Politics in Britain and the US: The Cameron/Clegg and Obama Governments

William Shawcross is a widely renowned British writer and broadcaster. His articles have appeared in the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Washington Post and the Sydney Morning Herald. His books include Dubcek (1970), Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979), The Shah’s Last Ride (1989) and Deliver Us From Evil: Warlords and Peacekeepers in a World of Endless Conflict (2001). He wrote and presented BBC television series Monarchy in 1995 and Queen and Country in 2002. On 9 September 2010 he shared his thoughts on recent developments in UK and US politics with The Sydney Institute. The paper which follows has been taken from an edited transcript of the talk.

POLITICS IN BRITAIN AND THE US: THE CAMERON/CLEGG AND OBAMA GOVERNMENTS

WILLIAM SHAWCROSS

A few weeks back, Gerard Henderson invited me to make a speech to The Sydney Institute. I said “Look I’m terribly sorry, I just don’t have time to prepare a proper speech, but I’m very happy to have an informal chat with some of your members.” And Gerard said that was fine but he never told me it was going to be like this. So I apologise in advance for the fact that I have not prepared a proper speech of the type that you deserve, coming out on a filthy, rainy night like this. But you must blame Gerard as well as me.

“Travelling with Mr Blair on this 700 page journey is like a trip around his monolithic ego with a sycophantic tour guide blethering on a mega phone.”

I’ll talk initially about Britain, our new coalition which is the first coalition since the Second World War. Australia is now in a similar position. Australia and Britain still seem to march in time, which is very good to know. The big political event in the last week in England, however, has been Tony Blair’s autobiography, which is an extraordinary book. All 700 pages of it. Some of it is very good and very important. His coverage of Iraq and on Al-Qaida and the threat from Islamism is powerful and brave. and good. But, likewise, some of it is very, very bizarre.

One critic, Jeff Randall in the Daily Telegraph, has written that: “Travelling with Mr Blair on this 700 page journey is like a trip around his monolithic ego with a sycophantic tour guide blethering on a mega phone.” That is actually rather a good description of it. Of the first time Blair goes to parliament, he writes:

I walked into the cavernous central lobby where the public wait to meet their MPs and I stopped. I was thunderstruck. It just hit me. This is where I had to be. It was very odd. Odd, because so unlike me. And in later times I was never known as a House of Commons man.

Well he certainly wasn’t, he treated it with contempt:

But there, I had a complete presentiment. Here I was going to be. This was my destiny. This was my political home. I was going to do whatever it took to get into it.

And then the MP he didn’t know and with whom he was to have a drink:

Tom thought me a pretty strange bird that evening. We’d had hardly been introduced when I started plying him with questions; “How do you get here?” “What can you do for me?” “Who do I see?”

Then he joins the Labour Party and gets into parliament. He is a backbench MP with his friend Gordon Brown in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They go to New York several times of which Blair writes: “We used to travel to the US from time to time, essentially just to get away and think. For some bizarre reason or other we would stay at the Carlyle Hotel in New York.” Now, that’s pretty bizarre; two left-wing Labour MPs staying at the Carlyle. Blair never mentions that it’s one of the best and most expensive hotels in New York. He does, however, say:

The Carlyle is as far removed from New Labour as binge drinking is from Methodism. It’s an exclusive hotel that had been used by the likes of Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, Eartha Kitt would sing there. At the time people dressed for dinner, the mood was formal, the décor elegant, the ambience a little austere. Not me at all. But funnily enough, I grew to like it.

So it is, you must admit, very, very strange. And then on the day that John Smith, the leader of the Labour Party, died in 1994, Gordon Brown was the expected successor, to be elected leader of the Labour Party. But Blair was absolutely determined that it should be him. He met Peter Mandelson in the lobby of parliament:

Peter said, “I think it’s going to be Gordon.” “Peter,” I said, “You know I love you, but this is mine, I am sure of it, and you must help me to do it.” “I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” he said. “Peter,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder, “Don’t cross me over this, this is mine. I know it. And I will take it.” … On that night, I needed that love that Cherie gave me. Selfishly, I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instincts. Knowing that I would need every ounce of emotional power and resilience to cope with what lay ahead. I was exhilarated, afraid and determined in roughly equal quantities.

Horrible. Anyway, that was the day Blair decided to become leader of the party. And he did so. As you know, Labour was elected to the parliament in the 1997 landslide and it was in government until very recently.

Despite this very odd tone, the Blair autobiography has some very serious things in it. It is a work of extraordinary ego.

Blair talks a little about sexual scandals in the Labour government. He makes a very wise observation when he writes:

As Prime Minister, I was the recipient of confidences and, via the Whips, of numerous revelations. Here’s the shocking, or not so shocking thing: politicians really are like everyone else. Some are in marriages of love, some are in marriages of convenience, some are having affairs, some are straight, some are gay.

Despite this very odd tone, the Blair autobiography has some very serious things in it. It is a work of extraordinary ego. Volunteering his mistakes, Blair talks about what a big mistake it was for the Labour Party, under his watch, to ban fox hunting. A lot of people thought the government should not be involved in a legal pursuit of hunting dogs. But for Blair to offer as his great mistake the attempt to ban fox hunting seems pretty bizarre.

The fact is that Labour inherited a flourishing economy from the Conservatives in 1997 and ran it a long way downhill. By the end of Labour’s thirteen years in power, unemployment was higher than when Blair came into office, there were far more welfare dependencies and far more personal bankruptcies, the private pension schemes had been vandalised by Gordon Brown and public finances were in freefall. The government was spending £150 billion a year more than it was getting in taxes; that was the situation that the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats inherited this May.

The vast spending spree that Labour had indulged in was caused by Gordon Brown, who insisted on spending without reforming, on throwing money at problems without trying to reform the public services at all. Blair could have been a much better prime minister had he tackled Brown. But he was always frightened to do so.

Blair portrays Brown as a weirdo and a bit of a lunatic. That raises the question, why then did you let him stay in power and why did you, above all, allow him to become prime minister after you?

In his book, Blair writes about his terror of offending Brown. And Brown behaved, according to Blair, aggressively and poisonously towards him throughout. Blair had joined Brown in a Faustian pact, before 1997. The agreement was that, as Chancellor, Brown would have far greater control of the economy than any Chancellor has ever had. It was a disaster, and Blair never dared to sack him.

So no institutions, not the health service, nor education, nor welfare, none of them were reformed because Brown did not want to upset the left of the Labour Party. He refused to embark on any reforms, market reforms, or any other than would have delivered better services. At the beginning, Blair appointed a very good MP called Frank Field, as Minister of Welfare. And the welfare problems in Britain are absolutely vast. Welfare costs more than the Home Office budget altogether. It’s a catastrophe and it has to be reformed. It is one of the things that the new coalition will have to do, difficult though it may be. Brown refused to accept the Frank Field’s reforms and Field had to be sacked. Never did Blair, in his long tenure at parliament, manage to face Brown down on serious issues like that.

Blair portrays Brown as a weirdo and a bit of a lunatic. That raises the question, why then did you let him stay in power and why did you, above all, allow him to become prime minister after you? To that he gives no satisfactory answer, except that it would have been politically too damaging to him to push Brown out at any time.

The damage to the UK is very much a secondary thing throughout Blair’s book. All he says is that by 2005, “Labour was insufficiently vigorous in limiting or eliminating the potential structural deficit.” Well it certainly was. And Blair has to take a great deal of responsibility for that. He could have been a great prime minister, if he had been more courageous – as courageous at home with his own party as he was abroad with many more serious problems like Islamic fundamentalism.

The Dail Mail’s Craig Brown in “Tony Blair’s fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood” for Online Mail portrayed Blair’s book in this way:

Once upon a time, there was this little girl called Red Riding Hood. She was a great little girl, really great. But let me say this. She brought it on herself. One day she set off to visit her gran. Did she have to visit her gran? No. Did she want to visit her gran? Not necessarily. But did she set off to visit her gran? Yup. … So she put on her little red riding hood  (hence the nickname!) and set off into the woods. Fairy tales: A wolf has to do what a wolf has to do and make the most of the limited resources available to him at any given moment in time … He knocked at the door. “Is that you, Little Red Riding Hood?” said grandma.” Yes, grandma,” replied the wolf, putting on Little Red Riding Hood’s voice. No sooner had grandma let him in than he gobbled her up.

Decisive? Yes. Necessary? Probably. Bold? Undoubtedly.

To be frank, there’s not a lot you can do in a situation like that, especially if you’re a wolf, and feeling peckish. Sometimes people ask me what I really feel about the wolf. I tel them that, honestly, the wolf was a really great guy – a team player and a truly good bloke.

I’m afraid there is that element to Blair’s book. I don’t mean to say that it’s not serious, it is a serious book.

I’ll end this section of my rambling talk to you on a serious note. Blair, as I mentioned at the beginning, spells out his horror on 9/11 when he and John Howard – John Howard was in America at that time – rallied immediately to the United States, recognising that the attack on the United States was a complete game-changer. It had changed everything entirely in the politics of the world. Blair has been consistent in saying, since then, that Islamic fundamentalism is one of the greatest threats to our world today. I agree with him. In a BBC interview about his book recently, Blair said that Western politics were designed to confront radical Islamism. This was essential because Islamic fundamentalism is regressive, wicked and backward looking. He’s completely correct. Blair has a commitment to Western civilization, an important one, which many others are too loathe to make too often.

You probably all know the extraordinary Somali woman Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has been threatened with death from radical Islamists in Holland. She had to leave Holland, where she had become a citizen. She now lives in the United States. She wrote recently about what she calls how to win the clash of civilisations, taking her phrase from Samuel P Huntington’s famous book, The Clash of Civilizations published in the late 1990s. Ayaan Hirsi Ali make this point:

The greatest advantage of Huntington’s civilisational model of international relations is that it reflects the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. It allows us to distinguish friends from enemies. Divide and rule cannot be our only policy. We need to recognize the extent to which the advance of radical Islam is the result of an active propaganda campaign. One CIA report written in 2003 shows that the Saudis invested at least two billion a year over a 30 year period to spread their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The Western response in promoting out own civilization was negligible. Our civilization is not indestructible. It needs to be actively defended. This was perhaps Huntington’s most important insight. The first step towards winning this clash of civilizations is to understand how the other side is waging it.

Cameron has dragged his party out of its conservative comfort zone and towards the centre.

That’s correct and Blair does do that very importantly in this book. That’s perhaps the most important message in A Journey – My Political Life.

And so to the government today in Britain, an extraordinary change. David Cameron is the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool in the early eighteenth century. He didn’t fight a very good election campaign. A lot of Conservatives thought that he wasn’t conservative enough. He has actually, in the last five years since he became leader of the Conservative Party, tried to force it towards the middle. Blair approves of this in his book, saying that it’s the only way you can win an election today – extreme parties can’t win in social democracies.

Cameron has dragged his party out of its conservative comfort zone and towards the centre. Those on the right of the party feel that’s why it wasn’t a robust enough conservative message, and that’s why he didn’t win strongly enough. In fact he didn’t win an overall majority, and he could have governed as a minority but he took a very unexpected and rather brave decision to create a firm coalition with the Liberal Party. It came in third. The Lib Dems haven’t been anywhere near government for at least 80 years.

The cost of the coalition has been, most importantly, the promise of a referendum on constitutional reform, introducing an alternative voting system and a fixed five year term. They have agreed the fixed five year term already. This is anathema to the British constitution in the sense that governments are supposed to be able to rise and fall on votes of confidence and so on.

The Economist had a cover story recently, with Cameron looking like an Indian American, saying that this is going to be more revolutionary than any government since 1945 or 1979 with Margaret Thatcher.

But the coalition has so far done a lot better than anyone had a right to expect, or than anyone expected. It’s inherited, as I said, a financial disaster of the most profligate government in our history. It’s looking, so far, as if it could be quite a revolutionary government. Indeed the Economist had a cover story recently, with Cameron looking like an Indian American, saying that this is going to be more revolutionary than any government since 1945 or 1979 with Margaret Thatcher. It’s certainly true that Cameron realises Blair lost a lot of momentum in the first two or three years of his thirteen year New Labour rule.

There’s been a lot of very obvious trivia in changes at Downing Street and the gossip in Whitehall. First of all, there are no more bacon rolls being eaten in Downing Street, it’s sushi. There’s a lot more politeness to civil servants than there was under the Brown regime.  Blair says that Brown had “zero emotional intelligence”. Brown was a rather sad man with an inability to relate to people. Certainly his relationship with Blair was poisonous to him as well as to Blair and to the party and to the country. But now Downing Street is a much happier place to be, and everyone there is said to be delighted. There’s proper cabinet government, around the cabinet table, unlike the sofa government of Blair’s years where decisions were made much more informally and often without proper minutes taken by civil servants.

He replied, quite simply, because I think I’d be good at it. He doesn’t seem to suffer from the tall poppy syndrome.

Cameron is direct and straightforward. He was asked by some journalists before the election, why do you want to be Prime Minister? He replied, quite simply, because I think I’d be good at it. He doesn’t seem to suffer from the tall poppy syndrome. When the election happened, Greece was in meltdown.

During the election campaign, the Liberals had taken the position that it was too dangerous to cut too far too fast, that this would bring on a second dip, a double dip recession. But the spectre of Greece, on the verge of meltdown, made even the Liberals think twice about this. They agreed to come into government with a policy of immediate and savage cuts of public services. And that is now what they’re embarking on it. It’s going to be incredibly hard to actually impose.

One of the first issues Cameron had to deal with was a report on the killings in Londonderry in Northern Ireland in 1972, where the British Army opened fire, totally improperly, upon demonstrators. A very long report has just been published and it blames the British Army. Cameron was pitch-perfect in accepting this report in Parliament. He made a very fine speech, around two weeks after he took office, in which he said no-one admired and loved the British Army more than he, but what had happened was absolutely disastrous and the British Government had to apologise, unconditionally, for it. That set the tone in a way neither Blair nor Brown could have done. Cameron’s straightforward and simple approach was much admired.

The deficit is now 11 per cent of GDP after thirteen years of Labor. It’s one of the highest amongst all the G20 economies. It’s not clear whether austerity plans and cutting back can actually be achieved without destroying at least some of the cherished public services.

The ball is now in the Treasury’s court – the Chancellor of the Exchequer is George Osborne. They’re going to raise the Value-Added Tax from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent. Seventy-five per cent of the savings are to come out of government cuts. I don’t think anybody realises yet how brutal this is going to have to be. I don’t think anyone actually understands how it’s going to happen. The NHS has been exempted, which is probably a mistake, since the NHS budget is so huge and it is such a sacred cow. The Conservatives fought the election promising to keep the National Health Service exempt from cuts. It expected that Labour would terrorise the electors if they didn’t.  But now it’s going to be very hard to exempt the NHS and nothing else.

There is, as you can imagine, an anguished debate. The deficit is now 11 per cent of GDP after thirteen years of Labor. It’s one of the highest amongst all the G20 economies. It’s not clear whether austerity plans and cutting back can actually be achieved without destroying at least some of the cherished public services. But, it’s clear the cuts will have to be fiercer than anything since World War II. Defence is particularly vulnerable. All three services are bound to shrink. Certainly in Afghanistan it’s going to be very difficult to see how that commitment can be maintained. Britain will go through a terrible year or two of change. And I should not like to see Britain without a serious armed service, all three services. It’s going to be very, very hard to sustain.

As I mentioned, the welfare budget has to be savagely cut because 28 per cent of all government spending at the moment is welfare. Gordon Brown refused to make an effort to reform that. There was a commentary this morning in one of the papers which I read, that ministers are saying that the cuts themselves are being discussed now within the Treasury and they’re going to be published later this year. Probably in October.

They claim millions of Liberal voters have been betrayed for the sake of those 20. It’s going to be a very, very brutal winter.

One minister was quoted as saying: “We’re now paddling in a canoe down the Zambezi with the Victoria Falls dead ahead. The government has not adequately prepared the country for the size of the abyss into which it is about to fall.” Other ministers mutter darkly about what 40 per cent cuts will mean. They worry that the voters, and even MPs, have yet to grasp what the public sector landscape will look like. That’s true. It will be very interesting to see how far the Liberals, who are big public spenders, can reconcile these cuts to which they’ve committed themselves to be in government with the demands of their constituents.

The Labour Party, which is leaderless at the moment but won’t be for long, is already making hay out of the fact that 20 Liberal Democrats are in government. They claim millions of Liberal voters have been betrayed for the sake of those 20. It’s going to be a very, very brutal winter.

The other part of Cameron’s revolution, apart from cutting back the state and the public services, is decentralising the state, or devolution. They are trying to devolve decision making in the hospitals, in education, in the police services; they’re going to have elected police commissioners which we’ve never had before. All in all it is a very, very radical government.

Success or failure, however, will depend to a large extent on how far they can succeed in pushing through this radical, extremely painful agenda of cutting services, which we’ve all come to feel entitled to over the last 40, especially the last 20, years.

Cameron talks of his vision of a big society rather than big government or big state. It’s rather an inchoate concept still but it’s basically a blurring of the lines between what the state is expected to deliver and what individuals and voluntary institutions can do. It’s supposed to enable charities and social enterprises to play a greater role. There’ll be a lot of problems, if only teething troubles, and much more complaints about postcode lotteries. People will have to expect different services in different parts of the country. It’s going to be very difficult and quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Blair and Brown in a way did more of the same building and throwing money at public services so this is going to be a very radical change, more radical than Margaret Thatcher who herself centralised the country a great deal.

To conclude, I must reflect a moment on Obama. You may have noticed that recently a broadcaster from Fox News, called Glenn Beck, managed to get 300,000 people to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to a rally in which Obama wasn’t mentioned at all. The rally was called “Restoring America’s Honor”. It was a huge achievement by Glenn Beck and those who organised it, members of the so-called conservative “Tea Party” movement.

This was an extraordinary reflection on the unpopularity into which Obama has fallen with astonishing speed since he was elected as a savior, almost less than two years ago. At that rally, the hatred with which President Bush was regarded, and the terms in which he was spoken of, was very much a counterpoint to the adulation which was granted to Obama throughout 2008 and at the beginning of 2009.

That could still happen to Obama. But it seems to me that he doesn’t have the same natural or brilliant political instincts that Clinton had. Obama is looking bedraggled in his political sense.

The way in which Barack Obama’s popularity has fallen is an extraordinary downfall. It may not last, and he may well come back. Bill Clinton, after all, in the middle of his first term was extremely low in the polls and lost very badly to the Republicans in 1994. Yet he bounced back and was re-elected in 1996. That could still happen to Obama. But it seems to me that he doesn’t have the same natural or brilliant political instincts that Clinton had. Obama is looking bedraggled in his political sense. Two days ago he made an extraordinary statement which The Australian picked up, saying: “People treat me like a dog.” That’s not a sensible thing for a president to say.

What Obama has been trying to do is outreach to the Islamic world. This hasn’t paid many dividends; his outreach to Iran has paid no dividends at all so far. He’s tried to change the culture completely from that of President Bush. And what Americans don’t like is that he specifically says he doesn’t believe in the concept of American exceptionalism. But most Americans do believe in this, for obvious reasons. When Obama was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, he said: “Yes, of course I do, in the same way that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” To an American, this is not exceptional at all.

Obama is a bit like Gordon Brown, extending big government all the time. There is his healthcare reform which is remarkably unpopular only six months after it was passed in March. He has not concentrated at all adequately on unemployment and getting people back to work. All these things go together like a perfect storm.

Britain’s relations with Obama are not as close as Tony Blair’s relations with either Clinton or with Bush. Cameron has been to Washington and committed to Afghanistan to the extent that Obama is committed to Afghanistan. When Obama sent a surge of troops into Afghanistan last year, he said that they would be coming out in 2011/2012. As one of his generals said, that really helps the Taliban know when we’re leaving.  Cameron, similarly, has said that we’re going to get out as soon as we can. Neither seems committed to the idea that we are in Afghanistan to try and create a safe society, one in which girls can go to school and women can be protected, and where the Taliban and Al Qaida will be denied space. It seems to me that there’s a very severe backsliding and a feeling that the price is too high. My own fear is that if we do pull out of Afghanistan, it’ll be catastrophic.

Now I must say something about Queen Elizabeth, to whom I have devoted the last six years in writing her biography. The book has just come out in paperback. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother was born in 1900 and died in 2002. She was literally in all of the last century. She loved Australia, which she should, and anybody wise does. She got to know Australians first in World War I. She had come from an aristocratic Anglo-Scottish family, and their houses in Scotland and Hertfordshire were turned into convalescent hospitals, as were many big houses in the First World War, for soldiers back from the Front. She helped look after them. Her job, her mother told her – she was a 14-year-old girl when the war started – was to look after the soldiers and take care of them and get them tobacco, play games with them, cards and so on. In June 1917 she wrote to her friend Beryl:

You must come on Thursday. Thursday is our Australian day – at least, every day is that now, we’re simply inundated with Australians, it’s wonderful. Do come and join the gory throng that goes fox-trotting along. You wear your hat and your best dress, I believe, at these sorts of things and the men are very nice and quite respectable, so your mother won’t mind letting flightly, flirtatious Beryl come and dance.

She wrote to a friend that “as we left I was overcome with emotion and so the only thing I could do was that I took a sip of champagne and tried not to weep.”

Queen Elizabeth first came to Australia in 1927 when she was married to the Duke of York, later King George VI. They came here to open the new Federal Parliament in Canberra. Princess Elizabeth had just been born, in April 1927, and the Duchess (as she was then) was very upset at having to leave her infant daughter behind. In those days there was no question of a baby travelling with them. She wrote to a friend that “as we left I was overcome with emotion and so the only thing I could do was that I took a sip of champagne and tried not to weep.” My editor said that “take a sip of champagne and try not to weep” should be the motto of life. The Queen Mother had a very healthy attitude to champagne and to gin and to all sorts of nice things like that. But she had a very serious side also, and I’d just like to read you a few lines from a four page letter she wrote to herself the day that war began in 1939. She said it was as a record:

My last cup of tea in peace, my last bath at leisure and all the time one’s mind working on many thoughts, chiefly of the people of this country. Their courage, their sense of humour, their sense of right and wrong. How will they come through the wicked things that war lets loose? One thing is that they are at their best when things are bad and their spirit is wonderful. We listened to the Prime Minister broadcast that we are at war. I could not help tears running down my face but we both realized it was inevitable. If there was to be any freedom left in our world we must face down the cruel Nazi creed and rid ourselves of this continual nightmare of force and material standards. We prayed together with all our hearts that peace would come soon. Real peace, not a Nazi peace.

Well, it didn’t. As you know it took five years with Australia’s complete and total commitment before finally the war was won. She stayed in London throughout the war and, with the King, was a very important morale booster. Robert Menzies visited her there in 1942 and said: “She is as fascinating as ever. She is as wise as possible and has the shrewdest estimate of all the Cabinet of everything that is going on.”

Elizabeth came back to Australia twice in post-war years. In 1953 she wrote to her daughter Princess Margaret, who had just had an unhappy love affair with Peter Townsend. She said:

I went and stayed on a sheep station in Townsend. The owners have some very beautiful nephews, all called Bill. The real country Australian is an absolute knockout. Very tall men with long legs encased in tight trousers, blue eyes, a drawl … They are too charming for words and the American cowboy is a mere nothing compared.

And there you are, with that I’ll leave you. Thank you very much.