Blair seemed to understand the dangers of indulging in identity politics long before it became a mainstream issue
Source - DaiLy telegraph - 30/12/21
Newly released government papers from the early Tony Blair era may not change anyone’s long-held opinions about Labour’s longest-serving prime minister, but they do reveal some magnificent insight into his thinking.
Most of the focus so far has been on revelations that Blair disagreed with his home secretary, Jack Straw, about how the Government should respond to the conclusion of the Macpherson inquiry into the racially-motivated death of Stephen Lawrence. As well as responding to the report’s recommendations, Straw wanted a ten-year action plan, a public commitment to place racial equality at the heart of policy-making and a wide-ranging inquiry into relations between the police and Britain’s ethnic minority communities.
But Blair rejected most of this, concerned about offering too many “hostages to fortune” and wary of creating a “regulation nightmare”. His opponents will, of course, latch on to these revelations to suggest that Blair was tolerant of racism, which is such a perversion of the truth that it barely warrants a response. What it does highlight, however, is Blair’s fundamental political instincts.
We see in Straw’s demands a shadow of what was to come. Straw himself was too pragmatic, seasoned and sensible a politician to indulge the cult of identity politics as it has manifested itself today — but in hindsight it does seem that Blair understood the dangers of the road the home secretary wanted to embark on better than Straw himself did.
The politics of race, now as then, has the primary effect of dividing communities. While some will see Blair’s recalcitrance as a cynical concession to the forces of conservatism, it can be more accurately viewed as the response of a master politician who understood the political and cultural arena better than any of his generation, and who could foresee the pitfalls of indulging in a divisive and ultimately self-defeating agenda.
The other item of interest in these documents sheds light on Blair’s close friendship with the embattled US president, Bill Clinton. In 1998, Blair apparently threw political caution to the wind and offered unambiguous public support to Clinton during a visit to Washington, just as the scandal over the president’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky was threatening his administration.
Yet today’s revelations suggest that, at first, Blair was more cautious and calculating than he seemed at the time, hiring a firm of American lawyers to advise him on the likely outcome to special prosecutor Ken Starr’s investigation into Clinton. Still, the firm’s conclusions — namely that the president could face charges of perjury for denying a sexual relationship with the young intern — seem not to have dissuaded Blair from mounting this stanch defence anyway.
Blair made his famous statement that he was proud to call the president "not just a colleague but a friend"; the White House breathed a sigh of relief, the relationship between Britain and America had arguably never been more special and, of course, Clinton himself, weathered impeachment and was finally acquitted by the Senate of all charges.
Those were different days. It’s hard to see any American president in a similar pickle receiving such unambiguous personal support from a British prime minister in these post-MeToo days. And it is frankly inconceivable that a modern Labour leader would even try to resist the pressure from his various factions to indulge the latest iteration of Critical Race Theory, with its obsessions about white privilege, racial “equity” and statue-toppling.
Blair was a unique politician whose emergence at the top of the Labour Party in the 1990s was a happy accident. Since his departure, his successors have sought to distance themselves from his philosophy and his policies, with the result that they have only succeeded in distancing themselves from his electoral success.
Comments
Post a Comment