Footnote to my post #16848:
Source: Direct Submission
Organization: Foreign Correspondent
Email: foreignc@foreigncorrespondent.com
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 08:25:46 -0400
Title: The bloom is off Blair's rose
The bloom is off Blair's rose
By Eric Margolis
July 9, 2000
LONDON - The old Britain I knew as a youth has almost vanished. Gone are the elegantly tailored gentlemen with their bowler hats and tightly rolled umbrellas. They have been replaced by the Cool Brittania look: shaven heads, T-shirts, Anglo-hipness. It does not even rain every day in London, as it used to, though the air remains as foul as ever.
London is Europe's most vibrant city, pulsating with energy and filled with young economic refugees who have fled the stultifying socialism of the continent. Even the food has become often edible. Under Prime Minister Tony Blair, the "new," rejuvenated, high-tech Britain is blazing the way into the 21st century, where talent, not class, will determine people's future.
Or so we're told. I pondered the claims made for Blair's nouveau-Britain from the luxuriant gardens of Kensington Palace, where Prince and Princess Michael of Kent were giving a gala birthday party for their children, Lord Frederick and Lady Gabriella Windsor. The soiree was a "fête champetre," or garden party, of the type favored by Louis XIV and Louis XV. The guests were decked out in mid-18th century costume. Flambeaux illuminated the gardens filled with revelers, entertainers in Venetian masks, giant, bizarrely-hued creatures, jugglers, dueling swordsmen, milkmaids, and musicians.
It was a magical, exquisite, extravagant evening, one whose like I was unlikely to experience again. I remarked to a well-known personality that I had the sensation the French Revolution was impending. He replied, "I feel like we're living on top of the thin crust of a pie. One of these days it's going to break and we'll drop into the muck below." I chatted with a pleasant young man whose family owned 300 acres of London. [Lord Grosvenor?]
Outside the palace gates, mobs of jostling paparazzi flashed away. Crowds of sullen commoners, muttering in the thick argot of the grimy industrial wastelands north of London, gawked at the lavish spectacle on the other side of the iron fence. Tony Blair's classless society, it seemed, had not yet quite dawned.
While the royals were partying or trying to figure out what to do with Prince Charles and his paramour, Lady Camilla Parker-Bowles, ordinary Britons were venting their growing wrath at the until recently adored Tony Blair.
Blair's fall from grace began at New Year's when his pet millenium projects, a hugely expensive dome and ferris wheel, designed to showcase the new, high-tech Briton, turned into white elephants bedeviled by mechanical problems. Another much-ballyhooed project, a footbridge over the Thames, had to be closed due to dangerous swaying. These embarrassing fiasco's unleashed a flood of pent-up anger and dismay at Blair's Labour government.
Gasoline is expected to shortly reach £1 (C$2.25) per litre. Prices in the UK are already stratospheric. Britain's socialized health system has broken down and is even in worse shape than Canada's. The inflated pound is damaging British exports and wrecking its competitive position in the continental Euro zone. British auto plants are threatened with closure, invoking the wrath of the powerful trade unions. In an amazing reversal of fortune, the much reviled and deeply boring Conservative Party leader, William Hague, is now almost neck-a-neck with Blair.
When Blair swept to power in an electoral landslide, 83% of Britons supported his "middle way," a combination of Thatcherite conservative economics with Clintonesque oozing of warm, leftish rhetoric about "caring," "empowerment," and social compassion.
Blair seemed like the Little Train That Could, chugging bravely uphill, puffing out vaporous clouds of platitudes and fuzzy promises. Suddenly, he has run out of steam and is careening backwards at an accelerating rate. Britons have lost patience with Blair. In a few months he has gone from visionary to vacuity. His cabinet is being rocked by sleazy financial scandals. Last week, one of Blair's strongest supporters, the pulp novelist Ken Follett, called the prime minister a backstabber, coward, character assassin, and, the ultimate Parthian shaft, "unmanly."
This last shot came soon after Blair tried to romance female voters by changing diapers of his newborn son before cameras and talking about taking family leave to nurse his offspring. Britons don't much care about the private lives of their leaders, but Blair's pandering to female voters repelled many people and made him look all the more conniving and devious. Briton's notorious beer-swilling soccer louts were far less gentle in their assessment of the prime minister's gender-bending.
Some of the criticism now buffeting Blair is unfair. He has been a good prime minister - certainly better than his Conservative predecessor, the lugubrious John Major - and fiscally responsible. But Britons are just fed up with the type of soggy political mush so familiar to Canadians, and with Blair's by now painful sanctimoniousness.
They also remain deeply split over whether to truly join the EU, and likely become diluted in a sea of socialist Euroblandness, or go back to being the proud eccentrics and buccaneers of centuries past - or at least remain as an island outpost of the old Anglo-American entente. Blair himself clearly does not know which way to go. As a result, he is being blasted from every side. Cool Brittania is getting rather hot under the collar.
Copyright: E. Margolis, July 2000
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