Publicpoems.com was created as a blog in order to publish and discuss poems which address some public subject rather than the usual, more private and personal subject matter of poetry.
Pursuing this interest, during the next month or so, publicpoems.com will be publishing a long satirical poem I have written in collaboration with David Pidsley on Tony Blair and the years of New Labour, called simply BLAIR, and subtitled "The rise of a British Fascist".
It was written, in part at least, as an antidote to the tide of New Labour autobiography, biography, and hagiography which is likely to engulf the publishing industry over the next year or so.
The poem is 110 pages long, and will be published on Tuesday 13 July in three volumes. Here are some thoughts about its subject matter:
In Robert Harris’s entertaining but somewhat far-fetched thriller The Ghost, a writer is asked to ‘ghost-write’ the biography of a British former prime minister who closely resembles Tony Blair. Delving more deeply into the politician’s life, the writer attempts to explain how his subject appeared to be so much under the influence of the Americans (effectively their “poodle”). In the course of his investigations, the writer finds increasing evidence that as a young student at Oxford the future prime minister appears to have been recruited by the CIA.
The story combines a somewhat facile political mix of anti-Americanism with the primitive assumption that because a politician happens to disagree with you, he must be motivated by malign intent. Like many prevalent myths, the notion that Blair was America’s “poodle” is effectively negated by any remotely objective consideration of the evidence. In Kosovo, Blair’s first major foreign military intervention, it was Blair, not the then American president, Bill Clinton, who drove the decision to bomb the Serbs. Clinton, far more cautious and fearful about the reception to foreign intervention by his own electorate, was dragged with the greatest reluctance by Blair towards committing America’s firepower against the Serbs in the service of protecting the Muslims of Kosovo from ethnic cleansing.
Blair remains to this day a hero in Kosovo, inspiring fervent admiration amongst the Muslim majority. If we wish to add some broad statistics to the chequered life of our political protagonist, I suspect Blair’s intervention saved up to a quarter of a million innocent Muslim lives from the ethnic cleansing policies of Milosevic, Karadzic and their Serbian cohorts. In support of Blair’s risky and courageous foreign policy intervention in Kosovo, I don’t know many people who have effected a similar humanitarian achievement.
Subsequently Blair also permitted a British military intervention in Sierra Leone. In the course of that campaign he first allowed, then tacitly encouraged, a formidable British officer, Brigadier David Richards (now General Sir David Richards, chief of staff of the British Army) to transform a rescue mission of British personnel into an effective military suppression of the brutal rebel forces who were attempting to overthrow the elected government. The reestablishment of legitimate democratic government in Sierra Leone by British forces is now widely regarded as benign.
The much more likely explanation of Blair’s motivation is that he is sincere in his political beliefs (though he might have been catastrophically wrong later in his career in his assumptions about the effects of intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq) and that he has always believed that he was doing good. On several occasions Blair described himself as a “liberal interventionist”, determined to commit the West’s riches and firepower to overthrow certain tyrannical regimes and allow those countries’ citizens to establish working democracies. Some of us may sneer at this, particularly in hindsight, but it is not the same thing as having malign intentions, or acting as America’s “poodle”.
During the last few months I and my collaborator David Pidsley have been constructing a long poem in which the protagonist, our former Prime Minister Anthony Lynton Blair, is described throughout as a very British kind of fascist.
Having attempted to defend Blair from facile assumptions about his political motives, is our proposal that Tony Blair can be accurately and objectively characterised as a fascist any different from Harris’s bravura speculation that he might have been an agent of the CIA? Well, actually, yes, I believe there is a difference. The two postulates are chalk and cheese.
For one thing, throughout the poem, there is no assertion of malign intentions. Blair is not accused of anything more malevolent than actively seeking power, which is hardly a great or surprising sin in a professional politician. Secondly, in the course of the poem at no point does Blair consider himself to be a fascist. (I suspect he would be horrified if that label were to be applied — but that has nothing to do with its historical accuracy or its analytical effectiveness, as will be argued below.) Eliminated from our assumptions regarding Blair’s motives will therefore be any suggestion of overt fascist motivation.
If these two presumptions are justified, how can he possibly be classed as a fascist in objective, historical terms? The answer is that the term ‘fascist’, as we apply it, does not refer to the loose and highly speculative area of motivation, but to the far more precise arena of action, and the visible, verifiable consequences of those actions. Consider, very briefly, the outline of his political career.
With two co-conspirators, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair took over the Labour Party at a stage when Labour was effectively moribund as a serious electoral force for government. The working class on which its support was traditionally based was being increasingly replaced by a broader, aspirational middle class. In Blair’s view, Labour’s unrefined centralism and statism belonged to an earlier era. The Labour party was falling behind the wishes of an increasingly educated and sophisticated electorate, accustomed to making their own consumer decisions rather than permit those choices to be made for them by a Westminster political elite or Whitehall bureaucracy.
After taking control, Blair and his tiny group fundamentally reformed the Labour Party, and led it in a direction which would have been inconceivable without his leadership. In a dramatic assertion of personal power he excised Clause 4 (the “nationalisation” injunction that government should control the “commanding heights of the economy”) from the Labour constitution and directed the party’s appeal towards the expanding middle class. This revolutionary takeover and fundamental reconstruction has all the hallmarks of a very British putsch. Thereafter, anyone in the party hierarchy who questioned the new direction was considered to be “off-message”, stripped of influence and effectively consigned to outer darkness. But in what other respects might Blair’s subsequent government be described as fascist?
I remember being called a fascist regularly during my earlier life because, despite my left-wing social views, I have consistently expressed the belief that some variant of the free market is a much better means of both creating and distributing wealth than the centralised, bureaucratic state. “Fascism”, as used against me and others, was effectively a blanket term to denote anyone who disagreed with an orthodox left wing creed which was then almost universally statist and centralist. But let us set aside the more traditional uses of the word fascism as a broad term of abuse or disapproval. In practice fascism has a more precise historical meaning, and that meaning can be accurately applied.
Benito Mussolini, fascism’s founder, stated on more than one occasion that the essence of fascism is the belief that the state is more important than the individual. This is a definition which deserves the most serious consideration. Any such objective consideration of Blair’s administration is likely to conclude that this central assumption formed a crucial part — indeed constituted the effective heart — of Blair’s highly centralised, leader-driven New Labour government.
After Blair led the party to an overwhelming democratic victory in 1997, he initiated a greater centralisation of power (epitomised by his famous or infamous sofa government) than any previous British administration over the past two centuries. He achieved this by bypassing Parliament and effectively reducing the cabinet to a rubber stamp for his own unilateral decisions. As an example, Robin Cooke’s decision to resign as Foreign Secretary because he had no control over British foreign policy is merely a signpost along that road. Clare Short, another independent minister and dissident, was also given short shrift in a cabinet where she was prevented from even expressing alternative views. In this too Blair conforms with the classic tenets of fascism.
Consider now a further line of evidence — Blair’s remarkable war record. During the course of nine years of continuous power, amongst numerous other unilateral personal foreign policy decisions, Blair committed British troops to no less than four separate wars (namely Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq). Each involved the invasion of another sovereign state. Not one of these wars was, strictly speaking, in direct defence of British territorial interests. By comparison, Margaret Thatcher, the so-called “iron lady” and epitome of the right, was much criticised for her aggressive temperament. During her eleven years as prime minister she only launched one hot war, and that was in defence of what she (and most experts in international law) considered to be an illegal military invasion of British territory in the Falklands by an unelected Argentine military junta.
As if this evidence of unprecedented centralisation of power in the hands of a single individual, including the launching of British troops into four wars, were not enough, Blair also, in the course of his administration, presided over the greatest and most sweeping assault upon individual rights and civil liberties in recent British history. The “security” of the state — or more accurately Blair’s interpretation of that security — was always the rationale and excuse for increasing state powers. Bending the legal system to his will included, amongst other assaults on individual liberties, a sincere attempt to replace the citizen’s right to a trial by jury of his peers — a right enshrined since Magna Carta.
Once more, this conforms precisely with the history of fascism. In historical terms, the security of the state has been, and always will be, the classic fascist rationale for assuming greater state control over individual lives.
The degree to which Blair’s government manipulated security to justify abolishing or limiting individual rights reached a kind of apotheosis when Walter Wolfgang, a gentle and idealistic 82-year-old Jewish concentration camp survivor, was arrested under the auspices of New Labour’s Terrorism Act at a Labour party conference in 2005 for his temerity in openly raising his voice in criticism of government policy while Jack Straw was speaking.
Why has the idea that almost every aspect of the Blair New Labour administration conformed to the tenets of classical fascism not yet been expressed as a coherent thesis, let alone discussed publicly? Part of the reason, I suspect, is that the notion of the rise of a successful British fascist prime minister is obscured by the popular, almost theatrical, image of fascism. In Britain we have the sinister but also comical example of Oswald Mosley — another handsome, plausible public-school-educated former Labour politician — who made the mistake of adopting the continental style of blackshirts and para-military posturing in the attempt to impress a British electorate equipped with, amongst other accoutrements, a sense of humour and a capacity for irony. Such behaviour might have been considered appropriate in certain cultures at different times. But its very comicality in the context of a politically sophisticated British culture is precisely the reason why it is unlikely to be used or deployed in a genuine and effective British fascist coup.
Suppose instead, we approach the subject from another direction, that of hypothesis or fiction. How could a fascist administration be achieved within the existing British electoral environment without alarming the public? To a novelist, playwright or screenwriter, the most plausible scenario would be if a sincerely idealistic politician arose who was capable of persuading the electorate that special measures were needed to achieve his soaring, ambitious aims. These measures could plausibly involve an unprecedented centralisation of power in the person of that politician and in the office of prime minister. In turn this centralisation of power, once established, could provide a future platform for the launching of numerous foreign wars effectively at the personal instigation of the prime minister. Putting a country on a war footing (for example, through “the war on terrorism”) is a classic means of unifying a country, justifying increasing state imposition and isolating the opposition as unpatriotic. As part of the hypothetical attempt to unify society in the pursuit of those grand aims, the process of centralisation of power could also lead to a major erosion of individual rights and civil liberties in the name of security.
The important point is that such a programme would be far more likely to succeed if the external, superficial, and theatrical elements of fascism played no part. Instead, it would be much more plausible if the idealism and manifest sincerity of the leader (let us call him Blair) persuaded large numbers of the electorate that his party (let us call that party New Labour) promised a fresh new start which would sweep aside an old and tired political administration (say, the Conservative Party led by John Major, mired in sleaze after 18 years of continuous Conservative rule) in favour of this promised land.
It would be more plausible if that leader had a genuine gift for communication and was capable of providing soaring and inspiring rhetoric. And it would be better still if that leader were largely or entirely unaware of the historical parallels between his own administration and that of the classical fascists such as Mussolini. In support of this latter contention, Roy Jenkins, who Blair considered to be an important political mentor and who admired Blair for much of his “modernisation” of the Labour Party, tellingly described Blair as a first rate politician but a third rate intellect.
Unlike Robert Harris, who was a strong supporter of Blair and New Labour during Tony Blair’s honeymoon period of rhetorical inflation (and who could be seen dancing energetically near his great friend Peter Mandelson to the tune of Things can only get better at the 1997 election celebrations) I admit that I personally have always viewed Blair as a snake-oil salesman of the most extreme kind. It wasn’t his malign intent that worried me — as with all great salesmen, I have always regarded Blair as almost ludicrously sincere, and have seen nothing then or since to change my views. It was, on the contrary, his superficiality, his lack of any historical sense, his apparent absence of understanding of the meaning and potential consequences of his own actions, which most alarmed me. It was precisely this puppy-dog sincerity and apparent appeal to the bien pensant or chattering classes (who have a history of being gullible to idealistic solutions such as Soviet communism) which, if anything, increased my alarm at his potential to do harm.
Even Blair’s final departure in 2007 emphasised the essentially fascist nature of his administration. There was no democratic election of the new prime minister, and no election of a new leader within the still cowed and largely acquiescent Labour party. Instead Blair agreed to a coronation of Gordon Brown, the second in command of the New Labour triumvirate which had seized power more than a decade earlier. The result was a further three years of a prime minister who had been elected neither by his party nor by the electorate at large.
When at last Labour was voted out of office, and Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell were finally forced to leave 10 Downing Street, I am not perhaps the only one who experienced a profound sense of relief that a small band of talented but ruthless political machinators had finally been ejected from absolute political control of the British ship of state.
The poem which follows is not therefore based on the rancour of the deceived (in Harris’s case — though I hesitate to ascribe motive to another person — perhaps the even greater rancour of the self-deceived). I believe instead that it is founded on a relatively objective account of Blair’s administration, and that over the longer term the fascist label, carefully and objectively applied, will be found increasingly to fit the historical evidence.
Let us turn to one final aspect of fascism — its almost spiritual claim to greater energy and vividness than the older, more moribund politics which it attempts to replace. These aspects too are true of Blair’s remarkable administration. Marinetti, the futurist poet and a supporter of fascism during Mussolini’s administration, fervently believed that a fascist government, after sweeping aside the old establishment restraints, was best placed to realise the future. Blair’s government, in its hopes and intentions, conformed finally to this aspect of fascism too. In many respects his administration was vivid, dramatic, even heroic — and thus a fine subject for an attempt at an epic satirical poem.
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