Becalmed by Blair

I enjoy Zoe Williams' columns in The Guardian, probably because she's about the only journalist from one of the country's progressive newspapers who has written a supportive article on equal pay, which is reproduced below.  

Anyway, I thought Zoe was talking a lot of sense in her latest piece about the legacy left by Tony Blair, Labour's most successful leader ever of course, but one who has been shunned by so many leading party figures who were only to happy to bask in Blair's reflected glory while the good times rolled.

The main criticism of Blair for years was that he was a great communicator, the kind of politician who could sell snow to the eskimos or coal to Newcastle - yet so many of his former colleagues have carefully repositioned themselves on issues like the Iraq War when, in reality, the only senior Labour figure to make a principled stand was Robin Cook who resigned his position as Foreign Secretary.

So people like Ed Miliband have reinvented themselves and rewritten history over Iraq and the existence of weapons of mass destruction, the end result is political manoeuvring rather than leadership which brought the Labour Party to where it is today - heading fast up a dead end.

Labour's failure to develop a new political narrative to replace the one that won Tony Blair three elections in a row is the reason that the Labour Party is now so bereft of a clear vision and political ideas to inspire the country.


Stop calling Tony Blair a war criminal. The left should be proud of his record

From Northern Ireland to the NHS, Blair left a real progressive blueprint. But the left has allowed it to be obliterated by Iraq


By Zoe Williams

Tony Blair is greeted by schoolchildren in Basra, Iraq, in May 2003. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/AP

The 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide disinterred some terrible acts, by warlords and technocrats, and also raised the spectre of Tony Blair, normally so quiet that when you hear a rumour that he's moved to Jerusalem, it sounds atmospherically true, even while being manifestly not true.

On the Today programme he spoke of Rwanda and moved on to Syria, and how our failure to act on Assad would imperil us for years. In the Guardian he wrote about Rwanda ; and there are arguments one could have with him about his uncritical support for President Paul Kagame, amuch more controversial figure than his version allows. There are debates to be had about Syria, and what these classic rationalisations premised on a counterfactual – we have to go in or we'll pay for it in the long run – actually mean. Do we have any reason to believe that interventions ever make us safer? Isn't the point of intervening against Assad not to save our own skins, but the people of Syria? But none of this came up, just as none of it ever comes up with Blair. The comments under his Guardian article were dominated not by Rwanda, but by the conviction that he is a war criminal. All anybody talks to him about is Iraq. He has no legacy apart from that war.

Blair left a blueprint for social democratic government; it wasn't perfect and some of it was disastrous. But we can't even see it because it has been obliterated by the bloodshed of the Iraq war. Even to say that "other things happened during the Labour term besides a war many of us did not agree with" is seen as disrespectful. We can't get over Iraq; only Iraq decides when Iraq is over. But this is completely silencing the left: it is ensuring that no stout defence can be made of those years: it is allowing the trope of "the mess they made" to become the truth; and it is preventing any coherent articulation that politics can be better than either "Tory" or "Tory-lite".

Many of the things the Labour party says now are laudable, and true: it is true that there are good capitalists and bad ones; it is true that global markets often look like a race to the bottom, but we don't have to just put up with it; it is true that regional regeneration is the key to a prosperous middle class and probably the partial answer to the housing crisis. But what Labour cannot make from these ideas is a solid, progressive identity, carving policies for people with ambitions beyond money, desires beyond their own front doors, and questions besides "What's the cheapest?". That identity is only possible if they are prepared to discuss their past.

Even though this starts with Blair, and how we understand his legacy, it does not end with him. The party itself has had its voice strangled, not by its collusion in voting for the war (this doesn't trouble any Conservative that I can think of), but by its inability to reach an accommodation afterwards. In the party they may mumble about why they voted the way they did, but generally speaking they have allowed Blair to become a pariah – and this leaves them unable to celebrate his achievements, incapable of examining what didn't go to plan. It leaves them without any pride in more than a decade of Labour government. Just about the only thing you hear being praised is Gordon Brown's swift and decisive action in bailing out the banks. Of all the decisions, we find the one that actually could have used a bit more thought – that actually did cost more than we could afford, that actually might have been more reckless than courageous – is the one we all feel so comfortable about.

The fact is, the national minimum wage that Blair fought for was a good thing. It isn't high enough; enforcement isn't strong enough; there are too many loopholes – but where do you think we'd be without that? Who in this government can you see fighting for the employee against the employer? When Blair came in, there were 3 million pensioners living in poverty; when he left it was 2 million. We have these arguments now about whether baby boomers stole everything because someone put selfishness powder in their milk supply, But it's preposterous to see that change as a generation war. This was a genuine attempt to tackle poverty, which happened to centre on pensioners because they were often poor, the fact that there are some rich ones notwithstanding.

The fight against child poverty was enshrined in law under the Blair government; I saw it as an attempt to avoid looking at the systemic causes of poverty, by sticking poverty in shorts and calling it cute. But I recognise, at least, that it's better to care about poor children than it is to recast their situation as the result of their parents' fecklessness. There is space between "Blair wasn't ideological enough" and "politicians are all the same".

Every hospital A&E was modernised or replaced in the Labour years; yes, they brought in that weak market system I think was needless – but carving the whole thing up and selling it to Tory donors? While your ownMPs buy shares in donors' companies? Can we just take a second to consider how unthinkable that would have been from Blair's new cohort? Not because they didn't want the headlines, but because they genuinely valued the NHS, financially and morally.

Can you imagine Northern Ireland's Good Friday agreement coming out of this coalition, with its ramshackle headline grabs and constant backbench rebellions, the chaotic, directionless jerk of its agenda, like a rat on amphetamines? Its leaders just wouldn't have the meticulousness, the patience, or the breathing space to do anything that didn't score an immediate point.

Did New Labour spend too much on social security? No, it didn't spend enough (an argument for another day). But none of these conversations can even begin until we stop calling Tony Blair a war criminal. Maybe that sounds like dishonouring the dead; but what kind of wolves are we leaving in charge, while we nurse this hostile "honour"?

Sisters With Solicitors (3 July 2012)

I think this is a good time to publish a previous post from the blog site - one from April 2010 which features an article written by Zoe Williams a regular contributor in the Guardian newspaper.

To be sure the trade unions have a terrible track record on equal pay and - in certain parts of the country - they have lost all credibility whatsoever.

Sisters With Solicitors (29 April 2010)

Here's an article on equal pay by Zoe Williams from the Guardian newspaper - the sections in bold have been highlighted by me - but you can read the full story on-line at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/

"On equal pay, sisters with solicitors must do it for themselves"
The Birmingham case shows just how much Labour and the unions have let women down.

The news about Birmingham city council is in its way as big a deal, as cataclysmically bankrupting, as Greece. Unlike Greece, it has a massive, Erin Brockovich feelgood factor. I feel sure we'd be talking about it much more if it weren't for bigot-gate.

The tribunal's finding is this: women employees have been systematically underpaid and discriminated against by this council, for as long as the Equal Pay Act has been in force. Female staff on the same pay grade as men (cleaners versus bin men, for instance) could expect to earn much less, to start with, and go on to be paid much less in bonuses. The starkest example given was one case of a refuse collector taking home £51,000 in one year, while women on his level received less than £12,000.

Paul Doran, of the firm Stefan Cross that successfully brought this case, told me: "The bonuses were a sham, there was no monitoring, they were paid simply for men turning up to work, doing their jobs properly." The council plans to appeal (of course it does), and there are appeals due to be heard in September from Sunderland and Bury councils, fighting similar cases. But if it proceeds according to the judgment as it stands, this will lead to payouts worth £200m. It is, in short, a wonderful day for equal pay, better than any manifesto promise: legislation has shown its teeth, and there isn't a council in the country that can afford to ignore it.

Nevertheless, the abiding sense I'm left with is not triumph but outrage, not least at the GMB union, which, solicitors say, was just as culpable as the council in maintaining this exploitative status quo. The GMB had the unbelievable brass neck to put out a press release yesterday morning claiming this as their victory. Technically, in terms of representing the litigants, this may be – but historically it's quite a different case.

Female staff, attempting to right the iniquities in the pay scale, weren't just poorly represented by their union, they were systematically bullied (this is all documented in the Allen v GMB appeal of 2008, which found against the GMB and which the GMB, brazenly, never mentions).

Doran recalls: "The Equal Pay Act was enforced from 1975. In spite of that, councils started paying bonuses in the 70s and 80s, which was driven by the unions. The bonuses are paid to male-dominated groups. The councils quickly realised that the bonuses would have to be scrapped, so the unions, rather than fight for equal pay for the women, spent a lot of their time preserving the bonuses for the men."

This included actively encouraging women to settle for pitiful sums (£2,000 to £7,000 in cases where the claims were for as much as £50,000) and publicly briefing against the women on the basis that their claims would lead to job losses or would bankrupt the council. Socialism and feminism aren't synonymous, and we all know that: but the misogyny of the left is almost more poisonous, more depressing, than the rabid materialism of girl power. I remember people saying this about Thatcher: that one of the reasons why she was rarely hauled up on those of her policies that were actively bad for women was that she had, at least, smashed the unions: and that was worth quite a lot of free milk.

I suppose if there's an ancillary point here, it's that unions can fight and win some quite improbable battles, at least for a time; so it's worth joining, as long as they are on your side – not just taking your money and stamping on your face.

By coincidence, yesterday's ruling was made on the same day that Harriet Harman and Theresa May faced off at the Fawcett debate, What About Women? Harman is a wonderful speaker; she took May apart, and I say that without agenda (I was rather taken with Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrat MP for Hornsey and Wood Green). But "Sisters!" she cried, talking about an extant 20% pay gap between the sexes. "Do we really think we're 20% stupider than men, less able, more lazy?" Everybody clapped. She talked about mandatory pay audits, and how they would ensure that bad employers have nowhere to hide. It was all incredibly inspirational, except for the fact that this government has already been in power for three terms, and we are standing here, gasping in amazement that anyone's managed to enforce some equality legislation that was passed in 1970.

It makes you think: first, that the Labour party, for all its big talk, is not necessarily the best for women. Of Harriet Harman's personal commitment to equal rights, I am in no doubt. But the forces working against her, in her own party or certainly their cohorts, the unions, are just as powerful and destructive to equality as anyone painting poor old Theresa May into the corner where she has to argue the married man's tax allowance until she's pink with embarrassment.

Second, maybe we don't need more legislation, at the moment, in this area. Maybe we do not need the Equality Act, until there is proper, rigorous implementation of the Equal Pay Act. And lastly, a moment to congratulate the solicitors: they don't campaign or (I doubt) call anybody "Sister". But they get it done."