Will There Always Be an England?: Blair's 'Project' and the fate of a nation - Tony Blair

National Review, Nov 20, 2000 by David Pryce-Jones

Tony Blair will be remembered as the most willfully damaging prime minister Britain has ever had. During his three years in office, he has ceaselessly tinkered with the social and political arrangements in place, to upset or cancel them out of all recognition, and so drain of meaning much that gave the British their sense of identity. Nothing is too big to be safe from his fiddling, nothing is too small to escape his attention. There is an awful lot of ruin in a country, as we know, but Blair has induced a great deal of it, and promises more. Not since the Lord Protector Cromwell has there been anything like it.

If Blair were a bad man, really a second Cromwell bent on civil war, it would be far easier to deal with him. But he is not. Born in 1953, educated privately at one of the best and most expensive schools in the country, a lawyer and now a family man, outwardly he has the background and manner of a conventional sort of quasi-upper-class chap, a likely Conservative, out to do his best for everyone with a good strong dash of team spirit. Just before he was elected, however, he gave a description of the inner self: "I am a modern man. I am part of the rock-and-roll generation: the Beatles, color TV-that's the generation I come from."

A standard Sixties child, in other words, at the mercy of every one of the cliches of that time. Too ambitious really to drop out, keen to continue enjoying the privileges that derive from birth and upbringing, like many others in this bind he tries to atone by being a socialist. How cool. In the first flush of his political career, Blair advocated unilateral disarmament, appeasement of the Soviet Union, and a full socialist program for Britain. He has a belief that he knows everything worth knowing, that the past is a pointless rubbish dump, and now is now, let it all hang out. Amiably and effortlessly shallow, he is unfazed by his own ignorance and aglow with an absolute sense of his own virtue. He cannot imagine that he might be unpopular or wrong. The grin on his face is perpetual, and his eyes roll with self-righteous fervor. The satirical magazine Private Eye brilliantly mocks him as the Reverend Tony, the ruthless but mealy-mouthed vicar of the parish of "St Albion." Caught red-handed accepting a million-pound donation to his party from a tycoon in return for a financial favor, Blair almost sobbed with sincerity, "I'm a pretty straight kind of guy." So he is, so he is. Rich with humbug and smugness, the worldview of the Sixties is now let loose upon Britain.

Blair is not to blame for the Sixties that made him the empty shell he is. Long-drawn historical processes have been at work. Europe, its civilization and its values, is evidently exhausted by war and failure. Britain is offering a classic example of the end of empire, as witnessed from ancient Greece and Rome, through the Habsburgs and Ottomans, to the late Soviet Union. Cut your losses and run, the rulers whisper to themselves in such terminal crises. But loss of nerve abroad soon turns in on itself to infect the home country. And finally there is Socialism, an export from Moscow, for decades swallowed all over the world by people unable to distinguish between disease and cure, and still a poison in the bloodstream of Britain.

To give Blair his due, he was quick to perceive that the Socialism of his youth made the Labour party unelectable, and kept the Conservatives in office for long years under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The Labour party had to reinvent itself. The task was immense, nothing less than a complete dislocation, a Gorbachev-like perestroika. Blair took his party by the scruff of its neck. There was nothing idealistic about it. His was the courage and determination of someone desperate for power. Out with the Marxist-inspired ideology of class war and nationalization of the means of production, out with cloth-cap militants and veterans of picket lines, out with unilateral disarmament. Out with critics and hardliners too, in a thorough internal purge of the party. Skeptical, and sometimes downright hostile to a leader with such unnatural credentials, the rank and file fell in with Blair because he seemed so confident about the prospect of power. Around Blair was a tight circle of enforcers, climbers, mouthpieces, and paymasters, known generically as Tony's cronies. The Conservatives either failed to appreciate this remaking of Socialism, or could do nothing about it.

Blair's landslide victory in the 1997 general election marked the arrival of New Labour and what Blair likes to call the Third Way, or otherwise his "Project." Modernization is the key word. The language in which this is expressed is deliberately vague, with a groundswell of Boy Scout uplift. For instance, "New Labour is a party of ideas and ideals but not about dated ideology. What counts is what works. The objectives are radical. The means will be modern." Or again, "Our case is simple: that Britain can and must be better." The country is to enjoy "modern local government in touch with the people." A typical Blair minister blathers: "Investment in human capital will be the foundation for success in the knowledge-based global economy."