The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Sunday, March 26, 2006

We Thank Thee, O Lord, for our Beloved Leader

In a delightful article in today's Observer, Will Hutton leaps to the defence of his beloved, beleaguered Vicar of Downing Street. He starts, on the question of the lordships for loans enterprise, by advocating the presumption of innocence with which the Reverend is so eager to do away - "no presumption of the innocence or integrity of the lenders is entertained for a nano-second". The truth, apparently, is "a cash-strapped party looking for support where it could get it, using similar ruses to its opponents and, by American or European standards, offering precious little back in return". New Labour is marginally less corrupt than Berlusconi or the Republicrats; therefore let it go in peace. "The rules should have been different"; the Reverend and his chums have had only nine years to change them, and they have, after all, been busy.

The altar-boy next proceeds to the dire and disgusting motives of those who impugn the Reverend's "astonishing political success story". He pillories Jack Dromey and the National Executive Committee for claiming they were not told about the lordships-for-loans business. "In the autumn of 2004, the Labour party was £16m in debt and traded at a loss. In 2005 it spent £18m fighting the general election. Yet not one person, we are invited to believe, thought to ask where this largesse had come from." It follows, then, that if the Reverend is a crook, then so are Dromey and the NEC. "Found out, there is a choice. You make the argument, however unpalatable; or you run for cover". We all know what Dromey and the NEC did. The argument, which they ought to have made instead, follows in short order. There is the ethical dimension: "Money had to be raised"; the need to be responsible: "All parties exploited the loans loophole"; and, of course, the urgent, ever-present Blairite concern for open government: "business donors have wanted privacy".

Despite the Reverend's characteristic moralising impassionedness, the choirboy does admit that "Blair cocked up ... There should have been more transparency". Some of us find him transparent enough and more; but love is blind, and so inevitably, as the Reverend grinned and slicked his way around the matter, the choirboy found himself "grudgingly admiring him. He took the criticism on the chin, made the argument, and fought back. Amid a Cabinet of rabbits and a party collectively blame-shifting, here at least was somebody prepared to lead from the front." The real issue, you see, had nothing to do with ethics, responsibility or good government at all: "Talk about recovering moral authority, purpose and good government is waffle". The issue, "as always in politics, is about winning the argument". The Reverend's critics, "riven by lack of intellectual rigour", have failed to see that Blair's talk about recovering moral authority, purpose and good government, while conspicuously failing to resign, is the unassailable argument of a genuinely rigorous intellect.

Besides, as the altar-boy correctly argues, the alternative is hardly more appetising: Gordon Brown is "New Labour through and through." But he has gained the admiration of Rupert Murdoch's economic guru, which certainly speaks volumes for his credentials in social responsibility. Brown is proving the thesis that "high social spending, high taxation and high spending on the public infrastructure leads to more rather than less growth", which is a wonderful thing so long as the spending is public and the growth is in private profits. David Cameron's Conservative party is thus "fortified in its belief that it can maintain New Labour's social spending and take on its right - constructing a new consensus in British politics" in which everyone who matters can participate and from which the voters are increasingly opting out. Democracy, it appears, is waffle too.

There follows the ex cathedra pronouncement that the Reverend is right (presumably in the sense of "correct") about "the need to personalise public services and to argue for plural delivery of them." If there is one thing we need, it is a wide choice of call centre workers to tell us their first names. The Reverend is also correct in embracing free-market capitalism "warts and all", like Deng Xiaoping, because "only then can you start to debate how to make capitalism more honest". Only by embracing the horrors of a system to the full can we even begin to debate how to make that system more efficient. By this brilliant logic, only when the ozone layer has completely disappeared and half of London has sunk beneath the sea can we begin to debate how to make the planet more livable.

Is the Reverend correct to demolish civil liberties in the name of counter-terrorism? "No - but with a qualification. The kind of terrorism we have experienced is different; some pre-emptive capacity to limit it must be right." In short: no, but on the other hand, yes. No wonder the Reverend inspires such adulation in his followers; it seems he can be right even when he is wrong.

And so, last and least, to the matter of the war crimes. Iraq is a "millstone" for the Reverend, but the choirboy is "beginning to revolt against the certainty with which apocalypse is now universally predicted." It seems that from where Will Hutton is sitting, at some considerable distance from Iraq, a few tens of thousands of deaths and the destruction of the country are not apocalyptic enough. The West "cannot be blamed for the murderous enmity between Shia and Sunni", which is causing so much trouble that most Iraqis apparently don't even notice the occupation any more. "Democracy may be the best way to mediate" these barbaric squabbles, as in Vietnam: "Today it is becoming obvious that American strategy in Asia from 1945 - seeking communist containment while encouraging democratic capitalism - was right." Thanks to the strategy of encouraging capitalist democracies like Suharto's Indonesia and Ngo Dinh Diem's Vietnam, the latter country "bought a crucial fifteen years", whatever that may mean, at a cost of a mere few million lives. This led to the election of Deng Xiaoping "on a prospectus that China had to follow the success demonstrated by the Asian tigers between 1960 and 1975", while the Vietnamese were being bombed and the Indonesians butchered. "As a result, 400 million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty" because "History is littered with unintended and unexpected consequences." Thus, in Iraq, either because we intend it or because we do not intend it, "today's gloom may prove to be as overdone as yesterday's optimism". This is certainly encouraging, not to mention intellectually rigorous.

The "central truth", to which the altar-boy now returns us, is that the Reverend "has overseen a fundamental shifting in British politics to the benefit of ordinary people" such as Will Hutton and the editor of the Observer. The "serial rebels who hold their seats in the House of Commons off the back of a New Labour manifesto", in which pledges on tuition fees and identity cards are serially broken, "need to examine their motives and conscience." Also, "media critics from the left need to ask themselves precisely why they make common cause with the left's enemies" and the enemies of the Reverend, who "created the new coalition" with the Conservatives. If Britain's very own Deng Xiaoping is prepared to "carry on soaking up the punishment" - remember, it's a lonely life at the top - then "the liberal left should be grateful". Let us pray.

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