A tale of two Tonies. (London journal).

Social life in London has become a dangerous business. You are at an apparently relaxed dinner party, and someone suddenly launches into an anti-American diatribe--as often as not, to general applause. You are having a friendly conversation, when out of the blue there is a crack about the utter impossibility of Dubya or the evil ways of the Washington junta--and the assumption is you'll agree.

The occasion for these outbursts is usually, of course, Iraq. But when the subject comes up it is striking how little time is spent talking about Saddam Hussein and what should be done about him. There is a ritual acknowledgment that he is not a nice man, and then the real denunciations can begin. America is a rogue state; don't let them fool you, it's all about oil (or alternatively all about Dad); George W. Bush is a cowboy, a simpleton, a recovering alcoholic, a madman, a usurper.... But readers of The New Criterion hardly need to be taken through the whole litany.

According to Gunter Grass, "the president of the United States embodies the danger that faces us all." Grass speaks, alas, for a large slice of European opinion. And if you have read the recent effusions of John Le Carre ("the United States of America has gone mad") or Harold Pinter, you will know that British calumniators of America can be every bit as shrill as their Continental counterparts.

No one who is exposed to current British anti-Americanism as it is exhibited on the BBC, for instance, will want to underestimate it. (The night before writing this I tuned into a BBC program about Iraq and found the narrator happily harking back to the days of American "hysteria about Commies": par for the course.) Still, there is one consolation. For the moment, at least, the disease is probably less virulent and widespread in Britain than it is in France, Germany, or most other parts of the world.

British anti-war sentiment also concentrates much of its fire on a local target--the obvious one, Tony Blair. He is scorned as a poodle and excoriated as a jackal. A tabloid switches to red ink so that it can devote its front page to portraying him with blood on his hands. "Obscene," if it still means anything, is the only word for some of the hideous cartoons about him in The Guardian and The Independent.

Above all, there is disaffection in his own party. At present, it is fairly muted. Most of his critics still cling to the hope that he can persuade Washington to hold back. But if war comes, open rebellion seems inescapable.

These are difficult days for Blair. Trade unions are showing renewed militancy. The stock market is on the slide. Some of his most important plans for the public services have come unstuck. His feud with the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, has grown worse. And amid all his troubles, he has taken a stand on Iraq which may yet cost him his political life.

Under the circumstances, many of Blair's former critics have begun to take a much more favorable view of him. Yesterday he was presiding over a deplorable project to "re-brand" Britain. Today he is holding together the Anglo-American alliance. If the alternative is Jacques Chirac or Gerhard Schroder, he looks pretty good.

Yet Blair is still the same man he was, and his "project" albeit in less flamboyant form, goes marching on: the British are still being re-branded. Given the contradictions, it is tempting to draw a distinction between Blair himself and the Blair government--and there are times, indeed, when he seems strangely isolated. But no, he is prime minister, and he can't be absolved from responsibility. His office is where the buck stops and where the big initiatives begin.

Recent Blairite measures include a proposal to replace the present House of Lords with a second chamber appointed wholly by the government (or by a government-appointed intermediary), and legislation designed to put enormous pressure on leading universities to accept more students from poor families.

In reality, whether through conviction or because of existing pressures, universities are already falling over themselves to admit such students--provided they come up to the requisite standard. But that last provision means that more remains to be done, and what is now being imposed is a form of affirmative action. The minister responsible has also announced that he is abolishing the last of the grammar schools--independent schools which were once the backbone of the English education system.

While many of the government's policies are wearisomely predictable, it is still capable of springing surprises. Some of the proposals in its new Sexual Offences Bill, for instance, have struck most commentators as downright bizarre. But perhaps by now we should have have got used to the peculiar combination of coerciveness and permissiveness which the bill enshrines.

One of its clauses makes any form of sexual activity which takes place in the open air a criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment. Come into the garden, Maud, but don't make love there. You could just wind up doing six months in jail.

At the same time, the bill goes out of its way to specify that there is nothing wrong with sexual activity in a public lavatory, provided it takes place in a cubicle with the door closed. Needless to say this is meant to be a friendly gesture towards gays, though as such it is somewhat at odds with the ban on open-air sex. The most celebrated centers for alfresco intercourse in London are the gay cruising-grounds of Hampstead Heath and Clapham Common. (Some AIDS workers have proposed that trees on the Heath should have free condom-dispensers attached to them.) If the bill were meant to be enforced to the letter, which no doubt it isn't, it would be as anti-gay as pro-gay in its effects.

The government is also trying to cope with the problems of immigration. Poor government. It decides to vet asylum-seekers on arrival in Britain, in an effort to keep out terrorists--a not unreasonable move, you might suppose, but one that has been bitterly assailed from the left. It also introduces a set of requirements for applicants for British citizenship, and comes under fire from the right for not including even a token acquaintance with British history among them.

The critics have a strong point, which is that the requirements are almost all concerned with rights rather than duties, with Britain as a provider of welfare rather than as a society with it own traditions. But would history--the we-were-wrong history that gets taught in schools today--really redress the balance? It might only make things worse.

The defects of contemporary history-teaching have often been aired. Much less gets reported about the teaching of geography, but a new study conducted by Alex Standish, a geographer at a university in Kent, throws a depressing light on what is going on. The religion of environmentalism has triumphed and doesn't admit of any disagreement. According to Mr. Standish, one major representative textbook, published by the venerable house of Longman, "leaves pupils with the impression that humans can only cause harm to the environment." At the same time, the Green agenda has replaced the mundane skills which used to be taught, and it shows. One parent interviewed when the report appeared complained that her twelve-year-old son came home from school talking about "renewable energy sources" but that he couldn't identify Africa on a map.

Meanwhile, beyond schools and colleges, the merry dance of contemporary culture proceeds. The Guardian offers the front page of its magazine section to a former winner of the Turner Prize, Gillian Wearing: she responds by covering it with the slogan "Fuck Cilla Black." (Cilia Black is a television game show hostess.) Channel Four, the TV channel founded to promote new standards of excellence, presents a program on which a performance artist eats a stillborn baby. The venerable house of Macmillan announces that it is publishing a children's book called Hello, Sailor about a gay relationship between a sailor and a lighthouse-keeper: it is "aimed at the over-threes."

Meanwhile the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has taken time off from screwing up the city's transport system to unveil a volume entitled London: Cultural Capital, which is meant to clarify his plans for the arts, leisure activities, and "creative industries." It is written in the kind of jargon that has made "creative" a dirty word, with lots of mind-numbing talk about access and diversity. But such things aren't meaningless. When the report reminds us that cultural life in London is still "predominantly mono-cultural," there is a clear indication of what kind of institutions or events are going to be favored and where funds are going to be directed.

The quest for diversity (which means making Britain out to be even more diverse than it is) has become an almost inescapable preoccupation. The organizers of something called World Book Day, for instance, recently published a list of the ten best literary representations of life in England today. It includes a facetious travelogue by the American writer Bill Bryson, White Teeth (Zadie Smith's novel about multiracial families in North London), an attack on "Thatcher's England" a gay sex-and-drugs novel, an attack on multinationals by the environmental correspondent of The Guardian, a book about the Manchester club scene by a DJ, and an anthology of black and Asian writing from Birmingham. Whatever the merits of the books on the list, and even bearing in mind that it was drawn up with the help of the public, it is hard not to feel that it leaves large sections of the population--the middle-class population in particular--disenfranchised.

Again, the new director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, has announced that he wants to stage plays which examine "what it is like living now in Britain." As a first sample he is presenting a play about yardies (Jamaican gangsters) and the "murder mile" where they have made their presence felt in the London borough of Hackney. And then it is on to an anatomy of "Blair's England"--it's hardly likely to be very friendly--by David Hare.

The most timely offering of all, however, is going to be a production of Henry V, and in case you can't work out why the play is so topical, Hytner has offered a clue in advance: "it's about an English leader who commits himself to a very dubious war." Get it?

John Gross's most recent book is A Double Thread: Growing Up English and Jewish in London (Ivan R. Dee).