Why do people hate Blair so much?

[Bardan the Slayer]

Given that he recently attained #1 most hated briton status, this column in the Mirror asked - why? Topical discussions from me? It must be winsday!

Yeah - if you're not interested in politics, then read it because it mentions breasts! Yeah, breasts!

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews...l&siteid=50143

I THINK it's in That Uncertain Feeling that Kingsley Amis's narrator says to himself that he knows why he likes women's breasts, all right. What he can't quite explain is why he likes them so much. This may seem like a strange way to begin a discussion of a 50-year-old male Prime Minister (though it got your attention, didn't it?). But I can quite see why some people don't care for Tony Blair. What sometimes baffles me is the intensity of the dislike. Why, in other words, do his critics dislike him so much? Clare Short's resignation speech, for example, accused him of being an authoritarian who cared increasingly and in a narcissistic way about his place in history. Yet her speech, which was designed to call attention (yet again) to herself and her various moral agonies, was not the speech of someone who was fired, or dropped, or sacked - as I think she ought years ago to have been. The ruthless despot kept her on. The people of Iraq, for whom Ms Short has done so much over the past year, will now just have to manage without her. But the recent events in Iraq are historic by any definition. Does one detect a note of animosity, even pique, nay envy here? I've only met the Prime Minister twice and only when he was Leader of the Opposition. On the first occasion I interviewed him in his office at the Commons and on the second occasion he kissed my baby daughter at a garden party in Hampstead. (I obviously forgive him for the second, though it's not something I normally allow adult male strangers to do. Professional capacity is professional capacity.) I joined the Labour Party when I became old enough to do so, was kicked out of its student wing because of Vietnam and have had the usual love-hate fluctuations with it ever since. I am not in any way personally invested, I mean to say, in Blair's success. Mr Alastair Campbell does not call me on my cellphone - and only partly because I don't possess one. However, I do count myself among Blair's supporters and admirers. If I go into some lowly poolroom or dive in America, or to some loftier resort perhaps, I run into people who can tell that I am English and who say, basically, that they wish it was Mr Blair making the case about Afghanistan and Iraq, rather than Mr Bush. This is an unforced tribute. It's partly a tribute to the parliamentary system, which compels British leaders to argue on their feet. And it's partly a criticism of Mr Bush, who wouldn't last a minute at Question Time. But I choose to think that it's a bit more than that. Ever since he spoke in Chicago in 1999, Blair has been saying, in effect, that co-existence with aggressive dictators is neither possible nor desirable. There are second-order arguments, about weaponry and terrorism, and the technicalities that surround these discussions, but the point about the essential point is that it is just that - essential. DESPITE endless obfuscations from people who think that co-existence with homicidal and genocidal psychopaths is possible (or desirable, or even profitable) such a basic statement has a way of sticking in the mind. It's also, of course, a "moral" point. And there is something in the British character that shies away from moralism in politics, or at least in politicians. And a good thing, too, I say - nothing is more suspect than a public figure who deals in piety. When I interviewed Blair all those years ago, I asked him what was all this about being a "Christian Socialist"? It sounded like the most gruesome echo of Harold Wilson to me. He didn't quite answer my question about Wilson - which made me suspicious - but he did say plainly that he despised politicians who employed religious rhetoric. Thus it dispirits me when I see him acting all martyred and self-pitying, and it positively revolted me when I heard him reading a lesson, with sonorous intonations, at the funeral of the woman he had retrospectively baptised as "the People's princess". Yuck, and yuck again. The same for the coy revelation that young Leo had been conceived during a moment of abandon on a conjugal visit to Balmoral. Talk about too much information. However, I think that this version of piety and family values is to be distinguished from the sort of genuine moral energy that is required to put up a fight. Blair helped push a wavering Clinton into Kosovo and he was warning against Saddam Hussein when Bush was still campaigning for the isolationist vote against "nation-building". (By the way, for those with short memories, these two examples on their own will take care of the witless taunt about Blair being America's "poodle".) In both conflicts, there were brief periods - which must have seemed very long at the time - when things looked as if they might be going very badly. It does require some character to put up with that. To be more exact, it takes one of two kinds of character. Some leaders don't even break a sweat during periods of reverse and disaster, and remain convinced that they are infallible. They usually end up on trial. Others, without giving way to panic, still betray signs of worry and unease. Better to have the second kind. I like the new haggardness of Mr Blair. Incidentally, what has become of those who wanted to prosecute him for going into Iraq? Are they still at it? Do they, by any chance, meet my objection that there is something hysterical in some of the anti-Blairism one hears? I am betraying my age again but for the whole of my conscious life, British politics has partly consisted of a stupid argument about whether the country belongs in an Atlantic alliance or a European one. The Tories in 1956 thought that they could put two fingers up to President Eisenhower and invade Egypt on a whim. They later caused De Gaulle to veto British membership of a club that then had only six members. WILSON fawned on LBJ throughout the Vietnam horror and wouldn't fight his own party on Europe. Callaghan grovelled to Kissinger and punted the Europe issue into the next parliament. Thatcher smooched Reagan and annoyed Brussels. So it went, decade after decade. Nobody seems to think it's worth mentioning but we now have a Prime Minister who thinks that this is a false distinction and that we need to be more internationalist in both directions. Culturally and politically, he comes from a generation that regards America as a natural second home but that doesn't think of the European mainland as "abroad" or "the continent". Well, that's a relief. And long overdue. It may not hurt, either, that Blair can at least give a speech in French. As to the Commonwealth or "Third World" dimension of politics, one can't be so affirmative. Blair did stick to the British commitment to Sierra Leone and prevented it from being over-run by a gang of hand-lopping child-molesters and diamond smugglers who had (it now turns out) commercial links to al-Qaeda. And he has helped to prevent the Palestinians from dropping off the bottom of the agenda in Washington. It would be nice to see more being done about, in particular, Zimbabwe. But in order to confront this nightmare, one would probably need a mixture of moralism and ruthlessness - the very qualities that Blair's critics most claim to abhor, even though many of them actually possess the same qualities in the wrong mixture. I don't live in the United Kingdom any more, so I can't say from direct experience how "New Labour" feels on the ground. I dislike what I hear about the National Health Service and, when I visit, I can't believe what I am seeing when I want to take a train. And it's not enough to abolish the her-editary principle, one must oppose the idea of an undemocratic second chamber altogether. Moreover, even if I don't care for fox-hunting and wish I could give up smoking, I detest the attitude of those who preach that they know what's better for others, or who engage in high-minded behaviour-modification. The Labour Party's embrace of New Orleans-type fund-raising also fills me with bile. But I still have the feeling that when some people screech about this and other things (such as the now-irritating word "spin"), they aren't quite showing their true hand. Do they believe that without Blair, politics would become squeaky-clean and immune to press-manipulation, or campaign finance? Obviously, they do not. These are the elevated-sounding names they give to a more generalised, as well as more personalised, resentment. Let's agree that this is better than the low-sounding attacks that also float around. I remember Tam Dalyell as a youngish and servile Parliamentary Private Secretary who actually used to polish the shoes of his fanatically pro-Israeli minister, Richard Crossman. Now I've lived to see him become a veteran fool and to accuse Blair of being the prisoner of a secret Semitic cabal. Good grief. It's actually come to this. In ancient Athens, there was a politician named Aristides, whose partisans and spin-meisters managed to get him called "Aristides the Just". He got into difficulty and there was then a public vote on whether to impeach and condemn him. ARISTIDES, in disguise, mingled with the crowd and, seeing a man drop his shell into the urn as a "yes" vote for impeachment, asked him why he had done so. "Because," said the disgruntled voter, "I can't stand him being called Aristides the Just." Here, I think, we approach the point. If you are right in politics, you will be hated by definition. If you are righteous in addition, you will be hated all the more. The hard-core anti-Blair forces don't get all that excited about the matters where he's been wrong or questionable, as on mad cows for example. They reserve their spleen for the questions where he has been vindicated, from Milosevic to Saddam. They hate him so much that they are willing, and sometimes eager, to make cheap excuses for the worst people in the world. That's a form of unpopularity that is well worth earning and I hope - not knowing the man - that Blair has profited from discovering how empty and ephemeral are the rewards of the deft spin and the instant poll. I cringe slightly when I see the pictures of the Ugly Rumours line-up and the long hair and the strumming attitude. For my part, I have taken pretty good care, in case I still have a chance of bidding for supreme power, to ensure that few of my own Oxford pix and Polaroids survive. But some years ago, it seemed me that my generation of Oxford quasi-radicals would be remembered principally because of the hirsute, hash-cookie ingesting, trash-rock figure of William Jefferson Clinton, of whom the ugliest rumours all turned out to be true. So it cheers me up to think that we are not now stuck with that and that someone from post-war and post-Thatcher Britain has found his way past focus-groups, faced down silly and ignorant weepers and "victims" in TV studios, outperformed the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope, and shown that seriousness and consistency can still count for something. Now, if he could only dump the Archbish and the Pope....

[Lavindathar]

I just searched the page for the word breasts.......

And on topic, he's the best of the bunch.

[Kaltia]

I hate Blair because of his ears ^^. My grandmother told me never to trust anybody that resembled a tobey jug.

[khazadman]

I doubt if Blair is as hated as some people make him out to be. Most of what we hear are his vocal opponents on the left. And since the left controls most of the media, all that get through is the negative reporting.

[Masklinn]

And since the left controls most of the media

Here we go again...

[Bardan the Slayer]

Actually, over here Rupert Murdoch controls the media, and that particular tax-evader and general alleged scumbag is as right-wing as you could get.

[wellard]

Well count me in as a supporter, though I would have liked to see the Tony Benn left faction in charge. The only disappointment that has totally infuriated me was his half arsed demolition of the house of inbreds
errrm Lords [img]graemlins/heee.gif[/img]

He seemed to run out of steam and interest on what should have been his most important task. Does it annoy anyone else that the mother of parliaments has a upper house still not democratic or answerable in any direct way to the people of Britain?


Edit cause i spelt britain wrong Charlie would have liked that

[ 05-14-2003, 06:24 PM: Message edited by: wellard ]

[Attalus]

Oh, when did Murdoch take over the BBC? I like Blair, first Labour guy that I can say that about since Clement Atlee. Woohoo, I'm actually on Bardan's side for once.

[Ramon de Ramon y Ramon]

Thank you, that is an interesting read, even though the author sounds at times as self-righteously simplistic in his criticism of Mr Blair's critics as he accuses them of being in criticizing Blair.

[Bardan the Slayer]

Originally posted by Attalus: Woohoo, I'm actually on Bardan's side for once.

Don't worry, it won't last long. It's to do with alignment of the planets, or something


And I wish people would get their info from the BBC. At least if's reputable up to a point. Sadly, our biggest-selling national newspaper is the Murdoch Pronouncements, sorry, the Sun, a rag that is most notable for having a different woman on page 3 with her tits hanging out every day.

[ 05-14-2003, 07:01 PM: Message edited by: Bardan the Slayer ]