Blair’s pretentious rant exposed an awkward truth about British people

Everybody agrees that Britain is in a terrible mess, and many promote their pet remedies to put the country back on the right track. Antidotes to the national malaise may be moral as well as social and economic, with Reform-run Kent County Council deciding on 21 May to begin full council meetings with the Lord’s Prayer and end them with singing “God Save the King”.

Reform council leader Linden Kemkaran described the Lord’s Prayer as a “shared spiritual template” and said Britain was a Christian country. A Green councillor proposed a motion on Kent’s water infrastructure, warning that the county was “sleepwalking into a water catastrophe,” with water outages, sewage discharges, unmeetable water demand from house builders and climate change, but debate on this was postponed until July.

A week later the predicted water catastrophe arrived for people living in 22,000 properties in east Kent as their taps went dry, lavatories ceased to function and they queued for bottles of water. South East Water (SEW) cheekily blamed its customers for using too much water because of high temperatures, an excuse going down badly in Kent – where I live – because the big water outages last winter, mostly around Tunbridge Wells, were blamed by SEW on too much rain bursting their pipes. As local anger grows, Kemkaran announced a new body to look at the Kent water supply problem, though without authority to do anything about it.

In its brief time in office, Reform in Kent has a track record of prioritising culture wars, announcing after its landslide electoral victory last year, that it was removing all transgender-related books from the children’s section of the 104 libraries run by the council. An investigation revealed, however, that no transgender books were in children’s libraries, though one called The Autistic Trans Guide to Life was found in the adult section of Herne Bay library.

The book purge debacle seemed comical to me at the time, but then I remembered the words of the German Jewish author Heinrich Heine 200 years ago who wrote that “where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings”. This thought is not an overreaction to Reform’s anti-woke pursuit of the culture war, but a recognition of the risk posed by populist, nativist movements like Reform in the UK and Maga Republicans in the US. Because they cannot deliver on real-world issues – like the supply of water – they double down on cultural issues like anti-immigrant and racial identity politics which are at the heart of their political appeal.

A further danger in Britain, spreading far beyond the pool of possible Reform sympathisers, is a pervasive sense that the standard of living is getting worse or stagnant. This combines with an exaggerated but morale-sapping belief that “Britain is broken”, opening their minds to plausible purveyors of political snake oil, advocating an ill-considered but superficially attractive national transformation that in practice will hasten rather than avert national decline. The Brexit referendum of 2016 is a gruesome example of this.

A grim sign of the current vulnerability of people in Britain to false prophets is the seriousness with which Sir Tony Blair’s pretentious rant about the poor state of the Labour party and Britain is being taken by otherwise serious pundits and politicians. Less than three months ago, this supposed seer was declaring that Britain “should have backed America from the very beginning” in its war against Iran. He advocated Britain joining an unwinnable war, from which today US President Donald Trump is trying desperately to extricate himself without too much humiliation. Hawkish American commentators describe this conflict as the greatest military failure in US history, one into which Blair would have plunged the UK, since, as an ally of America, “you had better show up when they want you to”.

“I have experience working with the Trump administration,” states Blair grandly – and this is all too true, as he is a member of “the Board of Peace” for Gaza. This has already earned a reputation as a dysfunctional, discredited and misnamed organisation, standing mutely by as some 900 Palestinians were killed by Israel in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire last October. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his plan is to occupy 70 per cent of Gaza, forcing its Palestinian population of two million into ever-deeper degradation and misery. Israeli defence minister Israel Katz says the long-term Israeli objective is mass expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza. None of these horrors, either underway or promised, have been condemned or criticised by Blair.

In his shameless obeisance to the super-rich and powerful, Blair resembles nobody so much as his former lieutenant Peter Mandelson. An explanation for the former prime minister’s otherwise inexplicable survival as an elder statesman is his talent for identifying and plugging into the fashionable political trend of the day. Right now, this is a call for “vision” and “a plan”, the lack of which supposedly capsized Sir Keir Starmer, so Blair calls for “a worked-out, coherent plan for the country in a fast-changing world”. The nature of this splendid plan is a mystery, but it fosters a misleading belief that Britain might be better off if it had its very own perestroika – radical restructuring – like that of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the 80s.

The analogy is not chosen at random: Gorbachev was a decent man and his vision of the autocratic Soviet Union transformed into a benign Swedish-type social democracy was attractive, though to my mind always doomed. In the event, the country broke up into a series of gangster republics, ultimately under the rule, in the case of Russia, of disaster-prone, secret policeman President Vladimir Putin.

The problem with visions and long-term plans in Britain or anywhere else is that the planners and visionaries never possess the leverage or the time to deliver on their promises – assuming they intended to keep them in the first place. The legacy of past errors is too great: good though it might be if the Government took control of South East Water or Thames Water, but this will not make up for the decades when pipes were not renewed or reservoirs dug. British universities teeter on the edge of bankruptcy and are imploding in quality, but this is the legacy of mistakes made 20 years ago which cannot be easily reversed.

A strength of Britain throughout its history is that it has eschewed visions and visionaries, caudillos – strong leaders – who promise to deliver the undeliverable. America long escaped the clutches of these toxic, national saviours, but the rise of Trump has seen 250 years of democracy unravel with horrifying speed.

In the case of the Soviet Union in the 80s and America over the last decade, the gravediggers of these countries are those who promised magically to revive them – and Britain is now getting all too close to the same precipice.

Further thoughts

Sherlock Holmes famously drew attention to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”. “But the dog did nothing in the night-time,” replies a perplexed police inspector. “That was the curious incident,” retorts Holmes.

But how would the great detective have responded had he been told that not one but 27 dogs, many of them large and powerful animals, had stayed mute or growled impotently during two ferocious wars that seriously damaged their vital interests?

Holmes would most likely have been dumbfounded, yet that is precisely what the 27 members of the EU are doing during the war in the Middle East as they watch US President Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu set the region ablaze and go far to wreck the world economy.

Amazingly, the EU has had little or no effective influence on the conflict, neither during the five-and-a-half week shooting war, which followed the US and Israeli attack on Iran between 28 February and 8 April, or during the subsequent shaky ceasefire.

Abdicating any political role, the main European powers have all behaved feebly, holding inconsequential meetings and explaining that they must keep in with Trump and America because they need their help to resist the Russians in Ukraine. But this excuse looks more and more pathetic, as it becomes obvious that the Ukraine war is stalemated and Russia is unable to make a decisive breakthrough.

But the 27 members of the EU remain paralysed, giving the occasional whimper of complaint about being ignored by Trump in both the Middle East and Ukraine. They have no ideas of their own on how to win or end these wars, presenting the Russian army as a terrifying military juggernaut, capable of sweeping on into Eastern and Central Europe, though it has been stalled in roughly the same positions for the last four years. But a European politician or commentator who suggests that the Russian threat is grossly inflated are accused of betrayal in the interests of the evil Putin.

Europe’s abdication as a geopolitical player is a strange phenomenon that continues to surprise me, one explanation being that the European political and military elite is simply too accustomed to acting only under American leadership to act independently – even when the leader is an unreliable crackpot who despises his allies.

Beneath the radar 

A politically-important division is emerging among experts in Russia on the Ukraine war between those who want to continue it, in order to win it by wearing the Ukrainians down through attritional warfare, and those who say this is not a recipe for victory but for endless unwinnable conflict.

A significant article in the magazine Russia in Global Affairs by Vasily Kashin, director of the Centre for Complex European and International Research at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, spells out what well-informed Russians believe about the likely outcome of Putin’s special military operation (SMO). It is interesting because it was allowed to appear, and because there is so little well-informed, objective analysis from either side during the war.

Kashin says that balance of forces between Russia and Ukraine is fairly even because Ukraine is “supported by 50 advanced economies internationally, while Russia’s allies are Belarus and North Korea”. Taking into account foreign supplied equipment and money, Ukraine roughly equals the Russian military budget and “exceeds Russian expenditure directly on the SMO”.

Though the Ukrainian population is smaller than Russia, it has conducted a general mobilisation, while Russia has “carried out only one mobilisation raising 300,000 men”. Russia may have more firepower and better air defence, but Ukraine is superior in tactical reconnaissance and communications, thanks to Western support: “In the use of drones – the key weapon of this war – the two sides are at a comparable level.”

Kashin concludes that historically wars between these two equally matched adversaries might go on for a long time but “very rarely end in the complete destruction of one side”.

What he does not say is that – given the original goal of Putin’s SMO was control of Ukraine – Russia’s failure to win is a defeat and, by not losing, Ukraine will be victorious. Kashin suggests a ceasefire along the present front line, which has always seemed to me to be a likely outcome.

Cockburn Picks 

There is a shortage of well-informed work by Iranians on the history of the past and present history of the Islamic Republic which is not rabidly hostile or, very occasionally, overly sympathetic to the regime, but I felt learned a lot from this long and timely interview with historian Ervand Abrahamian in the New Left Review No 157.