Excellent piece on Tony Blair

An excellent piece today in the Wall Street Journal online by Theodore Dalrymple of the Manhattan Institute on Tony Blair's legacy. It captures very well indeed the somewhat baffling contradiction between the gut reaction many people have (or once had) towards Tony as a "straight kind of guy" and what he actually achieved (or failed to achieve) as Prime Minister, and what he really stood for.

This paragraph sums up the thrust of the piece nicely:

Many have surmised that there was an essential flaw in Mr. Blair's makeup that turned him gradually from the most popular to the most unpopular prime minister of recent history. The problem is to name that essential flaw. As a psychiatrist, I found this problem peculiarly irritating (bearing in mind that it is always highly speculative to make a diagnosis at a distance). But finally, a possible solution arrived in a flash of illumination. Mr. Blair suffered from a condition previously unknown to me: delusions of honesty.

This is the inherent contradiction within Tony Blair, and Dalrymple does an excellent job of putting his finger on it - that Tony Blair believes the TB myth himself and so can blithely go on spouting the stuff he does and sound sincere at the same time. As far as he's concerned, it's all true and everyone who doesn't believe him simply isn't listening hard enough. Well worth a read of the whole thing.

Gordon Brown creating new "rights"

Gordon Brown delivered his 11th (and presumably last) budget on Wednesday. It appears that, among other things (including surprise "tax cuts") Brown is going to force all children up to the age of 18 to stay in school. However, instead of honestly describing this initiative in this way, he puts it thus:

"We will, for the first time in our country’s history, make education a right for every young person until 18" [my emphasis]

So now, when we force people to do something, we are describing it as a "right" on their part. I wonder what other rights we could think up? The "right" to pay high taxes? The "right" to have our children's education entirely dictated by the government? The "right" to speak only those words which are considered politically correct? Is this a preview of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister? Creating new obligations and labelling them rights?

Climate change and the UK

I was in the UK recently and several people who know I live in the US asked me questions about how most Americans feel about Global Warming. The phrasing was usually along the following lines: "Do they believe in global warming yet?" The tone very much suggested that at some point all those stupid Americans would finally believe in what all the rest of the world has long ago accepted to be true.

This is typical of British attitudes about America in general - they believe what they're fed by the BBC, which is typically a mixture of sceptical reporting of Republican politics, interviews with the most red-necked of Americans they can find and a general sneering tone when covering the US. Unfortunately, most Brits, even those who know real, live Americans, seem to buy into this whole set of stereotypes. Meanwhile, most Americans buy into their own set of stereotypes about Brits - wonderful accents, very articulate, bad teeth but a beautiful country with "so much history" (and of course there's the rain). I know which set of stereotypes I'd rather have falsely applied to me...