Is Tony Blair the most naive Prime Minister Briatain has ever had?

I keep trying to generate more outrage about all this than I actually feel. But it's kind of like the Lewinsky thing; to actually feel betrayed or "misled," you would have had to believe the obvious lies in the first place. I mean, it's a little like people being shocked to discover there isn't really a man with a hook for a hand marauding through the woods. Still, I'm all in favor of bullshit being called bullshit, so even the U.S. media is only brave or strong enough to call bullshit on 16 words of lies out of hundreds of thousands, it's a start.

As for Blair, it's hard for me to get a good read on him from this side of the Atlantic. He may well be naive. But he obviously sees himself in kind of an important light too -- like he thinks he can be the guy to single-handedly keep international diplomacy alive. His place in the history books certainly matters to him.

Which does give a sort of Blair/Clamberlain parallel in terms of a realpolitik couched in the language of freedom and diplomacy.

(i.e. selling out the Czechs wasn't "naive" so much as v. cold and calculating)

U.S. Convoy Is Attacked in Iraq, Killing 1 Soldier and Wounding 6
Rumsfeld Says Iraq May Need a Larger Force
Bush Defends Intelligence As 'Darn Good'

no-one ever answers my Labour threads. I have never been sure why.

I think Blair has already had a great political career.

*sex this bit up pls - something else beginning with an ‘s’

http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/index.cfm?id=767622003

Anyway, that has nothing to do with anything. But never let it be said I don't contribute to the political threads!

There was talk before this conference that I wanted to put aside discussion of Iraq.

That was never my intention.

I want to deal with it head on.

The evidence about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons, as opposed to the capability to develop them, has turned out to be wrong.

I acknowledge that and accept it.

I simply point out, such evidence was agreed by the whole international community, not least because Saddam had used such weapons against his own people and neighbouring countries.

And the problem is, I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam.

The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power.

y = The removal of Saddam from power.

shit xpost

Robin Cook, a member of Blair's own cabinet and his former Foreign Secretary, was clear in the lead up to the war that he did not think Saddam had WMDs.

Like this.

Or possibly like this.

Lucy Ferry. Otis Ferry. Jeremy Clarkson and A A Gill. The Daily Mail. John Redwood. The tweed-clad cunts who stare down their noses at me in the King's Road on Saturday mornings. Boris Johnson. Prince Charles. Madonna and Guy Ritchie. James Whale. Richard Littlejohn.

However bad Blair is, the alternative is infinitely, INFINITELY worse.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/dec/20/tony-blair-interview-british-press

"They (the press) don't approach me in an objective way. Their first question is how to belittle what I'm doing, knock it down, write something bad about it. It's not right. It's not journalism. They don't get me and they've got a score to settle with me. But they are not going to settle it."

he's got 104 friends to your hundred cows

Paranoid, deaf to disagreement and a more or less self-confessed liar is nagl for a statesman really. But approaching his hero Thatcher I suppose, except she probably lied less.

fuck this cunt of the decade

worse than thatcher in plenty of ways. absolutely no principles, no moral compass of *any kind at all*. say what you like about the tenets of thatcherite conservatism -- at least it's an ethos.

Blair made a major error with the Iraq war, and may have been a spiritual successor to Thatcher in terms of free market economics, but I would much rather have had him in power than another Tory government.

I think Labour have had an ethos of at least trying to promote the equality agenda, and they have introduced a lot of positive things which would never have happened without a Labour government - minimum wage, the 2005 extension to the disablity discrimination act, repeal of section 28, increased for maternity/paternity pay, increased attendance at university and other post-age-16 education, and other equality legislation. Of course they have made missteps (such as the calamitous 10p tax band removal) and failed to tackle poverty in many deprived areas.

Far from perfect, but better than Thatcher certainly.

pretty sure those were blair sops to the labour party. he himself always struck me as the epitome of 'power for power's sake' politician, and if he'd judged the tories a better intital bet for his rise to power he'd have fitted in with any of their agendas as easily.

minimum wage doesn't confront inequality in the slightest: it says we are totally relaxed with rampant inequality. the other stuff i don't know much about -- none of it is a particularly big deal, and people have produced pretty similar lists of non-evil legislation from the thatcher era in the past. the expansion of the university system (without the money t pay for it) was begun under the tories and continued under labour.

they've not only failed to tackle poverty but, famously, wealth inequality has increased. their view of equality seems to me basically statistical: they don't believe in improving secondary education (or i guess really i mean: actually increasing social equality) but they are keen that universities follow admissions procedures that make society look more equal.

and, obviously, though thatcher was also guilty of this, blair's record on civil liberties was dreadful. they were both (as is brown) strong centralizers.

they don't believe in improving secondary education

This is unfair imo - Labour have certainly not succeeded in much improving it, and it's unhelpful that they constantly claim they have, but a government that didn't care would not have implemented nearly as many iniatives etc, or thrown some pretty decent amounts of money at the problem.

what makes you think labour haven't improved secondary education? it's a grade inflation thing, you reckon?

I... don't know? Grade inflation is real and definitely obscene - I have marked GCSE papers and what you give a 'B' to is pretty horrifying - but you're right I have no real idea what things were like before 1997. I suppose one way to find out might be to look at the performance of the state sector vs independent schools on national exams, but I don't don't have any figures for that!

Do you think secondary education is much improved in the last 12 years?

a government that didn't care would not have implemented nearly as many iniatives etc, or thrown some pretty decent amounts of money at the problem.

a government has to throw money at something, and education is gonna be one of those things whether they 'care' about it or not.

i think the improvements in results are real, although it's difficult to attribute it to labour because it involves a whole bunch of long-term trends colliding, some to do with the way that things are measured, and some to so with kids' ability. afaict it takes a huge amount of school spending to achieve tiny gains in educational performance. think probably the big labour contribution was in capital spending because a lot of schools and colleges would be shitholes by now if they hadn't splashed the cash.

but it's not just what things were like before 1997, i guess. it's that britain has been having a really painful time in acknowledging that it has a universal education system, rather than one for the top few, and adjusting the design of exams has been a prolonged process and it's not yet complete. only 20 percent even took o levels; a quarter of those failed. and not necessarily because the questions were hard: a typical english question might ask for an essay about "pleasures of life in a small town" or to explain what "humility" meant.

pretty sure a-grade gcse students could manage that, which means standards haven't fallen (about 20 per cent get a grades at gcse iirc). there's some evidence the quality of work has risen in recent years (looking at english papers): a comparison by exam boards of o-level scripts in 1980 and gcse papers in 1993, 1994 and 2004 found spelling better in 1980 (gonna put that down to spell checkers doing for english what the calculator did to mental arithmetic) but in all other respects - vocabulary, content, style, punctuation - they were better in 2004 than in 93 or 94, and in most cases better than 1980, even though that was only a select few vs everybody.

i'm not a teacher, so i can't argue with you reading b-grade scripts that are horrifying, but i think most people have always been pretty bad at schoolwork, it's just that we've decided to redraw the scale to include them all over the last 30 years rather than making them do metalwork or sewing for five years and hoping they'll go away.

it also ignores the revolution in the education of women a generation earlier. women born in 1960 were 4 times more likely to get A levels than those in 1940. their kids are starting to take their exams now, and it's been shown repeatedly that the children of educated women are more likely to succeed in school.

Really really interesting post!

Do you know how I could look up the 2004/93/80 comparison study you mentioned? I'd love to read it.

FWIW I agree that infrastructure spending on education by the current government has been a success - again I wouldn't know, but it's very easy for me to believe that schools are much better buildings than they were in 1997.

I was under the impression that class sizes had risen under labour - is this correct?

i think maybe class sizes fell after they promised to bring them under 30 and then rose again? sorry, can't recall any handy stats on that, but it's mainly a demographic issue that rises and falls.

i'll try to find a ref for the 2004/93/80 study, i've only got second-hand info atm.

minimum wage doesn't confront inequality in the slightest: it says we are totally relaxed with rampant inequality.

Introducing the minimum wage was not intended to (and has not) remove inequality, but to reduce it. I have no statistical evidence, but I imagine people were paid below the minimum wage before its introduction, and afterwards they were paid at the minimum wage; and raising the income of some of the lowest paid in society can only be a good thing.

Yeah I guess the guy probably deserves more respect for managing to force thru a minor increase to very low wages whilst still finding the time to make the richest members of society considerably richer and keep two or three wars on the go, all this on a wafer-thin parliamentary majority. I can imagine posterity will be much kinder to the Blair/Brown governments, probably look on them as some kind of golden era.

On the other hand, all mean-spirited personal carping aside, maybe a few Labour supporters will feel that "not quite as actively malevolent as a Tory government, well not to their own citizens at least" mightn't be cause for tremendous praise for these fucking tools who've had a 100 plus majority for the best part of 12 years.

the road to hell is paved with good intentions etc, but i find it hard to credit blair with any good intent

I'd often regarded him as sincere but fundamentally wrong-headed, and dangerous like sincere people can be. But I'm surprised nobody seems to have really gone after his recent statements on Iraq, i.e. "I really didn't lie about the WMDs but I wd have been happy to get my war on even if I knew they didn't exist" which is some If I Did It shit imo

gotta be honest, i don't get beyond this:

I really didn't lie about the WMDs

before taking serious issue. anything else is just decoration.

now he's found religion, which i find an interesting angle- for popularity in africa? handy for the ambassador roles?

Nah, he dropped a lot of heavy hints about being a religious kind of guy throughout his PMship, even tho there was the officially leaked "we don't do God" wisecrack. I figure the religious shit has always been a "trust me I'm a conviction politician guy" kinda deal which works because nobody connected with religion has ever been a public liar or been involved in unnecessary warmongering. That and the fact that his wife appears to get down with whatever mystic gumbo she reads about in Hello.

sincere but fundamentally wrong-headed

as with bush, there's a huge benefit-of-the-doubt premium here. are you really prepared to believe that the premier leaders of the english speaking world are more naive/stupid than the person you buy your breakfast from?

that's kinda best-case scenario for them, isn't it?

Well as I say I think I stopped giving him the benefit round about 2000.

The one positive I will honestly give some credit to Blair for is his involvement in the Northern Ireland peace agreement, and that is not a mean achievement imo. Fair y/n?

yeah he was pretty religious in power, i thought. cherie did get into all that kooky carole caplin stuff, but she was also a catholic and iirc the right-wing press said that tony was too, really. except he seemed more of an evangelical. either way, though, there were aspects of him that were religious. he justified the iraq war on grounds that he "believed it was right" -- that sort of thing.

xpost

he does deserve credit for landing northern ireland, and a few other things. (i think that process started under john majors though.)

but with the majority he had, and the economic situation he had, it's a pitiful record.

Major government had been involved in the initial stages I believe yes. Impossible to imagine an agreement being reached under Thatcher and v. difficult to believe that a Conservative and Unionist government of any stripe could've gone all the way with the process.

Blair's evangelical kinda style does fit in with some sections of the Catholic church iirc

Also I think he's actually converted to Catholicism now??

a lot of the strides towards peace in the north were made under major, though i think that a tory government would never have been able to close that particular deal. (xp)

most of the progress was internal, with a willingness to co-operate with mitchell probably the main change. that's of course from a southern catholic POV, so for unionists it's maybe fair to say that more of the leadership came from westminster rather than the US.

catholicism last year, pretty sure he's qaballah atm

Do you know how I could look up the 2004/93/80 comparison study you mentioned? I'd love to read it.

don't think the full study is online (wtf?) but it's "Variations in aspects of writing in 16+ English examinations between 1980 and 2004." by Massey, A.J., Elliott, G.L. & Johnson, N.K. (2005)