Shaken . . . and Stirred

Common Sense
John Maxwell

There must be something about being a recovering social democrat that makes it impossible for some politicians to understand what politics is supposed to be about. In Jamaica, for instance, Mr Patterson has just recently discovered that the country is literally dying for an education programme which will improve the ordinary child's prospects of growing up to be a useful member of society.

After 14 years as prime minister, he has just announced a crash programme which might, in ten years or so, depress the level of delinquency and death among the least privileged in our society. In some ways Mr Patterson is not quite as bad as Mr Tony Blair.

On Friday night, after two terms as Prime Minister of the British, he announced that he had been taught a lesson: from now on, he pledged, he would listen to his constituents - "I. we. the government are going to focus relentlessly now on the priorities the people have set for us."

Wouldn't it be nice if there were a convenient word to express the process by which a decent, rational human being is transformed from being a democratic socialist into being a zombie? It would be great to find a word like 'denazification' for example, or 'de-Ba'athification' (as in Iraq)?

Perhaps we should ask the World Bank - our all-purpose intellectual provisioner - for a word. They have published treatises against 'Populism' - apparently a notifiable disease involving listening to people and respecting their choices.

The apostles of globalisation like the World Bank and the OECD would appear to believe that it is rational to accept the people's decision in electing you, but that anything they decide after that is irrational, irrelevant and unimportant. Which of course brings me back to Mr Blair.

Almost exactly two years ago the British people, like a majority of people round the world, even including the Americans, were dead set against war. We marched in protest demonstrations in our millions, so impressing the New York Times that it declared that there were now two world superpowers, the United States and world public opinion.

Unfortunately, the other superpower did not listen to us and Mr Blair defied a million marching citizens in his own capital and millions more who thought that he and Mr Bush were leading the world down a garden path designed by Hieronymus Bosch and Edvard Münch.

Before the assault, Iraq had been subject to a debilitating decade of starvation rations, sanctions and intermittent bombing which one American general said had reduced the likely military targets in Iraq to a few outhouses.

We now know that Messrs Bush and Blair, months before anyone else knew what they were up to, were cooking up plans for 'regime change' in Iraq - a wholly illegal enterprise under the laws of the UK, the US and International law.

As we now know, the Americans promised the British that they would sex-up the intelligence sufficiently to deceive the United Nations into giving them an excuse to carry out their barbarous adventure. The British went as far as alleging that the evil genius Saddam Hussain had the capacity, within 45 minutes, to visit destruction on whomsoever he chose.

The scenarios were awesome, shocking, horrific and, unbelievable. We now know that - as we thought then - it was all a pack of lies, the biggest con job in the history of mankind, designed to fulfil Mr Cheney's still secret plans to conquer and divide the Middle East for the greater good of the oil companies of the world, the United States and Israel.

EATING CROW

On Friday night in his own constituency Mr Blair had to listen, teeth clenched, as a retired ambulance driver, Mr Reg Keys, denounced the Prime Minister for sending his 20 year-old son to be killed in an illegal war. Mr Keys, a total unknown, had decided to oppose the Prime Minister in his own constituency, to protest against the PM's behaviour.

Most people expected that Mr Keys would get a few charity votes. He got more than 4,000 and those votes he said, "sent a clear and resounding message against the war". He was right.

The New Labour 'spinmeisters' are busy trying to minimise the truth. According to them, the war was only one of several factors operating against Labour, and no doubt some will soon say that the really decisive factor was voter fatigue.

People had got so used to voting for Labour that many of them simply took a break. The important factors were quite simply the war and Mr Blair's shredded credibility.

Unfortunately among the facts that proved the 'spinmeisters' wrong is one named George Galloway. Mr Galloway is a Scotsman, a Labour member of parliament who had met Saddam Hussain several times in relation to an Iraq-connected charity run by Galloway.

Galloway is a man who, as we say in Jamaica, pays no licence for his mouth. His enemies decided that the war was as good an excuse as any to wound him fatally and get rid of this nuisance forever.

According to the Daily Telegraph and other newspapers in Britain and the US, documents found in the rubble of Baghdad "revealed" that Mr Galloway had been on Saddam's payroll, had made millions off the Oil For Food programme, making him corrupt as well as unpredictable.

Unfortunately for his enemies, Mr Galloway has managed to clear himself and his reputation, being able to prove that the documents were forged. Before that, however, the New Labourites had expelled Mr Galloway from their party.

He decided to fight back and decided to do this by standing for election in Bethnal Green, one of the poorest parts of London, where nearly half the electorate is Muslim with a solid record of voting for Labour. Mr Galloway had represented a constituency 700 miles away from London, in Glasgow, Scotland.

On Friday night, to the shock and awe of millions, Mr Galloway succeeded in overturning a Labour majority of 10,000 votes and won the seat against a dedicated 'Blair Babe', a mixed-race Jewish barrister named Oona King. In his victory speech, George Galloway, as is his habit, went straight to the point.

"This is for Iraq," he began. "Mr Blair, this defeat is for Iraq, and the other defeats that New Labour has received this evening are for Iraq. All the people you have killed and all the loss of life have come back to haunt you and the best thing that the Labour Party can do is sack you."

But Bethnal Green wasn't Labour's worst defeat. In Wales, in the constituency which was probably the safest Labour seat in Britain, one of the first seats won by Labour after the party was formed, a seat once held by Aneurin Bevan and after him by Michael Foot, a member of the Labour party bolted the party because Mr Blair had decided to impose his own candidate on the constituency.

The rebel, a man with an impeccable record as a Labour councillor but now running as an independent, routed the official candidate. In London, the Liberal Democrats, now to the left of Labour, uprooted some Labour stalwarts, in one case, nearly doubling their vote in a swing of over 25% - unheard of in British politics.

The Labour party is back in office with a reduced majority and the Conservatives, the main Opposition party, increased their seats to a respectable figure (197 seats against 351 for Labour). Although they have increased their seats, there was hardly any swing at all to them - about one half of one per cent. They benefited by the haemorrhage of Labour votes to the Liberal Democrats, mainly in protest against the war.

The real winners were the Liberal Democrats, formed in the 1970s by a fusion between the old Liberal party and the breakaway right wing of the Labour Party.

THE LAST EFFLORESCENCE

This provenance makes it all the more remarkable that the LibDems are now seen as the alternative to Labour - and the left alternative at that. They were against the war and, generally, espouse a more 'populist' programme than either of the other parties.

The chastening of Tony Blair is a defeat for George Bush every bit as important as the defeat of Aznar in Spain. He is a lame duck; in fact, he is a legless duck, open to pressure now from nearly 100 leftish members of his own party plus the invigorated LibDems with their 60 seats. If these ever combine with the nearly 200 Tories, Blair will be pinned. Politics has once again reared its lovely head in Britain and all bets are off.

With Blair's freedom of action now limited, Mr Bush will find his parliamentary opposition not in Washington, but in London, and that may perhaps help invigorate the forces for change and civilisation in the United States.

There are already signs that the Creationist mobocracy are not having things their own way. Mr DeLay seems to be swinging slowly in the wind and the democratic forces seem to be gaining strength, enthusiasm and most important, boldness.

The Free Trade Area of the Americas is effectively dead, the Central American Free Trade Area is likely to be stillborn and the Doha Round of the WTO is suffering from oxygen starvation.

People round the world are beginning to realise that we don't have to be bullied if we don't want to be, and that there are effective ways of resistance apart from and distinct from terrorism.

The rest of us - the force described as the other superpower - suffers from disorganisation and a lack of awareness of our own strength. But as the strength grows, so will the awareness. Pundits find it easy to speak of watersheds, and thankfully, none has yet called this one. I believe it really is a watershed, for a number of reasons.

I see the Thatcher era as the last flowering of the Tories, rather like the enormous efflorescence of the "Century Palm" before it dies. The so-called Thatcher-Reagan revolution was not the dawn of a new era, but the last spasm of a culture in a frantic effort to turn back the tides of history and civilisation.

Blair and Bush are the last fruits of that efflorescence.