Why The Blair Creature wasn't my Hero, etc.

John Edwards asked, in tones full of scepticism, if I could ‘actually name any New Labour funerals or memorial events where the Internationale was played?’ He added that Caroline Benn was ‘obviously not New Labour’.

 

How about these;

 

From The Guardian , 13th August 2005:

 

‘Mr Cook’s coffin was carried out of the cathedral to the sounds of the Internationale and the Scottish socialist song Freedom Come All Ye.’

 

From ‘The Times’ 19th October 2000

 In a report of Donald Dewar’s funeral:

 

‘…the congregation hummed along to a Burns tune, and then, remarkably, joined in as the fiddler, Aly Bain, and the accordionist, Phil Cunningham, played the communist anthem, the Internationale'

I should point out here that most Blairites remain in good health, and long may they remain so. I cannot speculate on what might or might not be sung at their funerals when, in the fullness of time, they take place. (I hope that enough people attend my funeral to sing*all* the verses of *'Immortal, Invisible, God only wise', and *all* the verses of 'Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation' , and that someone is around to make sure that the 1662 burial service is followed, corruption, worms, pains of death and all, and that there is no blasted fake grass draped over the edge of the grave, thank you very much. If, after that, anyone wants to sing or hum the Internationale,  they're quite welcome, but only for laughs). 

As for the Caroline Benn point, she was of course not a New Labour person. But I was recording the pleasure expressed by Fiona Millar, who was at the very kernel of New Labour, at having the chance to sing this song at Mrs Benn’s memorial service, where my one-time International Socialist comrade Paul Foot urged those present to join in with gusto.

 

Mr and Mrs Benn may both have been far from ‘New Labour’, but the gulf between them and New Labour may not have been as wide or as deep as some people like to think. 

 

For instance, Mrs Benn’s principal preoccupation in life was the cause of comprehensive schools, which New Labour, in 1998, endorsed by using the law to ban the foundation of any future non-comprehensive schools.

 

And I doubt very much whether the Benns had much of a quarrel with Gordon Brown’s welfare policies, the real heart of New Labour, involving huge redistribution through such devices as tax credits,  and a colossal increase in both public spending and borrowing. 

 

Mr Benn’s differences with the Blair government arose out of his admirable English radical patriotism, which made him quite unable to accept the European Union’s theft of British sovereignty from Parliament, and which also made him a ferocious defender of liberty and an opponent of war.

 

His utopianism could be traced back to the pre-1914 Clarion era of British socialism, all bicycling, temperance, pacifism and Garden Cities, with a later admixture of half-understood Marxism which he picked up from his trade union friends. He wasn’t, and couldn’t have been, a Leninist because his liking for liberty was too strong and because, ultimately, he wasn’t that cynical.

 

The Utopianism of New Labour was a complete re-engineering of Leninism, by Leninists. It entirely lacks Benn’s nostalgic, romantic Edwardian character. This was the switch from the old model – a vanguard Party suddenly seizing the barracks, the post office, the telephone exchange and the railway station – to the Gramscian  model (based on the ideas of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, who realised early on the that Russian Bolsheviks were a disaster for the Left, and believed the Left had to triumph by capturing the minds of people in advanced western societies, brought up with liberal and Christian principles,  who would be repelled by Soviet Communism).

 

Instead of the violent putsch, the bodies in the street and the cloud of dark smoke over the city, they sought  a sunshiny non-sectarian movement, apparently dissolved in normal civil society,  while working slowly but actively to gain control of the TV studio, the school, the newspaper, the museum, and so, eventually, of the minds of the peoples of advanced western societies. As this change came during after the 1960s, it was preoccupied with sexual and cultural politics, the family, marriage, race, immigration, educational egalitarianism, artistic experiment and drugs.  Its interest in the older left-wing cause, especially trades unionism was limited and fading. It understood that state regulation was a far more effective way of controlling the economy than crude nationalisation.

 

This grew out of the organisational and political failure of European Communism, and over the failure of Western European Communist Parties to contain or absorb  the posty-1968 New Left (which began with a French student demand for male access to female dormitories). The gap between old and new Communism was neatly encapsulated in 1968 by the May events in Paris, a romantic revolution which was really about sex, drugs and rock and roll, and our old friend, personal autonomy;  and by the flattening of a tentative experiment in limited economic and personal liberty in Prague in August that year, final proof (if any were needed, and of course it *was* needed by the Communist faithful ) that Soviet Communism had ossified into an inflexible iron machine  even more repressive and intolerant of dissent and variety than any pre-1914 territorial empire.

 

These currents came together in the late 1980s in the journal ‘Marxism Today’, formerly the stodgy theoretical organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but under its editor Martin Jacques a nursery for a new, post-Soviet left, and in the view of many, for the ideas which lay beneath and behind New Labour -  deeply radical on social, moral, cultural, educational, sexual and international matters; identical to Margaret Thatcher on unchained economic liberalism. Political illiterates noted only the similarity to Thatchernomics, which they mistakenly thought were conservative, and so moronically concluded that New Labour was ‘right wing’ and Mr Blair ‘the best Tory prime minister we ever had’.

 

 

In this new and sparkling stream Marxism and student radicalism could unite into a movement capable, in the end, of accepting the economic changes of Thatcherism, while continuing to seek extremely radical social goals. Its problem was that, once the Cold War ended, it became completely linked with globalism, which the left loved because of its hostility to borders and the nation state, but also with the new ideology of ‘democratism’, in which the desire to plant ‘democracy’ all over the globe replaced Communism as the radical’s the utopian ideal.

 

Those who fully understood this (and there weren’t many on the Left or the Right, a grasp of Trotskyist or Leninist theology being essential to the task) grasped that the USA had now become the arsenal of progress, and believed that it could impose democratism with bombs and bayonets on those parts of the world that had until now resisted it. Iraq was a perfect chance for them to show what they could do. And, like all utopians, they concluded that the failure of the Iraqi experiment was caused not by the theory as a whole, but by particular conditions, by implementation, etc. So now they’ve done the same in Afghanistan and Libya and will carry on trying to do it in Syria and Russia.

 

Old-fashioned leftists were baffled by this. For years and years they had marched in the rain for what they called ‘peace’ .This normally meant the disarmament of NATO in face of the Soviet threat, but quite a lot of leftists, having their roots in various Christian pacifist traditions,  genuinely believed that such a  policy tended towards actual peace.

 

Now they found that their movement seemed to have been taken over by open enthusiasts for war. They were confused then, and they are confused still . The confusion has pretty much destroyed the Labour Party, and is the only way of explaining the rift which followed the Iraq war and which persists to this day. Those leftists who actually understand their own utopian, internationalist beliefs grasp why these wars are called for. Those who have embraced socialism as a substitute for a dead Christianity are outraged by leaders who preach a gospel of endless global war.  

 

Perhaps in time they will manage to achieve what Hegel called the synthesis, and either become keen warmongers or give up being leftists. But the chances are that, like most people, they will refuse to think about subjects which might compel them to abandon cherished faith, and be angered by anyone who disturbs that faith with facts and logic.

 

***A small note about Mr John McDeere, who posted on Sunday that it was ‘Bizarre that Hitchens critiques Blair so much these days when he used to be an ardent fan. Years ago he stated that he was his political hero.’

 

When challenged as to where and when I had said this, Mr McDeere replied : ‘You must recall it. It was before the 1997 general election.’

 

I said I did not. He said : ‘It was said in person to a colleague of mine, so I can't provide any textual reference.’

 

I have challenged him both in the comment thread and through a personal e-mail , asking him to name the colleague involved and  making it plain that I strongly dispute his account. The response has been total silence.

 

Now, I do have some confessions to make about Mr Blair. The first is that I sought and was granted an interview with him when he was still Shadow Home Secretary and (though the encounter was astonishingly uninteresting and unproductive of any fact save the name of his student rock ban ‘Ugly Rumours’, which had to be dragged out of him ) conclude that he was a threat to the Tories, which by that time was a cliché anyway. The second is that, thanks to being abroad for most of the Major era, I wrongly acquitted him of aping Bill Clinton in an interview on the US TV station C-Span. I did this because I was too anxious to boast to its viewers that I knew Mr Blair (I did in fact meet him some years before he became famous, and had a nodding acquaintance with him during his early years in Parliament, which partly coincided with my short spell in the Parliamentary Lobby. I never took advantage of this because I never found  him especially interesting, or believed that a conversation with him would be illuminating or indiscreet).

 

But I really don’t think I ever called him my ‘political hero’ or could have been called an ardent fan’.

 

Indeed, I was exasperated by all the attempts, from Neil Kinnock onwards, to pretend that Labour had been rendered harmless. I used what opportunities I had to warn against Mr Blair before 1997, though I confess that I then had only the vaguest idea of what the New Labour project was and was mainly energised by Mr Blair’s Cameron-like wangling of his child into a wholly exceptional state school, the reason for our confrontation during an election press conference. I was right to see in this action a key to the dishonesty of the rest of the project, and to its fundamental egalitarianism, to be imposed on us but not on them. .

 

I recall a strange dinner in the top floor boardroom at the old Daily Express, at which the then editor brought in a very distinguished Tory commentator to tell us all we must get with the project and back New Labour ( I don’t name him because the fact still seems astonishing to me, like a dream or nightmare, and I have no shorthand note or recording of what he said. But he did do it – it fell to me to make an opposing speech without warning).  This was quite common at the time, and I thought it wrong and shameful that so many people in the media did so, some of them Thatcherites acting on the basis that Mr Blair was Major’s enemy, and that was good enough for them.

 

Even if John Major was ghastly, and his defeat inevitable, it seemed necessary to me to fight against the Blair revolution, and to go down fighting. Those who give in to their foes without a struggle (as it proved) never rise again. They have to become their foes, adopt their foes' policies and aims to be allowed back into government, as duly happened.  I must dig up my old cuttings book and check to see what sort of language I used.