Bankrupt Legacies
When Mrs Thatcher was playing Oliver Hardy to Ronald Reagan’s Stan Laurel, everyone thought their time had come.
We were all going to live in lands flowing with milk and honey and riches and comfort would befall us all the days of our lives, even if we were going to have to behave like ravening wolves to achieve it.
To nobody’s great surprise, it did not quite work according to plan. Things just went on pretty much as normal, with the rich getting richer and the poor picking up the bill.
We all woke up to find we had been conned.
Then along came Tony Blair selling the same old claptrap and everyone got fooled again.
As that heavyweight of political thought, George Bush, would say:
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
No, it doesn’t make any sense, but you can see what his poor little brain is aiming at.
We all know that these bankrupt ideas have made a very few people repugnantly rich and the world in general a poorer place. As Polly Toynbee writing in The Guardian shows, people are now wise to all this nonsense.
The problem is, how soon will it be before the politicians catch up?
Tony Blair’s legacy is that he was a pantomime Mrs Thatcher in drag who managed to take the farce on tour for one long, last show before all the costumes and props unravelled and collapsed on the rickety stage and everyone saw the horror of the real ugliness of the players beneath the peeling and running greasepaint masks.
Not much to show for ten years in power.
What will Gordon Brown’s legacy be for the couple of years he will have at the big top of the political circus?
Educating Gordon Brown, The Wisest Fool In Christendom
British people are neither impressed by nor enamoured with intellectuals, as a general rule. In New Britain, we expend vast energies of feverish excitement over the banalities of The X Factor and Big Brother (or, in the case of the latter, we once, embarrassingly, did so), but anything which requires thought, we tend to steer clear of, as if we might be infected by it and forever after be compelled to use our brains against our wills and better judgment.
Mrs Thatcher, from the outset, portrayed herself as intelligent: we were all persuaded to swoon at her mastery of facts of the Mr Gradgrind variety. Tony Blair was described as ’superficially intelligent’ and when standing alongside the normal drones and lobotomised retards of the political world, he did have a quality of twinkling artifice imitating something like intellectual animation. Of course, outside that normal context, he was just another grinning imbecile.
Much has been made of Gordon Brown’s towering intellect, along with his moral compass and clunking fist, but although he knows things, does he have the common sense to apply them intelligently? Does his compass let him down and leave him to ricochet around like a headless chicken? Does his clunking fist simply smash things he attempts to mend, when they had not previously been broken?
The Wisest Fool in Christendom was a title given to James I of England, (VI of Scotland) and The Economist has this neat little precis of what it meant:
It is not even clear what prompted the coining of the epithet, though James was certainly a mixture of opposites of every kind. In the words of Sir Walter Scott,
He was deeply learned, without possessing useful knowledge; sagacious in many individual cases, without having real wisdom…He was fond of his dignity, while he was perpetually degrading it by undue familiarity; capable of much public labour, yet often neglecting it for the meanest amusement; a wit, though a pedant; and a scholar, though fond of the conversation of the ignorant and uneducated…He was laborious in trifles, and a trifler where serious labour was required; devout in his sentiments, and yet too often profane in his language…
In short, he was a fool. Yet he was also wise.
That made him a much rarer bird than the foolish brainbox—the egg-head who, as a child, takes every prize for scholastic achievement but cannot be trusted to tie his shoelaces, or cross a road, let alone take charge of anything. Such people are indubitably clever. They are the ones who, later on in life, may work out in their heads every kind of intellectual puzzle and show off every arcane piece of knowledge. They may shine at mental long division and be able to expatiate upon the workings of machines or the writings of scholars. But of judgment—everyday, practical judgment of men and human affairs—they have none.
So, we can see that being educated in what might appear to be a perfect manner will not of necessity make you capable of doing any particular job which might be required of you. You may end up red hot on the theory of how best to change the world, but absolutely useless at seeing that what you are actually doing is smashing what is good and replacing it with something shabby, shoddy and extremely unlikely to work.
The other day in The Guardian, Gordon Brown wrote an impressive NewSpeak article about education, including this:
In a globally competitive national economy, there will be almost no limits to aspirations for upward mobility. Globalisation dictates that the nations that succeed will be those that bring out the best in people and their potential. And this is the new opportunity for Britain. Put simply: in the past, we unlocked only some of the talents of some of the people; the challenge now is to unlock all the talents of all the people.
This will require a richer view of the equality of opportunity we seek. Opportunities to acquire education and skills must now be lifelong. We must recognise that human potential expresses itself in different ways over time and across a wide spectrum of abilities, aptitudes and talents. These cannot be determined simply by IQ testing carried out once and perhaps too early. Fulfilling the demands of a global jobs market requires us to nurture and develop creativity, interpersonal skills and technical abilities, as well as analytic intelligence.
In essence, all it said was that children are economic units to be exploited by the state for nothing other than their earning capacity in the wonderful new global economy. They do not have to be good, rounded, properly developed people; simply ruthless money-making machines.
Needless to say, nobody who responded to Gordon Brown’s article agreed and he received the usual kicking meted out to idiot politicians trying to sell their deceitful claptrap.
Then, on AOL News, we have this:
Ministers are treating school pupils as if they were business products to be managed rather than children to be educated, an Oxford University study has suggested.
The Nuffield Review of 14-19 education said the Government’s aim of boosting the British economy was overshadowing the true role of schools in young people’s lives.
Businesses increasingly run state schools and can even award their own A-level equivalent qualifications, as in the recent case of McDonald’s.
The lead author of the report, Oxford’s Professor Richard Pring, said: “The changes at 14-19 are too often driven by economic goals at the expense of broader educational aims.
“This is reflected in the rather impoverished language drawn from business and management, rather than from a more generous understanding of the whole person.
“We need to give young learners far more than skills for employment alone, even if such skills are key to the country’s economy.”
The Nuffield report said the broader aims of education were neglected, there was a “risk of damaging the values that define an educated and humane society”.
It criticised the use of terms such as “inputs”, “targets” and “curriculum delivery” in education.
“The boundaries between running a school and running a business can easily become confused,” the study said.
A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families dismissed the report. “This depressing view of education is simply not one that we recognise,” he said.
So, who are you going to believe? A scholar or a lying halfwit politician?
Tony Blair Was ‘Too Stupid’ To Understand Iraq War
Nobody in their right mind would accuse George Bush of being intelligent. He may, however, be the epitome of a politician: someone who, with no discernible talents, capabilities or redeeming qualities none the less rises to a position of power.
Tony Blair, on the other hand, like his political prototype Margaret Thatcher, was thought by many to possess rare intelligence, for no apparent reason, other than being able to quickly remember data and regurgitate them like a sick parrot.
Perhaps no surprise, then, to learn that Tony Blair went to war with Iraq for no better reasons than personal ambition and his own messiah complex, without understanding anything about what this personal crusade for self-aggrandisement and fervour to be seen as his god’s right-hand man on earth would mean for the people of Iraq and the perception throughout the world of how stupid, narrow, sordid and idiotic politics on a grand scale actually is.
The Guardian has this from Jonathan Steele’s book Defeat: Why They Lost Iraq:
Blair was not interested in these matters [what would happen within Iraq after it was invaded]. He took the view that it was in Britain’s strategic interest to go along with whatever Bush decided. Civil servants and senior British military sources repeatedly complained that he never raised difficult problems with Bush, even when he had been briefed to mention them before going to Washington. He either lacked consideration for the consequences of an invasion, or perhaps he feared risking his friendship with Bush by sounding like a sceptic or a wimp. He thought he had considerable influence in the White House, and his various trips to Washington, which always culminated with a press conferences at Bush’s side, were designed to give the impression that as a major contributor of troops he was an equal partner in decision-making.
More important than Blair’s ambition to be seen as a world statesman standing alongside the first US president to be unable to speak English, was his own monumental intellectual incapacity: his incredible thickness.
Four months before Blair finally became George Bush’s devoted little yapping lap-dog when the invasion finally happened, he was given the opportunity to listen to people with functioning brains who were experts on Iraq and the region.
Naturally, he was too stupid to be able to take any of it in:
“We all pretty much said the same thing,” Joffe recalls. “Iraq is a very complicated country, there are tremendous intercommunal resentments, and don’t imagine you’ll be welcomed.” He remembers how Blair reacted. “He looked at me and said, ‘But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?’ I was a bit nonplussed. It didn’t seem to be very relevant.” Recovering, Joffe went on to argue that Saddam was constrained by various factors, to which Blair merely repeated his first point: “He can make choices, can’t he?” As Joffe puts it, “He meant he can choose to be good or evil, I suppose.”
Joffe got the impression of “someone with a very shallow mind, who’s not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people, no interest in social forces, political trends, etc”.
Dodge also struggled to convince Blair of the obstacles that would face anyone who occupied Iraq. “Much of the rhetoric from Washington appeared to depict Saddam’s regime as something separate from Iraqi society,” he remembers. “All you had to do was remove him and the 60 bad men around him. What we wanted to get across was that over 35 years the regime had embedded itself into Iraqi society, broken it down and totally transformed it. We would be going into a vacuum, where there were no allies to be found, except possibly for the Kurds.”
The experts didn’t seem to make much of an impression. Blair “wasn’t focused”, Tripp recalls. “I felt he wanted us to reinforce his gut instinct that Saddam was a monster. It was a weird mixture of total cynicism and moral fervour.”
So, there you have Tony Blair’s legacy, inevitably intertwined with that of George Bush: you can elect (or in Bush’s case, have thrust upon you) an idiot to high office, but don’t be surprised if they fuck things up and kill millions of people in the process.
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