A Letter from Wales

National Interest, The, Fall, 2000 by Owen Harries

AT THE beginning of June my wife and I left the capital of the indispensable nation to visit the capital of a country that is, for all but its inhabitants, quite inconsequential in the affairs of the world. So here we are in Cardiff, once a great industrial port but now a sedate and rather handsome service and cultural center for a small nation. Its once notoriously tough dockland area, Tiger Bay, has been innocuously renamed and is now the site of "luxury" apartments and expensive restaurants.

More about Wales presently, but first a word on the "state of Britain" question, for we arrived just as the country's politics entered a very interesting phase. Indeed, in retrospect our first few weeks back in Britain may stand out as a decisive turning point in the premiership of Tony Blair. For him this was a hellish month, when everything went wrong. It started with his being slow-clapped by a normally decorous audience of middle-class women, while delivering an ill-judged, patronizing speech. Then, in rapid succession, came copious evidence of deep divisions and rivalries in his cabinet; utter incoherence in policy toward Europe; adverse public opinion polls; the symbolic fiasco of the opening and then immediate closing of a much hyped "Millennium Bridge" over the Thames; a spectacular display of English soccer hooliganism in Belgium, followed by the early exit of the English soccer team from the Euro 2000 competition; strong popular discontent with the insanely high gas prices (the equivalent of $4.80 a gallon); and substandard performances by the Prime Minister in Parliament, at a time when the leader of the opposition, William Hague, was doing exceptionally well. This dismal succession of embarrassments climaxed with what was in personal terms the worst one of all, the arrest of Blair's son after being found hopelessly drunk on the sidewalk of Leicester Square.

Not surprisingly, by the end of all this Tony Blair appeared badly rattled and a normally sympathetic press was giving him a rough time. Whether this will turn out to be merely an unfortunate interlude, of the kind that all governments experience from time to time, or a defining moment remains to be seen, and things will be clearer by the time this piece appears. But for someone who has depended so much on the manipulation of image, and the projection of an air of easy superiority and supreme confidence, recovery will not be easy. A series of leaked documents has made it clear that there is considerable demoralization, if not near panic, in the upper reaches of the government. As Philip Gould, one of Blair's closest advisers, lamented in one of these documents, "We are outflanked on patriotism and crime; we are suffering from disconnection ... undermined by a combination of spin, lack of conviction and apparent lack of integrity." Incredibly, his advice on how to recover from all this was simply more and bet ter spin: "We need to reinvent the New Labour brand"! Live by the image, die by the image. Indeed, by now overindulgence in the art has made spinning itself a major issue in British politics, and there is growing contempt for its practitioners. Once respected and feared as powers behind the throne, they were recently dismissed contemptuously by one ex-friend of the Prime Minister as "rent boys." It is a demystifying phrase.

DURING the same month there was compelling evidence that there has been a more fundamental and dramatic reversal in British public life. Until quite recently, it used to be the case that Britain was a decent, civilized country with very good public services but an absolutely lousy economy. Now it has changed to a country with a brilliant economy that is seriously and progressively sick in other respects.

In our first weeks here, two reports appeared. The first, concerning crime rates in the Western world, established that in every category of crime except murder--in terms of assault and mugging, of burglary, of car theft--Britain now has a worse record than any other developed country, and as far as crimes of violence are concerned things are still deteriorating. This in a country that used to be a byword for lawfulness, civility, respect for property, and police efficiency and incorruptibility. (It is reported that CBS's Dan Rather seized on this news with alacrity and made much of it. Understandably, he was delighted to find a country in worse straits than the United States in terms of crime, particularly one that takes much pleasure in tut-tutting about American violence.)

The second report, issued by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), places Britain close to the bottom of the table of developed countries--down with Poland, Portugal and Ireland--in terms of both literacy and numeracy. Fifty percent of the population of the United Kingdom is deemed incapable of coping with the normal demands of everyday life and work. Thus, at the dawn of the "information age", when knowledge is becoming the key asset in global affairs, Britain is busily creating a genuine lumpenproletariat of depressing dimensions.