Amongst the acres of hagiography written about our departing Prime Minister a number of glaring inconsistencies leap out at this reader about the decade of deceit that is drawing to a close. Let’s look at some of the most glaringly obvious of these…

1. He produced great constitutional change

The first great myth about Blair’s time in office is that he was responsible for the country’s constitutional transformation. This is arrant nonsense. He grudgingly inherited the reality of devolution in Scotland, which had been created from the hard work of a civic based constitutional movement, not handed down as so much benevolent crumbs from a Labour government running scared by support for independence. His input was first to install the tax-raising clause in the referendum (eagerly dubbed the Tartan Tax by the Unionist press in anticipation of its rejection). His wrecking bill failed. He followed this by describing Holyrood as a ‘parish council.’

In Northern Ireland, touted as Blair’s greatest achievement, a far stronger claim for those responsible for transforming the political landscape are Gerry Adams and Mo MNwlam (in that order). Adams’ bravery in guiding the republican movement to abandon its armed struggle and disband the IRA can’t be underestimated. But this story doesn’t fit the fast-building myth-making we’re experiencing.

2. He created a Britain “more at ease with itself”

A bewildering raft of commentators have been banging on about Blair’s legacy is to leave Britain a country “more at ease with itself”.

Having systematically and shamelessly induced fear and distrust in people it’s difficult to see where this claim comes from. Remember the tanks at Heathrow? The CCTV that follows us everywhere? The ASBO culture that acts a youth policy? Should we assume that the growth of the BNP in England or the SNP in Scotland is a sign of our being at ‘ease with ourselves’? Or the existence of Bellmarsh? This vague notion has little value or reality. Maybe ne of the Dimbleby’s doesn’t wear a tie n Question Time but children are still seized from their beds and locked up in Dungavel.

3. He was a Great Communicator

That Blair was a great communicator is a line re-tread by journos up and down the land, but is it true?

Feebly we are offered his line about Diana being the “People’s Princess”, a line so fabulously cheesy, incoherent and plainly nonsensical it is staggering. His oratory was stilted, staccato and famously verb free. His PR was good but contrived by backstage henchmen and often to cover-up policy that was wafer-thin, dysfunctional (or often both).

4. He was an international statesman – responsible for the Blair doctrine – Liberal Interventionism

The greatest lie about Blair – put about by his incessant media team is the nauseating idea of his ‘liberal interventionism’. Pundits casually tag on Iraq to his checklist of achievements and failures, as if you can equate unleashing a savage round of slaughter and mass confusion which have destabilised the geopolitics of the world with, say, child family tax credits.

Writing from Baghdad Patrick Cockburn wrote recently “On a quiet day yesterday police picked up 21 bodies of murdered men. Nobody knows how many corpses lie at the bottom of the river or in shallow graves in the desert.” Four years ago British troops distributed a message from Blair promising: “a peaceful, prosperous Iraq, run by and for the Iraqi people.” Four years on, none of this is true.

5. He tackled global poverty

Blair has made a great play of his international commitments. It’s an unspoken link to his spurious Christianity. The reality is he liked hanging out with Bono and being interviewed by Bob Geldof. This sort of posturing allowed Gordon Brown to attend the Make Poverty History March despite his neo-liberal policies being the focus of its anger.

The G8 agreed to increase aid from rich countries by $48bn a year by 2010. When Tony Blair announced this to parliament, he said that “in addition … we agreed to cancel 100% of the multilateral debts” of the most indebted countries. He also stated that aid would come with no conditions attached. These were big claims, all of which can now be shown to be false.

In recent evidence to the Treasury committee, Gordon Brown made the astonishing admission that the aid increase includes money put aside for debt relief. So the funds rich countries devote to writing off poor countries’ debts will be counted as aid. Russia’s increase in “aid” will consist entirely of write-offs. A third of France’s aid budget consists of money for debt relief; much of this will be simply a book-keeping exercise worth nothing on the ground since many debts are not being serviced. The debt deal is not “in addition” to the aid increase, as Blair claimed, but part of it.

Far from representing a “100%” debt write-off, the deal applies initially to only 18 countries, which will save just $1bn a year in debt-service payments. The 62 countries that need full debt cancellation to reach UN poverty targets are paying 10 times more in debt service. And recently leaked World Bank documents show that the G8 agreed only three years’ worth of debt relief for these 18 countries. They state that “countries will have no benefit from the initiative” unless there is “full donor financing”. In this like much else his claims are overblown or non-existent.

6. He made climate change a world issue

Tony Blair regularly made the claim that “Climate change is one of the most important challenges facing our planet today”. But what did he actually do about this? It was, he claimed ne of the great benefits of his special relationship with George Bush that he could influence American policy and bring them on board for Kyoto. This never happened. While early noises were positive nothing came of this. In fact its possible to chart the influence the other way from the Us onto the UK policy. In 2005 he said (on 15 September at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York) : “I’m changing my thinking about this.” Adding: “no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem”; instead, what countries would be prepared to do is “develop the science and technology in a beneficial way.” The main question, Blair argued, was how to put incentives in place to do that, in circumstances where “I don’t think people are going to start negotiating another major treaty like Kyoto.” This is one of his most lauded victories and is in reality one of his greatest failures. Like his recent rejection of taking seriously his carbon footprint by curtailing his flying, Blair is strong on rhetoric and pitifully weak in practice.

“I personally think these things are a bit impractical, actually to expect people to do that,” Mr Blair told Sky News in January. “It’s like telling people you shouldn’t drive anywhere.”

7. He has created a more open society

Another of the key claims made for Blair’s legacy is that he has created a ‘more open society’. It’s another one of those causal and hazy claims its both difficult to prove or deny. Proponents point to the signing of the Freedom of Information Act (2000), whist opponents point to its mishandling and misappropriation whilst also arguing that the most important and grave areas (such as the police and military) are protected from proper scrutiny and transparency.
As I write the news flashes up that the frontline firearms and surveillance officers involved in the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station will not face a disciplinary tribunal, the police watchdog announced today (see 2 ‘a country more at ease with itself’).

He leaves a climate of fear and a (perhaps healthy) distrust and cynicism about politicians cultivated by a string of ‘scandals’ and abject cronyism. The public are always sold the erosion of civil liberties on the basis that decent citizens have nothing to fear. And we, the citizens, can easily feel the current move is all about the “other” – terrorists, paedophiles, anti-social yobs, Muslims, young blacks, the mentally ill. We always think it is other people’s liberty that is being traded, which somehow makes it all right. We do not realise that liberty is not divisible in this way.

As Helena Kennedy QC wrote in 2004: “Anti-terror laws cannot be vacuum packed; they seep into the policing culture and create new paradigms of state power. During a visit to India this spring, the home secretary suggested that governments may have to consider whether the burden of proof might have to be lowered from “beyond reasonable doubt” to the civil test of the “balance of probabilities” in terrorist trials. Two days later, the prime minister agreed that such a change should be considered, and he went further, suggesting that the lower standard might also apply to other serious crime.

What is introduced today for terrorism almost invariably enters general usage shortly thereafter. The right to silence was first emasculated in terrorism cases in Northern Ireland in 1988, but the erosion of the right was extended into all domestic law in the UK in 1994. The proposal to lower the standard of proof is now part of the new “pre-emptive” civil order proposals for terrorists, coming before parliament in the next session.”

The veil fell revealing the truth about the sort of organisation and culture he’d created most famously when an elderly party member was thrown out of the party conferece in 20005. Walter Wolfgang, from London, was ejected from the hall after shouting “nonsense” as Foreign Secretary Jack Straw defended Iraq policy.

8. He’s created a more egalitarian, less hierarchical Britain

Is New Labour little more than, as Robin Ramsay famously described them “the last dribble of Thatcherism down the leg of British politics”? I think not. Last month’s Sunday Times Rich List recorded that the richest 1,000
people in Britain more than trebled their wealth under Blair. Their fortunes grew by 20 percent last year alone, to a combined £360 billion.

London has been described as a “magnet for billionaires, ” attracted by the UK’s reputation as an “on-shore tax-haven” in which the wealthy—many of whom earned their fortunes through asset-stripping, privatization and financial speculation—pay next to nothing on their incomes. In contrast, the number of people living in poverty in Britain last year rose from 12.1 million to 12.7 million, a rise of 600,000 people, whilst the number of poor children increased by 200,000 to 3.8 million between 2005 and 2006.

9. He’s transformed the Labour Party

Well he did that. Apart from moving the party away from its core ideals he also eviscerated its membership.

The membership figure quoted by Labour headquarters in April of 2006 – a number that is rarely released and has to be extracted from them with thumbscrews – was 248,294. It was met with disbelief. It probably came from 2003 and included tens of thousands who had left the party over the Iraq war, or who were six months or more in arrears with their subscriptions. By July of that year a new organisation called Save the Labour Party forced HQ to confess to a figure of 208,000: half as many members as there had been when Blair won the 1997 election, and nowhere near the million members John Prescott used to boast of as being the party’s achievable goal. People have left Labour in droves.

It’s got worse since then. Labour Party membership has declined dramatically since 1997 and is now below the 200,000 mark – the lowest level since Ramsay MacDonald split the party in the 1930s. The membership has grown weary of being implicated in what the media call a “conspiracy of lies,” and resentful of arrogant leadership. A YouGov poll presented to the Compass conference on 17 June found that only 25 percent of Labour Party members believe they influence Party policy, while three-quarters felt policy had been hijacked by rich donors whose influence has grown as membership has shrunk. All of which has ed t the issue barely whispered amongst the deluge of warm congratulations this week: cash for peerages

10. He goes out on a wave of popularity

Blair leaves at a time not of his choosing – an even more detested in Britain than his mentor Margaret Thatcher—officially the most hated prime minister in recent history. Opinion polls record that his legacy is one soaked in the blood of the preemptive war and occupation of Iraq. Half of the population believe it is for this reason that Blair will find his place in the history books.

Blair leaves office as an unindicted war criminal and the first sitting prime minister in history to be interviewed as part of a police investigation (the “cash for honours” scandal).

The elections saw Labour lose control in Scotland for the first time in 50 years, and delivered the party its worst result in Wales since 1918. In England, where Labour was already at an unprecedented low, it was wiped out in 90 local authorities and lost almost 500 councillors. Overall, its share of the vote stands at just 27 percent, under conditions in which turnout never went much beyond 50 percent.

Though his departure this week was a contrived stunt there should be no doubt he leaves a discredited figure, forced out because he’d become a liability.

www.1820.org.uk

The book collects amusing pieces from 100 bloggers. I’m in it but you shouldn’t let that put you off.

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Go on. ]]> http://sharpener.johnband.org/2007/03/shaggy-blog-stories/feed/ 0 http://sharpener.johnband.org/2007/02/649/ http://sharpener.johnband.org/2007/02/649/#comments Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:22:03 +0000 http://www.thesharpener.net/2007/02/23/649/ Camelot runs the SOCA
The lottery of crime-fighting

Anyone who didn’t believe in karma should take a peek at what’s going on in the Antarctic Ocean. As Associated Press reports: “The crew of a Japanese whaling ship (the Nisshin Maru) stranded in Antarctic waters by a fire that killed one seaman were trying to repair its engines yesterday so that they could reach safety by their own power rather than accept a tow from Greenpeace.”

The news that the Nisshin Maru is the only ship in the whaling fleet able to process whale carcasses, and the season may have to be abandoned if the ship is inoperable will no doubt make your heart break. But there’s a more serious side, if the ship breaks up it will cause havoc to the delicately balanced eco-community of the region.

It’s another piece of great PR for Greenpeace, fresh from their legal triumph over Blair’s dodgy consultation process on new nuclear things, but the environmental campaigners are are facing their own challenges. Greenpeace’s brand of direct action and well managed media messages faces a new challenge from the most right-wing communists you’ll ever meet. In the latest spate of attacks on charitable status after the Smith Institute contoversy, Thomas Deichmann writing in Spiked! challenges Greenpeace’s charitable status arguing that they act ‘politically’.

Keen readers will recall that Deichmann is a stalwart of the ex-Revolutionary Communist Party / Living Marxism group. He focuses on Greenpeace’s direct action against GM foods and suggests such misbehaviour is quite at odds with Greenpeace’s “charitable status”. As GM watch argues: “To judge by Deichmann’s other writings, however, his concern about trespassing in barns and sticking labels on supermarket products, does not necessarily extend to more serious lawbreaking – crimes like torture, rape, mutilation and murder.” As ever in these propaganda wars, things are not as they seem.

GM Watch continue’s: “Prior to his reinvention as a GM expert, Deichmann was perhaps best known for his writing on the Bosnian war. In one of his pieces on Bosnia, Deichmann accused British journalists of fabricating evidence of imprisonment and atrocities at the Serb-controlled camp at Trnopolje. The magazine that published his claims was sued out of existence. The court found, as did war crimes tribunals at the Hague, that – contrary to Deichmann’s claims – Trnopolje was a camp where Muslims were undoubtedly imprisoned and where many were beaten, tortured, raped and killed by their Serb guards.”

Deichmann’s anti-Greenpeace article comes courtesy of Sp!ked, but Deichmann has spoken on GM crops and the Third World for Spiked’s sister organisation, the Institute of Ideas (IoI). Both IoI and Sp!ked are the successors to LM – the magazine which published the Trnopolje claims that led to its demise. Deichmann is editor in chief of Novo, LM’s sister magazine in Germany. Deichmann’s book on GM was published by Novo’s publishing house.

GM’s Jonathan Mathews argues: “This is an incestous and self-perpetuating world of undisclosed affiliations within which “experts” are reinvented and the truth subjugated according to the ideological need of the time. In recent years the LM network, to which Deichmann belongs, has promoted an extreme libertarian ideology that leads them to be ultra-relaxed about crimes like paedophilia, race hate etc., but to fiercely oppose any kind of restrictions on technologies like nuclear power, genetic engineering and human cloning, or on the corporations that promote them.”

In order to punch above their tiny weight, the LM network often hide their affiliations and engage in infiltration of media organisations; or operate via front groups or by colonising existing lobby groups. You can see or hear them regularly across the media – Claire Fox (or sometimes Foster) is a regular on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, Question Time etc Ironically, these front groups often enjoy charitable status.

The irony doesn’t stop there. Deichmann argues Greenpeace should have its charitable status removed because it disseminates “unscientific opinion on scientific issues”. Interesting, given that the LM network and its various fronts have been in the thick of climate change denial.”

More on Deichmann.

More on the LM network and its various guises.

Or read Deichmann’s Just How charitable is Greenpeace? Here.

But the Nisshin Maru and Arctic Sunrise – like Greenpeace and the LM Group have some previous. Only last year they collided in Australian Antarctic Territory in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

According to an ABC report, Shane Rattenbury from Greenpeace said that the Arctic Sunrise had been observing their activists onboard inflatable zodiacs as they painted the words “whale meat from sanctuary” on the side of the Japanese supply vessel, Oriental Bluebird, shortly before the collission occurred. According to Mr Rattenbury, it appeared to be a deliberate move by the Japanese Factory ship.

“At the time we were over a kilometre from the Nisshin Maru – it had been tied up with another vessel making transfers, it then pulled away, it had to come around the vessel that it had been transferring from and had to head directly toward the Arctic Sunrise,” he said. “There were no other vessels in the area and there was no reason to head towards us, the Arctic Sunrise was virtually stopped at the time.”

“There is no way to describe this as anything but a deliberate ramming which placed the safety of our ship and the lives of our crew in severe danger.” said Rattenbury. He said that the Nisshin Maru is more than twice as long and six times heavier than the Arctic Sunrise. The impact has left the Sunrise “battered and bruised” but with no crew members were injured.

Statements by both parties conflict as to when the collision occurred and who caused the collision, but the video of the incident on the Greenpeace site clearly shows the Nisshin Maru cutting across the path of the Arctic Sunrise in breach of the collision avoidance rules at sea.

As these boats and these environmental issues collide, groups like Greenpeace and the LM group will clash over ‘the truth’. But increasingly being a ‘climate-change denier’ may become the unacceptable face of capitalism’.

One look at Sp!ked (‘online and off-message’) shows how consistently anti-environmental the ‘off-message’ is. Headlines such as: “Greenpeace and the courts have delayed New Labour’s energy white paper. That’s no victory – for you, me or the planet” or “For a government whose transport policy is to punish motorists, the 1.5million who signed a petition against road-pricing are a political pollutant” show the tone.

At least with Greenpeace its funding is clear. It’s a membership organisation with 2 and a half million members worldwide. How are Sp!ked and the Institute of Ideas financed? They say: “spiked relies for its existence on donations from readers, sponsorship from a variety of institutions and companies and contributions from founding investors.”

1820.org.uk

And here is some more evidence for the prosecution: grave robbing.

With the corpse of Billy Cox over his shoulder, Cameron declared the 15 year-old’s murder tells us…

…our society is badly broken and we need to make some big changes, starting now.

Needless to say, Blair – rightly – denounced the sickening hyperbole of it all:

This tragedy is not a metaphor for the state of British society, still less for the state of British youth today, the huge majority of whom are responsible and law-abiding young people.

If only he didn’t have previous form on the issue himself. Witness Blair’s wailing and gnashing of teeth over the still-warm cadaver of murdered toddler Jamie Bulger in 1993. The freakish murder he said was…

…the ugly manifestation of a society that is becoming unworthy of the name.

And the law and order arms race between Labour and the Conservatives was born. It goes without saying that we were no more up to our knees in murdered toddlers in 1993 than we are murdered teenagers in 2007.

Cameron might be a new dog but he knows the old tricks.

Update: Nick Robinson makes the same point.