FEATURES
Thought police
Paul Robinson says the Tories
are so frightened of challenging Blair on the war that their favourite
think-tank will not tolerate dissent
When the remaining flotsam of 20 or so
Conservative MPs wash up on dry land after the next general election,
they may do well to consider why it was that during this Parliament,
every time the credibility of Prime Minister Tony Blair sank further
into the depths, the credibility of their own party sank with it.
If Tony Blair is George W. Bush’s poodle, the Conservative party
is the poodle’s poodle or, as Jonathan Swift might have put it,
the flea’s flea: ‘Naturalists observe, a flea/hath smaller fleas
that on him prey,’ he wrote, ‘And these have smaller fleas to bite
’em,/and so proceed ad infinitum.’ Blair’s genius has been to make
his political opponents complicit in his own crimes, so that when
he suffers for them, so do they. In fact they suffer for them even
more than his own party does, since the general public sees that
many within the Labour party dislike the Prime Minister rather more
than most Conservatives do. In the run-up to the war in Iraq, the
Labour party at least had the virtue of a sizeable rebellion in
its ranks. The Conservative party had no such thing. As a result,
it cannot capitalise on the war scandals which have been revealed,
and is taking much of the blame.
Oppositions are meant to oppose. Instead we have the creepy spectacle
of Tory MP John Bercow writing crawling letters to Tony Blair saying,
‘Congratulations on your superb speech in the Iraq debate. On this
subject, as on many other foreign affairs issues, you have provided
outstanding statemanship.’ Not to be outsmarmed, the newly endorsed
Conservative parliamentary candidate Michael Gove cries, ‘I can’t
hold it back any more; I love Tony!’
The subservience extends beyond lip service. Take David Blunkett’s
endless efforts to revoke every civil liberty all the way back to
Magna Carta. Where is the outrage on the Conservative benches? If
the Tories came into power, can anyone imagine that they would abolish
Blunkett’s obnoxious identity cards with their gratuitous fee, end
the practice of imprisoning people indefinitely without trial, or
revoke extradition treaties which oblige this country to put British
citizens into the hands of foreigners without the latter having
to produce any evidence against those citizens? Obviously not. The
Tories are (with some noble exceptions) as enamoured of authoritarianism
as our Home Secretary.
The voter has not been impressed. In Leicester and Birmingham, the
Conservatives could at least kid themselves that they took such
a battering because there were a large number of Muslims in those
constituencies. When they come fourth behind the Respect coalition
in the Hartlepool by-election, there will be no such excuse. The
Conservative party is drowning, not waving.
The fatal shipwreck was the Conservative policy towards Iraq and
matters of defence and security in general. Opinion polls regularly
showed that Conservatives were much more likely to be anti-war than
Labour voters. Yet instead of seizing the helm, the Conservatives
nervously bleated along behind Tony Blair. In consequence, Britain
now finds that it went to war on what have proved to be false premises,
and the official opposition is incapable of landing a single blow
on the person responsible. It is hardly surprising that people are
abandoning the Conservatives in droves.
There is a way forward. That is for the Conservative party to stop
bailing out its doomed policy, admit that it was taken in by the
deceptions, and make a fresh start.
Sadly, there seems not the slightest chance of such a thing happening.
Conservatives seem incapable of seeing the iceberg sticking up through
the broken shards of their dogmas on defence and security. Their
hysterical reaction to the statement on defence capabilities was
typical. They remembered to shout ‘betrayal’ on cue, like pantomime
villains, but left their pocket calculators at home. Spending more
money on new equipment while firing people is not cuts, but restructuring.
Geoff Hoon, for once, is quite right. We are sacking infantrymen
not because we are spending too little, but because we are using
up all the money on aircraft carriers and fancy new electronic gadgets
so that we can sail off to invade other people. It isn’t the size
of the budget which is wrong. It is the priorities.
The Conservatives are not just uninformed about defence matters,
but determined not to learn. One of Britain’s most respected soldiers,
General Sir Michael Rose, recently wrote in the International Herald
Tribune: ‘It is all too clear that the present American [and to
this we may add British] strategy, which is based on military intervention,
is not working — and that a radically different approach to global
security is needed.’ But try getting the Conservative establishment
in this country even to consider what that might mean in practice,
and in a flash you see a row of duck tails sticking up, heads deep
in the water.
Not long ago I had an experience which demonstrated the problem
all too clearly. Earlier this summer a conservative organisation,
the Centre for Policy Studies, invited me to write an original pamphlet
on defence policy. (I almost called this body a think-tank, but
I fear that although they certainly believe in armoured warfare,
there is no think in their tank.) The pamphlet (whose outline the
CPS approved) laid out a conservative-minded thesis arguing against
the doctrines of military intervention and expeditionary warfare
which have characterised defence policy under the Blair government.
I concluded, as agreed, by offering some controversial, and hopefully
thought-provoking, recommendations.
The CPS reviewed the pamphlet and told me that the ‘analysis was
very good’ and the ideas ‘extremely well expressed’. However, they
also had to cringingly inform me that a member of the organisation’s
management board (no doubt a senior Tory) had ‘thrown a fit’ without
even reading the pamphlet. The pamphlet was thus vetoed; as a matter
of policy, the CPS would not, under any circumstances, countenance
any opinions which did not coincide with that particular member’s
own ideas of what defence should be. This is not so much the ‘Centre
for Policy Studies’ as the ‘Centre for Pre-determined Policies’.
It was precisely this problem of deciding the answer first, and
then working out how to get it, that led us into so much trouble
over Iraqi WMD, but it appears that the lesson has not been learnt.
Alone among the conservative press, The Spectator has done a sterling
job in representing the anti-war sentiment of most conservative-minded
people in this country. It has given voice to Matthew Parris, Simon
Jenkins, Correlli Barnett, and others. In return it has faced the
inevitable accusations of ‘appeasement’. Sadly, it is the latter
who are ruling the roost. The Conservative party and its hangers-on
in the world of the Daily Telegraph, the Times and so-called think-tanks
like the CPS are clearly determined to veto any ‘radically different
approach’ of the sort demanded by General Rose, preferably without
even understanding it first. They are determined not to examine
or reconsider policies which have proved disastrous for both themselves
and the country.
The Conservatives will pay for their folly at the polls. Mr Gove
may find that his safe seat proves not to be so safe after all,
and that a year or so from now he isn’t among that rump mournfully
looking on at the spectacle of Charles Kennedy, leader of Her Majesty’s
loyal opposition.
© 2004 The Spectator.co.uk
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