POLITICS 3

His legacy.

I suppose it must relate to his career.

He started by persuading the Labour Party to shelve temporarily their more extreme socialist principles. That way, I imagine he explained, we will get into power. Once that has been achieved, we can be as socialist as we like.

Power was achieved, but that was all. In due course it became apparent that a return to red-blooded socialism was not on Tony’s agenda, for the simple reason, I imagine he explained, that the electorate wouldn’t swallow it. However in due course his red-blooded socialist brothers and sisters had become addicted to large salaries, large cars, several homes, expense accounts and secretarial assistants. So they let the great persuader get away with the first of his illusions, and the rest is history.

By the time the tigers of the left had been transformed into tabby cats, Tony had developed a policy and recruited a management team. The policy was to preach a good news gospel, irrespective of the true facts, on the grounds that only a tiny minority actually know what the truth is in any particular situation. The great majority rely on what they are told, and have a instinctive preference for good news rather than bad. If therefore the government continually broadcasts messages which are louder and more frequent than the competition, and always happier, the electorate will have a natural tendency to be delighted. Sadly, however, misinformation is not the way to healthy living.

The management team Tony recruited were chosen for the ability to learn the message that Tony composed and to recite with complete conviction and without straying from the given text. The conviction was instilled in the team by the terms of employment which applied. Tony promised that, in return for unquestioning obedience  and irresistible fluency he would never remove any of them from the payroll.

Hence that extraordinary menagerie of shifty-eyed men and women who cannot pause in the middle of a discussion or interview, but must continue until they get to the end of the tape which they have so lovingly memorised – a tape which invariably confirms that everything in the garden is rosy, irrespective of the facts.

Hence also the curious fact that all these cheerful robots survive even the most diabolical ministerial disasters. They may move from one job to another, but there is never a hiccup as far as the monthly pay-cheque is concerned.

His legacy? He leaves the administration of government in Britain more corrupt – vastly more corrupt – than it has ever been.

End of story? Not really.

The trouble is that in this day and age government is nearly as all-pervasive as the air we breathe. The tone set by a prime minister and his cabinet colleagues spreads throughout the departments which they control, and if a prime minister and his cabinet colleagues are constantly seen to be spreading untruths and imposing policies that are indefensible, it is inevitable that those at the next level of public service will find themselves in a situation where the previously unacceptable becomes, arguably, a fact of life.

Inevitably, as long as the torrent from above persists, that stream will trickle down further and further, wider and wider, until the grass roots of the community begin to feel the effects of the poison.

His legacy?  Not just corruption, but corruption on a massive scale. 

Is it any wonder that the Blue Peter team decided to pull a fast one on the public? There, in a nutshell, you have the Blair legacy – if in difficulties, cheat.

There was once a public meeting at which a NHS manager announced that a certain hospital was redundant. Wards were lying empty. Case closed. The audience (consisting largely of those who favoured retaining their local hospital) was silent. It had no answer to this argument. Then a doctor rose to his feet and pointed out that the wards were empty, not because of lack of demand, but because the wards were not staffed, which was the result of economic restrictions which had nothing to do with health considerations or the needs of the community.
Did the NHS manager have an answer to this intervention. Absolutely not. Had she  been one of Blair’s Republican Guard she would no doubt have talked the hind leg off a donkey and used it to beat the gathering into submission – but she was just an amateur in the game spin. However I cannot help but think that her attempt to mislead the public was just one of a million examples of Blair’s Legacy in action.

I wonder how long it will take to decontaminate the public life of the nation and to return to respectability. That must be another consequence of the sad little man’s all-consuming vanity.

[PS. If the Blair administration has been, and still is, as disgraceful as its record suggests, for the life of me I cannot understand why there seems to be a general consensus that Brown will be an improvement. Whatever he may like to suggest, he’s been in it up to his neck since the beginning, hasn’t he?

PPS. Blair or Brown, let’s not forget that we elected them. The rodents did not gnaw their way into the kitchen. They sidled through the gaping loopholes in our skirting board. We really must do something about that pesky skirting board.]