New Labour's Moral Fervour posted by Richard Seymour

The respected political historian Anthony Seldon this weekend conducted a prolonged personality search on the Prime Minister, and discovered what he believed to be an essential truth about New Labour's front-man - he is a fervent Christian, and all of his decisions are informed by a desire for moral certainty. It is because the Prime Minister is so determined to get it right in the big picture that he is able to 'delegate nastiness' as one contributor put it on the programme, allowing others to say and do perfectly horrid things that would ill befit a Prime Minister as righteous as Blair. That is, in the detail he is quite happy to see the shit tossed around, but in the executive mode he is all white shirts and golden glorioles.

However, that being the case, I started to wonder. If Tony Blair is so assured of his moral assiduousness, if his sense of justice is so keen, how to explain the obviously baleful examples of his government's policy? He believes that invading Iraq was "the right thing to do" and is even prepared to explain this to his maker should the latter fail to comprehend. But what about, for example, sending £179m of arms to Turkey in 2001 so that their government could continue to extirpate the Kurdish rebellion, razing villages, scattering refugees in their millions and killing people in their tens of thousands? The fact that Britain continues to train Turkish army officers for precisely this task? What about the fact that Blair's government specifically assisted the Suharto regime in its massacre of dissidents and East Timorese before the revolution, in a continuation of British foreign policy that goes back to the Labour goverment in 1965 helping the incoming despotism kill 1 million people? What about the continued support for the Burmese junta? The sale of weapons to Israel ?

One of Blair's more impressive episodes, aired on the programme, was in dealing with a critic of the Kosovo war at a Labour Party meeting. He strode to the microphone and raged that if "this movement" could abandon the people of Kosovo when "genocide" was taking place, then there was no hope for it. It looked like dynamite. Unfortunately, given Blair's other moral proclivities, outlined above, it turns out to be pure, hypocritical bullshit. Seldon has missed something, which was picked up by another programme on Blair, also aired by Channel Four - he has the comportment and mindset of a trained lawyer, who is able at all times to absorbe and retain only the facts which support his case and relegate the others to the unconscious. He is, in short, the worst kind of hypocrite - a preaching charlatan. Don't give your money to him. If you're a member of his cult, try to extricate yourself. Don't let his acolytes brainwash you with their promises and threats ("do you want the Tories back?", "we'll do it next year", "we're speeding up the process of reform"). Labour is a pain. Abort now!