LONDON: Parliament draws to a miserable close next week, not a day too soon. The bloody slaughter in the Middle East leaves the government shamefully silent. No word of censure on the gross disproportion and long-term calamity of Israel’s retaliation passes its lips.
What could be said anyway? It is far too late to disengage from US policy now. Even if he wanted to, Tony Blair cannot convincingly speak a word out of step with George Bush, so inextricably tied together as they are in Iraq. Let the Israelis carry on bombing until bloody vengeance is done. With 6,000 Iraqis dying in just the past two months in a well-predicted civil war, what could Blair say now about the way Iraq has ricocheted across the Middle East? Words calling for restraint might die on his lips.
When historians look back, they may see more clearly than we do now how the fallout from Iraq bled into politics back home. So far, domestic politics seem curiously insulated from daily horror in Baghdad. Conservatives say nothing. Liberal Democrats have mislaid their outrage. Pictures of marketplace massacres are so repetitive that Iraqi deaths hardly make the news most days.
But standing back, historians may detect how this failing war psychologically paralysed the government. If Labour loses the next election, the war will emerge as a deeper reason than is immediately obvious now. How could a Labour cabinet not be rattled or its spirit enervated by what it has endorsed? The shadow of war has weakened its confidence in itself as a force for good and undermined its sense of purpose. That doesn’t stop ministers thrashing about, but without any clear direction. If John Major was in office but not in power, Tony Blair is still in power but no one knows what for.
What characterises the late Blair era is one word — cowardice. The government has lost the political nerve to do important things, while bending to pressures often more imagined than real, afraid of what it believes to be popular opinion. It rules for the lowest moral common denominator, though people are neither as bad nor as stupid as it fears. Brave leaders who tell difficult truths are usually admired.
Despite all the macho ‘fit for purpose’ talk, John Reid’s brand of cowardice on display is a prime symptom of this malaise. His is the cowardice of the bully obeying a media-induced crime hysteria. ‘Rebalancing’ the criminal justice system to ‘put the rights of victims before the offender’ only feeds the wild idea that the system is soft. Why another 8,000 prison places when we already imprison more people than virtually any EU country? Hidden in his words were good ideas too — rolling out the community court piloted on Merseyside. Good too that he will not repeal the Human Rights Act. But the headlines he sought were cowardly.
What would a brave Labour minister have said? Prison doesn’t work. It makes bad people worse. The best way to stop most crime is with treatment, early and out of jail. Yes, street robberies are up, mostly under-17s stealing iPods and phones off each other, and we will pursue it. But crime is down 44 per cent since 1995, stable this year and murder is down. And can anyone imagine a tolerable crime-free society? Let’s do what works, not what the Daily Mail says. But cowardice makes Reid chase his tail in pursuit of ever more punishment that only raises impossible expectations.
Cowardice has marked Labour’s feeble response to climate change. Ken Livingstone shows how easily it can be done, his congestion charge defying every new Labour political rule. Now he will charge £25 to gas guzzlers and prove that works too. The government’s chief scientist, David King, rightly warns that warming is a far greater peril than episodic terror: but a war on warming didn’t fit with joining Bush’s war on terror. People know they must save energy, they just wait to be lead.
Cowardice stops Labour talking about gross inequality and the harm it does. Inequality is not only the root cause of crime, but yet another report shows how inequality can also cause early death. It’s not diet or ignorance that kills the poor, but low ranking in the pecking order. It shouldn’t cost Labour much bravery to talk about disgusting greed and unfairness: most ordinary voters do. Cowardice saw Blair back off electoral reform that would by now be changing the political future. State funding of parties would have saved him from his present peril. Proportional representation would have ensured the future against any unrepresentative government in a nation by nature left of centre.
Nerviness was always a New Labour trait. But never underestimate the shock of war on those who bear responsibility. In the Labour cabinet it seems to have induced a kind of demoralised debility, unable to remove their war-leader though many think he should be gone. It leaves ministers fidgeting frenetically with things better left to managers, avoiding the great questions in a fog of technical tinkering. It is no surprise if war saps their appetite for anything bold. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
