Blair, Machiavelli and God

A reply to: Metro article 20/03/09 – ‘Leaders ‘must do God’ – Blair

 Tony Blair yesterday said world leaders must ‘do God’ to engage with the modern world. The ex-prime minister, whose spin doctor Alistair Campbell famously said ‘We don’t do God’, claimed faith was as key to this century as political ideology was to the last. He added ‘Leaders, religious or not, have to “do God”.’

In this recent article, I picked up on hints towards the rhetoric of a certain renaissance political philosopher. Was it not Machiavelli who wrote, in 1513 ‘It is necessary to cultivate the appearance of a God’? However, Machiavelli states it less ambiguously than the crude cultural relativist, Blair.

 At the heart of New Labour are seeming principles of ‘equality’ and ‘respect’(although the latter chimes also with unfashionable ‘Middle England’ Daily Mail rhetoric that Blair sought to distance himself from) But Blair does not realise the implications of ‘doing God’ (as he so elequently puts it) – as this could range from decent liberal ‘churchgoing’ but by definition it must also encompass the militant Islamofascism and inter-community warfare of Northern Ireland. The ‘irresponsible parent’ analogy of the hip over-liberal parent who allow their children  to ‘test the waters’ by smoking cannabis  only to foreshadow a later life-long habit of narcotics, is one that springs to mind here.

Blair,as is typical of many fathers living a midlife crisis, is simply too ‘cool’. The ‘down with the kids’ approach of appeasement is at best cringeworthyand at worst politically damaging.  The nonchalance with which Blair comments ‘Leaders have to do God’, is a symptom of the ideological malaise that many attribute to the dropping of Clause 4 in 1995. Labour – as in the ‘real’ Labour attributed to Fabians, Webb-ites and Benn-ites ceasing to exist. The compassionate Tory paternalism and trendy multiculturalism that ‘New Labour’ embraced so fervently, some speculate, marks the ‘end of ideology’.

 What is more, in attempts to involve the apathetic and ethnic minorities (by all means a good thing) Blair and Giddens’ brainchild – ‘New Labour’ is counterproductive. In an attempt to include all aspects of society within one mediocre and watered down mass movement, this realignment in the centre-ground of politics perhaps increases voter fatigue further. Cultural relativism or as E.P. Thompson called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity‘ rejects the notion of a’truth’ rendering all search for absolute truths and concrete meanings futile. Leaders must do God because if they do not, their liberal credentials and ‘tolerance’ are doubted by the left (and they are ultimately rendered unelectable on the right). That the idea of ‘doing God’ can contradict the enlightenment values we cherish, and that a tolerance of intolerance is clearly absurd, is not a concept that Blair and his New Labour predecessors have grasped on to.

When Machiavelli talks of the role of divinity in politics, this is ‘realpolitik’, (and this must of course be considered in a 16th Century context) but when Blair attempts to tackle the subject there is an air of fatalism that is bordering on arrogance. Perhaps this was where ‘New Labour’ went wrong. Behind Campbell’s spin we feel that we are admiring the ‘emperor’s new clothes’. Will this issue will be resolved by Brown? Unlikely, as he is hardly the most personable of characters (making the trendy-yet-cringeworthy cult of Blair almost bearable by comparison)  Brown’s stout insensitivity surrounding such a contentious subject as religion could, if uncarefully worded, prompt the shortest political suicide note in history.

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