Leo Abse's attack on Tony Blair

"The Man Behind The Smile: Tony Blair And The Politics Of Perversion"



In 1972: Tony Blair and Alan Collenette, Richmond, West London

1996: two years after Blair became leader, a year before his landslide electoral victory and triumphal entry into Downing Street. Veteran Welsh MP Leo Abse, Old Labour and proud of it, gives TB a working over with fists of Freudian analysis.

There is an old Chinese philosophical saying: "man is greater than anything that comes out of him." I find elaborate schematics of the human soul unconvincing. The insights of psychologists are illuminating and suggestive, but I don't think you can tie them all together with threads into a neat bundle. There's lots of ends of speculation poking out of it. For example, the foetus hears its mother's heartbeat, but that isn't necessarily why we respond to the rhythms of rock music, for we have heartbeats of our own.

I think it was Karl Popper who observed that much of psychoanalysis was unfalsifiable. Yes, Leo Blair had a debilitating stroke, but we don't know what the son read into his father's mute gaze. Yes, TB's mother was reportedly unassuming and the "cement" of the family, but no, we don't know that tending to her disabled husband's needs starved her son of affection; nor that "cement" should be read as cold and hard, rather than binding. One can certainly postulate that intimations of mortality galvanized Blair, but then he said that himself.

Explaining a public figure like TB is an even bigger challenge, because policy and presentation are at least as much about other people as one's own personal history. The vagueness of Blair's manifesto may be, as Abse suggests, to do with an immature reluctance to accept one's own aggressive impulses and enter into combat with opponents; but it may have more to do with making the broadest possible appeal to a public that wants pain-free answers.

As early as the 1960s, there was concern about how presentation had trumped policy in American politics - see Joe McGinniss' book "The Selling Of The President 1968." Then there's Robert Redford's 1972 film "The Candidate", in which the challenger's successful strategy is to get the incumbent to commit to policy statements, losing a percentage of the voters each time, without doing the same himself, so when he wins, the new President is lost:



Blair's "consensus by diktat" approach to his Party must have been a contrast to the divisions among the Conservatives, and the emphasis on youth helped to make Labour's opponents seem old and out of touch. Did Blair like Jagger? Wilson made much of the Beatles. Abse should have swung his bow round and loosed his penetrating shafts at an electorate infantilised by dreamlike media and by a government that promises to do all for us because it takes everything from us.

Mad, or cunning? The smile of a politician may be that of a pervert afraid of his own violence; or it could be to disarm you while being perfectly aware of his aggression - here is Chris Mullin's diary for September 13, 2001:

"To London on the 18.47. David Miliband was on the train. He is in a similar situation to the one I was in when I was first selected - enemies occupy every office in his constituency party, although in his case it is nothing personal.

"He says The Man - who was once in a similar situation in Sedgefield - advised him 'to go around smiling at everyone and get other people to shoot them'. Advice that The Man seems to have applied throughout his career."

But in 1996, there are elements of the coming Labour government that Abse correctly identifies as sources of trouble: the Wilson-style "kitchen cabinet" of four powerful men, the increased power of Brown's Treasury, the failure to think things through (despite protestations of "joined-up thinking") that led to the graceless Baroness Jay curtly dismissing the hereditary peerage without having a generally agreed alternative, the continuing obsession with presentation (endlessly "making sure", "shaking up", "rolling out").

It was all Bakunin, the impulse to destroy justified as a creative urge. It was rock, but it spilled out of the concert hall. Think of Lindsay Anderson's 1968 "If...": moral outrage at finding the pickled foetus in its school jar, but then mortaring and machine-gunning the assembly at Speech Day. Think of the 1970 film (based on 1968) "The Strawberry Statement", students destroying the academics' lifetimes' work and screwing among the filing cabinets. Or "Zabriskie Point". The Paris Riots of 1968. The revolutionaries who took over the Establishment, cannabis fumes rolling down the BBC's corridors.Tariq Ali, Jerry Rubin, Timothy Leary. Fun. Millenarian madness. The once-a-generation collective testosterone tension that explodes into war, civil war or rebellion. It wasn't just Blair, it was a whole culture ready to take on its parents, who had had enough of real, bloody conflict in their lifetime and who were dazed at the reaction from well-fed youngsters with money in their pockets. A culture ready for a Leader. "Don't trust anyone over 30", said Jack Weinberg.

Assisted by biased reportage, the public saw a divided, dithering and venal Conservative Party. Time for a change. Blair was on the boat when the tide turned.

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Does the Conservative Party defend the Union? Does it want to?

Despite its name, the Conservative and Unionist Party has reasons to permit the breakup of the United Kingdom.

In Scotland and Wales, the Labour Party has a strong and enduring dominance. It would benefit the Tories greatly in Parliament if these became independent countries; and Northern Ireland is an idiosyncratic electoral landscape, an irrelevance as far as the two major Westminster parties are concerned, except in straitened political times when their (and other minority) votes must be courted.

The shifting balance between Labour and Conservative means that minor parties can wield disproportionate influence. Leo Abse's 1996 book on Tony Blair reminds us that in the late 1970s a weak Labour government gave nationalists the go-ahead on devolution in exchange for their support; only Abse's "reasoned amendment" led to the requirement for referenda beforehand. This was profound long-term change made for fleeting party political reasons.

None of Northern Ireland's 18 MPs belongs to any of the Big Three, so aside from their ability to lobby they merely serve to raise the bar for an overall majority in the House, from 317 seats to 326. Changing demographics in the Province suggest that, ever so slowly, Northern Ireland is moving to a closer relationship with the South.

Without Scotland, the Conservatives would have had an 11-seat margin in 2010 (306/591); without Ireland also, it would have been 20 seats; and had Wales too been independent, the Tories would have had a comfortable 32-seat margin in an English Parliament.

Wales and Scotland are effectively Labour fiefdoms (and I suspect that if Scotland does secede, there may be a winnowing of Salmond's currently strong faction in the Scottish Parliament: what's the point of a nationalist who has finally got what he wants? The SNP will have to rebrand itself as a second socialist party). Northern Ireland is drifting away into a different future.

But even in England, the Conservative Party has no guaranteed dominance, and its seats are much more liable to swings than Labour's. In 2010, the 50 constituencies with the biggest winner's vote margin over the runner-up were all Labour. Conversely, in the 50 seats with the narrowest margins, 38 were Conservative, of which 17 are expected to switch to Labour next time and 1 to a minority candidate; 1 is and is expected to remain in Labour hands; and the remaining 11 were Liberal, of which 6 may go to the Tories and 1 to Labour. The Tories have to work far harder, and make more concessions, than the Labour Party. Only a long period of incompetent or tyrannical rule under Labour could propel the Conservatives to victory as in 1979.

Electoral Calculus is predicting a slaughter of the Liberals next year, with a loss of two-thirds of their current seats. If the UK fragments, the English tug-o'-war between Labour and Tory under "first past the post" looks likely to shut out minor parties much as in American politics; and as in the USA, the tussle is on common ground, though here the political territory is more redistributionist than there.

The Tories are doomed. They can remain a party only in name, if at all. They may slow their decay by jettisoning unprofitable (to them) parts of the Kingdom (as the EU keenly desires), but their ultimate future in a ruined economy is in some form of rapprochement with the socialists. Meanwhile their bandit-cronies strip-mine what's left while they can and sock it away abroad. Like Blair, like Clegg, Cameron will be a Lord Jim when the storm-tossed ship of state heads for the rocks.
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Tipping point

Source: http://www.justintarte.com/2012/10/leadership-and-your-tipping-point.html

"When looked at objectively each merger or take over is a loss of economic activity. This becomes painfully clear when we have a look at the unemployment rates of some countries...

"The pillar Prosperity of a society is about to fall again. History has shown that the fall of the pillar Prosperity always results in a revolution. Because of the high level of unemployment after the second industrial revolution many societies initiated a new transition, the creation of a war economy. This type of economy flourished especially in the period 1940 – 1945.

"Now, societies will have to make a choice for a new transition to be started."

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/05/current-problems-associated-end-third-industrial-revolution.html


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Gogol on German competition

A shoemaker, indeed? 'As drunk as a shoemaker,' says the proverb. I know what you were like, my friend. If you wish, I will tell you your whole history. 

You were apprenticed to a German, who fed you and your fellows at a common table, thrashed you with a strap, kept you indoors whenever you had made a mistake, and spoke of you in uncomplimentary terms to his wife and friends. 

At length, when your apprenticeship was over, you said to yourself, 'I am going to set up on my own account, and not just to scrape together a kopeck here and a kopeck there, as the Germans do, but to grow rich quick.' 

Hence you took a shop at a high rent, bespoke a few orders, and set to work to buy up some rotten leather out of which you could make, on each pair of boots, a double profit. But those boots split within a fortnight, and brought down upon your head dire showers of maledictions; with the result that gradually your shop grew empty of customers, and you fell to roaming the streets and exclaiming, 'The world is a very poor place indeed! A Russian cannot make a living for German competition.'

Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls (1842)

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Blair - 20:20 hindsight?

 

(Source: Daily Mail)

1972: Tony Blair and his friend pose (and preen, as good-looking English guys could in those days) outside the Vineyard Congregationalist Church in Richmond, west London. They played rock music in the crypt, and even then he went 100% at whatever he took on:

‘Guys, guys.’ Tony called us together after one show. ‘We’re OK and everything but we could be so much better if we rehearsed!’

No '70s laid-back amateurishness for him, then.

John Rentoul's sympathetic biography of Tony Blair "whom he admired more at the end of his time in office than he did at the beginning" (Independent newspaper) notes the future PM's avoidance of drugs, ability to persuade people to help, scrupulous honesty (leaving a note when the band's van scraped the paint off a Jaguar) and sincere, but unhokey, developing interest in religion.

And yet...



From "Tony Blair: Prime Minister" by John Rentoul

He didn't let lack of experience stop him. Here he is in his pre-Oxford gap year:

 

And here is the natural marketer, albeit with an amusingly obvious inducement:

- a forerunner of his penchant for "eye-catching initiatives" that aren't so great on closer analysis.

But the photograph haunts me. Two posers, but the one on the left is the one you look at. And the quality of that grin - not amusement, but somehow thrown at the spectator. What are that hand and hip doing? Is it the will to power, perhaps, combined with the desire for celebrity and adulation - Narcissus in early bloom?

Classical tragedy is based on a great man a with fatal flaw. Could we have foreseen where his egotism misled him into unjust (and it's said, illegal) war?

I have ordered Leo Abse's psychologising book on Blair - the original 1996 edition, to see whether Abse does more than simply vent his detestation of the new Labour leader and can predict the future problems, as well as his decade in the limelight of British politics.


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Knowing that every vote makes a difference, makes a difference

I've previously noted the unfairness of the UK electoral voting system in Scotland, which gives Labour an unearned majority there:

(Data: BBC)

But the system in the Scottish Parliament works far better. Each person gets two votes, one local and one party-list-based regional. In aggregate, here is what happened in 2011:

Data: Wikipedia

... bang on for Labour, slightly generous for the SNP. Not a bad hybrid, either: voting first for a local candidate, and then for a party, rather than combining the two and effectively voting for a Prime Minister (with all the personality-cult garbage that brings in its wake).

Even more interesting is the difference between how the two votes were cast:

 

Data: Wikipedia

In the regional contest, when it was no longer simply First Past The Post, and the vote was more likely to be taken into account even if one chose a minority candidate, the voting share for small parties leapt from 1% to 12%. Knowing that every vote makes a difference, makes a difference.

Electoral Calculus predicts that in next year's UK General Election, even under FPTP, UKIP may get over 14% of votes cast - and NO seats - so goodness knows what the voter behaviour would be under some form of proportional representation. Perhaps this month's European Parliament elections will give us a clue, and the differences between those results and GE 2015 could be worked up into some yardstick of democratic deficit.

Not, of course, that the EU Parliament decides anything, as Pat Condell points out in this splendid rant (htp: James Higham):



- which leads me to wonder why on Earth Alex Salmond would wish Scotland, if and when divorced from the rest of the UK, to remain in the European Union (or rather, join, legally speaking, not that the EU has much respect for law if it gets in the way of power).

I've already suggested that Scotland might do better to join forces with Norway and Iceland, maybe even Denmark (which, you'll recall, was expected to vote against the Lisbon Treaty and so the government cancelled the referendum and went ahead anyway). With North Sea fishing and oil, and firm Icelandic-style treatment of banksters, plus the energy and technical creativity of its people, a Kalmar-Union-plus might just work. Rather that than tie your jollyboat to a sinking megavessel like the EU.

One more question: should Scotland get independence, will the Scot Nats have outlived their usefulness? And has the shrewd Salmond already planned for that? Salmond the EU Commissioner? Salmond for EU President?


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Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty at home in Jackson, Mississippi (pic source)

From "Why I Live At The P.O.":

It wasn't five minutes before Uncle Rondo suddenly appeared in the hall in one of Stella-Rondo's flesh-colored kimonos, all cut on the bias, like something Mr. Whitaker probably thought was gorgeous.

"Uncle Rondo!" I says. "I didn't know who that was! Where are you going?"

"Sister," he says, "get out of my way, I'm poisoned."

"If you're poisoned stay away from Papa-Daddy," I says. "Keep out of the hammock. Papa-Daddy will certainly beat you on the head if you come within forty miles of him. He thinks I deliberately said he ought to cut off his beard after he got me the P.O., and I've told him and told him and told him, and he acts like he just don't hear me. Papa-Daddy must of gone stone deaf.'

"He picked a fine day to do it then," says Uncle Rondo, and before you could say "Jack Robinson" flew out in the yard.

What he'd really done, he'd drunk another bottle of that prescription. He does it every single Fourth of July as sure as shooting, and it's horribly expensive.

_________________________

- Part of Eudora Welty's collection "A Curtain Of Green" (1941)
 
What brings this to mind is Brain Pickings' republication of her unsolicited (and unsuccessful) letter of application to New Yorker magazine at the age of 23:


March 15, 1933

Gentlemen,

I suppose you’d be more interested in even a sleight-o’-hand trick than you’d be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can’t have the thing you want most.

I am 23 years old, six weeks on the loose in N.Y. However, I was a New Yorker for a whole year in 1930–31 while attending advertising classes in Columbia’s School of Business. Actually I am a southerner, from Mississippi, the nation’s most backward state. Ramifications include Walter H. Page, who, unluckily for me, is no longer connected with Doubleday-Page, which is no longer Doubleday-Page, even. I have a B.A.(’29) from the University of Wisconsin, where I majored in English without a care in the world. For the last eighteen months I was languishing in my own office in a radio station in Jackson, Miss., writing continuities, dramas, mule feed advertisements, santa claus talks, and life insurance playlets; now I have given that up.

As to what I might do for you — I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15¢ movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse’s pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. That shows you how my mind works — quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards.

Since I have bought an India print, and a large number of phonograph records from a Mr. Nussbaum who picks them up, and a Cezanne Bathers one inch long (that shows you I read e. e. cummings I hope), I am anxious to have an apartment, not to mention a small portable phonograph. How I would like to work for you! A little paragraph each morning — a little paragraph each night, if you can’t hire me from daylight to dark, although I would work like a slave. I can also draw like Mr. Thurber, in case he goes off the deep end. I have studied flower painting.

There is no telling where I may apply, if you turn me down; I realize this will not phase you, but consider my other alternative: the U of N.C. offers for $12.00 to let me dance in Vachel Lindsay’s Congo. I congo on. I rest my case, repeating that I am a hard worker.

Truly yours,

Eudora Welty
_______________________

Truly she was "a good gift".


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