Because I'm here...


Reflections on the UK election. Ian, 27 April



... I wont be voting in the forthcoming elections, and we weren't able to (or didn't) cast a postal vote before we left. My best avenue to try and re-enfranchise myself, then, is to share my thoughts here in the hope that there may be one or two undecided voters who, at the margin, may be swayed.

I have no idea how the polls are looking right now but for the past few years the government has seemed unassailable, with the only genuine opposition seeming to come from within the cabinet. When they first assumed power Labour seemed ready for it and Blair's competent front bench quickly and confidently implemented a range of constructive policies, beginning auspiciously with handing control of interest rates to the Bank of England. I now believe that it's time to vote them out. As is often said, Blair, who was a relatively new leader of the Labour party when he became PM, has become increasingly presidential. Following his apparent role models of Thatcher and Clinton, he has eschewed sound management, which was the early government's strong suit, in favour of visionary leadership. Unfortunately, he has no vision. The former wannabe guitar hero and campaigner for unilateral nuclear disarmament now lurches from cause to cause, craving the admiration of historians but now, in his vanity, generating more harm than good. In his simpering desire to be as strong as a US head of state, he has followed Thatcher in fracturing Britain's most worthwhile cultural assets, and it will surely be this for which he will be remembered. Never mind fox hunting. First, he has dismantled the United Kingdom, with a miscellany of devolved bodies in Ireland, Scotland and Wales that cost an absolute fortune in bureaucracy and serve no one well. I resent him for not making a genuine and impassioned case for the historical continuity of the UK, responding to the fair grievances of the Scottish nationalists, for example, with proposals for a more just distribution of power and wealth rather than severance. (Admittedly, if Scots still wanted devolution or independence in the face of a strong argument for continuity then they should have had it; but the case was not made.) Second, he has abolished the centuries-old composition of the House of Lords, which needed modernising, but again in his rush to the history books he broke what we had before he had any proposal for the re-creation of a modern revising chamber. Following this, he abolished centuries of tradition in the role of senior Law Lords, and also ancient orders of the armed forces, and again with no credible plan for a replacement, alienating all who were involved. More even than any of this, perhaps, he has continued in Thatcher's direction of eroding the scrutiny of parliament, and even the cabinet, in the creation of law, pushing through unprecedented volumes of badly-formulated legislation, increasingly seemingly framed to make Tony more popular. Labour's preoccupation with focus groups and polls, learned from the US (and, one suspects, watching The West Wing) is itself unsavoury, as is Blair's tetchy hypersensitivity to journalists who are at all critical, especially at the BBC, which is another British institution that he has tried to attack. Even in times recently when he has "taken an unpopular stand" he has done it with the pomposity and flourish of a man whose pollsters inform him that he needs to seem less concerned by popular opinion.

If Blair's destructive impact on our national assets were guided by a higher vision for Europe then I would have some sympathy. But Blair has been a European flop. Not only has he failed to cultivate constructive relationships with fellow European leaders, for which he deserves blame, he has, in Iraq, shown himself prepared to act on the global stage outside of international law and apparently to be mendacious in covering up his knowledge that this is what he did. More profoundly than this, he continually acts to undermine the Socratic tradition of soliciting all perspectives and applying rigourous rational analysis in open forum to determine the most durable ideas, which more than anything, defines what it is to be European. While I've been in Africa the only journal that I've read contained two interesting articles: the first was the text of Blair's speech in which he described why we must save Africa and the second was an interview by the President of Botswana. While the latter was articulate, fact-based and informative, Blair's speech was a bricolage of shards of ideas, rarely forming actual sentences, in which he tried, absurdly, to convey passion and vision. He has not learnt that passion is transitive: it is always passion for something (other than being passionate). Tellingly, while Blair has inherited the institution of the Commonwealth through which he could reach out to peers who genuinely know about Africa and with whom he could work shoulder to shoulder (or even in the background!) to get something done, he has again chosen to go it alone, in ignorance, decorated only by the presence of the besuited Sir Bob Geldof. In this he is in some respects repeating his Iraq folly, where the rights and wrongs of his argument for war were irrelevant when only he was making them. If instead of his own on-screen hand-wringing Blair had reached out to our sizeable Muslim community to find his advocates, the damage wrought by the escapade, while still considerable, would have been far less the global alienation of the Arab and Muslim world that he and Bush achieved.

Blair's very accent reveals his rootlessness: it has no provenance, it's vowel sounds seem to have been randomly assembled in his trendy muesli-belt haunts of North London. Now, as he flails around, lurching destructively from one failed vision to another, he betrays that his only bedrock of belief is in his own eventual importance. Worse still, if we vote for Blair, we may well end up with his equally vain and even more ominous counter-side: Gordon Brown.

For their vanity and their vapid valuelessness, Labour should be voted out of office: as God said, according to John of Patmos, "Because you are neither hot nor cold I spew you out of my mouth".

But at least Blair and his government are better than the Tories. In all of my adult life the Conservative party, despite having many admirable members, has spurned every single opportunity to show compassion and turned instead to base populism and xenophobia. They may have, as Roger Scruton shows in his book Conservative Texts, a credible historical legacy but this is not we see, and I feel shame, as an Englishman (for the Tories only have any base at all in England), that a party that to this day appeals to the lowest of human instincts still features in our political landscape. There is no level of economic competence or ingenuity of policy (which they also seem now to lack) that can make such a miserable and unkind party electable in a civilised nation. Thankfully, it's core constituency is now, through death and demographics, in decline and I hope to see the party die in my lifetime.

Setting to one side the execrable UK independence party, if they are still going, this leaves only the Liberals. The Liberals seem to have no sense of themselves as a serious party on the national stage. The call to "Return home and prepare for government" has rung futilely too often to be uttered again without self-parody. Furthermore, the Liberals are economically illiterate. It has been argued and demonstrated many times (notably in the UK by Nigel Lawson) that decreasing marginal rates of taxation significantly increases the revenue available for social programmes, and that the converse is also true. (It was the Callaghan/Healy government with their top tax rate of 89%, if I recall correctly, who had to call in the IMF.) The Liberals seem not to have learnt this judging by their counterproductive plan of "funding" a clutch of spending programmes by raising the top rate of tax to 50%. Nonetheless, the Liberals are, this time, the only decent party to vote for (their almost absolute lack of power perhaps leaving them the least corrupted), and decent people have to vote for a decent party. They are also the only UK party not to have renounced their founding principles (the modern Tories have shown repeatedly that they will opportunistically roll through volumes of new intrusive legislation at the drop of a hat, irrespective of its effect on our traditions and institutions; and it would be absurd to relate Blair's Labour to Kier Hardy's socialism).

Maybe if enough people vote Liberal we might end up with a hung parliament. This could put a break on the legislative juggernaut that has rumbled on from Thatcher and increased in speed under Blair. This itself would be a benefit. It may also allow the parties to re-group and give us more appealing voting choices. I know I'm dreaming but why isn't everyone else? Why aren't you?

Posted: Wed - April 27, 2005 at 06:49 PM              

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