Tony Blair's Journey: A Green Perspective

Photo by Jebur via Wikimedia Commons

I've finally finished it!

I'm not a fast reader, but even for me Tony Blair's book A Journey has taken an incredibly long time, although I was only reading it at work when I had the time. And there was a three week period when even the thought of continuing with it brought me out in hives!

But finish it I have, so I thought I'd review it from a greenish perspective.

First off, I suppose I should share my feelings on Blair overall. I would say it was fair to categorise him as a better-than-average Prime Minister, with the caveat that he was a lying, warmongering, press-obsessed egomaniac. I voted Labour in 1997, and I was hopeful of what he could do to change society. I really liked him, I was proud that Britain once again had a statesman in Number 10, and I guess a lot of people are now in the same boat as me - we weep for what could have been.

The book itself follows a loose timeline, with each chapter dealing with a topic rather than reading like a diary. Some of those topics I found easy to read and found fascinating, like his thoughts on Europe, the Northern Ireland Peace Process and Kosovo and Sierra Leone.

Other chapters I found painful. Surprisingly, the interior machinations of the Labour Party were dull when all you're reading is Blair's take on why everyone else was wrong. There were no real revelations on Gordon Brown either, other than the previously quoted "lack of emotional intelligence" line.

Most painful of all, though, was the chapters justifying the war in Iraq. This was where I got bogged down on, as I had to keep putting the book down to pick my chin back up off the floor. Blair still doesn't see it. He still doesn't realise, or doesn't want to realise, that he was played by the American NeoCons into supporting an unjustified and illegal war. He spends fifty pages banging on about Saddam being a tyrant and Weapons of Mass Destruction, at one point reprinting at length a report on VX nerve gas.

And here's the first greenish part of the book. The fact that the Iraq war may possibly be about oil is dismissed in ONE PARAGRAPH! Here it is, so you don't have to go through the pain of reading the entire thing just to get this delusional nugget:

The issue of oil raises another allegation: that it was all about oil. Although fatuous as an explanation, it gained enormous currency and will have its adherents today. In truth, if oil had been our concern, we could have cut a deal with Saddam in a heartbeat. He would have readily given more in return for the lifting of sanctions and the threat of inspections.

So there you have it, the war couldn't have been about oil because we could have bought some from Saddam. There's no mention of American companies land-grabbing the oilfields as soon as the conflict starts and ensuring that they were the ones to get the contracts to redevelop the fields. No, it wasn't about oil because we could have bought some!

Climate change, on the other hand, is dealt with in a matter-of-fact way. The first mention of it is in relation to Blair and Bush having different views on subjects, but thankfully Blair deals with the subject as if it is a fact and a threat without trying to get bogged down in scientific details.

The main thrust about climate change comes in the chapter dealing with the G8 meeting at Gleneagles in 2005, alongside debt-cancellation for Africa. But he takes the opportunity to have a pop at NGOs:

Over time, I'm afraid I came to dislike part of the NGO culture, especially the Green groups. NGOs do a great job, don't misunderstand me; but the trouble with some of them is that while they are treated by the media as concerned citizens, which of course they are, they are also organisations, raising money, marketing themselves and competing with other NGOs in a similar field. Because their entire raison d'être is to get policy changed, they can hardly say yes, we've done it, without putting themselves out of business. And they've learned to play the modern media game perfectly. As it's all about impact, they shout louder and louder to get heard. Balance is not in the vocabulary. It's all 'outrage', 'betrayal', 'crisis'. They also have their own tightly defined dogma and conventional wisdom which, if you challenge them, they defend fiercely - not usually on their merits, but by abusing your motives for challenging them. On Africa, I tried constantly to get them to see free trade, with aid for trade, as an essential African interest, but it was virtually impossible. Part of their coalition basically took the position that 'globalisation is a rich-country conspiracy', and challenging that was to fracture their support. So they resisted.

So at the start of the paragraph the NGOs are competing and at each other's throats, but at the end of the paragraph they're in a coalition. And Blair complaining about anyone being media-savvy is, quite frankly, laughable!

The reason NGOs oppose free trade and would prefer fair trade is that free trade doesn't let Africa compete on a level playing field. All the large multinational companies come in and either undercut the local competition or buy up the land and commercial rights to ensure they have all the resources.

Blair continues in the next paragraph:

It's like the Greens over nuclear power. The case for nuclear power is now so overwhelming that frankly it is almost irresponsible - faced with an energy crunch and climate change - to oppose its development. I bet many of them know that privately, but it would be such heresy to say so and would divide the movement.

There are some "greens" who say so, but mainly because they're in thrall to the nuclear industry - see the ballyhoo about Channel 4's documentary a few weeks ago. If nuclear was the right thing to do, why didn't Blair's government build new nuclear power stations? Because they're expensive and there's a major drawback in the form of nuclear waste and local contamination.

So what to make of the book overall? Again I come back to the feeling of a wasted opportunity. Here was a Prime Minister who "got" climate change, but couldn't see that you can't let the markets guide you out of it and you have to do some unpopular things. He's wholly unrepentant over a lot of decisions he took, not just Iraq, and thinks it bizarre that Labour and now the Conservatives are distancing themselves from some of those, like ID cards and 90 day detention.

Actually, I felt sorry for him towards the end of the book. He was clearly quite delusional. He proclaims that in 2007 he was at the height of his powers, on top of his game and was a much better Prime Minister than he was in 1997, so it was slightly unfair that he was pushed out. He clearly couldn't see that most of the population were putting two fingers up to their TVs every time he came on and that he was a figure of immense hate.

And still is.