As Tony Blair’s political obituaries proliferate across the media, there is a danger that these will form the first drafts, not of history, but of a hagiographic mythology. In spite of the heavy political weather that has cast a shadow over the latter half of the Blair premiership, there exists across the spectrum of mainstream political discourse something approaching a personality cult where the departing British prime minister is concerned, based primarily on two widespread views of Blair: firstly, as a uniquely gifted politician, and, secondly, as a crusader for liberal values on the world stage.
The first of these views – that of Blair as a political magician – is based on his having led the Labour Party to three successive election victories. However, a review of the statistical evidence exposes this view of Blair’s powers as having only a limited grounding in reality.
Until very recently, Blair’s main opposition had been a Conservative party beset with corruption and incompetence, retreating into its base on the xenophobic right and actively detested by much of the electorate. As a result, the Tories flatlined at around 30% in the polls for over a decade. To overcome such flaccid competition was perhaps a less than awe-inspiring achievement. And yet, as political writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft has pointed out, Blair’s popularity with the electorate, even when opposed only by a crippled Tory party (and the mostly irrelevant Liberal Democrats), has been rather less than emphatic.(1)
Blair’s first election victory in 1997 was won with only 44 per cent of the popular vote; and fewer individual votes were cast for New Labour that year than were cast for John Major’s decidedly unpopular Tories when the latter narrowly won their surprise victory in 1992. That Blair owed his 1997 win more to anti-Tory sentiment than any appetite for his “third-way” revolution was further evidenced by the fact that between 1992 and 1997 the Tory vote collapsed by an massive 4 million.
Major’s 1992 victory had come in the wake of a recession and the disastrous implementation of the “poll tax”, and Labour’s failure to secure victory even in these favourable circumstances provided much of the justification for the party’s subsequent lurch to the right under Blair. Yet in his 2001 election victory, after 4 years of relative economic stability and a near total-absence of effective political opposition from the Conservatives, Blair won fewer popular votes than Neil Kinnock had won in the 1992 defeat. And the trend continued. In 2005, Blair won fewer popular votes than the Tories had in their seminal 1997 meltdown.
The shallowness of Blair’s electoral success is further demonstrated by the recent rejuvenation of a newly “centrist” Conservative Party under David Cameron. As soon as the Tories were able to find a plausible human being to field as party leader - with policies that, unlike those of his immediate predecessors, didn’t resemble the teenage fantasies of some home counties closet-fascist – Labour’s lead in the polls evaporated.
Between 1997 and 2005, the Labour vote plunged by nearly 4 million, just as the Tory vote had done during the living death of the Major years. As Wheatcroft points out, this is “what statisticians call a trend line”. Put bluntly, the more the British public experienced of Prime Minister Blair, the less of them were inclined to support him (and that support was limited and shallow to begin with).
The long-term evisceration of Labour’s popular support under Blair’s leadership gives us the true measure of his alleged political genius. His real talent has been an ability to play the system so as to remain in power for ten years, in defiance of widespread and sharply increasing unpopularity. For Wheatcroft, “Blair has not only carried out a kind of imposture, he has hugely benefited from grave systemic faults and deformations in our political culture”.
The second major aspect of the Blair myth is that of Blair the crusading liberal internationalist. Even the harshest of Blair’s mainstream critics see the Iraq war as an error of judgement that sullied the record of an enlightened world statesman dedicated to the energetic promotion of humanitarian values. It was NATO’s 1999 intervention over Kosovo that first properly established this view in the prevailing narrative. But again, the image is unsupported by the evidence.
In 1999 Blair announced, to wide acclaim, “a new internationalism where the brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated”. Less noted was the fact that, in the contemporaneous cases of Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds and Indonesia’s treatment of East Timor, Blair’s government not only “tolerated” the “brutal repression of whole ethnic groups”, but provided material support in the form of arms sales (2). In these cases, New Labour intervened on the side of governments committing atrocities every bit as shocking as those committed by Serbia against the Kosovar Albanians. Yet for the myth-makers, Blair’s opposition to Serb atrocities is a definitive factor in the judgement of his humanitarian credentials, whilst his support for similar Turkish and Indonesian atrocities is apparently irrelevant. In fact, even Britain’s humanitarian role in the Kosovo episode is highly questionable.
Before the Kosovo intervention, at the Rambouillet conference in March 1999 where Serbia rejected NATO’s terms, a senior US administration official told the media, “we intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing and that’s what they are going to get”. Human rights groups criticised NATO’s conduct during the war, as indiscriminate cluster bombs were used and civilian infrastructure targeted. A sharp rise in Serbian atrocities was precipitated, not prevented by the action; an outcome that was widely predicted, even on the NATO side. NATO then failed to seriously counter Kosovar atrocities against Serbs in the war’s aftermath. (3)
NATO’s less-than-humanitarian conduct before, during and after the war, and its apparently contradictory behaviour in the cases of Turkey and Indonesia, raise obvious questions about the sincerity of the West’s purported humanitarian intentions. For all Blair’s lofty rhetoric, a more plausible interpretation of these events is that Kosovo was simply a case of business-as-usual for nation states in the international system. Turkey and Indonesia were supported in their “brutal repression of whole ethnic groups”, whilst similar behaviour on the part of Serbia was not “tolerated”, because the former were economic and military allies of the West, whilst the latter was not. Humanitarian concerns do not appear to have entered into the equation.
Unlike the mythology, this latter view has the advantage of being consistent with the facts. For example, we need not ask, counterfactually, what the UK’s reaction to events in Kosovo might have been if Serbia had not been resisting neo-liberal economic reform or NATO’s eastward expansion. The cases of Turkey and Indonesia provide us with our answer. This interpretive consistency contrasts with the difficult questions and inconsistencies raised by the claimed humanitarian motives for Blair’s “liberal interventionism”. (4)
Many other apparent contradictions, highlighted when contrasting Blair’s alleged humanitarianism with his actual policies, are rendered comprehensible by understanding his actions as those of a standard-variety politician serving classic state interests, as opposed to those of a liberal-humanitarian trying to “do the right thing”. Contrast Blair’s claimed concern for Third World Poverty with his ardent support for neo-liberal “reforms” that have so catastrophically failed developing countries, though amply serving Western economic interests. (5) Contrast Blair’s claimed support for democratisation in the Middle East with his actual support for the House of Saud, one of the most tyrannical regimes on the face of the planet. Contrast Blair’s claimed concern for the fate of the Iraqi people with New Labour’s attempt to rubbish a scientific survey that had estimated over 650,000 deaths caused by the US-UK invasion, even though government advisers had privately described the survey as “robust”.(6)
Was Blair’s foreign policy underpinned by a belief, however erroneous, that he was “doing the right thing”? Only Blair can know his own mind. The rest of us must rely on the evidence, and this does not allow us to casually assume the benign motivation described in the mythology, much less to characterise Blair’s policies in the moral light that he himself would choose. Of course it is plausible that, when helping to starve the population of the occupied Palestinian territories for voting the wrong way in a free election, or when blocking calls for a ceasefire during Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas in Lebanon last summer, Blair had satisfied himself that the actions he was taking were morally virtuous (7). In fact, given what we understand of human nature, this is not only possible but probable. It is also largely irrelevant. What is relevant, not least to the victims of Blair’s policies, is the objective facts; not what Blair claims he “thought was right”.
With Blair apparently poised to become the Quartet’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, it would appear that the world has, regrettably, not seen the last of his characteristic personal blend of cynical politicking shrouded in pious cant. But the above analysis has implications beyond those for Blair himself. Propagation of the Blair myth serves to distort our understanding, not only of one man’s career, but also of our governments’ role in the world. Above all, it encourages us to think uncritically about the behaviour of politicians; to accept their rhetoric as unproblematic descriptions of reality. Where Blair is concerned, it remains to be seen whether history will be written by the myth-makers, or by those concerned with the facts.
_David Wearing is the author of the website The Democrat’s Diary._
*Notes*
(1) “It really should be easier to get rid of an unwanted prime minister”, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Guardian, 30 August 2006
(2) A New Generation Draws The Line, Noam Chomsky, Verso Books, 2001. Web of Deceit, Mark Curtis, Vintage, 2003
(3) Curtis
(4) For more on these questions, see my “Kosovo and its Implications”, 29 May 2007, The Democrat’s Diary.
(5) Curtis
(6) “Iraqi deaths survey ‘was robust’”, Owen Bennett-Jones, BBC World Service, 26 March 2007
(7) See my “Still Strangling Palestine”, 20 April 2007, ukwatch.net, and “Britain’s Role in the Israeli-Hezbollah War”, 7 September 2006, The Democrat’s Diary.
As Tony Blair’s political obituaries proliferate across the media, there is a danger that these will form the first drafts, not of history, but of a hagiographic mythology. In spite of the heavy political weather that has cast a shadow over the latter half of the Blair premiership, there exists across the spectrum of mainstream political discourse something approaching a personality cult where the departing British prime minister is concerned, based primarily on two widespread views of Blair: firstly, as a uniquely gifted politician, and, secondly, as a crusader for liberal values on the world stage.
The first of these views – that of Blair as a political magician – is based on his having led the Labour Party to three successive election victories. However, a review of the statistical evidence exposes this view of Blair’s powers as having only a limited grounding in reality.
Until very recently, Blair’s main opposition had been a Conservative party beset with corruption and incompetence, retreating into its base on the xenophobic right and actively detested by much of the electorate. As a result, the Tories flatlined at around 30% in the polls for over a decade. To overcome such flaccid competition was perhaps a less than awe-inspiring achievement. And yet, as political writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft has pointed out, Blair’s popularity with the electorate, even when opposed only by a crippled Tory party (and the mostly irrelevant Liberal Democrats), has been rather less than emphatic.(1)
Blair’s first election victory in 1997 was won with only 44 per cent of the popular vote; and fewer individual votes were cast for New Labour that year than were cast for John Major’s decidedly unpopular Tories when the latter narrowly won their surprise victory in 1992. That Blair owed his 1997 win more to anti-Tory sentiment than any appetite for his “third-way” revolution was further evidenced by the fact that between 1992 and 1997 the Tory vote collapsed by an massive 4 million.
Major’s 1992 victory had come in the wake of a recession and the disastrous implementation of the “poll tax”, and Labour’s failure to secure victory even in these favourable circumstances provided much of the justification for the party’s subsequent lurch to the right under Blair. Yet in his 2001 election victory, after 4 years of relative economic stability and a near total-absence of effective political opposition from the Conservatives, Blair won fewer popular votes than Neil Kinnock had won in the 1992 defeat. And the trend continued. In 2005, Blair won fewer popular votes than the Tories had in their seminal 1997 meltdown.
The shallowness of Blair’s electoral success is further demonstrated by the recent rejuvenation of a newly “centrist” Conservative Party under David Cameron. As soon as the Tories were able to find a plausible human being to field as party leader - with policies that, unlike those of his immediate predecessors, didn’t resemble the teenage fantasies of some home counties closet-fascist – Labour’s lead in the polls evaporated.
Between 1997 and 2005, the Labour vote plunged by nearly 4 million, just as the Tory vote had done during the living death of the Major years. As Wheatcroft points out, this is “what statisticians call a trend line”. Put bluntly, the more the British public experienced of Prime Minister Blair, the less of them were inclined to support him (and that support was limited and shallow to begin with).
The long-term evisceration of Labour’s popular support under Blair’s leadership gives us the true measure of his alleged political genius. His real talent has been an ability to play the system so as to remain in power for ten years, in defiance of widespread and sharply increasing unpopularity. For Wheatcroft, “Blair has not only carried out a kind of imposture, he has hugely benefited from grave systemic faults and deformations in our political culture”.
The second major aspect of the Blair myth is that of Blair the crusading liberal internationalist. Even the harshest of Blair’s mainstream critics see the Iraq war as an error of judgement that sullied the record of an enlightened world statesman dedicated to the energetic promotion of humanitarian values. It was NATO’s 1999 intervention over Kosovo that first properly established this view in the prevailing narrative. But again, the image is unsupported by the evidence.
In 1999 Blair announced, to wide acclaim, “a new internationalism where the brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated”. Less noted was the fact that, in the contemporaneous cases of Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds and Indonesia’s treatment of East Timor, Blair’s government not only “tolerated” the “brutal repression of whole ethnic groups”, but provided material support in the form of arms sales (2). In these cases, New Labour intervened on the side of governments committing atrocities every bit as shocking as those committed by Serbia against the Kosovar Albanians. Yet for the myth-makers, Blair’s opposition to Serb atrocities is a definitive factor in the judgement of his humanitarian credentials, whilst his support for similar Turkish and Indonesian atrocities is apparently irrelevant. In fact, even Britain’s humanitarian role in the Kosovo episode is highly questionable.
Before the Kosovo intervention, at the Rambouillet conference in March 1999 where Serbia rejected NATO’s terms, a senior US administration official told the media, “we intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing and that’s what they are going to get”. Human rights groups criticised NATO’s conduct during the war, as indiscriminate cluster bombs were used and civilian infrastructure targeted. A sharp rise in Serbian atrocities was precipitated, not prevented by the action; an outcome that was widely predicted, even on the NATO side. NATO then failed to seriously counter Kosovar atrocities against Serbs in the war’s aftermath. (3)
NATO’s less-than-humanitarian conduct before, during and after the war, and its apparently contradictory behaviour in the cases of Turkey and Indonesia, raise obvious questions about the sincerity of the West’s purported humanitarian intentions. For all Blair’s lofty rhetoric, a more plausible interpretation of these events is that Kosovo was simply a case of business-as-usual for nation states in the international system. Turkey and Indonesia were supported in their “brutal repression of whole ethnic groups”, whilst similar behaviour on the part of Serbia was not “tolerated”, because the former were economic and military allies of the West, whilst the latter was not. Humanitarian concerns do not appear to have entered into the equation.
Unlike the mythology, this latter view has the advantage of being consistent with the facts. For example, we need not ask, counterfactually, what the UK’s reaction to events in Kosovo might have been if Serbia had not been resisting neo-liberal economic reform or NATO’s eastward expansion. The cases of Turkey and Indonesia provide us with our answer. This interpretive consistency contrasts with the difficult questions and inconsistencies raised by the claimed humanitarian motives for Blair’s “liberal interventionism”. (4)
Many other apparent contradictions, highlighted when contrasting Blair’s alleged humanitarianism with his actual policies, are rendered comprehensible by understanding his actions as those of a standard-variety politician serving classic state interests, as opposed to those of a liberal-humanitarian trying to “do the right thing”. Contrast Blair’s claimed concern for Third World Poverty with his ardent support for neo-liberal “reforms” that have so catastrophically failed developing countries, though amply serving Western economic interests. (5) Contrast Blair’s claimed support for democratisation in the Middle East with his actual support for the House of Saud, one of the most tyrannical regimes on the face of the planet. Contrast Blair’s claimed concern for the fate of the Iraqi people with New Labour’s attempt to rubbish a scientific survey that had estimated over 650,000 deaths caused by the US-UK invasion, even though government advisers had privately described the survey as “robust”.(6)
Was Blair’s foreign policy underpinned by a belief, however erroneous, that he was “doing the right thing”? Only Blair can know his own mind. The rest of us must rely on the evidence, and this does not allow us to casually assume the benign motivation described in the mythology, much less to characterise Blair’s policies in the moral light that he himself would choose. Of course it is plausible that, when helping to starve the population of the occupied Palestinian territories for voting the wrong way in a free election, or when blocking calls for a ceasefire during Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas in Lebanon last summer, Blair had satisfied himself that the actions he was taking were morally virtuous (7). In fact, given what we understand of human nature, this is not only possible but probable. It is also largely irrelevant. What is relevant, not least to the victims of Blair’s policies, is the objective facts; not what Blair claims he “thought was right”.
With Blair apparently poised to become the Quartet’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, it would appear that the world has, regrettably, not seen the last of his characteristic personal blend of cynical politicking shrouded in pious cant. But the above analysis has implications beyond those for Blair himself. Propagation of the Blair myth serves to distort our understanding, not only of one man’s career, but also of our governments’ role in the world. Above all, it encourages us to think uncritically about the behaviour of politicians; to accept their rhetoric as unproblematic descriptions of reality. Where Blair is concerned, it remains to be seen whether history will be written by the myth-makers, or by those concerned with the facts.
_David Wearing is the author of the website The Democrat’s Diary._
*Notes*
(1) “It really should be easier to get rid of an unwanted prime minister”, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Guardian, 30 August 2006
(2) A New Generation Draws The Line, Noam Chomsky, Verso Books, 2001. Web of Deceit, Mark Curtis, Vintage, 2003
(3) Curtis
(4) For more on these questions, see my “Kosovo and its Implications”, 29 May 2007, The Democrat’s Diary.
(5) Curtis
(6) “Iraqi deaths survey ‘was robust’”, Owen Bennett-Jones, BBC World Service, 26 March 2007
(7) See my “Still Strangling Palestine”, 20 April 2007, ukwatch.net, and “Britain’s Role in the Israeli-Hezbollah War”, 7 September 2006, The Democrat’s Diary.