Martin Rowson – As I Please

IF THE historians of the future ever wake up for long enough as they pore over the records of the period, they may choose to dub this stretch of British history “The Age of Tedium”. “The Age of Change” sounds better, in a strictly metrical sense and deprived of any futile attempt at guessing its actual meaning, but in truth the golden era of Brownism is unbelievably boring.

Even the serial crises Gordon Brown has weathered to various degrees of success, entirely in a reactive way, are pretty dull once the initial thrill of the unexpected has passed (usually in about three hours in the never-ending 24-hour news cycle), but worse still, the proactive stuff – or what there is of it – is so mind-numbingly tedious, tears of boredom stream down your face even as your brain numbs up and sloughs you, at last, into the welcoming arms of blissful sleep.

OK, so maybe that’s pushing the rhetoric a bit far, but we’ll get back to rhetoric in a minute. Nonetheless, for a politics junkie like me these are dark times, and whatever kind of political methadone they’re fobbing me off with now has clearly been laced with valium.

Irrespective of its faults or merits, Brown’s Government displays something we haven’t seen in British politics for decades, if not centuries. It’s not like James Callaghan’s government in the late 1970s, beset by crises from without but also typified by cultural and political responses which ranged from punk to Thatcherism. Nor is it like John Major’s administration in the 1990s, hollowed out from within by arrogance and corruption, which inspired such levels of national disgust and contempt that the Tories almost consciously conspired at their own destruction in May 1997.

I suppose if you wanted a political parallel, the closest you can get is the “Great Brezhnev Stagnation” in the Soviet Union, where the apparatchiks of a burnt-out ideology kept going through the motions and mouthing the rhetoric for decades before they finally worked out that they were dead.
In the meantime, give or take a tiny elite of dissidents, the vast majority of the Russian population proceeded to drink themselves into oblivion because the whole hollow edifice was so bloody boring.

This isn’t all bad news for Tribune readers, because the ideology that’s finally burnt itself out is, of course, Thatcherism. Over the past few months, I’ve written several times in this column that Brown’s discomforts and travails are ultimately all his own fault, because he was the primary architect of “new” Labour and “new” Labour is an entirely Thatcherite construct.

In its “new” Labour manifestation, it fits with the comedian Mark Thomas’s definition of Blairism – “Thatcherism with KY jelly” – but it’s Thatcherite nevertheless and Brown’s initial surrender to the supremacy of the market means that he’s painted himself into a corner, and he knows it.

During the 10 horrible years of the born-again merchant banker Tony Blair (and yes, that is rhyming slang) this was less of a problem. As Blair was, in Labour Party terms, a parvenu entryist, his serial betrayal of everything Labour should epitomise, coupled with his undisguised contempt for the party itself, was just about bearable, in psychological terms at least, because no one really expected anything else.

Blair was good at the rhetoric, but again no one imagined that he meant a word of it. True, his relative powerlessness to do anything that kicked against the pricks of market capitalism meant that the temptation to wander off into classic displacement activities, simply to stave off the boredom, was overwhelming. Hence Iraq. But again, craven support for American imperialism was par for the course, and he hiked up the empty rhetoric accordingly.

Unlike Blair, who couldn’t really sell out because he wouldhave never bought in in the first place, in Brown’s case the rhetoric no longer works. The language of action – all that talk about “conviction”, “leadership”, “change” and the rest of it – is transparently meaningless, because we know that he knows it merely disguises his structural inability to take any kind of grand action at all, because the ideology he’s embraced is structured to prevent politicians interfering with the primacy of the market.

Brown’s real problem is that the Blairite/Thatcherite grand, gaudy, grand-guignol rhetoric is out of all proportion to the important yet small initiatives he’s constantly announcing. This is what makes them seem boring, whereas in fact the wider availability of corneas for transplant makes a material difference to a lot of people, simply by restoring their vision.

However, because he’s still wedded to Blairite rhetoric, we’re still waiting for Brown’s Vision, because he keeps telling us it’s coming, when in fact, given the consequences of previous visions, we and a lot of other people are probably infinitely better off just being bored.