Lessons from the Blears/Monbiot spat
I posted a comment at Paul’s blog yesterday, when I was in an exceptionally angry mood about the whole Blears-vs-Monbiot spat on Comment is Free. Blears has form as regards lashing out at the “commentariat”, which seems to be New Labour word of the year. The common theme of Blears’ rant last week and her several rants last year is that journalists and bloggers aren’t directly accountable to anyone.
Of course this neatly sidesteps the point that neither is Hazel Blears directly accountable to anyone. She may be Salford’s elected MP, but let’s not pretend that this confers any degree of accountability. Salford is one of the safest Labour seats in the country and would probably still vote Labour even if the constituency party selected one E. Powell to stand in it. He’d probably be less interested in photo-ops.
There are many reasons to be angry at Hazel Blears, and the rest of this government -which Dan Paskins seems to miss in his article at LibCon, where he asserts that there are things to consider other than what TWFY.com monitor. Dan seems to think it a crime that George Monbiot, in his polemic about Blears and her record of voting with the Whips, didn’t consider some of the good things she’s voted for.
Allow me to interject with a disagreement and some prioritization. The most important thing this Labour government has done, for better or worse, has been to declare war on Iraq and they did it with Hazel Blears’ help. We have this tendency, because we live secure in the West, to think about the war as just one issue among many. It isn’t; decisions don’t come much bigger than that, and Blears failed to oppose it.
Dan lists other votes – such as Blears’ support for draconian ASBO legislation, her votes for welfare ‘reform’ (i.e. piecemeal abolition), or her opposition to letting councils build social housing – and by considering these, yes, Monbiot’s polemic about Hazel “war criminal” Blears would seem watered down. But is it really? Do her votes on these subjects really change the fact that this government is complicit in war and torture?
Moreover, these votes do not clear Blears and her New Labour ilk of the charge that they have abolished the distance between Labour and the Tories. There is nuance to consider; just because Blears voted for more NHS funding and Cameron voted against doesn’t mean they’re on opposite sides of the issue – merely that the Tories were making a political issue out of where the money was being spent.
I’m not suggesting that Cameron’s Tories will increase spending, or that they’ll be as “good” as Labour on the issue – but to reduce it to Labour “good”, Tories “bad” is to forget that this government has gone out of its way to damage the NHS with pointless bureaucracy and wasteful private initiatives. Which is something, I suspect, the Tories will continue to do once they assume office in 2010.
Finally, while Blears may have a point about the ‘unaccountability’ of the Press, I don’t see the government stepping up to the plate, to reform the Press Complaints Commission. Indeed this government has endlessly benefitted from a Press which is accountable to itself alone – whether from the Observer‘s selection of the evidence to build a case for war or the kneejerk response of the Press to government propaganda.
So, there are lots of matters to take Blears to task for; war is one of them and the biggest, but there are plenty of others. One of the things I’d like to take Blears to task for is that I really believe she hasn’t a clue. It is possible, as Hopi Sen notes, that Hazel Blears genuinely believes in everything she is doing, and her personal narrative includes times when she forced the Cabinet slightly to the Left or towards a progressive tack.
Yet, having met the woman and read some of the documents (.pdf) which have come out of her department, I don’t believe it. It may be that accession to a Cabinet post and working with senior elements of the civil service corrupts one’s clarity of thinking, but that’s no excuse for the obscene amount of drivel which seems to get put out as White Papers. Blears may believe in all that she’s doing, but that somehow makes it even worse.
We should remember, with Blears’ sneering talk that Monbiot would do a better job if he dedicated his life to service in the Tory Party instead of poncing around at this journalism lark, that Blears’ own life doesn’t exactly consist of a shoestring budget and wondering where the money is going to come from to finance her political activism. Bottom line: she can get off her high horse an’ all.
She has nothing to be proud of – but the double-think common to New Labour will probably mean that, as the shit begins to hit the fan over school building projects that are collapsing, unused hospital beds while others desperately need beds and such, it’ll be blamed on a Tory government. No matter that they inherited the policies from a Labour government. So Blears will be insulated from the yawning abyss of her mistake.
Hi Dave,
I wasn’t actually trying to defend Hazel Blears – many of the issues that I mentioned which Monbiot and TWFY omitted are ones where I think she is totally wrong (e.g. her votes in favour of restricting immigration or welfare reform are ones which I vehemently disagree with).
Instead, what I was trying to get at was that TWFY offers a very partial way of assessing politicians’ voting records, and that this is a problem when it gets used as the primary or only source of information.
It’s a useful resource for people who think Iraq is the most important thing that the government has done, but not for people who think that crime, immigration, public services or the economy are the most important issues – and it would be a better resource if it gave people a wider range of information.
It’s a useful resource for many other reasons too – I have most of my favourite and love-to-hate politicians added to the function which sends me an email every time they speak or submit a written question. Nevertheless, I think my point as regards your article goes like this:
You were saying Monbiot’s complaints may have seemed different had he used a different means of computing how Hazel Blears had voted…I’m saying that even with that different means, Monbiot was being deliberately selective, and it doesn’t reflect on his argument that he was being selective.
He was, after all, making a point about – among other things – the war.
Wee Hazel was on Newsnight last Friday, representing New Labour in a debate on working people. Bob Crow was there as real Labour and he raised the issue of the privatisation of the Tyne and Wear Metro – the country’s best performing rail network, and still in public hands. Blears shrugged off concerns about a decline in working conditions and quality of service for passengers by insisting that Crow was fixated on political purism.
Sadly, Crow wasn’t able to give a response to this, but he would have no doubt pointed to the absurdity of what she was saying when the govt is only to happy to nationalise failed banks, retain the bankers who ran them into the ground, and spend billions on clearing up the mess.
What with growing opposition to the plans to sell off Royal Mail to a Dutch company that only delivers twice a week, it’s clear that the lies about public ownership won’t wash with the public, nor with Labour MPs.
Blears recently said there was could be an explanded role for the cooperative sector as the recession bites. All very nice, but she hasn’t considered why cooperative and public forms of ownership are favoured by working people compared to the big banks and multinational corporations that dominate our economy. Or if she has thought about this, it’s occured to her that if she wants to get a cushy non-job at some big company, she’d better keep shtum about the real substance of socialism.
“Salford is one of the safest Labour seats in the country and would probably still vote Labour even if the constituency party selected one E. Powell to stand in it. He’d probably be less interested in photo-ops.”
Well, I’m not going to havea go at core voters, but if people are silly enough to vote for people without making demands of them, that’s their responsibility…
“Bob Crow was there as real Labour”
Bob Crow is not ‘real Labour’, he’s a Communist.
*ducks return flame*
Tom, both of your replies were flame, not just the one about Bob Crow. It is the responsibility of individuals to hold their representatives to account, but to think of depoliticization as a choice is politically illiterate and I think you know that.
As for Bob Crow being a communist, communists were some of the earliest members of the Labour Party…what’s your point? How many thousands of non-sectarian (i.e. affiliated only to Labour) communists will there have to be within the Party before we get some recognition that being a communist is a legitimate political stance?
Seriously, look at some of your political friends on that particular issue!
Monbiot was making an important point about accountability. He wasn’t just making the point that Blears voted for the invasion of Iraq: he is pointing out that attacking a country that isn’t attacking anyone else is a very unusual thing to do, so those who vote for it should be able to explain why they did it: Blears is unable to do so. She is an extreme case of politicians who are unable to explain what their principles are and how these guide their actions. (Her subsequent intervention merely proves the point.) She is also a good target because she is supposed to be in charge of “engaging communities” while she blatantly avoids answering valid questions, and because she makes comments about “unaccountable journalists”.
It is very difficult to “make demands of politicians” as they have so many opportunities for avoiding accountability. Where do we start to build real accountability?
We start by changing the nature of the State…well that’s my view anyway. And I know what Monbiot’s broader point was – my focus on the war specifically was a rejection of Dan’s seeming relativization of all the different things Hazel Blears has voted for.
I agree with you that accountability is the central issue, and I agree that Blears has lost the plot entirely – but I was focussing not on the essence of the whole discussion but on a particular intervention.
It is not possible to make demands of an MP. Where’s the legally binding mandate?
Bob Crow was in the Communist Party – as were some of the architects of New Labour. It’s neither here nor there.
What matters is that today Crow is pro-worker and the New Labour elite are not.