Opinion

Labour’s ‘Blair rage’

Why is the party’s most successful prime minister also its most hated?

A protester steps on a portrait of Tony Blair | KAMARUL AKHIR/AFP/Getty Images

LONDON — Ever since Tony Blair secured the agreement in 1998 that brought peace to Northern Ireland, I thought that he would be remembered, on balance, as a good prime minister. I continued to think that, but was aware after 2003 that the small number of people who disagreed with me had become a larger number.

Many times I thought the hostility toward him had reached a high-water mark and was about to recede, to allow historians to reach a dispassionate judgment about him. Each time, however, the tide advanced further. Now it has engulfed the Labour Party entirely.

The leadership of Jeremy Corbyn is an equal and opposite reaction to Blair. Its purpose seems to be to repudiate as completely as possible everything about the party’s most successful leader. The Corbyn insurgency is united by rage against Blair, and driven onwards by it.

* * *

So why is Blair so hated? This is a question to which I have devoted much time over the past 12 years, having written a book about him, now teaching a course about his government at King’s College, London, and all the time as a journalist writing about British politics.

Recently, I think I have understood the phenomenon better.

The main reason that people give is that Blair lied in order to persuade Britain to join the war in Iraq. As with the causes of the English Civil War, I think it’s better to take what people say at face value. In 1642 they said it was about religion, so that, rather than a Marxist analysis of class, should be our starting point. Since 2003, they said it was about Blair’s deception, so we should accept that. However, that only raises another question, which is: Why do so many people believe something so implausible?

That is answerable enough if we engage with the anthropology of the question rather than the argument. I find this hard to do, being too easily distracted by the absurdity and unfairness of the proposition. Too often, in my search for the sources of “Blair rage,” I am diverted into arguing about the rights and wrongs of people’s views rather than trying to understand why they hold them.

The idea that Blair lied is, by contrast, easy to grasp. He said that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, which turned out not to be true. Given that people generally have a low opinion of politicians, and given that the decision to join the invasion was a controversial one, it is hardly surprising that many of the people who disagreed with the decision — either at the time or later — felt they had been deceived.

The Iraq war would count against Blair’s reputation in any case. The result of it has been disastrous.

Hardly surprising — and yet preposterous at the same time. When the report of the Chilcot inquiry is finally published this year, it will conclude, as all the previous inquiries have, that there was no deception. The idea that Blair — and George W. Bush, because he would have had to be part of the deception – would have invented Saddam’s illegal weapons as a pretext for something they wanted to do anyway is self-refuting. Why would they invent a lie that was certain to be found out?

But I am being distracted by the argument again. The idea of the deception settled on most of the London-based media elite, and through it on the British Left. At the risk of being distracted again, we should pause for a moment to savor the irony of the anti-capitalist left sharing memes incubated by the “mainstream media,” and in particular by the right-wing Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.

The Iraq war would count against Blair’s reputation in any case. The result of it has been disastrous. But it is the gap between what Blair said beforehand and what was found afterward that generates an energy out of all proportion to what actually happened 12 years ago.

The factual story that will be told by the Chilcot report is that something that was widely believed turned out not to be true. It will try to assess the extent to which Blair should have foreseen that his attempt to protect the world and the Iraqis from a dangerous dictator would go wrong. But that is unsatisfying as a morality tale, so the publication of the report is bound to trigger another spasm of Blair rage.

* * *

So Iraq is at the center of it. To it have been attached all sorts of other disappointments: that Blair promised so much and delivered so little, as the glib cliché has it. It is an easy sentiment that sounds as if it is part of an internal monologue among the disappointed, explaining to themselves why they were so enthusiastic once. They were taken in, you see. It was all a deception.

All this, beyond Iraq, is more about the person who is disappointed than the one who did the disappointing. James Morris, who was recently a pollster for the Labour Party, explained why he thought the party had to distance itself from Blair — and from Gordon Brown: “Voters relate to them as if they were ex-partners not ex-prime ministers. They remember the early excitement, are nostalgic for the hopes they had of a better life together and feel bitter at having those hopes dashed.”

Instead of wondering whether their expectations were realistic, some people prefer to think they were duped.

Instead of wondering whether their expectations were realistic, some people prefer to think they were duped. Starting with the Good Friday Agreement it is straightforward to list the achievements of the Blair years and I won’t do so again here. Equally, it is possible to list some of the shortcomings, although it is worth noting that the main one mentioned by voters in opinion polls is that Blair let in too many immigrants, which is not one of the charges on the Left’s sheet.

No, there were many on the Left who always thought he compromised too much of Labour’s traditional values, on public ownership, schools and welfare. Some were never reconciled, and others accepted compromise as a temporary expedient to win an election before returning to traditional Labour policy in government. For a long time, most had their doubts suppressed by electoral success. That run ended in 2010. Losing elections has, paradoxically, made anti-Blairism more fashionable.

For those who take a balanced view of Blair, this makes no sense. He won elections. He changed the country significantly by social-democratic lights. It may not have been enough or it may not have been the right sort of change, but he made changes. How do Corbyn’s supporters respond to two defeats? They “quintuple down,” as one of David Cameron’s advisers put it.

* * *

Recently, though, I came across an article that helped to explain the Corbyn phenomenon to me. It was by Thomas Wood, about the debate on guns in America. His thesis is that proponents of gun control have argued their case counter-productively. They think it is obvious that guns are dangerous and that the more people who have them, the more people will be killed, by suicides, accidents or mass shooters — an argument that seems particularly compelling to us Europeans.

But Wood says that this argument is ineffective because people who have guns see them as part of their identity. They own a gun: They are taking responsibility for the safety of their family and their home. People’s identity can be changed, but it is hard, and the best way to do it is usually to offer them something else to make up for the part of themselves that they will lose.

That, it seems to me, is what Blair rage is really about. It is about identity. A lot of people think of themselves as left wing. Being left wing has come to mean a few simple propositions. Against the establishment: Blair was in government for a long time. Against “war”: Blair was a warmonger. Against the rich: Blair was soft on the rich in power and is one of them himself now.

Again, I am tempted to dispute the Labour government’s anti-poverty record and to point to Blair’s charitable works since he left office, but they are not the point. Opposition to an idea of “Blair” is central to the identity of many “left-wingers.” This is one reason for the fashion for the phrase “virtue signaling.”

That, it seems to me, is what Blair rage is really about. It is about identity.

Many of the positions taken by Corbyn supporters are not rational responses to the problems of the Labour Party or of the country. They are adopted because they confirm the holders’ view of themselves. Virtue signaling is an offensive way of putting it: Non-Blair-haters are just as much invested in their own identity. For me, an aversion to Marxism-Leninism and a reverence for the views of the median voter are just as irrationally central to my own political identity.

But that is why arguments about, say, the need to win general elections are ineffective against Corbyn supporters. To suggest that they should compromise their principles to win elections (which is how they see it) is to challenge their identity. More than that, they see it as a Blairite argument, and therefore to resist it strengthens their identity. It is like trying to explain the grammar of the Second Amendment (“A well regulated militia being necessary…”) to someone who believes that owning a gun makes him a responsible citizen.

I am not sure where this gets us, but it makes me feel better. Wood admits he doesn’t know what to offer people to compensate them for giving up the gun part of their identity. I don’t know what to offer Corbyn supporters for giving up the anti-Blair part of their identity. I suspect that time will eventually wear it down.

But realizing that this is a question of identity makes it easier to separate the uses of the Blair myth in the fight over Labour’s future from an assessment of Blair’s record: on balance, a good prime minister.

John Rentoul is chief political commentator for the Independent on Sunday and a biographer of Tony Blair.

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