”. I’m certain now that Blair’s departure is imminent and I expect it’ll be done and dusted before the Autumn. An election early in the Summer recess would put Brown in place in time for conference and allow Blair at least a month or two to tie up those loose ends (and God knows, there are some loose ends…).

The thing about Britain’s big newspapers, the ones we call broadsheets (although they come in all sorts of sizes these days), is that they belong to two groups: pre-industrial, 18th Century landowner newsletters (like The Times) and steam-powered, 19th Century, industrial-era organs of the modern (like The Guardian). If you look very closely you can still see the shadow of their origins today. They’re all in decline, of course but one of them, Alan Rusbridger’s Guardian, finds itself, quite accidentally, in something of a sweet spot in this torrid political moment.

With all three major parties fighting over a very crowded scrap of territory about the size of a toupé, just to the left of the old-fashioned centre, The Guardian’s special relationship with both sides of the newly recentred British political scene has paid off in a big way. Essentially, if you want to read about politics in Britain now there’s very little point getting anything else, least of all the quite bankrupt (and very ugly) Times. Look at last week’s Guardian: Will Hutton’s hymn of praise for the Education Bill (admittedly in sister paper The Observer) cheek by jowl with Polly Toynbee’s open disgust.

Also of note, you’ve got Fiona Millar’s nicely forensic attempt to elucidate Gordon Brown’s education policy from years of speeches in which he doesn’t mention education at all and (off topic a bit, I know) there’s Simon Jenkins’ not-unfriendly hatchet job on the Beeb’s unhealthy hold over our legislators’ affections and, swinging back round to our theme, Jackie Ashley’s excellent piece about the surprising (and apparently total) victory of the centre-left in British politics. And, bringing us right up to date, here’s Martin Kettle’s assertion, on the paper’s new comment blog, that Jack Dromey dumped Blair in the political merde for reasons of purest principle and not because he was “…outraged to be snubbed by a Labour johnny-come-lately like Lord Levy…” There. Read that lot. Get yourself up to date.

Cameron is impressive (although he needs to do something about the hair) but Tuesday’s PMQs left me sort of quietly reassured. Principally, I think, because his ‘consensus’ rhetoric is a gimmick and you can’t reform a political party with a gimmick, no matter how cleverly wired into the zeitgeist that gimmick is.

Cameron can’t dump the ‘ya-boo’ culture of The Commons on his own: reforming Parliament’s adversarial model will require… well… consensus – across party boundaries and across equally bitter internal party divisions. Check back in a year: I’ll bet you a tenner that Cameron’s perfectly reasonable (and very grown-up) consensus idea has been quietly dropped.

Likewise, dragging the Tories back to the political centre and dumping the pensioners who own the party infrastructure and fund its operations is going to be an epic task – equivalent to taking on the left for Blair. Cameron will certainly need his Clause 4 moment, or his Clause 4 issue. My guess: gay marriage. Although – inconveniently – the Labour Government already legalised it, it’s such a potent issue and will so royally wind up the Tory old-timers that I see Cameron and Osborne and the rest of his kitchen cabinet attending lots of gay weddings in the next few months.

I expect a period of explicit and deliberate provocation of the old guard. Cameron can’t achieve his goal without dumping the blue rinse brigade. Item 1 on his ‘reform the party’ to do list is to alienate the hardcore Tory membership so profoundly that they voluntarily leave the party and create a space for the next generation Tories he believes exist. Cameron knows that if, at the end of this parliament, the party looks roughly like it does now (demographically, ethnically), then it’s game over for The Conservatives (which would be interesting, wouldn’t it?).

Geoff Mulgan ran New Labour Think Tank Demos and then Number 10’s Strategy Unit. He’s an interesting man, full of ideas, unconventional, a proper modern thinker/doer. His three part series for Radio 4’s The Westminster Hour is the best political radio I’ve heard in years. A genuine insight to the policy-making process and a really good overview of politics’ crisis – received opinion given a good kicking in the process. Should be compulsory listening, especially for the crowd of puffed up old-timers on the Labour back benches who are getting ready to use their new-found clout to wind back the clock to precisely five minutes before Tony Blair was elected leader.

(I’m going to leave it to trust that the programme’s Real streams will not be removed or overwritten…)

We’re getting used to a certain amount of political role reversal since Blair turned the tables on the Tories eight years ago but watching Michael Howard putting the boot into the police in yesterday’s Commons debate was about the most surreal political inversion I’ve seen, at least in this parliament – almost worth the historic defeat all on its own (his new ACAB tattoo is the talk of the tea room).

This is where the story starts to get really Shakespearian. Blair’s messianic tendencies – his readiness to put belief ahead of logic – make him look more and more like Macbeth by the day (the fact that the cast of characters is practically all Scottish helps). His isolation can only intensify now. Gordon Brown – Blair’s embittered Malcolm – found 49 happy Macduffs on the seething Labour backbenches today. Blair’s protracted public assassination at the hands of his gleeful party enemies has begun.