Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

Is it Hair or Blague?
by Nick Cohen - The Guardian (UK) - Dec 31 2000
Posted: Friday, January 05, 2001 11:13 am CST

As we count down to the next general election, we can all play Spot the Difference.

Special report: New Labour in power

The British entered the first year of the new century with our flattering self-image facing a challenge. It was a touch difficult to believe in native tolerance, decency and an innate sense of fair play when asylum-seekers were being libelled by the far-Right press and persecuted by the Government. Tony Blair ordered them to live way below the poverty line on £10 a week in cash and £26 in asylo-vouchers while they waited years for his vastly incompetent Home Office to deal with their claims. To add insult to penury, he allowed supermarkets to pocket the change when refugees exchanged vouchers for food.

To William Hague, these were the wet tactics of the liberal élite. He wanted all refugees to be locked in internment camps. In a neat example of the under-examined phenomenon of right-wing political correctness, Hague insisted on calling the camps 'reception centres', as if prisons for people who have committed no crime (and are often the victims of the world's worst criminals) were hotels and the warders were receptionists cooing 'enjoy' and 'have a nice day'.

Never mind. Tony Blair announced a new holiday which will allow everyone to feel jolly good about dear old Blighty. On 27 January, we can have a nice Holocaust Memorial Day. The BBC and Home Office will invite us to reflect on the beastliness of the Germans of a mere 60 years ago and pity the plight of refugees from Nazism.

The Foreign Office has insisted, and the independent BBC has accepted, that there should be no tactless mention of Turkey's genocide of the Armenians in the First World War, the mass slaughter that inspired Hitler.

When Turkey is not pushing Kurds into seeking what sanctuary is on offer in Fortress Europe, it gets very ticklish on the Armenian question. It threatened to expel US troops from its territory if the American Congress described the carnage as 'genocide' and has put an Assyrian priest on trial for speaking out. (A life sentence could follow if he is convicted.) One of the stated aims of Holocaust Memorial Day is to rebut denial of genocide, but the good intention is strictly circumscribed. When Nazis and other crackpots on the fringe deny, they must be fought ferociously. When a fellow Nato power with large export markets does the same, respectful reticence is in order.

Speaking of dictatorships, the Government's Stalinist reputation was enhanced in February when a study by the Liberal Democrats found that the Blair administration produces more targets than an Soviet apparatchik with a gun at his head. Five thousand have been set since May 1997 as noble and banal aspirations were sent whirling around Whitehall.

There are so many targets that there are targets of the number of targets civil servants must hit. There are targets to halve world poverty and improve dental hygiene; to end child poverty within 20 years and raise 'the quality of service by catering staff at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre to 88 per cent' within one; to cut hard drug use by 50 per cent by 2008 and 'increase the favourability of media coverage of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority by 43.9-50 per cent' by 2001.

My favourite was from the Department of the Environment: 'Prescott Sets Targets For Improving Quality of Life - For Everyone.' As those who rely on the trains know, he hasn't quite got there yet.

The betrayal of the year is undoubtedly a prize William Hague can claim. Jeffrey Archer had turned the Leader of the Opposition into a real leader; transformed him from Wee Willie, a bleeding-heart who bleated about his support for gay marriages and single mothers, into Big Willie, a hard man, a man who would shoot you in the back with an illegally-held sawn-off shotgun if you so much as thought of giving money to a gypsy beggar.

Every day, Willie was graciously allowed to prepare himself for the political struggle in the great novelist's private gym. Hague's attraction to gay rights was suppressed by the exercise of grabbing fellow gymnast Sebastian Coe by the sleeves of his flapping judo pyjamas, crushing him in a constrictor's embrace, bending the screaming aide's tortured body back until the pain was unendurable and then burying him with a cathartic scream of triumph into the hard, sweat-stained mat. Archer's many kindnesses are forgotten now. One petty perjury charge and Hague acts like they never met.

For those grown weary of vapid political speeches, tested on focus groups and delivered without verbs, the Countryside Alliance rally at the Labour Party Conference was a relief. There was unadorned passion as Sam Butler, one of its leaders and the master of the Warwickshire Hunt, bellowed in Churchillian tones about the townies' plot to wipe out rural England. 'Our forebears did not not fight Hitler to let Blair destroy hunting,' he exclaimed.

He didn't add that one of his forebears was 'Rab' Butler, who, as a Foreign Office Minister, appeased Hitler throughout the Thirties, then allied with Lord Halifax in a manoeuvre to force Winston Churchill to accept a negotiated peace in 1940.

Nor is the Alliance opposed to all arrogant slickers. Butler runs Butler Sherborn, an estate agency which makes a very good living. It prices the local peasantry out of the Oxfordshire property market by selling their cottages as commuter and second homes. When Butler warned that banning hunting would lead to enraged yeoman turning on their oppressors, I phoned his agency posing as a cash buyer for a remarkably over-priced Cotswold pad.

'But couldn't there be trouble?' I asked nervously. 'Won't I be set on for coming from the town with pitchforks and stuff?'

'Oh no,' replied the eager saleswoman. 'Everyone round here's a commuter.'

The great political puzzle of the twentieth century continued to baffle the twenty-first: how do you tell the difference between New Labour and the Tories? In the autumn, Tony Blair explained that there really was no mystery at all. As he stared across the Commons at William Hague and Ann Widdecombe, he let slip the definition of the Third Way, which has eluded researchers for so long.

'What is the alternative?' he cried. 'What does the Right Hon Gentleman offer? Why was it that he made a policy-free speech, apart from a load of nonsense from the Shadow Home Secretary, most of which we are doing in any event?'

Understand these lines and you will have learned all you really need to know about modern politics and need never listen to the Today programme again until 2008 at the earliest.

Convergence criteria are being met in virtually every area of politics. For example, in 1999 the Tories demanded that the unemployed, suspected of working in the black economy, must be forced to sign on every day. The workless who lived miles from a benefit office would see a slice of their tiny incomes frittered away on bus fares. All would waste time when they might be looking for a job.

New Labour responded with a rare display of radical anger. Jeff Rooker declared the Conservatives had descended into 'right-wing madness'. David Blunkett cried that the cost of this lunacy would be £540 million a year as thousands of staff would have to be recruited to monitor the workless.

They were silenced by Gordon Brown, who transformed insanity into prudence within seconds and conceded that the Tories had a point. He asked Lord Grabiner, a New Labour peer, to investigate. In the spring, Grabiner upheld the finest traditions of the English Bar by recommending that claimants suspected of - but not convicted of - working illegally should be presumed guilty and forced to report daily.

Grabiner's experience of the struggle to make ends meet in the slums is limited. He's the most expensive barrister in London who rarely touches a case worth less than £100m and charges £800 an hour (or 216 times the minimum wage) for his services. A government which is anxious to revive the concept of shame in wider society is rarely embarrassed by its own shamelessness.

While Labour triangulated with Conservative class war, the Conservatives attempted to match Tony Blair's intimacy with the Supreme Being. William Hague, whose previous religious beliefs were of the New Agey Tibetan healing stones variety, had a Pauline conversion and embraced Christianity. Not the boring Christianity of the established churches, but the born-again fundamentalism of the Christian Coalition of the American South, which provided so much support to George W Bush and could just provide activists for the Tories.

At Easter, he addressed 8,000 ecstatic evangelicals who gathered to bother God in the Minehead Butlin's camp (memo to editor: Boss, I swear I'm not making this up ). He promised that a Tory government would allow them to have national television networks. Tele-evangelism would be imported to Britain and sobbing preachers would exhort us to send them money and pray for miracle cures.

Whoever wins the forthcoming election, I think we're going to need them.

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