From another place

Johnny Cash
American V: A Hundred Highways

This is the cracked voice of a man dying on a mastertape. At times it's almost unbearable. The notes issuing from his vocal chords hover between life and death. Here is human mortality in a human voice, a voice so human that is seems to carry within it all human emotion. We are human because we die, because we are aware of dying and because we can express it.
It’s a lot more than saying goodbye. It’s saying hello, too. A calling card from the mortal human race to the (perhaps) immortal human race of the future. A farewell message from a world and a culture that was real, fallible, warm, irrational, hetrodox, still a little wild and a touch rough, a culture that stretched back as well as forwards and sideways, one that was rooted and raw enough to feel natural but developed enough to express some sense of human progress. Johnny Cash sung from a place where the world still spun in a mysterious space, where the night was still dark, where stars still blinked and the moon still rose alone in awide sky. There were still things we didn’t know; and still things we didn’t know we didn’t know. It already sounds like a message from another world.

Sound sense on deaf ears

Book Review
Not Quite the Diplomat
by Chris Patten
Pengiun, £20.

At one point in Not Quite the Diplomat, Chris Patten interrupts another denunciation of George Bush’s administration to exclaim, ‘What an old-fashioned Conservative I have clearly become!’ He has, and this is an old-fashioned book. But never a reactionary or nostalgic one.

Patten, a former Tory party chairman, was EU commissioner for external relations from 1999 to 2004. This book purports to be the product of the wisdom acquired during those years. There is wisdom aplenty here, but more than a little wishful thinking too.

After a messy opening during which he gives us his tuppence-worth about the poll tax, the fall of Thatcher and the rise of New Labour, Patten offers a cogent and principled defence of the EU and its impact on world affairs. As he rightly argues, the EU has been a much more effective agent of “regime change” than American tanks, although it doubtful whether dangling the carrot of EU membership would have had much effect on Saddam. He makes an unapologetic defence of the now-defunct constitutional treaty and a scathing attack on euroscepticism – the ‘ruinous fantasy’ that has imprisoned Conservatives in a ‘sentimental delusion about a our pluperfect system of self-rule.’

But this book is as much about America as Europe, and this is where the wishful thinking starts. Put simply, Patten urges America to return to its rightful course, as ‘the world’s leader, acting through working institutions of global governance, the world’s moral and political exemplar at home and abroad’. Europe’s job, as ‘allies with minds of our own’ is to ‘help’ American recover this role. It is an utterly persuasive case – to anyone except the present occupants of the White House.

As the flies in his ointment, Patten pours visceral scorn on American “neocons” (Dick Cheney is a particular bête noir). ‘As is often the case, “neo” means not “new but simply “not”’, he writes. They are reactionaries bent on ‘permanent revolution or at least permanent war. This is Mao, not Madison.’ Protecting the American right to own guns is an argument that ‘begins stupid and ends in small coffins’. Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol is ‘like the Pope denouncing Galileo’. It all threatens to end in ‘a Hobbesian world in which capitalist democracy defends its wealth and values from the random violence of the angry and the poor – like the “gated communities” in rich suburbs’.

There is more wishful thinking (and a whiff of double standards) when Patten turns to China. Everywhere else, in Russia, Serbia or the Maghreb for example, access to Western markets should be conditional on democratic reforms. Maybe Patten is beguiled by China’s soaraway economic growth or bowled over by the fact that Chinese leaders, unlike Russian ones, are always smiling. Either way, China is off the hook. ‘I doubt whether you can sustain a modern economy for long without democracy and its principle fixtures and fittings – pluralism and the rule of law,’ Patten muses. He may be right, but there is no sign that Beijing has noticed. In a less principled politician this could be excused as realpolitik. For Patten, it won’t do.

This is a decent book by a decent man. Ironically, it will appeal more to those on the left than on the right. Like it’s counterpart, the social democracy of Denis Healy and Roy Hattersley, Patten’s brand of moderate, internationalist conservatism been squeezed from the political landscape. And that’s his problem, and our loss.

© Craig Ryan 2005

First published in Public Service Magazine, Nov-Dec 2005

The Elusive Mr Blair

Book Review
The Unfulfilled Prime Minister
By Peter Riddell
Politicos, £15.99

Peter Riddell’s bookshelf already groans with 20 books on the significance of New Labour and Tony Blair and ‘few are light reading,’ he says without irony. Now assistant editor of The Times, Riddell has been one of our most respected political commentators for more than a quarter of a century. But he needn’t have burdened that shelf further with this dull and sterile book.

Despite the suggestion of tragic failure in the title (Riddell resisted the urgings of Blair acolytes to insert a question mark at the end), Riddell offers a characteristically balanced and cautious assessment of Blair’s premiership. Setting out to compare Blair’s potential legacy with that of Asquith, Atlee and Thatcher in the UK, and Franklin Roosevelt in the USA, Tony inevitably comes up short. Riddell notes the government’s ‘solid achievements’ and its ‘enviable’ economic record, and sympathises with Blair’s public service reforms, but takes him to task for being ‘muddled in implementation and cavalier in the exercise of power’.

But Riddell’s main arguments are pedestrian. Yes, we know expectations were unreasonably high in 1997, that ministers were inexperienced and early policies were vague. And it is not very revealing either to learn that New Labour was an electoral rather than a governing strategy, or that ministers initially tried to govern as if they were still in opposition, leading to an over-reliance on spin and presentation. And did you realise that public service reform has been hindered by the conflict between Blair’s centralist approach and the need to devolve more autonomy to services? Thought so. There is little here that a moderately attentive newspaper reader won’t have picked up long ago.

The bulk of the book is taken up with a forced march through the bleak terrain of public sector reform and a dry-as-dust assessment of economic policy (which concludes, sort of, that not much changed after 1997). The big questions – for example, whether Blair has governed as a social democrat or a neo-Thatcherite – are ducked or left unresolved. This is fertile ground for a good spat, but Riddell prefers to stodgily reprise the arguments on both sides before concluding that the issue is ‘ambiguous’, ‘unresolved’ or – a particular favourite – ‘elusive’.

Only on foreign policy does Riddell move out of second gear. He is not much interested in the Iraq war itself (‘fully covered elsewhere’), concentrating on the ‘growing stresses and strains’ in Blair’s foreign policy, of which Iraq is only a part. The constant postponing of awkward decisions and the failure to recognise the changed climate in transatlantic relations was ‘a major failure of British foreign policy’ for which Blair must shoulder much of the responsibility. From a government that prided itself on being ‘best when boldest’, Blair’s ‘minimalist and risk-averse’ approach to Europe scuppered his declared intention of joining the euro and led to the disastrous collapse in relations with the rest of Europe in the run-up to the Iraq war.

But The Unfulfilled Prime Minister is itself an unfulfilling book. Without the wit of Andrew Rawnsley’s Servants of the People and with little new or big to say, it is hard to see who it’s aimed at. Writing ‘history’ when events are still unfolding is pointless unless the author is prepared to get stuck in, to take a position, to try to influence events or, if nothing else, offer some tempting gossip you won’t read in the papers. Riddell does none of these things. Towards the end, the book simply peters out in confusion: it is ‘impossible at present’ to deliver a verdict on Tony Blair, ‘any Blairite settlement is still in doubt’, his legacy remains ‘bitterly contested.’ You’re left wondering why Riddell bothered. And especially why now.

© Craig Ryan 2006

First published in Public Service Magazine, Feb-Mar 2006