The bloom is off Blair's rose
By Eric Margolis
July 9, 2000
LONDON - The old Britain I knew as a youth has almost vanished. Gone are
the elegantly tailored gentlemen with their bowler hats and tightly rolled
umbrellas. They have been replaced by the Cool Brittania look: shaven
heads, T-shirts, Anglo-hipness. It does not even rain every day in London,
as it used to, though the air remains as foul as ever.
London is Europe's most vibrant city, pulsating with energy and filled with
young economic refugees who have fled the stultifying socialism of the
continent. Even the food has become often edible. Under Prime Minister Tony
Blair, the "new," rejuvenated, high-tech Britain is blazing the way into
the 21st century, where talent, not class, will determine people's future.
Or so we're told. I pondered the claims made for Blair's nouveau-Britain
from the luxuriant gardens of Kensington Palace, where Prince and Princess
Michael of Kent were giving a gala birthday party for their children, Lord
Frederick and Lady Gabriella Windsor. The soiree was a "fete champetre," or
garden party, of the type favored by Louis XIV and Louis XV. The guests
were decked out in mid-18th century costume. Flambeaux illuminated the
gardens filled with revelers, entertainers in Venetian masks, giant,
bizarrely-hued creatures, jugglers, dueling swordsmen, milkmaids, and
musicians.
It was a magical, exquisite, extravagant evening, one whose like I was
unlikely to experience again. I remarked to a well-known personality that I
had the sensation the French Revolution was impending. He replied, "I feel
like we're living on top of the thin crust of a pie. One of these days it's
going to break and we'll drop into the muck below." I chatted with a
pleasant young man whose family owned 300 acres of London.
Outside the palace gates, mobs of jostling paparazzi flashed away. Crowds
of sullen commoners, muttering in the thick argot of the grimy industrial
wastelands north of London, gawked at the lavish spectacle on the other
side of the iron fence. Tony Blair's classless society, it seemed, had not
yet quite dawned.
While the royals were partying or trying to figure out what to do with
Prince Charles and his paramour, Lady Camilla Parker-Bowles, ordinary
Britons were venting their growing wrath at the until recently adored Tony
Blair.
Blair's fall from grace began at New Year's when his pet millenium
projects, a hugely expensive dome and ferris wheel, designed to showcase
the new, high-tech Briton, turned into white elephants bedeviled by
mechanical problems. Another much-ballyhooed project, a footbridge over the
Thames, had to be closed due to dangerous swaying. These embarrassing
fiasco's unleashed a flood of pent-up anger and dismay at Blair's Labour
government.
Gasoline is expected to shortly reach L 1 (C$2.25) per litre. Prices in the
UK are already stratospheric. Britain's socialized health system has broken
down and is even in worse shape than Canada's. The inflated pound is
damaging British exports and wrecking its competitive position in the
continental Euro zone. British auto plants are threatened with closure,
invoking the wrath of the powerful trade unions. In an amazing reversal of
fortune, the much reviled and deeply boring Conservative Party leader,
William Hague, is now almost neck-a-neck with Blair.
When Blair swept to power in an electoral landslide, 83% of Britons
supported his "middle way," a combination of Thatcherite conservative
economics with Clintonesque oozing of warm, leftish rhetoric about
"caring," "empowerment," and social compassion.
Blair seemed like the Little Train That Could, chugging bravely uphill,
puffing out vaporous clouds of platitudes and fuzzy promises. Suddenly, he
has run out of steam and is careening backwards at an accelerating rate.
Britons have lost patience with Blair. In a few months he has gone from
visionary to vacuity. His cabinet is being rocked by sleazy financial
scandals. Last week, one of Blair's strongest supporters, the pulp novelist
Ken Follett, called the prime minister a backstabber, coward, character
assassin, and, the ultimate Parthian shaft, "unmanly."
This last shot came soon after Blair tried to romance female voters by
changing diapers of his newborn son before cameras and talking about taking
family leave to nurse his offspring. Britons don't much care about the
private lives of their leaders, but Blair's pandering to female voters
repelled many people and made him look all the more conniving and devious.
Briton's notorious beer-swilling soccer louts were far less gentle in their
assessment of the prime minister's gender-bending.
Some of the criticism now- buffeting Blair is unfair. He has been a good
prime minister - certainly better than his Conservative predecessor, the
lugubrious John Major - and fiscally responsible. But Britons are just fed
up with the type of soggy political mush so familiar to Canadians, and with
Blair's by now painful sanctimoniousness.
They also remain deeply split over whether to truly join the EU, and likely
become diluted in a sea of socialist Euroblandness, or go back to being the
proud eccentrics and buccaneers of centuries past - or at least remain as
an island outpost of the old Anglo-American entente. Blair himself clearly
does not know which way to go. As a result, he is being blasted from every
side. Cool Brittania is getting rather hot under the collar.
Copyright: E. Margolis, July 2000
************************************************************************
********
War at the Top of the World - The struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and
Tibet - by Eric Margolis is available at major book outlets and online in
both the US and Canada - recently reviewed in The Economist as "His account
of recent warfare in Asia's highest mountains is both gripping and
instructive."
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end
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