[A-List] EWP: Hugo Young to join?

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Welcome to the one-party state that is Great Britain

Thanks to the Tories, Blairism has been allowed to infect our democracy

Hugo Young
Tuesday October 29, 2002
The Guardian

On the surface, Britain is a country politically doing what it should. The
government has a big mandate. It continues to be tolerated by an unecstatic
but untroubled public. The prime minister is better regarded than any of his
predecessors at a similar point in their second term. The polity is
evidently working. Yet in reality it is diseased. It lacks conflict. Britain
has evolved into a mental as well as political one-party state. There's a
uniformity of allegiance, under which the absence of organised disagreement
legitimises, or at any rate readily accepts, a culture of easy opportunism.

The government rejoices in this, but the Tory disintegration is just as
responsible for it. We see that the failure of the Tories stretches far
beyond the party. It taints the entire quality of British life. For there is
no alternative magnet of power, no competition for Blairism, and this means
that contention is mostly futile. The establishment, whether in politics, in
business or in intellectual life, is all of one colour. There is little
point in being anything else.

There's no more telling place to watch this than in the BBC, nor could there
be more revealing textual evidence of its evolution than the memoirs of John
Birt, the former director-general. Has any man ever been more certain that
he was right in everything he did? More staggeringly vain in his recitations
of success? More biliously scornful of the efforts of every colleague who
challenged him? More blindly aggrandising of every particle of credit for
anything good his organisation did in the last decade? More serenely obtuse
as to the effect such a chronicle of perfection might have on even a
sympathetic reader?

But this is not why Birt is an emblem of Blairite Britain. By comparison
with his lordship, Tony Blair is a model of decent and human self-doubt.
Where Birt personifies what Britain has become is in his creepy opportunism,
culminating in his accurate perception that backing Blair is the only stance
any sensible modern man could take. He began as a bit of a lefty, he tells
us, sucking up in those days to Jim Callaghan. He became a Thatcherite at
just the right moment, getting as close as he could. Power was all that drew
him, cresting, with Blair, in an era, the present one, when almost all
challenge to the reigning orthodoxy had anyway ceased.

The BBC's engagement in this culture was completed with the appointment of
Greg Dyke as Birt's successor. It was shocking that Dyke could get the job
despite having paid £50,000 to the Labour party, and I wrote about that at
the time. Much more shocking was that so few people were shocked - but now
one better understands why that was. The Birt memoirs are not ashamed - are
proud, indeed - to describe the author coaching candidate Dyke, at the
instigation of his chairman, Christopher Bland, for the interview at which
this awkward political detail might be raised. But in the wake of the
memoirs we learn that the training was otiose. The BBC vice-chairwoman at
the time, Baroness Young of Old Scone, wrote to the Times, innocence and
indignation perfectly matched, to say: "The question of political neutrality
hardly figured in the process."

In other words, the £50,000 didn't matter. There was no issue. It wasn't
even worth considering. Could there be a more resonant sentence about the
ethos of this time? For it is absolutely true. The governors did not have to
bother about the money because, in the absence of political conflict, it now
had no meaning. The body that once cherished manifest impartiality as the
central plank of its credo could effortlessly overlook what, not long ago,
would have been an absolute bar to the appointment: and could deploy Bland's
Tory past as cover to show its political objectivity to those few people who
might still slightly wonder whether it existed.

Bland, indeed, makes his own emblematic point. Like many once-Tory
businessmen, he has become, in all that counts, a Blairite. With regulatory
arguments to win and favours to seek, how could a BT chairman be anything
else? How could any mainstream capitalist, whose business would tend to
profit from amicable relations with the powers that be? It requires heroic
weirdness these days for anyone with any ambition in any field, save perhaps
the Daily Telegraph and the Tory party itself, actually to declare
themselves a personal opponent of the government.

There may be occasional blips in the process. The audit commission has been
resistant to the sliding of one Blairite, and perhaps a second, into its
chairmanship. But who else would do? Where would you find one? Maybe the
live-in partner of the arts minister, which is the status of the second
candidate, is rather too flagrant a connection for a post peculiarly
dependent on distance from government for its credibility. But the broad
penumbra of public life, from which all such appointments are drawn, is now
peopled exclusively by those who have made their number with the only
orthodoxy they can see prevailing for many years ahead. Allegiance, in these
days of apathy and opportunism, may not be strong. But it is all-pervasive.

This is an unhealthy, ultimately repellent, national condition, not found in
any other western democracy. The one-party state of mind as well as politics
doesn't seem to be making the country happier, or better governed. It is a
direct, pernicious consequence of the collapse of the Tories as a political
force. It has pretty well the entire establishment, for reasons of
opportunism or comfort or idleness, in its grip.

But it is more an offence against than an endorsement of the British way of
politics, and perhaps that is a reason why, below establishment level,
something is stirring. The Tories may have nothing to say, and offer no
magnetic pole round which alternative approaches to power may gather, but
some trade unions can. The extremity of the firemen's original claim was
insupportable, but their assertion of a countervailing power against
Blairite minimalism and control has come not before time. Still more
enlivening would be the breakout from consensual apathy that seems likely to
follow a decision by President Bush to attack Iraq without the support of
the UN, a decision Mr Blair has left himself no option but to support. That
might mark a conclusive moment for the single-track conformism that
otherwise defines the Blairite era.

I pray devoutly this does not happen. A unilateralist invasion of Iraq poses
dangers that are more credibly terrible than anything Saddam Hussein has an
interest in perpetrating. But there's also a need to blow apart the coterie
politics of compliance into which Britain has descended and the post-Beeb
Birt has formally migrated, and which nobody has the nerve or the means or
the anger fundamentally to challenge. There are pinpricks and problems, but
no sense of an alternative power centre: which means no guarantor of serious
challenge, on which the health of democracy depends.