As you can see from the picture, a real circus has come to town, and has opened up despite the snow.
Everyone expects a General Election to be held in May, and political campaigns have already been (unofficially) launched. The climate of electioneering is unmistakable – a sense of anticipation and expectation perpetually checked by cynicism and disillusion. Many commentators talk as if the election is a foregone issue, and that New Labour will sweep into power again, with their unique mixture of populism and watered-down socialism.
New Labour has been very adept at identifying groups of potential supporters (not always people who traditionally supported “old” Labour) and then bribing them with state patronage of various kinds (tax concessions, subsidies, housing developments etc). This is the way all political parties operate, but New Labour has been particularly skilful at isolating target audiences and winning them over with selling propositions. This makes me wonder what calibre of marketing professionals they have advising them, since their presentation is extremely slick (they certainly have PR professionals at every level of their operation).
Their achievement is all the more impressive when you consider the social fragmentation that has taken place in urban centres. While old allegiances to family, class and locality have broken down, New Labour has succeeded in building a new unity based on how people see themselves (“caring”, “modern”, “informal”). Supporting a political party has become a lifestyle choice, and New Labour is the first political party to have recognised this.
New Labour rule has been characterised by economic success and an emphasis upon euphoric prestige projects (the Millennium Dome, art centres such as Bankside and Baltic Mills, stadiums such as Wembley and Cardiff Millennium, the bid for the 2012 Olympic Games) which brings to mind the formula the patricians of ancient Rome used to keep the population quiet and compliant (Duas tantum rex anxius optat, panem et circensus – the people long eagerly for two things, bread and circuses. I had thought the quote came from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall but actually it was by the Roman poet Juvenal).
Booming neo-socialist economy, grand building projects, a culture in which everyone is encouraged to think of themselves as celebrities of some kind (no matter how marginal), a political use of language that is so pliant and manipulative that words and phrases mean whatever “they” want them to mean, a constitution that is routinely and arbitrarily chopped about to suit the requirement of the moment, a legal system that is abandoning trial by jury and introducing house arrest (and house arrest by political fiat!), an approach to international relations that has reintroduced war as a primary instrument of foreign policy…
The New Labour experience is for many (vulnerable) people, intoxicating, deliberately stressful, mildly fascist.
2 comments:
While your analysis of the internal political is probably accurate, I wonder why you throw in the reference to making war as the primary means of foreign policy...after all, Britain has a few thousand troops in Iraq doing basically garrison duty, backing up the main American presence. That's not much of an imperialist dream...after all, France regularly sends troops to African states embroiled in chaos...no one is pointing the finger at them, except for being hypocrites when they criticize American military actions overseas....perhaps British participation in Bosnia contributes to this perception of a warlike Britain...but I just can't see it...if the government began making war on their own citizens through further curtailment of civil liberties, then that would obviously be evidence of fascist style...
For me the interesting point is the abandonment of the post-war consensus (in the United Kingdom) that war would not be used as an instrument of foreign policy (ie no first use of force). Even Margaret Thatcher’s government (possibly the most belligerent of the post-war administrations) when faced with Argentine invasion of the Falklands / Malvinas avoided declaring war on Argentina and attacking mainland Argentina – the campaign was limited to removing the invaders and sending them back to Argentina. The internal war in Northern Ireland, over thirty years, has been essentially reactive (apart from possibly secret offensive wars in the late 70s and again in the mid 80s). The internal war against the miners (1984/85) was fought using the existing apparatus of police and courts.
The Blair government, on the other hand, has shown an increasing preference to first use of force – not just in the bombing of Serbia and the invasion of Iraq, but also in “policing” Sierra Leone (which was basically an invasion). We are far too close to these events to judge whether they were justifiable or not. What is undeniably the case is that we now have a government that is prepared to shoot first and ask questions later.
Is Blair a “mild fascist”? Not consciously. But I think one can point to disturbing parallels that indicate we may have drifted into an unhealthy state of affairs: the economic “Third Way” is a modern version of Mussolini’s syndicalist/corporate economy; the cult of celebrity (which pervades all levels of society) is a modern version of the myth of the master race; the relentless dumbing-down of intellectual standards is a modern version of the burning of the books; the demonisation of minorities is a modern version of the demonisation of minorities; the obsession with modernity itself (in which the policy of “modernising” is being used as an excuse to trash almost every institution in the country from the National Health Service to the House of Lords) has unsettling suggestions that 1997 is to be considered “year zero”. All this is not fascism per se, but perhaps fascism-lite.
But these tendentious statements are just notes written to myself, to be read thirty years hence (when I might well decide I was wrong). Please don’t take them seriously and thank you for commenting.
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