Tony Blair

I've often thought how extraordinary a person must be to be able to feel competent to "run" a country of tens of millions of people. Of course, personally, I don't believe anyone can. The cult of leadership is unhealthy for society. The notion that one person is somehow supremely capable above all the rest of us to make decisions affecting us all as comprehensively as the tentacles of government reach into our lives is repugnant to me.

But clearly blogging John Prescott buys in to this cult of leadership:

So, wait a second; we have a former postie in charge of a £100bn plus budget, including, ultimately, decisions of life and death importance and he's still lacking a certain "je ne sais quois". We have a trained lawyer who's held more of the great offices of state, and cabinet posts traditionally associated with the senior minister - Lord Chancellor, Lord Privy Seal, Leader of the House of Commons, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Secretary of State for the Home Department - and still hasn't the "skills and experience"?

Of course we can all see that the incumbent whom Prescott holds in such esteem has been promoted beyond the level of his competence anyway. But the idea that there is some step change in skills and experience between Prime Minister and other ministers is just bonkers. Don't get me wrong, I hate the man with a passion, and this is a backhanded complement at best, but at least Tony Blair had the skills and helpers to spin his way through, to sound convincing and to persuade people, but he had no practical ministerial experience at all.

Of course, nobody has such skills, and perhaps especially those who have surrounded themselves in the political system for most of their adult lives. As the concentration of power into the hands of the Prime Minister in the UK has continued apace ever since Walpole was first in office so the world has become immeasurably more complex and fast moving, making it all the more ridiculous to expect one person to be an adequate representative for so many of us in so many aspects of governance and diplomacy. I daresay that, when the House of Lords in 1741 decried the idea that any minister should have primacy over others' departments, the daily work of those departments probably could have been handled by one person. Now, it is completely impossible and we should ditch the whole edifice.

I used to take it more or less as an article of faith that the EU is good for us. Somehow. And that the Liberal Democrat position of being avowedly critical of some of the ways it operates was a good one - we were the first, I believe, in calling for CAP reform way back just after we joined, for example.

Like so many lofty political projects it has or perhaps could have beneficial aims. I was even rather enthusiastic about the idea of a "United States of Europe", if only it could be constructed as a genuinely liberal federation in which sovereignty rests as much as possible with the individual. I'd even like to have seen it replacing national governments, mainly because I can't think of anything that national governments are good for in a world where the individual is sovereign that would not be better done perhaps with a "light touch" overarching supra-national body.

The current line indeed is that there are some things we just can't handle on our own - issues that naturally do not respect national borders - pollution, global warming, terrorism. Some, I noted during the campaign for the European parliamentary candidates, take a more controversial line (for me at least) that the "fight" against "excesses" by transnational corporations can only be handled at a supranational level. And that the EU is such a model supranational body capable of meeting all these challenges.

All the time of course there have been nay-sayers - on the left by people who see it as a free market capitalist conspiracy (actually I think they mean protectionist but I don't think they understand that any longer on the left) and on the right that it is meddlesome, protectionist (and they mean it correctly) and no longer, if it ever was, centered on freeing trade to make individuals better off. And there is evidence that both have a point - in fact the same point - especially about protectionism.

But for me the reason I'd quite like it to slow down is that we have lost control of our own, national politics - even without Europe interfering, though it certainly helps when they claim things are out of their hands. And, despite the chimera of representation that is the European Parliament if we have no control over our national politicians we have no control over what they do in our name in the other courts of the European project.

So, can anyone sell the whole idea to me again; explain to me how we can possibly make it work for the sovereign individual if we have a great barrier at our national government level not interested in that sovereign individual even in their own countries? It probably goes without saying, as I've done so before, but all the brilliant arguments in the world will do nothing for me if Blair ends up as president. I have not left this sceptered isle now for nearly twenty years, and even then it was just to go to the emerald one, but I will seriously have to consider emigrating to Norway if that happens.

More and more recently I hear or read people saying that Tony Blair's ten years in power has generated in them a deep distrust and even loathing of politics and politicians. Through sleaze, spin, wars, a vast growth in the reach and size of the state - most of which appears to many to have gone straight into the pockets of corporate bosses and shareholders, he has produced a far more powerful advertisement for the possible benefits of a minimal state than many who have tried to explain it academically through their writings.

Even now, in his political retirement, with his vulgar rush to pick up lucrative jobs where he could use his rent-seeking influence to further the very fat-cat industries he pledged to attack in 1997, he still generates much loathing. Forget the Lisbon Treaty or EU Constitution, I'm ready to campaign for an "out" vote in an "in or out" referendum should Tony Blair get anywhere close to becoming the first permanent EU president.

And from behind the portcullis I don't believe that the current crop of party leaders are rising to the real challenge of Blair's legacy. In fact, ostrich like, I feel they view it as merely a series of mistakes that can be put right by more government, just of a different political hue, when in reality the message of Blair's premiership is clear:

Government is moribund, inherently corrupt, a necessary evil for a particular point of human development. A point that has been passed and government can do no more except fight for its own existence as if it has a right to exist regardless of and separate from the desires and needs of the people it seeks to govern. This infantilizing of the people (indeed we even call it the "nanny state" in tacit recognition of that infantilization) needs to be brought to an end.

I was at some training last week on dealing with "Difficult, Disturbing and Dangerous Behaviour". In an aside about the nature of psychopathy the trainer, himself a clinical psychiatrist, suggested that perhaps politicians are in fact psychopaths. It got me looking up the definition of a psychopath. Judge for yourself how many of these criteria Tony Blair meets:

Personally, I make it at least half of them.

Utter madness! Bliar for Europe?

Dear God, please, no! Or rmaybe, just perhaps, France wants Britain out? Alternatively, Sarkozy recognizes that Blair failed to do anything of any use during the last British rotating presidency that the best way to hamstring the whole organization would be to put the useless, lying, egomaniacal shit in charge permanently.

Tony Blair could be EU President - Telegraph:
By Toby Helm and Bruno Waterfield in Lisbon
Last Updated: 5:47pm BST 19/10/2007

Tony Blair has been placed in the frame to become the first permanent President of the EU after France launched a campaign to install him in the powerful new Brussels job.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, touted the former Prime Minister as his preferred candidate after Gordon Brown and fellow leaders agreed the EU Reform Treaty, which establishes the new post from January 2009.

If you are already a Christian baptised in a trinitarian tradition, all you really need to do to be "converted" to Rome, is to undergo the Sacrament of Reconciliation ("confession"). Now, of course, it's perfectly possible that in a twenty-five minute private audience this morning with the Pope, Tony Blair may have already done so.

Part of the Sacrament is to perform a penance which is intended to help you reflect on the sinfulness of what you have just confessed and consider how you will avoid doing such things again.

What should brother Tony's penance be I wonder? For me, with some pretty venial sins to confess, it was to meditate on certain Psalms. But I hadn't gone against all the exhortations of the highest authorities in the church and sent men to kill and die in a far off land on a false prospectus in arrogant disregard of evidence collected by servants of the international community on the ground.

So maybe his penance should be to hold a proper inquiry into the decision to go to war and, when it is completed, apologise and face the consequences of his decisions like a man.

Technorati Tags: iraq, catholicism, penance, tony blair

There's often talk about the "younger generation" who have only ever known Tony Blair in charge in their political memories. Well, in a way that applies to me too. Of course at forty, I have more political memories than that (including writing, at age 11, to someone called Williams who was in charge of schools at the time, or so I thought, to complain about the discipline regime at my private preparatory school!), but I only really got involved in party politics after the 1997 General Election.

So far as I am aware my family had always voted Liberal. They were part of that Scottish cohort who were not in the Kirk (Tory party at prayer) and were not Catholic (who it was always said were instructed by their bishops to vote Labour), but Gospel Hall Brethren and so in that non-conformist set that gravitated in Scotland to the Liberals.

But, at public school, self interest put me off ever wanting to vote Labour (who would, we were all told, close down private schools) and, whilst my early career in the City was unashamedly inspired by the Thatcherite loads-a-money era, I could not stomach voting for a party that treated me as a gay man as inferior (don't argue with me here, they did, and as recent opinion polling amongst their members shows still do at heart). I had the great misfortune, at my second voting General Election, to live in the constituency of that odious woman woman Jill, now Baroness, Knight, author of the hated Section 28.

Despite all the promise of equality from Labour, I actually contacted Millbank during the 1997 campaign, the first in which I had gone so far as to actually read party manifestos, to ask whether Labour party policy of repeal of section 28 and equalisation of the age of consent were specific first term promises and was told they were not. So that settled me on joining the Lib Dems. And for a year and a half I was just that, a "sleeping" member, paying my dues (albeit at the rate of the minimum annual subscription per month in order to salve my conscience at not actually doing anything active!).

Whilst there was a certain feeling of relief that Labour had routed what had become a moribund and corrupt government, and some smiles at the "New Labour, New Britain" agenda, little did I know that the reign of Tony Blair would lead me to a deep loathing of national politics, the notion of the nation state even and crucially the role of an individual claiming to "lead" and "speak for" an entire nation of sixty million different opinions. The size of that first, and indeed second, majority, silenced real political debate as surely as a one party state would have done. Only the House of Lords, which I loathe as an institution, seemed willing and capable of opposing anything, and their days were numbered.

I am hard pressed to name anything I think Blair has done in his ten years that was done voluntarily and with good grace and for the better. Age of Consent and Section 28 were both changed in the end, but reluctantly, after European Court intervention in the case of the former and after unnecessary delay in the case of the latter. Devolution for Scotland and Wales was good, but in reality all but predated Blair in the form of the Scottish Constitutional Convention. Wealth inequality has been up and down, the Big Brother state has moved on apace, there feels like there has been just as much massaging of figures, and certainly more spin than ever before, and little if any feeling of a real ideology behind it all. I've never felt before that politics was merely a cynical exercise in winning elections to perpetuate one's own power at almost any cost.

At the same time I have flirted with Trots, and then "seen the cat", respectively looking for the small government option - either anarchist in the former case or "geo-libertarian" once I had had my eyes opened, precisely because, like nobody else before him, the smarmy, spinning, unassailable man at number ten had put me off government entirely. Two books that kicked off that search for a personal ideology are "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism (Intelligent Person's Guide Series)" (Conrad Russell) and "The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery and Destructive Economics" (Michael Rowbotham). And now not even the Lib Dems can adequately express my radicalism for economic and constitutional reform, to end protectionist monopoly and elected dictatorship respectively.

So it's good bye and good riddance Mr Blair. I'd rather you didn't take any international man of mystery jobs that would mean me continuing to see your smarmy git face on my television or newspapers ever again. In fact, maybe you'd consider going to Mars for a while. Thank goodness nothing, not even conversion to Rome, can bring you a plenary indulgence any more, and there remains a chance that you will be brought before some authority you might recognize at some point in your future, to answer for your actions.

Technorati Tags: political obituary, tony blair