NLR on Blair

Readers of Crooked Timber will know that I have an old and unhappy relationship with the New Left Review. I mention this just to trigger an appropriate level of discounting for bitterness and resentment in the reader. The “latest NLR has an attack on the record of New Labour”:http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25901.shtml by the person now listed alone as “editor” on the masthead: Susan Watkins. Watkins, married to Tariq Ali and co-author with him of _1968: Marching in the Streets_ but perhaps best known for the cartoon book _Feminism for Beginners_ , has written an extraordinarily poor rant in sub-Andersonic tones. It begins thus (afficionados will recognise the style):

bq. The Centre Left governments that dominated the North Atlantic zone up to the turn of the millennium have now all but disappeared.

Since when was “North Atlantic zone” a category worth bothering with?

The rant continues through a whole section of Andersonic historical sociology which I won’t reproduce. (Actually, it is Anderson as he might have been rendered by a broadcaster on the old Radio Tirana: simplified and shoutified). Watkins then finishes with the following judgement on Blair’s government:

bq. Judged against its immediate predecessors, an objective audit can only conclude that New Labour has scattered a few crumbs to the poor, while otherwise consolidating and extending Thatcher’s programme; externally, it has a far more bloodstained record. The civilians killed in Blair’s successive aggressions abroad—Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq—outnumber Thatcher’s tally by tens of thousands. Such domestic pittances as the regime has distributed count for little beside the destruction of international legality and loss of foreign lives that have been its hallmark. Like any government, Britain’s can only be judged on its record and on a rational assessment of its future trajectory. The sooner New Labour exits the better.

Now I’m no friend of New Labour, and I have severe doubts — to say the least — about whether the latest intervention in Iraq was justified. But Watkins’s list of a series of instances exemplifying Blair’s “successive aggressions” is just breathtaking. I long ago despaired of reading sense in the NLR, but somewhere there was always a flicker of hope. No longer.