A Fine Time for a Holiday

Anuradha Vittachi © Peter Armstrong So the British PM Tony Blair has decided not to go away on holiday yet, after all, despite telling us as recently as Thursday that he certainly would. Why the change of mind? The Independent newspaper occupies Britain’s centre-left, the same point on the political spectrum that PM Blair suggests he occupies. Its leader writer pretended yesterday (Saturday) to be puzzled by the turnaround, and argues that PM Blair would have done better to leave: there’s no point in hanging around when he can’t do anything useful. The previous day, the paper had run an Opinion column by Russell Razzaque, a Muslim psychiatrist and film-maker, that went much further. In a powerfully written piece, Razzaque argued that PM Blair’s presence beside President Bush amounted not to an irrelevance but to an active danger for citizens in the UK as well as the Middle East: © Radio Netherlands Wereldomroep “By supporting Bush, Blair lends credence to the claims of the Islamic terrorist that it is the entire West that hates us. If Britain stood apart, we moderates could have argued that it was the backwardness of US neocon thinking that is skewing the world order and perverting the normal course of international law “[B]ut today our Prime Minster’s words have become the single most potent propaganda weapon for paranoid fundamentalist Islam. He is not George Bush’s poodle, he is his fig leaf. He makes Bush look representative of a wider consensus, instead of the underlying naked truth, which is that he now represents little more than his own country’s religious right.” A more flattering view is offered by the rightwing Economist magazine, which gives the PM the benefit of the doubt: maybe he has actually tempered the Bush view, he just can’t openly claim his victories. A kind thought; but doesn’t this mean that it hasn’t yet occurred to Bush and his advisors that they are being hugely patronised by the British PM? Even Dubya isn’t that dim – and the ‘Yo, Blair’ conversation seemed to indicate that any patronage was going the other way round. So why has PM Blair still not cleared off to the seaside? A fourth and more cynical view is that his advisers insisted on a U-turn that has less to do with policy and more to do with the PM’s personal PR. If he wants to stay on in power, he has to stay on in London. The British public is famously picky about politicians and their holiday dates. They really don’t like it when government ministers go off to sun themselves, even if they insist they are only doing it to be good Daddies to their children, if at the same time tens of thousands of other people’s children are being massacred, maimed or driven out of their homes for reasons not unconnected with their ministerial decisions. Nemer and Fatima Shaito and their children: among 200 families seeking refuge in a park in central Beirut. © Alan Manski / International Rescue Committee The latest estimates are that 900,000 Lebanese civilians – hundreds of thousands of vulnerable, impoverished families with terrified children, elderly grandparents dying of dehydration, desperate and exhausted parents – have now been driven out of their homes. Pictures of Tony Blair contentedly building castles in the sand would sit awkwardly beside pictures of homeless refugees, their numbers soaring up and over a million. Remember how severely Geoff Hoon was chastised when he tried to go on holiday during the Iraq invasion? Tony Blair is already in trouble for his choice of holiday hosts (by what stretch of the imagination could he believe that going on holiday chez Silvio Berlusconi would heal the deepening public mistrust?) If he now added a timing mistake to his mistakes in his choice of host, he would never be forgiven. And when he returned, the world would finally get to see what a genuinely happy smile from Gordon Brown looks like. Entertaining though that would be, the people of Britain would probably be happy to forgo that fleeting pleasure. They deserve better from their PM than decisions based on guesses about personal power over the electorate or personal influence over the US President. They want decisions straightforwardly based on humane values. © Peter Armstrong Yesterday’s Stop the War march showed that tens of thousands of British citizens were in no doubt about their own values. The brightly coloured children’s shoes they flung in front of No. 10 Downing Street symbolised the blood-soaked shoes of the children of Lebanon: a piece of the battlefield brought home, literally, to Tony Blair, father of four. Maybe this lateral-minded reminder would work where the usual linear reasoning had not, to say the UK government should be protecting children, not allowing them to be subjected to massive and relentless attacks by an Israeli military supplied with billions of dollars’ worth of US arms. The marchers were in no doubt either about what they wanted: for the official British position to become an insistence on an immediate ceasefire – and for this to be asserted openly whether George Bush likes it or not. © Peter Armstrong The British want our integrity back. The French have kept theirs, and seem to have had a far more decisive effect than us on influencing the direction of the US administration. Saturday ended with the news that the French and US have agreed a draft UN resolution, calling indeed for a ceasefire. It was a breakthrough. If PM Blair had had a hand in this, perhaps it was a good thing he stayed around. But did he? And if he did, did his cosiness increase or diminish his influence? There are several other buts too: First, if both the Israelis and Hizbollah are fighting for the right to live of the people they each believe they represent, why is it that Hizbollah has to desist from all attacks, while Israel only has to desist from ‘offensive’ attacks, leaving a giant loophole for Israel to continue attacking ‘defensively’? Second, will this inequality of demand not fatally undermine the Resolution, since it is that very sense of inequality – that unjust refusal to treat all humans in a spirit of equal dignity – that lies at the heart of the conflict? Third, how can Blair pin so much faith on a UN resolution now, when he betrayed his own faith in the UN before the invasion of Iraq? Fourth, since when did Israel care about UN resolutions? And even if Israel is going to stop attacking Lebanon one of these days, yesterday’s massive, untrammelled bombardment showed that they are determined to inflict as much damage as possible before the draft Resolution gets approved by the Security Council. Fifth, since when did the Bush administration begin to value the UN? If the UN is so poorly regarded by the US, Israel and even the UK, what good can it really do? Nonetheless, the UN is (almost) all we have. To their great credit, Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his Deputy Mark Malloch Brown have courageously stood up and spoken out. We have them – and we have ourselves, the people in whose name the UN acts. Tens of thousands of us marched purposefully in the sultry August heat of London yesterday, from Hyde Park Corner, past the US embassy, past No.10 Downing Street, to Parliament Square. We came from all over the country and were a varied crew: a frail pensioner in her ancient Liberty-print summer frock, a businessman in a formal grey-striped shirt and suit, several groups of Muslim women in deep black or brown from head to foot, a man holding up a placard saying ‘One World, One People, One Future’, an orange-haired young woman on her mobile phone © Peter Armstrong And lots and lots of children: little girls with protest stickers all over their clothes, arms, foreheads, boys in oversized white T-shirts declaiming ‘Ceasefire Now’, toddlers pushed along in buggies by mothers and fathers. The massacres of children in Lebanon have roused even those who have never marched before. Beneath the varied costumes and the multiple calls for action, a single underlying message emerges once more, simple and humane, loud and clear: No more violence - not in my name.