Two utterly terrifying things are going on in the world right now. The first is the steady disintegration of Pakistan as an effective state, raising the desperate possibility of its nuclear weapons falling into the hands of crazed Muslim fundamentalists. India, also a nuclear power, is no doubt watching developments closely. If it decides to act, the risks of nuclear war will be real. The region’s third and greatest nuclear power, China, looms over the entire scene.
The second is what is going on in America, with the emergence of the far-right Tea Party movement and the steady advance of Sarah Palin as a viable Republican candidate to fight Barack Obama in just over two years from now. At the time of the last election, when Palin was plucked out of the obscurity of Alaska to run for the vice-presidency, she cut such a ludicrous figure that such an idea seemed totally absurd. Not any more.
Because a lot has changed since then. For a start, President Obama has not been able to maintain the extraordinary command he exercised over the American people during his remarkable election campaign. This is partly his own fault, since he has failed to convey the image of a man who is wholly in charge of his administration. But mainly it is down to the emergence of an immense and frightening army of right wing militants who appear to believe all manner of bizarre things about Obama.
Helped along by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and an array of weirdo broadcasters who seem prepared to say almost anything that will damage Obama, many of them profess to believe that their President is really a closet Muslim and, anyway, isn’t even a native born American. The fact that there is no evidence for either of these outrageous allegations seems to make no difference; they are believed all the same.
But the really astonishing thing about these people is that so many of them are working class. Somehow, Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media have managed to persuade them to support things that are directly contrary to their economic and social interests, and to oppose things that would benefit them. They declare themselves implacably opposed to free medical care, on the grounds that it is socialism. And that, of course, amounts to communism, which adds up to dictatorship and labour camps and – well, you know how it goes.
Having lived for some years in the United States, I have always been aware of the existence of this strange feature of American political life. But in my day such people were scornfully dismissed as rednecks, and they were treated as simple mid-western hicks who knew no better. But in those distant days they were very far from being a majority and therefore posed no great threat. Now, suddenly, they have multiplied. They do pose a threat – specifically, a threat to make Barack Obama a one-term President and put Sarah Palin in the White House.
That would be very bad news for the enormous number of poor families in America. And it would be petrifying news for the rest of the world.
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Many of the reviewers and commentators on Tony Blair’s memoirs have declared that, whatever else you may think of them, they are un-putdownable. I’m afraid my experience has been rather the opposite: I find them un-pickupable. Nor is this entirely down to the book’s size and weight (it is 700 pages long), although that is certainly a factor: it is difficult to balance comfortably when one is sitting in an armchair. But what really turns me off is the style. It is faux-folksy, with everyone referred to as “guys” and himself denoted by “you” – you do this, you do the other. After only a few pages, it gave me the creeps.
But I am made of stern stuff, so I have persisted – albeit in rather small doses at a time. And that, I think, is a good thing, because it is quite revealing in places. There is a fascinating passage, for instance, on how he tricked the party into backing the redrafting of Clause IV of the constitution, and revealing that Gordon Brown expressed the view that he seemed to be deliberately trying to provoke his own party. Blair denies it, although the text makes it clear that he was doing just that.
But one of my favourite passages deals with his conception of what New Labour was meant to be about. He concedes that he made some compromises when he first became leader, but none on “essentials”.
This is how he defined New Labour: “No return to the old union laws; no renationalisation of the privatised utilities; no raising of the top rate of tax; no unilateralism; no abolition of grammar schools… pro-Europe and pro-US; opportunity and responsibility in welfare; encouragement for small and medium-sized businesses, and even-handedness between business and labour… The country had to know that if I was going to be their Prime Minister I would be ‘of the party’ but also removed from it.”
Pretty accurate, I reckon. Which is why I didn’t vote for him as leader, and why I shall be voting Ed Miliband and not David.
