How can I disagree with A C Grayling on British values when he sums up Blair’s agenda so succinctly:
Motivating the illiberal policy of Blairishness is a huge and poisonous fallacy. It is that the first duty of government is the security of the people. This is a dangerous untruth. If it really were true then we should all be locked into a fortress behind the thickest walls of steel and concrete, and kept still and quiet in the dark, so that we can come to no harm. Or the government should be prepared to allow us to stay home behind drawn curtains, and to pay our mortgages and deliver our groceries under armed guard, to protect us form venturing into the streets where (so government fear-mongering might have us believe) thousands of bomb-carrying lunatic fanatics lurk.
To sum up, Blair would prefer us to be sheep, compliant, uncomplaining and stoical. These are the values that he would instill in new immigrants for his legacy: the great and glorious socialist millennium. That part of our history which has ensured our survival would be lost:
To this end they are to learn about our empire, our industrial revolution, our agrarian revolution, our Glorious Revolution of 1688, and so on back to Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort (the sanitised version) and the demand for, and founding of, Parliament.
This will gloss the fact that all our “revolutions” (after the Civil War at least), which by being so called give us a faint aura of past flair, were very pragmatical affairs, and like the empire almost accidental ones, driven from below by thoroughly banausic impulses and only retrospectively embellished, Boys’ Own style, by a sense of the heroic.
Their pragmatism is no doubt a virtue, and it would do no harm to anyone to learn as much; but Mr Blair wants it to be understood as the pragmatism of the ox under the yoke – an ox with an ID card, surrounded by CCTV cameras, stoutly resisting the temptation to have opinions, and certainly not to voice them if by chance one should form between its safely capped horns.
Indeed, we would no longer be part of the Anglosphere.
I thought this comment to Grayling’s article summed it up superbly:
Blair’s Britain and its values. It’s Sinagapore, with dirtier streets and worse weather.
I was back in Blighty for an increasingly rare visit this week, and was astounded at the TV advert which showed a driver being spied on by some government black-box computer as some sort of incentive for him to get his car licensed/taxed – more odd was that this was considered pretty normal stuff these days by my excellent hosts.
You only see the incremental changes by absenting yourself – how sad I felt for my birth country on my return to la bella Toscana.
I find it interesting how some people react with puzzlement when you point out how regulated and authoritarian Britain has become, followed by irritation and even anger when they discover you do not just oppose this or that policy, you in fact hold the whole system that is Blairite Britain and the world view that comes with it in contempt.
If you were to go by what you see in polls and most of the media, the Blairite view is unchallenged (and certainly Blair’s world view is now firmly the guiding light of the Tory Party), yet the strange thing is that if you talk to people, the true views of the man-in-the-street are not Blairite or even party political but rather deeply cynical (i.e. indicative of a pretty accurate appreciation of the realities of modern Britain)… and I think that suggests ‘the system’ may not be quite as resilient to shocks as it is always assumed to be in the UK, which is a perverse source of hope to people like me of course.
Of course, Australia is also going down this road of ID cards and security cameras. It is a reflection of what in Australia’s case is definately a servile society that will accept any infringement on its liberties as long as they get their bread and circuses.
I am glad that Perry has hope for the UK; I have none whatsoever for Australia.
Perry wrote: “I find it interesting how some people react with puzzlement when you point out how regulated and authoritarian Britain has become, followed by irritation and even anger when they discover you do not just oppose this or that policy, you in fact hold the whole system that is Blairite Britain and the world view that comes with it in contempt.”
This made me keen to post: “optimism chaps (and chapesses): he’ll be gone soonish, and the backlash will be a pleasure to observe.”
Then I read: “If you were to go by what you see in polls and most of the media, the Blairite view is unchallenged (and certainly Blair’s world view is now firmly the guiding light of the Tory Party),”
And I felt sad.
And then: “yet the strange thing is that if you talk to people, the true views of the man-in-the-street are not Blairite or even party political but rather deeply cynical (i.e. indicative of a pretty accurate appreciation of the realities of modern Britain)… and I think that suggests ‘the system’ may not be quite as resilient to shocks as it is always assumed to be in the UK, which is a perverse source of hope to people like me of course.”
Yes, YES, YES!!!
Scott – you need to mix in the secessionist circles in WA….
“That part of our history which has ensured our survival would be lost:
To this end they are to learn about our empire, our industrial revolution, our agrarian revolution, our Glorious Revolution of 1688, and so on back to Magna Carta …..
but Mr Blair wants it to be understood as the pragmatism of the ox under the yoke – an ox with an ID card, surrounded by CCTV cameras…”
You know, the bit that got the Magna Carta in place was that people were not afraid to identify themselves; indeed were known to the highest power in the land.
Your resistance to the ID card will ensure that personal responsibilty will continue to be unidentifiable. Just like the mob.
Yep! you are absolutely right. I must say the title is totally justified by your blog.
Bobby, it isn’t.
This blog confuses privacy with anonymity.
I always thought that without privacy, there could be no anonymity…
And without anonymity there can be no privacy. That’s why there is more social variety in cities than villages, because you cannot be censured when you are unknown.
Why’s money a good idea? Not just as portable property, but because pecunia non olet. It has the same value to you regardless of where I got it from. It allows our transaction to take place if we agree on it regardless of the views of third parties about either the purchase or our merits as individuals.
What this really amounts to is a request you notice that the interchangeability of roles is vital to freedom.
ADE appears (as governments do, but with less deliberation) to be confusing two radically opposed conceptions of identity.
The first, the one on which society actually runs, asks, “Is this the same person as last time?” or “Is this the person who was introduced to me by X?” It is the positive identification that gives us what we need for social interactions. It is based on trust and is non-exclusive.
It does not matter to readers or editors of this blog whether or not the contributor/commentator writing as “guy herbert” is also known as Coco Lamour and appears 3 days a week in sequins at a Blackpool nightclub. (lf only I had the time and talent!) It does not matter to them whether “I” in fact am a collective, after the manner of Ellery Queen, or Bourbaki. What they care about is the cogency of the contribution. It does perhaps matter that if I write elsewhere, the claim the writer makes to identity with this writer can be justified.
The second derives from the ancient magical conception that everything in the world is a distinct entity with a ‘true name,’ knowing which grants you power over it. When Blair, et al., say “we need to know who people really are,” they imply they want everybody controllable and ordered.
The nightmare of power is uncontrol. It was the disregarded, unsworn, mistletoe that killed Baldur.
The authoritarian underdog squirms and squeals that he has nothing to hide, reassuring the overdog and himself that he’s not a contributor to chaos. If not everybody’s place in the heirarchy is knowable; if they might have more than place; if it might change; then that’s a possibility of conflict. Worse, there might not be a simple ladder to cling to.
The ‘true name’ model of identity is therefore exclusive, and universal. One file on everyone. Everything in society is to be named, and bounded; one name may disclose all about an entity. Knowing all, the sheep and goats may be divided. For this negative conception of identity is based on mistrust. It reassures the fearful that this person is not the same as anybody else, anyone unapproved.
It does so at the cost of placing total trust in one authority and placing total reliance on approval of the same third party in relationships where “identity” is an issue. I’d suggest this is true regardless of whether the third party is a godlike authority or an emergent property such as a file accrued by many hands on a presumptive single individual, village gossip, or Google. Absent anonymity, we are subject to direct or indirect moral control. Absent anonymity we are prisoners of our pasts (and perhaps other people’s) and can never risk failure or disapproval.
Natural authoritarians like this because it appears to promise stability. They will naturally prefer a godgovernment, by definition inerrant, to keep the books impose the moral order. But for those of us who think discovery or experiment in life is worth making; who believe some evaluations of people or things are matters of opinion; or anyone who thinks policies may on occasion be misguided, or bureaucrats can make mistakes, the exclusive identity model should be a source of terror.
I had to smile at guy herberts phrase
“One file on everyone. (Everything in society is to be named, and bounded); one name may disclose all about an entity”
It reminded me of
“One ring to rule them all,
One ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them”
(If memory serves me correctly).
I was quite astonished to look on the BBC news webpage (something I do only occasionally) and for want of something better to do clicked on the “Have your say” link. In the past this section has been heavily censored to exclude anything that was not left wing, right on politically correct but clicking on th “Illegal Immigration” link rocked me back in my seat. If you don’t want to plough through all the comments, as a rough and ready method of determining the opinions is to click on the “Reader recommended” tab which ranks the comments in how many people agree with them …
Interesting scenarios emerge which our political “Masters” would do well to heed.
Excellent excellent comment, Guy.
I couldn’t help but wonder, while reading it, where we would be today if Newton had been outed as an alchemist.