George doesn't like Gordon as much as he likes Nicolas and Angela, although she's a Girl
Yes, it's
international politics as the junior school playground. Of course this is the problem with going out of your way to cultivate the "Special Relationship" - it only lasts as long as you keep on cultivating it. It doesn't have very deep roots, despite all of the history. Even then it can disappear (see John Major) if the personalities change.
Brown's approach seems sensible. There's been nothing that can be seen as hostile - with any other country the relationship he has had with the United States would be described as 'close'. That is the right policy - good relations with the United States should be maintained. It is the most powerful country in the world by far, and its actions will have a huge impact on Britain now, and (given the imbalance in economic and military power will only get worse in the next 50 years and beyond) for the rest of our lifetimes. Furthermore the interests of the United States and UK are often the same.
Yet they are only often the same, and often they are not. Blair seemed to think that if the UK interest and the US interest didn't suggest the same policy, the best thing to was change what was seen as being in the UK's interest, rather than the policy. The (limited) evidence so far is that Brown isn't that short-sightedness.
Labels: Blair, Gordon Brown, The "Special Relationship"
"At the time of his choosing"
I've only read the first nine lines of Oliver's
piece on Tony Blair in the TNR, as unusually it seems to be behind a subscription barrier (I say unusually because his piece on Gordon Brown's foreign policy was not), but I still disagree with something.
Imagine it's the 1960s:
Teenage Tony Blair: Y'know, I'm going to a party and I won't be back 'til 2am.
Alive Tony Blair's parents: No you're not, you'll be back by midnight.
Teenage Tony Blair: You're so UNCOOL, y'know, I hate you.
Some hours later...
Teenage Tony Blair at party at 11:59: I'm going home now because I want to.
Teenage Tony Blair's friends at same party at same time: What a statesman. He's going home at the time of his choosing. We wish we could be like him.
Update: Here's the
full post - there's nothing to justify the 'at the time of his choosing' statement. [Thanks DW]
Labels: Blair
Amis & Blair
I would say an odd couple, but they seem perfectly suited. Anyway as the British military attache
tells Chatham House the surge isn't working, apparently Martin Amis of these views' fame:
There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan.
was travelling with him :
Accompanying him was Martin Amis, the novelist who is writing about Mr Blair's final days in office. Downing Street declined to say whether Mr Amis's work was of a biographical nature.
It must have been quite a trip for Martin. Almost everyone in Iraq 'looks like they're from the Middle East' - his urges must have been unbearable.
Labels: Blair, Decent Left, Iraq, Martin Amis
Tony Blair goes
It's really
happening. That's a sigh of relief you hear all around you - I think all but the most die-hard Blairite probably thinks he has gone on a bit too long.
It seems a long time since 1997, that's for certain, although maybe that's just me. I remember the tremendous sense of excitement of his first few weeks in office, when it really seemed as if the country was being governed in a vastly superior way to the last few years of the Major administration. Indeed, despite the long-running Blair/Brown fiasco, the resignation of a seemingly abnormal number of Cabinet Ministers (some twice - I wonder if there are any statistics on whether there were more resignations than under Major or Thatcher), it's never quite reached the depths that the 1987-1997 Conservative governments did, particularly in 1990 and 1995.
How he will be remembered as a PM, I don't know. When people say that, do they mean by professional historians or the public? I've read quite a bit of history about our ex-PMs and I would struggle to write a paragraph about most of them. Anyway Iraq, Northern Ireland and very high house prices seem the most likely [1]. He deserves some credit for going of his own accord, but I suppose it wasn't much of his own accord.
The BBC points out that the morning of the election in 1997 Blair was contemplating a coalition with Paddy Ashdown's Liberal Democrats. I'm not sure how seriously that should be taken - there was a lot of denial about the opinion polls on both sides, but a lot of commentators (I remember in particular a Bagehot column in
The Economist) were talking about the forthcoming landslide. I suppose after 1992 it paid to be cautious - anyway, I wonder how things would have turned out differently if he had required a pact.
[1] On that topic, reading Mrs Thatcher's autobiography the other day (as you do) she defends a windfall tax on banks on the grounds they did not earn the money through better service or cutting costs. I wonder if the Tories could justify a tax on house price gains in the same way?).
Update: There's devolution as well, I forgot that. I think some of
these statements of the usual suspects' views are quite interesting. Neil Kinnock makes a good point about his winning elections, but of course we knew that, that's the thought we have of Blair when we think about his other achievements. Kinnock also say "the government which he has led has produced conditions in which people expect stable affluence. That is unprecedented.". I'm not sure if it is unprecedented, but certainly I think there is a case that the lurching from economic crisis to economic crisis has ended.
There's more here in
Le Monde, which I think (though my French is not very good) has written John Smith out of history. He is rather forgotten, isn't he? I always liked Bryan Gould, though a friend used to say his hair was like Labour's policies - it looked good at a glance, but in more detail you realised there was nothing there.
Labels: Blair
Ruth Turner
There's been some criticism of the Police arresting
Ruth Turner (no relation!) at 6:30am. I don't on the whole think that kind of thing is necessary, though surely a dynamic New Labour person like herself would be up at 5:30am, so it's only like a 8 am start for most of us.
Anyhow it reminded me of similar critism when the Police arrested either Kevin or Ian Maxwell, sons of Robert. So I wondered what they were up to now, and the answer seems to be
Not Famous Enough for
a Wikipedia Page. This Times article sheds some more light though, at least on
Kevin.
Labels: Blair
Blair and buggery
Jamie links to a Blair speech in which the Prime Minister
warns the Army about cowardice. As Jamie says, Blairs farewell is essentially: "We’ve all let him down in our various ways, and we should all be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves."
Jamie
also links to the
new searchable online database of Old Baily Trials. He finds the ones involving animal buggery. I found the
sad case of George and Basil Blog, who had their gold watch nicked.
Labels: Blair, Bloggy, Decent Left, defence, England
