Consorting with the Enemy

A few thoughts about a curious debate on Thursday night at the Cambridge Union, almost always the sharper of the two great University debating societies. It may be the chamber. The Oxford Union debates in what always seems to be an enormous, freezing sepulchre, with the ceiling lost in gloom, high above. Cambridge has a smaller, more intimate room, in which laughter stands a better chance. It may be Cambridge’s frostier, more astringent climate as compared with Oxford’s melancholy, soft dankness. Or it may just be that this is the way the luck has fallen for me on the dozen or so times I’ve struggled into my decrepit, baggy dinner jacket, and wrenched my annoying red bow tie into place for one of these occasions.

 

Anyway, last  night we were debating New Labour. Had they ruined the country? Well, of course they had helped to do so, and had given the poor old thing a severe shove down the slopes of doom.  But they’re hardly the only culprit. It’s a bit like Murder on the Orient Express, with a whole queue of suspects serially plunging the knife into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, its heirs and successors.

 

And then again, it’s still the case that if an Oxbridge debating society wants to discuss what’s wrong with Labour, they get Tories to speak for the motion, and Labour people to speak against it. It’s as if it’s a private fight, even though plenty of good patriots loathe the Tories, and plenty of proud socialists loathe Labour.   I hesitated over accepting the invitation, as I knew it would mean sharing a bench with Tories, whom I regard as my opponents just as much as Labour. On the other hand, these events don’t decide the fate of the nation, but they may just possibly help people to think – people who in a few years will be in influential positions in our society.

 

The outgoing President, Ben Kentish, opened for the Labour defence rather naughtily, saying that it was going to be very tough for my side to prove the rather severe proposition ‘New Labour Ruined Britain’. I pointed out to him that since he had written the motion himself , it was he who had set the bar too high for us. If he hadn’t liked it, he could have fixed it.  There was also a glorious moment when, after Mr Kentish had been railing for some minutes against the Horrors Of The Evil Thatcher Regime, a rather beautiful woman in the audience asked him sweetly how old he had been at the time.  Mr Kentish  was forced to admit that he had not yet been born during the Thatcher Terror, which took some of the whizz and bite out of his denunciation.

 

Hazel Blears, for New Labour, made a silly reference to the fact that all the speakers on the anti-Blair side were ‘white’ (I should have said ‘grey’ was a better description, but there) , and was a bit incommoded when I said that I thought it was time skin colour stopped being important to civilised people. What mattered was the content of their characters. I felt she never quite got her zing back after that, but maybe that was just my conceit.   

 

The Tories, John Redwood and Andrew Mitchell, said pretty much what Tories do say, about the economy  and the Gold Reserves, and in Mr Redwood’s case about the EU.

A contributor from the floor, rightly in my view, complained that the old-fashioned Left had no advocate among the main speakers.

 

So, when it came to my turn, I thought that I could, to some extent, put that right. Amazingly, you might think, nobody had so far mentioned the Iraq invasion. I did, and was slightly amazed to find Andy Burnham jumping up and asking righteously if I wished Saddam Hussein was still in power. I said (which is true) that I supposed that was the implication of what I said, since I was against invading other people’s countries to change their governments. But I did also point out that the Blair creature had said  clearly during the preparations for the invasion that his aim was not to topple Saddam (Chapter and verse, for those interested : 25th February 2003, Blair: ‘I do not want war. I do not believe anyone in this House wants war. But disarmament peacefully can only happen with Saddam’s active co-operation. I detest his regime but *even now he can save it* (my emphasis)  by complying with United Nations demands …the path to peace is clear’ (House of Commons Hansard)) . Blair got into a similar mess about Slobodan Milosevic, and had had to be rescued from his militancy by a NATO spokesman in April 1999, after first calling for Milosevic to ‘step down’ .  I also tried to undermine some New Labour piffle about the marvellous NHS by contrasting it with the catastrophe of the Stafford hospital scandal, showing as it does that pouring billions into a nationalised health service does not automatically improve the health of the people.

 

But I also turned on the Tories, for complaining about the Labour surrender to the EU when they were only additions to surrenders made during the Thatcher and Major years. I also mocked their noisy complaints about Gordon Brown’s sale of the gold reserves, by pointing out that, at the time, the Tory front bench did nothing, and it was left to the eminent backbencher Sir Peter Tapsell to raise the matter in the Commons. This was typical of the supine state of the Tory party in the face of New Labour for most of its existence (they did of course fail to oppose the Iraq adventure). As I said, the first New Labour government was really the John Major government.

 

Perhaps I was too keen to peel off the many left-wingers there, to concentrate on the whole conservative indictment. I mentioned identity cards and detention without trial, and the attack on the constitution, but clean forgot to mention mass immigration. Was this a Freudian memory slip? Who knows?  By the way, the whole thing was recorded and will sooner or later be put up on the web, and I acknowledge that this is a wholly partial account which concentrates very much on my own contribution.

 

Anyway, the result was interesting – an enormous number of abstentions, many fewer votes for New Labour, and even fewer for the motion itself, though the margin wasn’t that great. The abstentions, in effect, won, which is rather an unusual outcome.  I like to think that the Left-wingers there decided they would rather abstain than support that tawdry government,  though they certainly weren’t going to vote with Tories.  I also like to think (after some post-debate conversations) that I may have encouraged them to do so. Unscrupulous? I don’t think so. I did oppose the Iraq war. I did oppose identity cards and detention without trial. On such things I’m quite willing to form alliances with opponents, as they rise above other issues. It’s an interesting exercise, both for Cambridge undergraduates who probably loathe me as a right-wing monster, and for me as someone who believes a new coalition in politics is possible, in consorting with the enemy, and wondering where the true boundaries really lie in British politics.