It’s only been four years since Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister (somehow it seems longer) — and he’s back today with an opinion piece for The Observer on the underlying causes of the riots, ‘Blaming a moral decline for the riots makes good headlines but bad policy’. Here are 5 thoughts on his article:
1) Mr Blair remains the ultimate triangularist
Witness the oxymoronic opening line: ‘Both David Cameron and Ed Miliband made excellent speeches last week and there was much to agree with in what they said.’ First, no they didn’t; neither speech rose to the occasion. Nick Clegg’s under-reported speech was a much weightier contribution than either the Tory or Labour leaders mustered. Secondly, to agree simultaneously with directly opposing arguments suggest that Mr Blair retains his crown as the past-master of intellectual flexibility.
2) Mr Blair remains at heart an authoritarian
As evidenced by his line, ‘my experience with the police is they need 100% backing’. Like all other professionals the police deserve respect and understanding for the immensely difficult job that they do. But politicians will not and should not earn the police’s respect unless there is a recognition that support requires challenge; and that if the police are seen to lack accountability, that politicians will automaticaly back them right or wrong, the public’s respect for the police will crumble.
3) Mr Blair is a much better, more intuitive communicator than David Cameron
The current Prime Minister has struggled to appear front-footed throughout the last few weeks of moral/social/political/economic crisis. His latest cliche-ridden utterings about the riots showing a need for a British Bill of Rights — an article appropriately kettled in the moral vacuum of the Express — suggest a leader who lacks original ideas, or at least is unable to couch his old ideas with any degree of originality. Contrast Mr Cameron’s “we’re all doomed” bluster about Britain’s moral turpitude with Mr Blair’s optimistic (and more accurate) analysis:
Britain, as a whole, is not in the grip of some general “moral decline”. … The true face of Britain is not the tiny minority that looted, but the large majority that came out afterwards to help clean up. I do think there are major issues underlying the anxieties reflected in disturbances and protests in many nations. One is the growing disparity of incomes not only between poor and rich but between those at the top and the aspiring middle class. Another is the paradigm shift in economic and political influence away from the west. Each requires substantial change in the way we think and function.
He then looks at the stereotypical examples trotted out by rose-tinted commentators like Peter Oborne of the ways Britain has alegedly declined from top to bottom from the ‘good old days’ — the scandals of phone-hacking and MPs’ expenses, the excesses of bankers and boardrooms — and points out how simplistic and ahistorical such comparisons are, before highlighting his ‘key learning’ from his time at Number 10:
The spirit that won the Olympic bid in 2005 – open, tolerant and optimistic – is far more representative of modern London than the criminality displayed by the people smashing shop windows. And here is what I learned in 10 years of trying to deal with this issue. When I visited the so- called “bad areas”, whether in Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham, London or elsewhere, what I found was not a community out of control. What I found were individuals out of control in a community where the majority, even in the poorest of poor parts, was decent, law-abiding and actually desperate for action to correct the situation.
It doesn’t matter what you think of Mr Blair’s politics: this is the message that our leaders should have been delivering, optimistic and realistic. Mr Cameron has often been casually dismissed as the ‘heir to Blair’. The truth is he’s just not that good.
4) Mr Blair’s prescription is for much bigger government.
The former Labour prime minister’s prescription for social ills is a liberal nightmare:
We [have] to be prepared to intervene literally family by family and at an early stage, even before any criminality had occurred. And we [have] to reform the laws around criminal justice, including on antisocial behaviour, organised crime and the treatment of persistent offenders. We [have] to treat the gangs in a completely different way to have any hope of success.
This is the paragraph which shows most vividly how Tony Blair (and those ‘Blue Labour’ adherents who agree with him) and the Lib Dems are poles apart: this is a top-down, Orwellian approach to social control, one which places unconditional trust in the state to intrude into the lives of individuals and families — with the best possible motives, I’m sure, but with all manner of unintended consequences that would further infantilise those who already have no feelings of responsibility to their communities.
5) Once again, a politician shows maturity happens after politics.
I agree with Tony Blair’s analysis; I disagree with his prescription. But what strikes me as I read his rational conclusion:
In 1993, following James Bulger’s murder, I made a case in very similar terms to the one being heard today about moral breakdown in Britain. I now believe that speech was good politics but bad policy. Focus on the specific problem and we can begin on a proper solution.
is that politicians seem to make these speeches only once they are no longer in power, when they can no longer influence either policy nor elevate the standard of public discourse regarding our deep-seated problems. I guess time and distance (and no longer having to contest elections) afford that luxury. But why do we have to wait til they’ve retired to get the grown-up politics we need?
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15 Comments
David Cameron is blaming the Human Rights Act for the riots. This goes far beyond the worst nightmares of liberals under Labour. Yet the Liberals are now in Coalition.
What are you for?
Spot on. The other point I picked out is that, according to Mr Blair, those who value civil liberties are responsible for his government not being able to deal with the underlying problems that led to the riots.
I think that in “We [have] to be prepared to intervene literally family by family and at an early stage, even before any criminality had occurred” Blair meant ‘we’ as in the British public, as in civil society, not just the state.
One would have certainly expected Mr. Blair, as a Roman Catholic, to denounce the state of morality in the UK. But of course his point wasn’t so much that morality is terribly poor but that it wasn’t the cause of the looting.
And how ironic for a Lib Dem to criticise someone for saying they agree to extent with both the Tory and Labour perspectives!!
Sorry two mistakes there: ‘that morality *isn’t* terribly poor’ and ‘to *an* extent’.
“We [have] to be prepared to intervene literally family by family and at an early stage,”
This is the statist socialist approach (or, sometimes, the patriarchal approach from Tories). The Liberal approach is to set the rules properly so that people understand them clearly and largely self-regulate. The state can then intervene in a limited way with a limited number of people. If you encourage too great a reliance upon the state for everything, the state collapses in a heap.
At the moment, our state (in the widest sense) sends out mixed messages all the time. Blair is right that we have not gone morally downhill significantly in the time just before the recent riots. But we were in a bit of a midden for many years before that, for which he bears some responsibility which he can not cop-out of by ‘getting religion’.
“But why do we have to wait til they’ve retired to get the grown-up politics we need?”
Probably for the same reason that former heavy weight politicians who call for the legalisation of drugs don’t do so until they have left office.
Because they’re moral cowards and when they’re in power they are only interested in what will look good to the editor of the Sun perhaps?
Tony Blair: ‘my experience with the police is they need 100% backing’
I guess that explains why there was never any real accountability for the execution-style murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, a totally innocent man. 100% backing, even when the police are 100% in the wrong.
I suppose the police are so weak that the slightest criticism from anyone in the government or the press will cause them to dissolve into a puddle of muddy tears.
It’s perfectly possible to have respect for the tremendous work of the ordinary policeman and poiicewoman while admitting that their leadership and management is often spectacularly incompetent, and that there are, as in any institution, individual ‘bad eggs’ among them.
here’s my view: http://livingonwords.blogspot.com/2011/08/in-praise-of-tony-blair.html
The conclusion I draw from this analysis is that anyone hoping to re-engage the people in politics has to re-learn their speech-making. We need to exclude consideration of the media impact and constantly, relentlessly, speak from our principles, with honesty and clarity.
Blair is correct that is was a tiny minority, and this is really a rather excellent article about his speech too.
Body language experts will tell you that if someone adjusts their tie before speaking it probably means what they are about to speak is a little less than the truth. (see photo and text for second opinion)
Is Blair really a better, more intuitive communicator than Blair, or did Blair act with the benefit of two weeks to digest the riots and opinions and see the mistakes Cameron was making?
He also witters on, ever the theorist, but without solid solutions. I much preferred Clegg’s details on ‘Community Payback Orders’. It’s a pragmatist that should run a country, not a personality obsessed with staying in the limelight.
All of Blair’s so called maturity in retrospect over the Bulger case was a thinly veiled PR move to demonstrate his difference from Cameron and appeal to a leftwing, intelligent audience that would be wooed by such placations, intended to suggest “I’m not a bad guy”.
Far more concerning about Blair’s astute piece in the Observer is what his motives were. Blair has never done anything without some foresight of gain.
g
Under Labour I came close at an airport to being
arrested. Six airport security thugs seem to have
nothing better to do than stop and question me.
I was doing nothing wrong and had done nothing
wrong.
Please don’t lecture us on human rights. Any good that
Labour did at the beginning of its term in office was all
undone by the end of it.
The best cartoon I saw of this was Blair and Cameron standing together saying “we agree completely, it wasn’t our fault”