It has often been remarked that for Tony Blair “sorry” seems to be the hardest word. Despite granting — in his recent Al Jazeera interview with David Frost — that the situation in Iraq is now a disaster, Britain’s prime minister has yet to express anything resembling genuine regret for the escalating Iraqi death toll which his tireless support of US foreign policy has done much to bring about. Even that “admission” was soon being passed off by Downing Street as a slip of the tongue.
So it seems bizarre that this habitually unapologetic politician is now expressing profound sorrow about Britain’s involvement in the slave trade, the squalid exercise in human trafficking which, during the 18th and 19th centuries, saw the transportation of millions of blacks from Africa to the Caribbean, generating profits that helped bankroll Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
Anticipating commemorations of the slave trade next March, Blair wrote last week in the British black paper, New Nation, that the episode had been a crime against humanity and alluded to its unhappy present-day legacy. Though it stopped short of being a formal apology, his statement went as far in that direction as possible without exposing the British government to reparation claims from the descendants of the slave trade’s victims.
Judged without reference to his sanguinary record, Blair’s statement would make impressive reading. Yet there can be few in whose eyes Tony Blair has not by this stage forfeited the right to hold forth on humanitarian issues. Considering the appalling carnage to which Blair has made no small contribution in the Middle East, it surely requires extraordinary forbearance to take seriously his outpouring of regret over the slave trade — an iniquity that was after all stamped out two hundred years ago and for which he bears no obvious responsibility.
The surprising thing is that commentators normally unsympathetic to Tony Blair are saluting him for taking the initiative in acknowledging British culpability in the matter. Conceding that his motives might be open to question, the London columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown nevertheless declared that Blair was doing what she had despaired of ever witnessing a British leader do: Apologizing for one of the great wrongs perpetrated by the British Empire. His statement, she feels, signals the awakening of the national conscience and delivers a necessary rebuke to white patriots who believe that Britain should not be remembering the dishonor of slavery but paying homage to abolitionists like William Wilberforce. Similarly appreciative of his initiative, New Nation commended Blair for speaking out on a subject in which there are no votes and on which he was not obliged to say anything.
But this indulgent attitude toward Britain’s discredited leader seems a trifle excessive, even if the things Blair is saying badly needed to be said.
The truth is that his statement exemplifies gesture politics at its most vacuous.
It cost Blair nothing to voice regret over the slave trade, and you do not have to be an inveterate cynic to suspect that he is seeking to exploit the forthcoming slave trade commemorations as a means of rescuing his ruined reputation and securing his legacy as a British leader of impeccable moral credentials. Come next March, Blair will be on the verge of leaving office. What better way to stage his departure, this obsessively image-conscious politician may be calculating, than by associating himself with a great historic humanitarian cause and thereby diverting attention from the baleful consequences of his foreign policy — not to mention the endless domestic problems he will be leaving behind him?
Blair would have carried more conviction had he backed the efforts of the black British poet Benjamin Zephaniah to establish a slavery memorial day on the model of the Jewish holocaust memorial day inaugurated in Britain and other countries in 2001. As it is, to applaud Blair’s statement amounts to an endorsement of his empty rhetoric, the reflexive reliance on righteous sound bites that has been his trademark. Long before he came to power, Blair, while evincing consummate media skills, was routinely selling himself as an ethical politician, a devout Christian leader in comparison with whom his main political opponents, the Conservatives, who ruled Britain from 1979 until 1997, were people of bestial instincts. Indeed, high-mindedness became his chief selling point, and it must be said that when it comes to putting on a show of chivalry and moral passion, Blair has few if any contemporary rivals.
There is, to be sure, a long tradition of moral grand standing among the British governing class. In parading his conscience and projecting himself as the representative of a country with a special moral mission, Tony Blair may be said to conform to an old British type (though it would be easy enough to point to past British reformers who, in contrast to Blair, possessed real moral stature). “Progressive” British politicians have long plumed themselves on how Britain is doing more to help the world’s poor and disadvantaged than any other nation; Blair’s self-flattering concern with Africa and the fallout from the slave trade is of a piece with this tendency. Nor is such bombast confined to statesmen; British academics are susceptible to it, too. In a recent article on the slave trade, the historian Tristram Hunt asserted that Britain is publicly debating matters of race and empire in a “far more sophisticated way” than any other European nation. This may be so, but Hunt — in common with Blair — forgot to mention that if Britain is sensitive to past depredations, it also happens to be once again behaving like an imperial power, yielding afresh to hegemonic impulses which Britons like him and Tony Blair maintain their country has eradicated.
One thing is certain: That this overblown sense of Britain’s moral prestige is not widely shared by black Britons, for whom the slave trade remains an enduring trauma. Rather, there is deep residual bitterness among them about white oppression — oppression that is far from being a thing of the past. The fact is that in the matter of addressing injustices suffered by blacks, the government of Tony Blair cannot be said to have achieved very much. Black male unemployment is scarcely less severe than when he came to power in 1997, with black drug-dealing, robbery and gun crime assuming ever more alarming rampancy.
For all Blair’s torrent of pious words, psychological disorder, chronically low educational attainment and depressed living standards continue to blight the lives of British blacks. In short, the legacy of the slave trade is still much in evidence on Britain’s streets.
The verbose mid-20th century British socialist, Harold Laski, was acidly advised by the Labour leader Clement Attlee that a “period of silence” from him would be welcome. Many must wish somebody would issue similarly blunt advice to Tony Blair.
