Tony Blair’s New Year message to his fellow countrymen was grim. Invoking the faltering world economy, looming war against Iraq and the growing threat of terrorists attacks, the British prime minister declared that he could not recall a time when Britain was faced by “so many dangerous problems”.
On New Year’s Day, London’s Daily Mail, a paper frankly contemptuous of Tony Blair and his New Labour government, gave over its front page to Blair’s dispiriting address. “We’re all doomed” ran the paper’s mocking headline.
While Britain has been lashed by torrential rain, with flooding widespread and some people forced to leave their homes, Blair and his family have been on holiday in Egypt. It was from Egypt that the prime minister sent his cheerless message. Cynical Britons have the impression that their leader nowadays spends most of his time abroad; indeed, Britain’s globe-trotting leader is widely felt to be increasingly out of touch with the shabby reality of life in his own country. The popular British satirist Rory Bremner once pictured Tony Blair jetting from capital to capital, only dimly conscious of his exact whereabouts at any given time. Squinting out of the fuselage window one day as his plane taxies to a halt in yet another airport, the prime minister gasps with horror. “God,” he exclaims. “What a frightful dump. Where the hell is this?”
An aide is obliged to explain to him that he has just arrived back in Britain.
Blair lends himself to being satirized. Much given to striking poses (he especially likes to play the grave statesman, all jutting chin and steadfast gaze), he is in many ways a theatrical figure. But then, running Britain has become a largely theatrical affair — not least where the conduct of the country’s relations with the world-at-large is concerned. For, in terms of foreign policy, London’s strategic goals are barely distinguishable any longer from those of Washington, D.C. Britons of a certain age look back in disbelief to the 1960s and 70s to the former British leaders, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, both of whom were capable of refusing to be dictated to by the United States.
If Britain is, in all but name, a US client state, a docile American satellite, it is also a country much at the mercy of global capitalism, with “market values” now penetrating every hole and corner of society. Returning to Britain after a spell in the Far East, the journalist Martin Jacques was staggered by the extent to which commercialism has begun to permeate the whole fabric of British life. Given all this, it is hardly surprising if governing Britain has become an inescapably constrained and compromised undertaking.
Yet even a government doggedly committed to a program of national reconstruction would be hard-pressed to undo the malign effects of the chronic political mismanagement which Britain has suffered. Examples of such mismanagement are legion. Much in the news at present, as it happens, is the shambles into which Britain’s higher education policy is inexorably collapsing. Under Blair, access to university has undergone furious expansion. During the last few years more people have taken degrees in Britain than ever before. But this expansion has taken place with little reference to the country’s actual economic needs — to, for instance, the dearth of skilled artisans — such as plumbers, carpenters and electricians which the country has for some years been experiencing. The result is that at a time when plumbers in particular are in desperately short supply, the British jobs market is being swamped by graduates in inessential subjects like Media Studies.
Among the plethora of superfluous arts graduates who are finding themselves compelled to go out and acquire marketable skills, plumbing is suddenly turning into a popular career move. The news has not been slow to travel that in London plumbers can earn as much as 50,000 pounds a year. Plumbers may be in the process of attaining a status and prestige they never enjoyed before. The irony is that they might never have become so scarce in the first place but for the condescension with which, in snobbish Britain, such employment has traditionally been viewed by the graduate class.
Tony Blair came to power in 1997 in the guise of a messiah, vaunting his managerial capabilities and promising to deliver Britain from inefficiency. Now — even as he prepares to lead Britain into a war for which few can see any justification — he is portraying himself as a leader at the mercy of events. Many are bound to feel that by focusing on the “dangerous problems” by which his country is beset, he is aiming to distract public attention from the poverty of his domestic achievements — from the mounting evidence that he is going to leave Britain an even worse place than he found it.
One day the British people may become united in feeling that the most dangerous of all their national problems is Tony Blair himself.
— Neil Berry, a London-based free-lance journalist since 1980, is the author of “Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism”.
Arab News Opinion 6 January 2003
