BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
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some way more socially inclusive, by tackling racism and homophobia.
These issues were managed with little fuss. More difficult was the role of
women. In terms of recruitment they were of growing importance, and
studies suggested that there was no inherent bar to effective battlefield
performance. The issue was more one of whether men and women could
work together professionally in the unusual and highly charged conditions of military operations and exercises. This was not a new issue – the
Royal Navy had both sexes serving on warships for some time – and the
experience suggested the importance of clear rules if a series of scandals
were not to result. In an unfortunate incident in April 2007, a female
member of an RN boarding party abducted by the Iranians was picked
upon and coerced into writing embarrassing letters denouncing the
British role in Iraq. As she was released a report came through of two
women, along with two men, killed in Iraq, where the insurgency did not
acknowledge a front line.
The complexities of irregular and asymmetrical warfare were producing their own stresses and strains. Instant communications and a global
media meant that any lapses in discipline, such as mistreatment of prisoners, or just the harsher aspects of modern soldiering were soon likely to
be shared and exposed. During his brief period as Defence Secretary,
John Reid made a challenging speech at King’s College London on the
role of the media as a ‘virtual battleground’. The microscopic analysis of
behaviour this made possible was combined with a real though often
exaggerated role being played by human rights legislation in assessing the
conduct of troops. Add an enemy happy to exploit this while ‘systematically rejecting any previously accepted constraints, conventions or standards in combat’, and the result was what Reid called an ‘uneven playing
field of scrutiny’.23
A further pressure resulted from Labour’s difficulty in finding any
better ways than its predecessors to prevent the delays and cost overruns
that had long disfigured the equipment procurement process. When forces
were being used more actively this mattered more than might have been
the case in earlier times. The sheer length of these programmes meant that
even after a decade many problems were still being caused by the procurement decisions of the Conservative years. The most obvious example of
this was the farce of the Bowman radio, which had failed to materialise as
commercial systems went through a number of technological generations.
23 Speech by John Reid MP, Secretary of State for Defence, to King’s College London on
20 February 2006.
The new Typhoon aircraft were both expensive (232 aircraft at a total bill
of around £20 billion) but of uncertain value in supporting counterinsurgency operations. After a decade of discussion, by the time Blair left
office the proposed aircraft carriers had still not been ordered and their
fate would depend on the forthcoming comprehensive spending review.
The carriers were costed at £3.6 billion; the 150 Joint Strike Fighters that
would fly from them some £8 billion.
It was not until the 2000 Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) that
some increases in forces were agreed.24 After 9/11 there were more arguments for additional funding. In the 2002 CSR and the new chapter of the
Strategic Defence Review, agreement was given to the largest increase in
defence expenditure for two decades, with a projected increase of £3.5
billion by 2005/6. At a time of substantial increases elsewhere, real terms
annual increases of an average 1.2% per year were hardly spectacular.
Including the extra funding for Iraq and Afghanistan, spending has
remained constant at roughly around 2.5% of GDP and at around £32
billion a year plus some £1.5 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2007
however there were regular complaints about substantial underfunding,
and a lack of kit appropriate to the operations being undertaken. ‘ For
ordinary soldiers’, observed the Economist, ‘the strains are visible from
the moment they leave Britain in clapped-out Tristar jets to the moment
they reach the valleys of Afghanistan with little or no American-style
computer networking.’ 25
The decline of the Northern Ireland commitment brought some relief,
and other forms of support to the civil power, such as acting as stand-in
firemen or organising the cull of livestock to beat foot-and-mouth
disease, were only occasional. But with Iraq and Afghanistan turning into
demanding missions of long duration, the question of the stretch on
forces became more acute. To some extent this was a matter of elasticity. It
was one thing to stretch capabilities at times of particular stress if they
could ease back to a form of normality when the stress was over. The risk
was that the stretch would cause the capabilities to snap, with it becoming
progressively more difficult to recruit and retain personnel, and give those
in service proper training or time with their families. The stress was felt
particularly in the army, which tried to cope by restructuring battalions
and increased development of special forces and reserves in operational
24 Spending Review 2000, Cm 4807 (London: TSO, 2000). CSR 2000 added almost £400
million to the previous budget for 2001/2, a 0.1% real increase rise to £23.75 billion,
growing to 0.7% in 2003/4.
25 ‘The Battle of the Budget’, The Economist, 3 May 2007.
roles. By and large it coped, although some areas that had been hit by past
cuts, for example medical services, remained problematic.
Conclusion
In his Plymouth speech Blair professed himself struck by the contrast
between the front line and the home front. At the front the troops were
professional, with high morale and a sense of mission. Yet at home there
was anxiety. This was in part because of the pain caused by each casualty
but also because of questions of logistics, inadequate equipment or substandard accommodation. ‘Any grievances, any issues to do with military
life, will be more raw, more sensitive, more prone to cause resentment.’
The absence of a victory as previously understood and the ‘propaganda of
the enemy, often quite sympathetically treated by their own media’,
would encourage the view that it’s really the West’s fault. In turn that
risked demoralising the forces, who wanted the full support of public
opinion, and not just admiration for their courage. If politicians on both
sides of the Atlantic would not so much slip into the caricature of illjudged adventurism but instead decide that it was ‘all too difficult and
default to an unstated, passive disengagement, that doing the right thing
slips almost unconsciously into doing the easy thing’ and the armed
forces would no longer be ‘warfighters as well as peacekeepers’, the enemy
would be emboldened and the country’s ‘reach, effect and influence qualitatively reduced’. The tragedy for Blair was that Iraq in particular had
reduced
the country’s appetite for such a role. Polling at the end of March
2007 found majorities seeking immediate withdrawal from Iraq and
Afghanistan (barely differentiating between the missions), two thirds of
voters believing that Britain was over-extended and that it should not
‘become involved in any foreign conflict unless it is absolutely clear that it
is in Britain’s own interests to do so’.26 Events could change these perceptions again, but for the moment, despite Blair’s best efforts, the military
were seen as a force for national security but not a force for good.
26 Anthony King, ‘Voters Want Britain to Scale Down World Role’, Daily Telegraph, 5 April
2007.
Commentary
‘What is the essence of Blairism in foreign policy?’ I asked Tony Blair, at
the end of his decade in power. ‘It is liberal interventionism’, he replied.1
His foreign policy, he explained, was about combining soft and hard
power, and about strengthening Britain’s key alliances – with the United
States and with our partners in the European Union. Britain, a country of
sixty million people ‘in a relatively small geographical space’, can only
‘make its weight and influence count through its alliances’. Yes, relations
with other democracies are important, but ‘you build out from the
European–American alliance’.
Only thus can you confront the big, supranational problems which,
over his ten years as Prime Minister, had come increasingly to dominate
his agenda. This produced an acute dilemma: ‘your country expects you
to be focused on the domestic and yet the truth is [that] the challenges
you’re facing are often global’. Sometimes, he said, it was almost ridiculous. Consider climate change, for example. Of course a country like
Britain should take domestic action on climate change, but all the time
you know that ‘the purpose of it is to give yourself traction on international leadership’. In this respect, something fundamental has changed
since 1997. Today, ‘foreign policy is no longer foreign policy’.
Minerva’s owl flies at dusk. When Tony Blair became Prime Minister in
May 1997, he did so on a manifesto that was almost entirely domestic.
Only one of the ten promises in the New Labour manifesto was about
foreign policy: ‘We will give Britain the leadership in Europe which
Britain and Europe need.’ (A characteristically vague New Labour
formula: did it mean that Britain would lead Europe or simply that
Britain would ensure that Europe had good leadership?) The one thing
that was clear was that he wanted to improve Britain’s relations with the
European Union, after the froideur of the Thatcher–Major years.
1 All quotations are from a conversation with him in London on 23 April 2007.
Otherwise, Blair’s foreign policy was an unwritten book. He had given
a few speeches on the subject, long on British patriotism and vague proEuropeanism, short on detail. No one could have predicted from them
that he would end up sending Britain’s armed forces to fight in Sierra
Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. He learned on the job and he made
it up as he went along. The intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was a formative moment, prompting as it did his Chicago speech, in which he enunciated his neo-Gladstonian ‘doctrine of international community’. Only
at the end, looking back with the advantages of retrospective rationalisation, could he sum it up so clearly.
There are two ways of responding to Blair’s own retrospective
summary. One is to disagree with the agenda itself. Liberal interventionism, you could say, is a lousy idea. What business is it of ours to stop foreigners killing each other if they want to? Our morally superior, pacific
European attitude is demonstrated by not intervening anywhere. We keep
our hands clean by not lifting a finger. And we do not want to be close to
the US in any case (Blairophobes of the left), or to Europe (Blairophobes
of the right).
The other response is to examine his record in the light of his own proclaimed goals. If you believe, as I do, in genuine liberal intervention – that
is, intervention to prevent genocide or other massively inhumane or lifethreatening behaviour within the borders of another state – then high on
the credit side of the balance sheet must be Kosovo. There, Blair led the
way in forging an international action to reverse a genocide being perpetrated by Slobodan Milosevic against the mainly Muslim Kosovar
Albanians. And we did not make a complete bloody mess of the occupation afterwards. Kosovo in 2007 was hardly Switzerland, but it was beginning the journey to being a European democracy. And both Serbian and
Kosovan warlords were being prosecuted in The Hague. For a liberal
interventionist, Kosovo was Blair’s finest hour. In Sierra Leone, too, Blair
is remembered with gratitude as someone who rescued the country from
terrible civil strife.
Britain’s relations with both the US and our partners in the European
Union were better when he left No. 10 Downing Street than when he
entered it. In the European context, devolution to Scotland and Wales,
and the amazing spectacle of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness starting
to govern together in Northern Ireland, must be counted to his credit.
Britain was also better placed in Europe and the world because it had a
relatively strong economy, mixed with a partly reformed welfare state.
That success – Blairism building on the foundations of Thatcherism – is
part of Britain’s soft power, a concept defined by Joseph Nye as the power
to attract. For all the problems that remained, you must ask yourself this
question: who was better off? Britain after ten years of Blair, France after
twelve years of Jacques Chirac, Germany following eight years of Gerhard
Schröder, or the US in the seventh year of George Bush?
On the debit side, there was one overwhelming red figure – Iraq. Blair
kept insisting that history would give the final verdict on Iraq but, writing
in summer 2007, I believe we can already say with confidence that the
invasion and occupation of Iraq has proved to be a disaster. To describe it
as a case of liberal interventionism is the greatest disservice anyone could
do to the cause of liberal interventionism. Britain and the United States
went to war on a false prospectus about weapons of mass destruction and
without proper authority, either legal or political. The failure to prepare
for the likely consequences was a disgrace. It would be difficult for things
to be worse than they were under Saddam Hussein, but in 2007 they were.
Hundreds of thousands of people had been killed or maimed, and there
was no good end in sight. US intelligence agencies said Iraq had become
a breeding ground for a new generation of terrorists. The hundreds of
billions of dollars squandered on the war and occupation could have
bettered the lives of many of the world’s poor.
Drawing away troops from Afghanistan when the job there was only
half done, we created two failures instead of one possible success. The
; Shia–Sunni rift had been inflamed across the Muslim world. The theocratic dictatorship of Iran was greatly strengthened. The moral authority
of the US was in tatters, and that of the United Kingdom dragged down
with it. Iraq alienated Muslims everywhere, including our own fellow citizens in Britain. Need I go on? This was the most comprehensive British
foreign policy disaster since the Suez crisis of 1956.
Iraq also exposed the weakness of another strand of Blairite foreign
policy – the attempt to influence American policy by working privately
through the corridors of power in Washington, while avoiding all public
disagreement. This is what I call the Jeeves school of diplomacy. To
America’s Bertie Wooster the British government plays Jeeves – the
impeccably loyal gentleman’s gentleman in public, but privately whispering ‘Is that wise, sir?’ Although Bush administration officials insisted that
the President actively sought Blair’s advice, it is hard to point to a single
issue on which Britain actually changed or decisively shaped American
policy. Britain alone was no longer big enough to sway the hyperpower,
especially when Washington assumed that British support could always
be taken for granted.
What the US needed was a friend big enough that Washington had to
listen to him. That friend could only be a strong EU, speaking with a single
voice. Here is the third key failing of Blair’s foreign policy. To achieve that
European voice would require the full commitment of Germany, France
and Britain; but for more than fifteen years Britain’s European policy has
been drastically constrained, if not actually dictated, by our Eurosceptic
media. Blair saw the problem clearly. When I reminded him of the 1997
manifesto promise he said, somewhat defensively, that Britain had been ‘a
leader in Europe’, but went on immediately to acknowledge that ‘on the
surface British attitudes remain stolidly Eurosceptic’. A lot of this was due
to the media. ‘Europe is the area, above all others, where I’m urged by even
quite sensible areas of the media to do things that are completely daft and
that anyone sitting in my chair would think is completely daft.’ This is