It’s currently the main ‘splash’ story, and while it doesn’t carry as fantastic a picture as accompanied my first piece for them, it nonetheless looks quite smart.

It makes the point that whoever wins the US election tomorrow, they have a completely dreadful legacy to deal with in Iraq, a crisis which the surge, despite John McCain’s enthusiastic embrace, has done nothing but exacerbate.

There were, however, some good points made and I thought I’d just pick a few out…

Immigration: On the two recent reports that emerged, one saying that immigrants contributed £6bn to the UK economy and one saying they are putting public services under strain, one audience member made a killer point: this means that immigrants are effectively being ripped off by the British state – contributing productivity and tax while getting sub-standard service provision in return. Philippe LeGrain, author of Immigrants: Why Your Country Needs Them was very impressive (despite his monotonous voice), and made some really good points. One is that the method of calculation used to generate the £6bn figure was just poor: all it basically said was ‘more people = more growth’. Actually, because of the social nature of productivity and work, it’s never as simple as just measuring the output of the immigrants themselves; you need to take the social effects into consideration. E.g., a Polish nanny not only earns a wage, but allows a British doctor to return to work, who then helps to cure people’s ailments and improve their productivity; immigrants not only produce but consume, i.e., they boost demand and thus create jobs for others. Also, he pointed out that the government’s ‘points’ system is stupid: governments simply cannot predict who the economy will need or who will make a useful contribution to society. History is replete with examples of unskilled or semi-skilled immigrants launching successful businesses, inventing new products or simply bringing up children who go on to make huge contributions to society.

Terrorism: Frank Furedi launched his new book, Invitation to Terror, which sounds like it contains interesting insights. One point he made was that while terrorism can destroy physical and human capital, it often has the indirect effect of creating human capital, i.e., rather than the mass panic and selfishness expected by elites, people react to adversity with solidarity and kindness (this was drawn from personal testimony of a 7/7 survivor, and reinforced by further such testimony from the floor), becoming more human in the process. This struck me as intuitively right, although of course this only applies to context of limited terror; where suicide bombings, etc, are a daily occurrence (e.g., Iraq), this does appear to create social rifts. Nonetheless, what struck me was that the social capital created by terror in the West is often directly undermined by elites’ interventions. E.g., in the UK, following the attempted terrorist attacks in Glasgow recently, the government issued calls for restraint in the clear expectation that anti-Muslim violence would ensue; in fact, no such thing happened and nor does it happen generally. But by stoking the fear of Islamophobia, we are encouraged to think the worst of each other and Muslims’ sense of otherness is reinforced. Likewise in the US, in the wake of 9/11 the population spontaneously organised itself to donate blood, give money to support groups, etc. The government’s response was to demobilise the people by telling them to “go shopping more”.

Africa: one person I found very impressive at the Battle for Africa strand was ‘Dapo Oyewole from Nigeria, Executive Director of the Centre for African Policy and Peace Strategy. Highly intelligent, humane and critical – definitely someone worth keeping an eye out for. Conversely, the less said about Paul Collier, the better.

But yesterday’s media circus is worth looking at in its own right. You might remember several months ago a highly embarassing leaked memo from 10 Downing Street in which Blair’s spin doctors proposed that Blair should embark on a “farewell tour”, using “different forms of transport”, embracing “open spaces, the arts and businesses”. Blair must “be carefully positioned as someone who, while not above politics, is certainly distancing himself from the political village”, and by whipping up the crowds would depart leaving the crowds begging for more to “be the star who won’t even play the last encore”.

It’s difficult to convey in words just how absurd this plan was – the idea that by jumping on a bus and “embacing open spaces” he could somehow transform himself from a figure less popular than Margaret Thatcher (an incredible feat) into someone that people would pant over and beg to stay. More than anything it exposed the incredible disconnect at the heart of government – the cloud cuckoo land that the policy wonks and spinmeisters inhabit, isolated from the people Blair was meant to serve and lead.

Yesterday showed that perhaps these individuals had experienced a rude awakening. Rather than leaving the British people wanting more, the collective reaction seems more a grumpy, exasperated sigh of “good riddance”. Where, I would like to know, were the spin doctors even able to find 250 people to line the approach to the Sedgefield Labour Club who would hold up signs (all curiously on identically-sized placards, as if they had been supplied them along with felt-tipped pens) saying “Britain is Better”, “I ‘heart’ Tony”, “we love you”, etc, etc? They must have been carefully hand-picked, each and every one – for a farewell tour around the country would have been more likely to elicit at best apathy and at worst protests and egg-throwing.


Even the venue had been carefully chosen; rather than a UK-wide farewell tour, or even a grand hall, the meagre crowd was packed into the tiny bar of the Sedgefield Labour Club to give the impression of a popular send-off. It was a visible signal of Blair’s shrunken public support and his diminished political vision. Yesterday was an incredible piece of political theatre, a desperate attempt to revive the ill-placed euphoria and pop-star-esque adulation that surrounded a much younger, less tarnished Blair in 1997 when he first swept to power on the back of huge disaffection with 17 years of Tory mis-rule. It was embarrassing to see him hugging and kissing ageing ‘groupies’ holding up their carefully hand-made signs, as if he was somehow still popular, and this was somehow spontaneous in a way the ’97 celebrations were.

Blair’s resignation speech itself exposed many of his critical failures just as he sought to eulogise his own performance and excuse his mistakes, and ultimately fell flat. There was almost a pleading tone in his voice as he implored: “go back to 1997. Think back. No, really, think back. Think about your own living standards then in May 1997 and now.” In a long ‘please understand me’ section to the speech, he suggested, “Decision-making is hard. Everyone always says: ‘Listen to the people.’ The trouble is they don’t always agree.” So how did Blair make his decisions? Was it to listen to some of those people, the ones he supposedly represents, and promote some of their interests, which is surely what traditional political practice has always been about? No: “Your duty is to act according to your conviction… Sometimes, as with the completely unexpected, you are alone with your own instinct.”

This is where all of Blair’s failings as a leader ultimately flow from: his ‘alone’ness, his disconnection from society, his Messianism, his policies born of personal conviction and moral faith. Although he will be particularly remembered for this in foreign policy, it was also readily apparent in domestic policy, too. Even apparently progressive policies were rammed through as articles of faith and without deep roots in society have been defended coercively. This is nowhere more obvious than in new hate crime legislation which penalises racist or anti-religious speech; rather than reflecting public opinion or leading it by engagement with the masses, the law is used to dictate and police it – while the masses themselves are still objects of suspicion, as betrayed by the knee-jerk alarums sounded at every election when the BNP is (always erroneously) expected to make massive gains. The dogma that private is better than public has been another article of faith for Blair, ramming through plans for PFIs, PPPs, Foundation Hospitals and City Academies long before there was any proof of their efficacy, and with little support in the country for such privatising moves. Attempts to reach out to the electorate through devolution have encountered little but apathy.

But, of course, it is in foreign policy that this Messianic quality of Blair’s manifested itself most starkly, the international apparently presenting itself almost as a tabula rasa to the Prime Minister, or a world of darkness in which he could shed righteous light. Naturally this is most obvious with Iraq but as some commentators are only belatedly realising, Iraq was simply the bloody conclusion to an interventionist spree that stretches back through Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Kosovo. As liberal interventionists continue to demand intervention in Sudan, it is clear that the lessons of these years have not been learned; the focus is very much on this botched operation, handily blamed on the USA, rather than on the problems of intervention itself. And of course it is very easy to blame Blair himself; as he says, “I decided we should stand shoulder to shoulder with our oldest ally. I did so out of belief… I ask you to accept one thing. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That is your call. But believe one thing if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our cou
ntry. “

However, it’s just too easy to write off Iraq as the folly of one individual – we are all collectively to blame for not doing enough to stop the war, not just Tony “Bliar”. But this ‘please understand me’ plea, couched in the language of agonised moral choice, reveals Blair’s degraded view of democracy. It was his choice, his alone, isolated on his pedestal; our role as the electorate is simply to judge it after the fact – that tiny role is “our call”. It is entirely typical of this attitude that rather than the “farewell tour” around Britain that his spin doctors had initially planned, Blair plans to embark on a 7-week world tour to remove himself from domestic politics.

A politician’s political vision, Blair said, “is painted in the colours of the rainbow, and the reality is sketched in the duller tones of black, white and grey”. The latter part was at least true, but his vision was always degraded and grey – albeit shrouded in the euphoria of novelty in 1997. That greyness found its final expression in the flat ending of his speech: “It has been an honour to serve [Britain]. I give my thanks to you, the British people, for the times I have succeeded, and my apologies to you for the times I have fallen short. Good luck.” He then paused – the speech was over. Silence. The audience, so carefully stage-managed until then, had missed their cue. And then, a shrug: that’s all, folks. Cue applause, cheering, tears. But that flat, botched ending to the farewell speech seemed to sum it all up – far from being the great statesmen he so desperately wants to be remembered as, he flops, going out on a shrug.