Daily Mail, February 4 2002

Charles Dickens, in his great novel Bleak House, invented the monstrous character of Mrs Jellyby. This icon of progressive ideas spends every waking hour campaigning for an African project in Borioboola-Gha, neglecting her children and causing her husband to become suicidal.

Our Prime Minister calls Mrs Jellyby irresistibly to mind. Off he goes to Africa this week to reform it, just like that. He leaves behind the local irritations of collapsing health and transport systems, a growing scandal over the relationship between politics and business, and a corrupted civil service.

He is not just escaping from a domestic agenda which is proving far more difficult than first imagined, illustrated by the weekend’s rows at Labour’s spring conference over what to do about the crisis in the public services. Tony Blair is motivated by the grandest and most dangerous of dogma. He believes he has a mission to transform society.

Things like health care, education or transport are mere adjuncts to the new Jerusalem he wants to create, in which he will eradicate poverty, inequality, prejudice and war. He will heal all our pain, even if human nature itself has to change.

This new world order is behind his perfect faith in peace processes, European federalism and human rights. It envisages one ‘interconnected’ world, where divisions are pointless because it will be governed by one set of enlightened attitudes – his own.

This is why those who claim Tony Blair is a conservative have hopelessly missed the point. For his is the authentic mindset of the utopian left: the infinite capacity for self-delusion in pursuit of impossible ideals, which leaves behind a trail of destruction and neglect.

Look, for example, at Africa itself, a tragic continent which has defied repeated attempts at reform. The Prime Minister seems to think that by laying on his hands he can heal the terrible ‘world scar’ that Africa represents.

Yet his government has failed to confront the grotesque abuses of human rights in Zimbabwe. Moreover, British arms deals which only make Africa poorer are set to quadruple between 1999 and next year.

The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, says Britain must help Africa become more prosperous ‘to make the world more equal’. Oh dear, oh dear. This is Robespierre via Leeds student union. It’s not poverty or inequality that have done for Africa, but the absence there of the institutions of democracy and civil society. It is Africans themselves who must develop these, not western politicians jetting in and out.

While preaching to Africa, what’s more, the government is busily unstitching the fabric of democracy in Britain. It is destroying our once-dispassionate civil service, taking us back to an era pre-dating William Gladstone’s nineteenth-century reforms that created the least corrupt system of public administration in the world.

Instead, government is now administered by fawning political satraps dependent on the Prime Minister for patronage. How can we presume to teach Africa what we ourselves have forgotten?

Such a mind-set can do real damage. It has meant, for example, that far from unambiguously helping prosecute the war on terror the government seeks to appease it, giving the message that violence pays.

Jack Straw is still saying that Israel’s prime minister Ariel Sharon and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat have to start talking again. This is the same Foreign Secretary who cosied up to Iran after September 11. But Iran’s recent arms shipment to the Palestinian Authority revealed that both are intent on creating a terrorist state on the West Bank.

In Northern Ireland, the government similarly pretended that terrorists were statesmen. Its template ‘peace process’ silenced the guns against the British army at the expense of the rule of law and has created an incipient mafia state.

Yes, the Protestants behave badly to the Catholics. Yes, Israel behaves badly to the Palestinians. There are no excuses for any such behaviour. But in both cases, the Blair government has lost sight of the main issue before it: the duty to resist revolutionary terrorist violence against a democratic state and its citizens.

It has forgotten it because of its governing belief that it alone is the guardian of truth and morality, and everyone else is a lower form of life that simply has to be policed by the enlightened liberal imperialists of the British Labour party.

This is all of a piece with its domestic policy. New Labour believed the public services went wrong simply because they were run by the Tories, who were the incarnation of evil. So these services would be rescued simply by Labour coming to power.

But the new world order appears to have had the opposite effect. Thus ‘social inclusion’ has made teachers’ jobs impossible by forcing them to handle highly disruptive children. ‘Institutional racism’ has paralysed the police so that black people as well as white are increasingly the victims of attacks by black youths.

‘Multiculturalism’ has fuelled social and racial conflict. ‘Lifestyle choice’ has swelled the number of fatherless children. ‘The war on poverty’ has inflated welfare dependency and dishonesty. Ending ‘privilege’ in the House of Lords has produced a huge expansion of political cronyism. And on and on.

Tony Blair is gung-ho for European federalism because he believes the nation state has had its day. It is astonishing that the man who presides over the world’s fourth largest economy should believe this. It is astonishing, above all, that a Prime Minister should wish to give up his country’s power to run its own affairs.

It only makes sense when one realises he believes he can order the affairs not just of Britain but of the west (and maybe, even, the world) through supra-national institutions observing a universally applied doctrine of human rights.

He believes (liberal imperialism again) there can be no argument against these rights. But in reality each of them is highly contestable, as is shown by the fact that the Human Rights Convention consists of rights that conflict.

This human rights doctrine potentially turns every public body into an enforcement agency for a world view that is wholly subjective and, through the increasingly politicised judges who interpret it, the tool of politicians who want to short-circuit democratic argument and impose their own beliefs on everyone.

The curiosity is that such revolutionary utopianism should be associated with Tony Blair. After all, he was no student radical but an apolitical, religiously-minded individual from a Tory background who somehow became leader of the Labour party.

However, this absence of deep political roots has made him vulnerable to the agendas of those who surround him: the Stalinist control freaks, the man-haters and enemies of the family, and assorted warriors of the victim culture who despise western civilisation and want to destroy it.

His genuine desire to do good is commendable. But utopia should be consigned to his fiction library. The mundane repair of British public life is urgent. The Prime Minister should come down to earth, where lesser mortals reside, and get his priorities right.

Posted by admin at February 4, 2002