Under the New Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, Britain seemed to lead the world in the art of ‘spin’. It is a reputation that has been ruined by the government’s botched handling of the crisis over the British sailors and Marines. Even seasoned cynics have scarcely been able to credit the ineptitude of a government that could permit active service personnel to sell their stories to the highest bidder and then — after two of them had done so — find itself obliged to revoke the decision in the teeth of overwhelming public disgust.
Last week, Downing Street was insisting that it was the Royal Navy, in conjunction with Defense Secretary Des Browne, who authorized the sale of the Marines’ stories. Yet it is hard to believe that Britain’s notoriously interfering prime minister did not at the very least condone a decision that has made Britain a laughing stock in the eyes of the world. It seems oddly fitting that this peculiarly British fiasco has coincided with the worldwide release of the new “Mr. Bean” film. The other day, the Guardian described how Mr. Bean has come to be seen as the personification of Britishness — not least in Iran where, to his much-publicized distress, the youngest of the detained British sailors was taunted by his captors for his likeness to Rowan Atkinson’s rampaging clown. What the article might also have pointed out is that there is one Briton above all who seems to embody Mr. Bean’s salient characteristics, his deviousness, maniacal pursuit of his own ends and endless capacity for causing mayhem. In Blair, Britain boasts a leader who could be described as the Mr. Bean of world politics.
Few in Britain, however, are laughing at Blair’s behavior. There is a mounting sense that whatever his precise role in the debacle, Blair bears ultimate responsibility for exposing Britain’s services to shame and dishonor. Little wonder that he has sought to pin the blame for the whole sorry mess on his defense secretary, a gloomy Scotsman with much to be gloomy about at present. With typical evasiveness, the prime minister has urged the need to “move on”, but he will be hard pressed to stifle the growing clamor for a full inquiry into the awkward questions which the Marines saga has raised. Topping the agenda of any such inquiry will be issue of how they came to be so ill prepared to cope with a confrontation with Iranian forces in the first place.
As for permitting the sale of the Marines’ stories, what exactly was the rationale behind it? Was the assumption that it would enable the British government to counter the propaganda initiative that Iran’s President Ahmed Ahmadinejad had seized with his Saladin-like gesture of magnanimity in releasing the Marines, his “Easter gift”? Perhaps it was reckoned that the stories they told at their press conference of abusive treatment at the hands of their captors would end up being sensationally embellished, thereby undoing the effect of Iranian photographs of them apparently enjoying themselves. Almost certainly, the expectation was that the media coverage would serve to show up what a double-dealer Ahmadinejad really is and demonstrate how imperative it remains for Britain to stand by the US in maintaining a bellicose posture toward Iran. It could hardly have been anticipated that the Marines would end up looking like ludicrous wimps, with the one who was piqued by being likened to Mr. Bean also whinging about the confiscation of his iPod. In any event, the genial Ahmadinejad scored a huge PR triumph at Blair’s expense. The British prime minister who has projected himself as the scourge of tyrants was made to appear weak and vacillating.
In Britain, meanwhile, and especially on the right, there is fury over the damage that has been done to the standing of Britain’s armed forces and to the whole concept of serving one’s country. The line of the patriotic Conservative newspaper, the Daily Mail, is that Blair is nothing less than a traitor who, even before this latest debacle, had wrecked the armed forces, deploying them, for reasons of cynical political advantage, on impossible missions, even as he has imposed on them disabling cost-cutting exercises.
Prominent among the outraged members of the Conservative establishment is the sometime Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkin. It’s Rifkin’s belief that the decision to allow the Marines to sell their stories testifies to the wholesale vulgarization of British society that has taken place in recent years. And it is undeniable that during the Blair era, Britain, with its rampant materialism and obsession with celebrity, has become a country where nothing appears to matter except money and where more or less everything seems to be for sale. What the high-minded Rifkin seems to forget, however, is that the moral decline he deplores has its roots in the period when he and his party were in power and has more than a little to do with the courting of the Australian media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, not just by the New Labour government of Blair but by Conservative governments of the 1980s and 90s. It is no accident that Murdoch’s tabloid newspaper, the Sun, played a central role in the saga over the Marines, making much of the “ordeal” of the female captive Faye Turney. By offering larger financial inducements than its rivals, the Sun retains a monopoly on tawdry sensationalism, even if, in the age of the Internet, its popularity is not what it was. The paper may be said to have reflected, and in turn encouraged, an utterly venal conception of human existence.
Yet for the past three decades, British leaders have turned a blind eye to the coarsening effect of Murdoch’s media empire as the price worth paying for his political loyalty.
The truth is that Murdoch has for years operated what amounts to a privatized state propaganda service, which he hires out to governments that share his commitment to the free market and the foreign policy of the United States. Even before Blair entered office in 1997, it was sufficiently plain that the relationship of mutual favors that Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher established with Murdoch in 1979 was going to continue unabated under New Labour. Indeed, his willingness to flatter the mogul was among the surest early signs that Blair had nothing but contempt for the traditions of the old Labour Party. That he and Murdoch are more or less united in their brutal right-wing world views is no longer in doubt. In cooperation with Blair, Murdoch has kept up his long-standing effort to convert Britain to his US-style, frontier “values”. Chief among his objectives has been to rubbish the public service ethic, that once vaunted feature of British society. It follows that Murdoch’s entire media empire has been especially hostile to the British Broadcasting Corporation, with its commitment to public service programming. An inveterate foe of elitism who regards the BBC, along with the British establishment in general, as essentially patronizing, Murdoch has devoted his energies to championing the rugged ideology that the only cause worth fighting for is naked self-interest.
The hawking of the Marines’ stories to the tabloid press underlines how successfully Murdoch has propagated his message, how totally he has re-made Britain in his own crude, acquisitive image. Many British people are horrified by what he stands for, but by this stage his baleful influence has so far pervaded British life and institutions that it is too late to do anything to curb it.
If today’s Britain often seems like a lurid, money-grubbing soap opera, where everyone is actuated by the lowest possible motives, it is because Murdoch’s ungentlemanly standards have achieved exemplary status. Whether the country might have followed a less degenerate course if British politicians had resisted instead of yielding to his blandishments is open to debate. The question, though, has become academic, for the malign impact Murdoch has had on British morals is now a fait accompli.
