The age of the spin-doctors: blair or blair?

HERE IS ANDREW MARR'S legend of British history since the Second World War. There have been two true leaders--Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher. They radically changed the United Kingdom. The others (Macmillan, Heath, Major among the Tories and Labour's Wilson, Callaghan and Blair) cannily drifted with the tide and are at least partly responsible for the contemporary malaise--that "philosophical or religious emptiness that marks us off from earlier times".

But Man" is not without hope. His last words, on page 602, are: "we British have no reason to despair, or emigrate ... to be born British remains a wonderful stroke of luck". He has a cure. It is the renunciation of spin and the revival of candour in public life. Marr is a leading British journalist and former political editor of the BBC. Is his narrative sustainable?

THE PROLOGUE to Marr's historical drama is an epic moment in the old House of Commons. It is the afternoon of May 28, 1940, in Prime Minister Churchill s office. At issue is whether the British government should cut a deal with Hitler, whose army is in Calais. The British public is divided. Some politicians want a deal. The Americans think Britain will surrender. But Churchill, supported by the Labour leader Clement Attlee, prevails. There will be no surrender. The Battle of Britain begins. "From that decision on that day, everything follows." It was a glorious and nation-shaping episode, Churchill's finest hour and Britain's.

Five years later, at the moment of victory, the British people sacked Churchill and voted in the Attlee Labour government. On the floor of the House of Commons the Labour MP's belted out "The Red Flag". A new battle of Britain began.

The country was broke. It could barely feed its people. It begged for an American loan and the one it got was on the harshest terms. (The negotiations in Washington helped kill John Maynard Keynes.) But the Attlee government was still determined to build, if not a New Jerusalem, at least a welfare state and a Keynesian social democracy.

It scrapped most of the Royal Navy. (Australia picked up a couple of aircraft carriers on the cheap.) It abandoned the Indian empire (with a million killed following the creation of Pakistan). It nationalised iron and steel, coal and rail. It dramatically expanded public housing. (Soon there were proportionately more families in state houses in Britain than in communist eastern Europe.) It also created the National Health Service, free at the point of use--intended as a reward, Marr says, for the sacrifices of the war.

But if it was a tired and hungry country, it was still proud. It patronised everyone (not only Australians). It had won the war while most Europeans had collaborated with Hitler. It was still determined, despite the horrendous cost, to maintain an independent defence policy based on its own nuclear bomb. It went to war again in Korea. It all ended in 1951 with a great arts carnival (the Festival of Britain) and electoral defeat. It would be a generation--twenty-eight years--before Britain got another strong leader.

Marr presents the following thirteen Tory years as a period of complacency and failure. The Ealing comedies of the time were characteristic. Formerly projecting a robust, vaguely socialist patriotism, they fell back on romantic self-congratulatory guff. The Suez crisis marked the last nostalgic throw of British imperialism. The Mau Mau revolt against the white settlers in Kenya became a battle between vicious black terrorists and the doomed "middle-class white sluts". There was a nest of Cambridge spies, a purge of homosexuals, a pod of Angry Young Men, and a satire boom. The Tory defeat in 1964 coincided with the death of Churchill: it seemed not only the end of an era but the end of a nation. Would Britain ever again summon up the blood, sweat and tears needed to defeat a Hitler? Few thought it would. Next time the appeasers would get their way.

Preparing for government (Marr's narrative continues) Labour had to choose between a drunk, George Brown, and a crook, Harold Wilson. It chose Wilson. He promised an end to Tory stuffiness. He would deliver a white-hot technological revolution, a clever country in place of a lucky country. With sleeves rolled up, the brainy boys from state schools would be set to work: up with central planning, decimalisation, metrication, the arts, personal fulfilment; down with hanging, censorship, drug laws, the harassment of homosexuals.

Down too with snobbish (selective) state grammar schools. In future English boys and girls would learn democracy in comprehensive schools: "I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England," declared Labour's lordly education minister, Anthony Crosland, himself a product of the venerable upper-class Highgate School.

But the Wilson-Callaghan years (briefly interrupted by the Heath Conservative government) became an age of insurrectionary trade unions and stagflation, culminating in the winter of discontent of 1978-79--with schools closed, ports blockaded, rubbish rotting in the streets, the dead unburied. Only the Thatcher Revolution saved Britain.

In eleven radical, often exhilarating years the Thatcher government freed up the country with a program of privatisation, deregulation and de-unionising. She defeated the Keynesian economists of Cambridge as thoroughly as the fascist generals of Argentina. It was, says Marr, "the most extraordinary and nation-changing premiership of modern British history".

She easily won the battle of ideas. None of her successors even tried to reverse her libertarian policies. Her successor John Major talked of building "an opportunity society" in place of the welfare state, but New Labour disposed of him in a landslide.

Marr presents its Prime Minister Blair as "the playful magician" of British politics, charming everyone with his impish grin but not taking reform seriously. He relied on pop stars, friends in the advertising world, and news management or lies (with "well educated Australian ladies barking at journalists").

There would be no more privatisation, he said, but he privatised the air traffic control system; no university fees but he introduced them; no increase in taxes but he raised them; no more sleaze but it flourished (most recently, cash-for-peerages); no more fake news but his Iraq war dossier was sexed up to suggest Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ready for use in forty-five minutes. Blair had inherited a thriving economy and, with the wind at his back, smiled ruthlessly through the years of broken promises, truth-shaving, subtle deception and syntactical evasion. Soon his name became Bliar. (See Hal Colebatch's Blair's Britain.) "There is nothing you could ever say to me," his Chancellor Gordon Brown told him, "that I could ever believe."

IS MARR'S LEGEND the truth? On one reading it is not. It distorts the story to present Attlee and Thatcher as the only leaders who changed the United Kingdom in a mould-breaking way. Attlee certainly introduced large-scale nationalisation of industry and established a welfare state. But his nationalised industries were soon denationalised and his National Health Service may still be. The Thatcher Revolution did not extend to the culture wars, the schools, universities, the BBC, the welfare system, including the health service, or the rising tide of political correctness. It remains an unfinished revolution.

The other leaders, the ones Marr diminishes, deserve better. Macmillan ushered in the consumer society and pushed African decolonisation hard. Wilson legislated the permissive society and the 1960s which never ended. Blair settled Northern Ireland, committed Britain to the war against terrorism, and moved the Labour Party to the right.

But if Marr is biased in his choice of heroes and lightweights, he is on firmer ground in his diagnosis of the new British disease--the substitution of spin for candour, of lies for truth. He sees the Attlee years as a lost golden age. Attlee embodied the opposite of spin, sleaze, self-importance or swank. When a deferential journalist asked him if there was anything he would like to say about the coming general election, he snapped: "No." (Churchill shared his candour. The story goes that he was in the House of Commons toilet when an attendant knocked nervously on the door to say that the Lord Privy Seal, Sir Stafford Cripps, wanted to see him urgently. Churchill replied: "Tell Sir Stafford that I am in the lavatory and can only deal with one shit at a time.")

But it has been downhill ever since. Macmillan changed the place-names and seats around the cabinet table to avoid Enoch Powell's accusing eye. He evaded unpleasant issues (union power, state over-spending, dependence on America) with a double-talk that was an early form of spin.

Wilson's "liberal hour"--abolishing hanging and liberalising laws on abortion, homosexuality and divorce--was based on more brazen lies. (Leo Abse described the case he put in the House of Commons to end the indictment of homosexuality as "absolute crap"--but he put it anyway.) Thatcher was far less evasive. She knew her enemies and friends in the press and kept them both throughout, but she had come into politics in the clays when newspapers were still comparatively deferential: it was beneath a rising minister to court journalists.

But, as Marr sees it, Blair and "Tony's cronies", his spinmeisters and bullies, turned New Labour into a perpetual media news-desk with a plan for every day's headlines, an endless grid of announcements, images, soundbites and rebuttals. This style of news-management is destroying public life and journalism--in Australia as well as Britain. It works because journalists ("quislings") are ready to co-operate with the spin-doctors. But its success also depends on the connivance of a corrupted public---on you and me, hypocrites lecteurs, who have also been known to prefer spin to truth.