January 21, 2011
Blair’s Heirs
The other day I noted the sheer scale and audacity of Coalition lies and u-turns. My intended point was that the volume of dishonesty is staggering, and has potentially corrosive impacts upon our politics in the long term.
My piece was cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy. Sadly, LibCon is no longer a place for reasoned exchange. The fate of any highly successful blog is (almost) inevitably an exponential increase in morons until sensible debate is suffocated.
Still, amidst the whataboutery and “Labour also lied; two wrongs make a right!” lines of “argument”, something vaguely sensible was being articulated. Namely, that even if I’m right that the scale of Coalition dishonesty is astonishing, this isn’t wholly new. So it’s worth asking: where did it come from?
By sheer co-incidence, Tony Blair has again been up before the pointless farce of the Chilcot Inquiry. Aside from giving him the opportunity to intone about the threat of Iran – whilst straight-facedly denying that invading their immediate neighbours to the west and east has made that worse! – we also know that:
Summing up the contents of the statements, [Blair] said he had told Mr Bush: “You can count on us, we are going to be with you in tackling this, but here are the difficulties.”
The message he wanted to get across, he added, was “whatever the political heat, if I think this is the right thing to do I am going to be with you, I am not going to back out if the going gets tough. On the other hand, here are the difficulties and the UN route is the right way to go”.
One reason Chilcot is a farce is, precisely, that any remotely impartial spectator already knows Blair lied about Iraq. And whatever Chilcot determines, there will be no consequences for Tony.
Regardless of retrospective justifications offered by the Iraq conflict’s apologists, never forget that what clinched the Parliamentary vote for war was the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and was an immediate and dangerous threat. But that was complete baloney.
Blair lied about the evidence. He had already promised Bush that Britain was committed to an invasion, regardless. Blair was never going to pull out. Even when the Americans continued to make unilateral decisions with total disregard for British action or interest.
Blair misled Parliament to secure British backing for America. He has never shown an ounce of remorse. He still acts as though his declarations of unfailing moral vision are all the justification he ever needs. He shows us a putative sincerity, against a clear backdrop of dishonesty. He expects that to be enough – and in a lot of ways, it is. For blair and Labour were re-elected in 2005. He walks the streets a free – and very rich – man.
Now recall the ascensions of David Cameron and Nick Clegg to their respective party leaderships. Cameron – a moderniser despised by much of his own party – beat the favourite David Davis largely because many Tories thought they had finally found their answer to “Teflon Tony”. As for Clegg, he too was a Blair clone if also with a dash of Dave. (The Liberals picked the more rightwing contender, because the country’s mood was at that point moving towards the Conservatives.)
Tony Blair, along with Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, initiated an era in British politics where the truth was a worthless commodity. One easily traded for pious intonations, technical get-outs, and straight-faced declarations of hollow sincerity. Iraq was the apotheosis of this, not least because all those responsible got away with it.
By the sheer scale of their recent dishonesties, Cameron and Clegg may simply be confirming that they are, indeed, Blair’s heirs. But perhaps not in the ways their parties originally hoped.
December 14, 2010
EMAs and Real Politics
I am increasingly drawn to the view that politics is not – and can never be – an exercise in “applied ethics”. That means having something like the following views:
By necessity politics is about horse-trading between political actors, and the juggling of competing interests. In particular, “competing interests” will relate both to groups who directly support one’s cause or position (e.g. by voting for, or funding, it), as well as those who oppose it but who nonetheless possess power to be reckoned with now and in the future. Achieving any kind of political decision or action means mediating between competing interest groups, to reach compromises that look nothing like what individual groups would have chosen in an ideal world of directly-applying their preferred outcomes.
What makes things even more difficult is that competing groups will at some level not share the same ethical priorities, commitments or beliefs. After all, if they did share (all) such things, we wouldn’t have any politics in the first place – politics being, by definition, the phenomenon of groups who hold different values attempting to triumph over each other (sometimes by force).
Further, individual political actors by necessity each bring personal histories to the negotiating table (or street rally). As a result, whatever individual actors say and demand is refracted through the prism of their past actions, and judged accordingly by other political agents. For example, if Tony Blair tomorrow called for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and for Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders, other political actors would not interpret this as a simple application of politically-worked out principle, but as a suspicious u-turn out of step with Blair’s previous commitments and actions.
Given these factors – and more – politics is not, and can never be, the simple application of ethical principles. It is inherently about the struggle of irreconciled values, powers and interests, and then of the search for compromise which (in western democracy at least) stops short of dominating violence.
Within the academy, such considerations are increasingly used to urge a re-thinking of political philosophy, which has for the past 40 years predominantly been conducted as though its core purpose is to distil essential abstract “values”, regardless of whether they can or cannot be applied to the currently existing “facts” of the real world. (See, for example, some of the late work of G.A. Cohen, as well as the vast industry of Rawlsiana). Against this, recent political “realists” claim that if political philosophy is actually to be about politics at all, it would do better to theorise about the process of politics as it actually occurs, not just as some would like it to, in an ideal world.
Of course that doesn’t mean somehow abandoning value assessments. That would be very odd – arguably impossible – and also defeat the point of any political theory that aspires to the name. But it does mean moving away from an emphasis on “ideal theory”, and the formulation of ethical propositions which (purposefully?) bare no relation to the realities of practical politics as it occurs on a daily basis.
Interestingly, the latest findings of the Institute for Fiscal Studies – and my anticipation of the Coalition Government’s response – push me further into this “realist” camp.
The IFS has slammed Coalition plans to remove the Education Maintenance Allowance from Britain’s poorest kids. In brief: the EMA is good value for money, it’s removal is likely to have adverse affects on the attainment and schooling rates of the poorest kids in society, and even if it doesn’t improve educational standards for the worse-off it nonetheless represents a valuable redistributive measure from rich to poor.
I anticipate, however, that the Coalition will respond to this awkward IFS finding the way it’s responded to other reports criticising the regressive and unfair economic policies emerging from the Treasury. Namely, by either ignoring the IFS, or by dispatching Nick Clegg to redefine “fairness”, or “progressivity”, or whatever other word needs to have its meaning re-arranged, so as to save the Coalition (and particularly the LibDems) some face.
And it’s not hard to see why this will (probably) happen. If the Government were to back down on EMAs, it would arguably look weak. After going through the fire of recent protests – which, after all, turned rather violent – the Government is unlikely to want to appear as though it lacks resolve. It is also unlikely to want to appear as though its policy terms are dictated by some poxy little think-tank. And in particular, the men who lead this Government – proud egomaniacs all, as by necessity politicians generally must be – are unlikely to want to admit that they have gotten a big, controversial policy decision wrong – especially at this late stage of the game.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Most (and I stress “most”) Conservative and LibDem MPs are not out to intentionally hurt the poor. It’s just that they have very specific ideas about how best to help the poor (ideas which are usually wrong – but that’s another story). And it happens that for whatever reasons (multiple cognitive biases not withstanding) many have already decided that scrapping EMAs is compatible with these pre-existing ideas of how to help the poor.
Unfortunately, this means that the IFS report is not going to change anything – even though it shows that if politicians do want to help the poor they should keep EMAs.* The reality of politics as it happens in practice is thus that even when ethical principles (“help the poor”) are agreed upon, it does not mean policies which promote those principles are actually enacted (or in this case, kept). Other principles – including (especially) power-considerations and demands of strategy and positioning – trump ethical principle.
If that’s not a demonstration of how politics quite quickly and easily becomes anything but “applied ethics”, then I don’t know what is. Of course, it doesn’t follow that there will be no value in formulating principles of abstract ethical value in the academy. But it may well bear on the question of whether the formulating of such abstract values has anything to do with politics, and thus whether such an activity can really be called political philosophy.
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* And as a general rule, if the IFS says something, it’s a much better guide to reality than any political party’s approved policy documents.
November 30, 2010
Windbag
Nick Clegg appears to be descending into a world of fantasy and illusion.
Last week he delivered a seriously confused lecture on how raising university fees and slashing higher education budgets – as well as abolishing the Education Maintenance Allowance – will boost social mobility.
He also had the audacity to suggest that opponents to the Browne review haven’t understood it, because if they did they’d know supporting Browne’s proposals is unquestionably right. Call me elitist, but I can’t help thinking Cambridge professor Stefan Collini possess the analytic acumen to analyse the Browne proposals and come to a valid – hostile – conclusion. Ditto the numerous distinguished academics recently condemning the report in a letter to The Telegraph.
Yet Clegg is already back up on his patronising high horse, insinuating that student protestors themselves are a threat to more equal university access:
“However, I also believe that all of us involved in this debate have a greater responsibility to ensure that we do not let our genuinely held disagreements over policy mean that we sabotage an aim that we all share – to encourage people from poorer backgrounds to go to university.”
Put aside Clegg’s apparent inability to grasp the causal relationship between the policies he’s supporting and the substance of the opposition they’re arousing. Ignore the rather insulting implication that poor students are so stupid they’ll just rule-out university because they saw some protests on the telly.
Focus instead on what connects today’s statement with earlier ones: Clegg’s repeated insistence that everything that’s going wrong is everybody else’s fault, and that if they just listened to him they’d see the light.
Now also recall his response to the Institute For Fiscal studies condemnation of the Comprehensive Spending Review as deeply regressive. Namely, to accuse the independent and highly respected IFS of using the wrong (i.e. non-Cleggist) understanding of regressivity in the tax and benefit system.
A pattern, it seems, is emerging. One that has precedent.
By the end of Tony Blair’s time in power – particularly after the full nightmare of Iraq was under way – he had clearly descended into a world of fantasy. One in which the Mesopotamian Adventure had been a triumphant success. Where Britain was safer – despite the heightened risk of domestic terrorism. Where the Middle East was stabilised – despite increased Iranian bellicosity and justified regional paranoia. Removing Saddam was A Good Thing; those who didn’t agree were moral hypocrites merely using Iraq as a beating stick.
For Blair, this was clearly a psychological coping mechanism. Living in his world of fantasy, he remained the champion of Goodness and Light. Outside that world he was the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Nick Clegg appears to be treading a strikingly similar path. The problem, he insists, is students and an unreasonable public. He correspondingly shut-outs the fact he has systematically betrayed his party grassroots and (former) principles. He ignores the fact he’s reneged on core, vote-winning promises with the likely result of electoral decimation and a return to the political wilderness for his party.
He pretends he’s not the man enabling the most viciously right-wing and socially-destructive government in Western Europe; a Government now launching a drastic programme of enormous, ideologically-motivated cuts far removed from liberal democratic principles. Cuts which Lib Dem voters expressly did not vote for.
What perhaps differentiates Blair and Clegg’s trajectories is the sheer speed with which the latter has descended into fantasy and blame-gaming. But, ultimately, they both come out as pathetic – if increasingly damaging – political figures. These are men who, as Max Weber put it so well, lack the true calling for politics; a calling which depends upon taking self-reflective responsibility for one’s actions. They parse the maxims:
“ ‘The world is stupid and base, not I’, ‘The responsibility for the consequences does not fall upon me but upon the others whom I serve and whose stupidity and baseness I shall eradicate’. ”
They are “windbags who do not fully realize what they take upon themselves but who intoxicate themselves with romantic sensation”.
October 27, 2010
Necessities of War
Saturday’s Wikileaks revelations – of British and American troops in Iraq covering-up civilian deaths whilst systematically ignoring and facilitating torture – have begun to expose the full horrors of a war that long-ago went terribly wrong. Yesterday’s Guardian revelations – that British troops systematically employed torture methods that violate the Geneva Convention – makes the picture darker still, even if only by adding detail.
One consequence of the latest revelations is that they demonstrate the nonsense-thinking behind the original case and “justification” for war.
A central plank upon which the Mad Mesopotamian Adventure was floated was the claim – made tacitly or overtly – that this would be a new kind of war. Our troops would not be invaders but liberators; warriors of peace welcomed by grateful Iraqis. Smart bombs would target military installations only ensuring a minimum of civilian deaths. The Axis of Evil would be confronted by the Forces of Freedom; if there was violence only Bad Guys would receive it, as Good Guys basked in the death-lite glory of Shock and Awe.
Such, at least, were the assurances given by a Bush Administration salivating for war.
Connectedly, what came to be known as the “Decent Left” in the UK criticised those who refused to back military action. The Decents chastised what they claimed were the gutless faux-principles of an anti-war left which wouldn’t put its cruise missiles where its mouth was.
Underlying this rhetoric of decency was precisely the American assurance that a new kind of war could and would be fought. A very special kind of war, in fact: one which transcended the horrors that history teaches have attended every other war in history. Somehow the Republican Party – with Tony Blair in tow – would negate the logic of all previous conflict and be back in time for Christmas.
Hence: no longer would the presence of armed victors over invaded peoples lead to the use of planned and calculated violence against civilians. No longer would senior officers employ violent tactics to deal with rebellious native populations who viewed their “liberators” as oppressive invading conquerors. No longer would scared and exhausted young men (sent into a country to act as killing machines and operating in permanently hostile environments) enact revenge on civilians or suspected enemy fighters they (rightly or wrongly) believed had killed their comrades and were trying to kill them.
Rather, the logic of what armies do in conflict situations – or even what individuals in positions of power are prone to do to those they control – would be magically left behind. The Bad Guys would get their comeuppance, the Good Guys would ride off into the sunset. This would be, precisely, a Decent War.
We now know for sure that it didn’t work that way. Abu Ghraib, for a start, was no aberration. “Our” side did profoundly horrible and nasty things for the fundamental reason that profoundly horrible and nasty things are constituent features of all wars – and they are perpetrated by all sides, albeit in varying degrees in varying places and times.
Chris Bertram is thus right when he says:
“During an earlier phase of discussion, when those advocates [of war] were still unapologetic, but whilst the slaughter was well underway, we were treated to numerous disquisitions on moral responsibility: yes there is slaughter, but we are not responsible, it is Al Qaida/the Sunni “insurgents”/Al-Sadr/Iran ….
Well the latest Wikileaks disclosures ought to shut them up for good (it won’t, of course). “Our” side has both committed war crimes directly and has acquiesced, enabled, and covered up for the commission of such crimes by others. The incidents are not isolated episodes: rather we have systematic policy.”
But we can and must go further. The latest revelations are much more than just a reminder that the advocates of war were wrong in this instance. They drive-home a fact about war that should never have been forgotten in the first place: that war is always, and by necessity, hell.
The next time a Bush (or a Blair) comes offering “humanitarian” war of liberation, we would do well to remember such a basic fact. Iraq now sadly confirms an already long-established judgement of history: that “humanitarian war” is inevitably oxymoronic. Even if some wars, very occasionally, have to be fought regardless.
October 8, 2010
The Passing of Blair Rage
I used to be angry with Tony Blair. Really angry. About the Iraq war (especially). About his continuation of Thatcher’s legacy. About the assault on civil liberties. About the wasted opportunities which followed the two largest Labour majorities in history.
But I’ve recently started to change my assessment of the man himself. And my anger is mutating into something else.
Take David Runciman’s unmissable review of Blair’s memoirs in the LRB. It is focused on two defining features of Blair’s premiership: his 10-year battle with Gordon Brown (or rather, his 10-year resistance to the assassin next door), and his decision to back an American invasion of Iraq. In Runciman’s withering assessment, Blair not only got two of his biggest decisions wrong, he got them the wrong way around.
The time to be decisive and head-strong was mid-2001, after Labour had been returned with a second landslide. Blair could have dispatched Brown there and then. The rest of his premiership, and New Labour’s record, would have been profoundly different. The time for hesitancy and refusal to land a body-blow was 2002-3, when the American war effort was going into full effect. But instead Blair embarked on the worst foreign policy disaster in British post-war history.
Runciman’s assessment is broadly shared by Andrew Rawnsley in his The End of the Party. Yet what comes through most clearly in Rawnsley’s treatment is what a terrible judge of situations, and what an ineffectual decision-maker, Blair was at crucial junctures.
Blair lacked the stomach for a fight with Brown, and mistakenly thought he could charm Bush out of bellicosity. The result was disaster at home and in the middle east. Yet what Rawnsley claims, in particular, is that on crucial occasions Blair made shockingly bad political decisions: he brokered lop-sided bargains with Brown that left him totally exposed; he pledged unconditional support to Bush and thereby forfeited any potential British leverage. There are many more examples.
I had long assumed that image of Blair projected whilst in office reflected the real thing: a supremely talented politician with a ruthless Machiavellian gift for the back rooms of politics, combined perfectly with the buckets of charisma that made him a media-manipulating genius.
What Rawnsley (and to a lesser extent, Runciman) bring out is the extent to which Blair charmed and bluffed his way to the top, believing in his own vacuous rhetoric along the way. Yet when the really big moments came he turned out to be made more of straw than steel. For a politician so obsessed with his legacy, Blair may end up very disappointed with how history remembers him.
But two other things have also influenced my reassessment. First, over at Potlatch Will Davies has a very funny – but also incisive – post suggesting that Blair is incapable of feeling embarrassment. Read it; there’s definitely something there.
Second was Chris Brooke’s epic (and slightly bonkers) marathon tweeting of A Journey. What struck me reading Chris’ summary was the extent to which Blair was apparently deluded in his basic grasp of the world. Indeed I asked Chris if he shared this impression, and he replied:
“Yes — I think he has become a fantasist. He says at the end that he’s much happier now he’s out of office, and obviously part of that is that he doesn’t have to deal with Gordon Brown or the British media every day, but I also wonder whether part of it is that he isn’t so constrained by the real world any more, and so can just live in a fantasy of his own construction.
The final chapter of the book seems pretty delusional to me — as Blair insists he is “progressive” while defending an exceptionally right-wing approach to dealing with the economic crisis which involves low direct taxes on rich people, allowing banks to write new rules for regulation, jacking up indirect consumption taxes, & so on.”
These two factors – the dispelling of the illusion of Blair as political colossus, and the possibility that he may actually be psychologically unhinged – have had the effect of making me considerably less angry at Blair. I’m still – don’t get me wrong – angry at what happened over those 10 years. But towards Blair himself I’m starting to feel something decidedly different: a bizarre form of condescending pity.
Again, I’m fairly sure that’s not the sort of legacy Blair had in mind for himself. Fittingly, that compounds my emotive revaluation of him.
