Abstract

Still Blair's Party

The author comments on British politics and Tony Blair. The first thing I saw when I walked through the labyrinth of security checkpoints at the annual Labour Party Conference here was a young man in a black CBGBs T-shirt and baggy jeans on a big video screen talking about Iraq. This was a conference where no detail of presentation was left to chance, speakers remained relentlessly "on message" and the few outlets for dissent were as carefully choreographed as any Soviet-era festival of unity. One delegate who refused to join in the customary standing ovation following Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech and instead held up a sheet of paper saying I'm Sitting Down for Peace was forcibly removed from the hall by police. The vast majority of the British people never supported going to war in the first place, yet once British troops commenced hostilities even Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader who'd led parliamentary opposition to the war, fell in line behind the government. We can't vote Blair out--his surprise announcement, on the last day of the Labour conference, that he will resign at the end of his next term in office was a superb coup de théâtre, knocking Iraq and Ken Bigley clean off the front pages, as well as a reminder that Blair's power has become personal, no longer a gift of the party.