Jonathan Freedland (Guardian Utd): Power but no purpose

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Utd (UK)
Dated Wednesday July 28

Power but no purpose
Labour will get its 'historic' third term, but what's the point of winning if there's no big idea?
By Jonathan Freedland

The reviews are in and the critics are agreed: Tony Blair is back on top. He keeps doing it, defying the doomsayers and navigating through weeks billed in advance as the "worst" or "toughest" of his premiership. This month it was the Butler report coming within 24 sticky hours of a pair of tricky byelections; in January it was the tuition fees revolt and the Hutton report that came back to back. Same outcome each time: with one bound, Blair was free.
No wonder he and his team head for their summer villas in smiling mood. They survived a Butler inquiry that contained a series of damning revelations about the prime minister and his conduct and, next day, won a byelection. Safe seat or no, that counts as quite an accomplishment for a government in its eighth year. What's more, the Blairites can rejoice in the sight of the Tories doing what they do best: slitting each other's throats. No wonder the Conservatives are despondent. Blair's escape over Butler is due in large part to Michael Howard's astonishing failure to use the ammunition his lordship had so carefully laid out in his report. He should have done a Robin Cook, forensically stretching Blair on the rack of tight, specific detail. Instead he adopted the quiet, methodical voice - but didn't have the right words. And so August 2004 dawns with the opinion polls locked in their autumn 1992 position - with Labour still out in front.
So all is fine and sunny? By one measure, yes. If politics is simply the business of winning elections, what the Americans call "the horse race", then Blair is the Derby, Grand National and Gold Cup champion, his critics little more than serial whingers who keep getting it wrong. For years they - we - have pored over the flaws and weaknesses in Blair's programme, faulting him for this policy or that speech, never more so than on the decision that will define his premiership: Iraq. Yet now he looks set to win a third election victory. Surely that means he was right and we have been consistently wrong?
It does if your definition of politics is mechanical, the simple calculus of winning and losing. By that standard, Blair is a master, breaking record after record. But most of us expect politics to be about more than that. We want to believe that winning is only a means to an end, that power is pointless without a purpose.

A very interesting set of circumstance has arisen over there. Tony Blair is unpopular and widely distrusted after leading Britain into war on false pretexts against the will of the British people. Yet there seems to be no way for the British people to hold him accountable.

[displacedtexan]

1. As horrible as Liberals think Blair is...

they probably think that handing the country to the Tories would be much worse.

[Nihil]

2. He's a hypocritical little liar but leads a charmed life

He's not known as "Teflon Tony" for nothing ...