The latest edition of the Quarterly Review is out - includes long review of Blair's A Journey
RH
Quarterly Review Vol 4 No 3 (Autumn 2010)
EXTRACTS
AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
“There are plenty of people in Congress who think of themselves as
conservatives who would be happy to declare war against Iran or a lot
of other countries. I think they should consider what these wars
really mean. The foreign policy we’ve had since the Cold War is not
only immoral because it inflicts enormous casualties on civilian
populations, but it’s counterproductive too, because it creates a lot
of resentment toward the United States. Even when we’re not at war,
having hundreds of bases around the world and meddling in other
countries’ affairs creates enemies for us. Washington responds to
real
or imagined enemies by becoming even more interventionist, which only
makes things worse.”
RON PAUL
TONY BLAIR'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
“The lasting impression left by the book is not of a career
politician
but of an adolescent living out his fantasies and satisfying his
exhibitionist urges. When these inevitably lead to disaster, like
adolescents everywhere he refuses to take responsibility and drifts
ever further into a fantasy world in which he is never wrong, merely
misunderstood. That such a child was the most powerful man in Britain
for ten years is a truly frightening thought.”
ROBERT HENDERSON
BULLFIGHTING'S LINK TO ARCHAIC EUROPE
“The myth of Theseus, who slew the Marathonian bull and its son, the
Minotaur, freeing Athens of its onerous tribute to bull-worshipping
Crete, is one example of the Greek hero who specialised in the
killing
of oppressive monsters like the Minotaur and the Gorgon, just as
later
matadors were to dispatch the bull in the ring. It was against the
nature of the early Greeks ever to bend the knee to foreign despots
or
totalitarian culture. The bull, Taurus, was honoured with a
constellation in the sky but just above him lies the constellation of
Perseus, Greek destroyer of Asiatic monsters, drawn knife in hand.”
PETER STARK
SUICIDE IN NAZI GERMANY
“The 20-year old chauffeur Ordulf Thomas decided that life was too
boring and that he needed a change. So he shot himself in the
Grunewald forest in Berlin in 1928. In his note he told the police:
‘I
couldn’t care a less what you do with my remains. As far as I am
concerned you can put me on the Victory Column. So, that should do,
and I wish you much pleasure with my cadaver.’ A father who killed
himself told his daughter: ‘When you find this note, do whatever you
want, because I’m not coming back. I’m sick of you acting like an
animal. You have no idea what a bitch your mother was…Best wishes.
Your Father.’
FRANK ELLIS
THE POPE AND CARDINAL NEWMAN
“Benedict XVI’s recent visit to Britain, preceded by loud fanfare
about abuse in his church, was doubtless conceived in part to exploit
openings in these troubled realms, akin perhaps to decades of
diplomatic push to bring recalcitrant fringes of Europe back into
Christendom. With not atypical German naïve optimism, allied with a
soupçon of equally typical bürgerlich Anglophilia, the Bavarian pope
harboured high, even triumphalist hopes; and Newman as saint,
apotheosizing the original ‘Catholic Revival’ in post-Oxford Movement
England, must have struck him as a coup de grâce to set at the centre
of his trip – a perfect means for mounting an arguably native riposte
to the mouldy muddle of Rowan Williams-ism.”
STODDARD MARTIN
WHY EQUALITY IS NEITHER POSSIBLE NOR DESIRABLE
"Inequality we will always have with us. Humans are neither equal nor
interchangeable. Whether despite or because of the best intentions of
political leaders, efforts to eradicate economic inequality will
continue to cause incalculable damage. In the most innocuous
scenario,
politicians will tinker with tax codes and create perverse financial
incentives that will impede economic efficiency. At the other
extreme,
zealots will use arguments about inequality to rationalize lethal
egalitarian economic policies like the Soviet Union’s
collectivization
program in Ukraine – the Holodomor of 1932-1933 – in which six to
eight million peasants perished, or China’s even deadlier Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976. Wilkinson and
Pickett have given ammunition to the epigones of Stalin and Mao.”
MARK G. BRENNAN
CONTENTS
Editorial on Islam Derek Turner
Commonsense and conscience in Congress –an interview with Ron Paul
Classical democracy: a model for the modern world? Kenneth Royce
Moore
Last post for the Bronze Age in Catalonia? Peter Stark
The worst of both worlds – the crisis in American higher education
Ronald J. Granieri
The impossibility of equality Mark G. Brennan
Blair’s very, very long Journey Robert Henderson
Saint and scholars – the Pope’s hopes Stoddard Martin
The death wish in Das Reich Frank Ellis
Brown study Frank Ellis
Sigmund Freud, from myth to counter-myth Leslie Jones
Faith and enquiry in medieval Europe Jonathan M. Paquette
Happy talk Sagy Zwirn
Anglo-Saxon attitudes to women Sonya Jay Porter
Replay – The Bedford Incident Bill Hartley
Uncollected Folk Roy Kerridge
Taki’s Universe Taki
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Sample article
Blair’s very, very long Journey
ROBERT HENDESON endures the self-justificatory and selective memoirs
of one of the worst PMs of modern times
Blair takes 691 pages to say what could have been fitted comfortably
into 200. It is little more than an exercise in the author’s vanity.
The other problem with A Journey is Blair’s ineptitude as a writer
which extends not merely to tortured syntax, purple prose, the
presentation of banality as profundity, a mania for short sentences
and an addiction to cliché, but to a relationship with correct
punctuation which does not extend much beyond the use of the full
stop.
When it comes to their autobiographical offerings, Barack Obama and
Tony Blair have much in common. Both massage their past shamelessly.
Both are superficial in their approach to politics. Both unwittingly
tell you things about themselves that directly contradict the persona
they are carefully attempting to construct.
Blair also copies Obama in one highly suspect trait: he provides
acres
of dialogue. This is distinctly odd because, apart from a mention of
an “intermittently” kept diary in 1983-5 (p60), there is no
indication
that Blair has kept any contemporaneous record of his life.
This supposed conversation in the House of Commons lobby between
Blair
and Peter Mandelson shortly after the death of the Labour leader John
Smith in 1994 will give the flavour. Blair is pressing Mandelson to
support him rather than Gordon Brown for the vacant leadership:
“[Mandelson] ‘Now, let’s not run away with all this. Gordon is still
the front-runner, still the person with the claim.’
As ever with Peter in a situation like this, you could never be quite
sure what he was saying; but I was sure what I wanted to say.
‘Peter’, I said, ‘you know I love you, but this is mine. I am sure of
it. And you must help me to do it.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that,’ he said. For once, there was no
playfulness; and for a moment we stood, looking at each other by the
green leather-topped table at the north side of the Aye Lobby.
‘Peter,’ I said, putting a hand on each shoulder, ‘don’t cross me
over
this. This is mine. I know it and I will take it.’
‘You can’t be certain of that,’ he replied.
‘I understand.’ I spoke gently this time, the friendship fully back
in
my voice. ‘But just remember what I said.’
Someone entered the lobby. As if by telepathy, we moved apart and
went
in different directions.” (pp62/3)
Apart from the extreme improbability of anyone accurately remembering
a conversation from 16 years before, there is the oddity of a
relationship between two men in their forties rendered in a manner
disconcertingly reminiscent of a Mills & Boon novel by a man now aged
57. Note also Blair’s willingness to threaten someone he claims as a
close friend.
The man also has a curious lack of dignity. He does not seem to
understand that it is unseemly for a former prime minister to write
something like this:
“On that night of 12 May 1994, I needed that love that Cherie gave
me,
selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal
following my instinct… “ (p65)
Blair frequently builds up his character as being one thing, then
forgets the script and sabotages his intention. For example, he
constantly attempts to represent himself as being in politics not
from
any vulgar ambition but because he wishes to serve the country.
Suddenly this pops up:
“I was almost forty. I had been in Opposition for a decade. The
thought of another five years of merely incremental steps towards
change in the party that was so obviously needed, filled me with
dismay. If the steps were too incremental, we might fail again and I
would be fifty before even getting sight of government; and what was
the point of politics if not to win power, govern and put into
practice the policies you believe in?” (p51)
So, it was vulgar ambition after all.
Blair may not “do God” very much in A Journey, although he assures us
before he ends that “I have always been more interested in religion
than politics” (p690), but he certainly wants us to think that he was
in some mysterious way called to be the saviour of his country. Here
he is visiting the Commons for the first time before he was an MP:
“I walked into the cavernous Central Lobby where the public meet
their
MPs, and I stopped. I was thunderstruck. It just hit me. This was
where I wanted to be. It was very odd. Odd because so unlike me, and
odd because in later times I was never known as a ‘House Commons
man’.
But there and then, I had a complete presentiment: here I was going
to
be. This was my destiny. This was my political home. I was going to
do
whatever it took to enter it.” (p34)
Blair’s fraught relationship with Gordon Brown threads its way
through
the book with Blair’s character assessment of Brown – “ Political
calculation, yes. Political feelings, no. Analytical intelligence,
absolutely. Emotional intelligence, zero.” (p616) – bleakly
summarising the state of relations between them at the end.
Blair several times addresses the question of why he did not sack
Brown. He attempts to explain this by saying Brown was a brilliant
chancellor, but capsizes this line on p494 with “By then [2003], even
more so than in 2001, removing Gordon would have brought the entire
building tumbling down around our ears. He had massive support in the
party and had backing among powerful people in the media.”
So there you have it. He did not sack Brown for the crudest of
political reasons, to keep himself in power.
Tellingly, having described Brown as a great chancellor and a
brilliant intellect throughout the book, Blair is silent on Brown’s
failure to foresee the financial disaster we are currently enjoying.
Instead he employs one of his favourite scapegoats, the incompetent
expert:
The failure was one of understanding. We didn’t spot it. You can
argue
we should have, but we didn’t. Furthermore, and this is vital for
where we go now on regulation, it wasn’t that we were powerless to
prevent it even if we had seen it coming; it wasn’t a failure of
regulation in the sense that we lacked the power to intervene. Had
regulators said to the leaders that a huge crisis was about to break,
we wouldn’t have said: There’s nothing we can do about it until we
get
more regulation through We would have acted. But they didn’t say
that.” (pp666/7)
Yet the greatest political hate object of Tony Blair is not Gordon
Brown but the Labour Party. Tony Benn’s views amounted to a
“virus” (p45) and old Labour was “more like a cult than a
party” (p89)
before Blair appeared on a white progressive horse to turn it into
New
Labour. How did he do this? By ignoring the party:
“In order to circumvent the party, what I had done was construct an
alliance between myself and the public.”
Blair is also consistently snide about his immediate predecessors as
leader, always decrying them not only for their politics but their
personal failings, for example, John Smith was “a stupendous
toper” (p37). Unsurprisingly in the light of this attitude, Blair
toyed with the idea of bringing Lib Dem MPs into his cabinet because
“I was closer in political outlook to some of them than to parts of
the old left of my own party [and] …Re-uniting the two wings of
progressive social democracy appealed to my sense of
history.” (pp118/119)
There are a few genuinely startling things in the book. Take this
anecdote about the Sinn Féin leaders:
“In October 2006, while I was at St Andrews for the Northern Ireland
negotiation with Ian Paisley and Sinn Féin, General Sir Richard
Dannatt, the new Chief of General Staff, gave an interview to the
Daily Mail essentially saying that we had reached the end in Iraq, we
were as much a risk to security as keeping it and we should transfer
our attention to Afghanistan where, in effect, we had a better
chance.
As you can imagine, I wasn’t best pleased, my humour not improved by
Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams telling me the IRA would never have
had one of their generals behaving like that.” (p470)
“One of their generals”? Sinn Féin has always claimed to be separate
from the Provisional IRA. Improbable as this may seem to most people,
this line was always supported by British governments from John Major
onwards. Yet here we have Blair claiming that the two most
influential
public faces of Sinn Féin casually admitted that they directly
controlled the Provos .
Those who still believe that the police enforce the law without
political interference will have their illusions shattered by
passages
such as this on the fuel duty protests which briefly panicked Blair’s
government in 2000:
“I looked at the police officer. ‘Tell me what you are going to do to
stop the protests.’
‘Stop the protests?’ he said, his eyes narrowing slightly. ‘You mean
you want us to prevent them taking place?’
‘Yes,’ I said, very calm. ‘And I want you the oil companies to
instruct your drivers to cross the picket lines, and if they don’t,
for reasons anything other than fear of violence to their person, I
want you to sack them. And I would like the army to come in and if
necessary drive your tankers, and if they meet with any violence from
protesters, I want you the police to deal with them very firmly, and
if not, to let the army take care of them. They’re very good at
it.” (p295).
Then there is Blair’s appetite for gratuitous war-mongering which is
surely greater than any other British PM. His utter recklessness is
shown when he tries unsuccessfully to persuade Bill Clinton to commit
150,000 men to a land invasion of Kosovo with half coming from
Europe
despite the fact that he admits he “had no clear reason to believe
Europe would contribute any troops other than UK ones…” (p239).
Despite the mess left by the Kosovo adventure, Blair learns nothing:
“I’m afraid, however, that Kosovo had not diminished my appetite for
such intervention where I thought it essential to resolve a problem
that needed resolution, and where a strong moral case could be
made.”(p246).
Though he does not realise it, Blair is carrying on the old imperial
idea of bringing civilisation to the benighted natives, believing
“We thought the ultimate triumph of our way of life was
inevitable.”(p665).
Blair is remarkably dishonest in his omissions. Take immigration:
“The truth is that immigration, unless properly controlled, can cause
genuine tensions, put a strain on limited resources and provide a
sense in the areas into which migrants come in large numbers that the
community has lost control of its own future. In our case this
concern
was the numbers involved. It was not inspired by racism. And it was
widespread. What’s more, there were certain categories of it from
certain often highly troubled parts of the world, with their own
internal issues, from those troubled parts of the towns and villages
in Britain . Unsurprisingly, this caused real anxiety.” (p524)
A reader unfamiliar with Blair’s premiership might imagine from those
words that he made strenuous efforts to control the influx. The
reality is that he presided over the greatest surge in immigration
into Britain ever seen. Yet Blair does not acknowledge this and fails
to mention the single biggest encouragement to immigration during his
time in No 10 – the failure to put restrictions on the movement of
people from the new EU entrants such as Poland, which resulted in at
least half a million migrants in a very short time. All Blair does is
complain about asylum seekers.
The lasting impression left by the book is not of a career politician
but of an adolescent living out his fantasies and satisfying his
exhibitionist urges. When these inevitably lead to disaster, like
adolescents everywhere he refuses to take responsibility and drifts
ever further into a fantasy world in which he is never wrong merely
misunderstood. That such a child was the most powerful man in Britain
for ten years is a truly frightening thought.
ROBERT HENDERSON is a freelance writer living in London
http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/
Politics with the cant taken out
de Graeme
> http://www.quarterly-review.org/id3.html
>
> Quarterly Review Vol 4 No 3 (Autumn 2010)
>
> EXTRACTS
> AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
<Huge Snip>
>
> ROBERT HENDERSON is a freelance writer living in London
>
> http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/
> Politics with the cant taken out
Malcolm was right, the pretendy RH couldn't resist buying a copy of
Blair's autobiography!
dG
RH
Nkosi (ama-ecosse)
>
> - Show quoted text -
No you obviously stole the copy from Camden Public Library
Nkosi
de Graeme
No doubt while he was in making the most of their free internet
access.
dG