It is getting harder to be an optimist. After the loss of life and wanton destruction at Samarra’s sacred Shi’ite shrine, Iraq descended into butchery that is shocking even by recent standards.
In neighbouring Iran, President Ahmadinejad presses on with uranium enrichment and the outside world can devise no way to stop him. Among Muslim populations across the world extremists have whipped up violent demonstrations supposedly provoked by the Danish cartoons. In Britain opinion polls suggest that large numbers of Muslims sympathise with militancy and violence. And as Britain seeks to defend democratic values we are locked into an alliance with a United States that violates them, for example by allowing at least 98 people to die in its custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The time is out of joint; O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right,” laments Hamlet when instructed by his father’s ghost to bring justice to a rotten (pre-cartoon) Denmark. Our leaders are unlucky to hold office when the world has become dismayingly complicated. Nothing has readied them for the crises with which they have to deal. Religious militancy is beyond their comprehension. In any case the generation now in power in Britain is the most spoilt of all time. Temperamentally it is ill-suited to rooting out rottenness and setting things right.
The prime minister and I were born in the same month of the same year, May 1953. I arrived in coronation week and was rewarded with a silver teaspoon. The young monarch symbolised renewal following years of war and austerity. Rationing was ended and a democratic Germany was set to re-emerge.
Our childhoods were full of certainties. I grew up largely unaware of racial or community tension. We celebrated diversity by colouring in union jacks on Commonwealth Day. Crime was low, education was good and the National Health Service was thought “the best in the world”. I remember the Cuban missile crisis but I was too little to worry for long about the impending destruction of the world through nuclear war.
The meritocracy had arrived. Academic selection enabled children who passed the 11-plus examination to aim for the top. My school’s motto was “worth not birth” and we assumed that our modest backgrounds would not hold us back and that hard work would bring rewards. In our teens we were lucky to coincide with the Beatles and the sexual revolution. We enjoyed feeling avant-garde and benefited from extraordinary freedom.
At the end of our schooling we did not have to do national service as our predecessors had. Nobody complained that our A-levels had been too easy. We went to university and, at Oxford and Cambridge at least, were taught one-to-one by highly distinguished academics. We did not have to pay fees or incur debts: indeed we received a maintenance grant to help us settle our bills. Tony Blair and I were in college at a tranquil time: the student protests over Vietnam and the Greek colonels had been years before.
When we left university we had no doubt that we would be employed (unlike generations that followed). Jobs for life were available with index-linked pensions related to final salary. My generation will probably be among the last to receive them. In our twenties we took out mortgages that were demanding, but inflation soon made them easy to service. Cheap flights began in our teens, laying the world at our feet. Global warming may mean we experienced the golden age of mass travel.
If we had been born in China, Russia, eastern Europe, Gaza, Vietnam or Cuba, the second half of the 20th century would not have been such a doddle. But we were delivered into a stable democracy. We wrote some exam scripts by candlelight during the three-day weeks of 1974 and we had to dodge a few IRA bombs. But that is about as close as we have come to adversity.
Almost the only thing that troubles our generation’s tranquillity is guilt at having had it too easy. Enoch Powell said his greatest regret was having survived the second world war (given that “better” men had died). Maybe we envy our parents their part in that terrible struggle for freedom. Whether they fought in battles or on the home front they proved what they were made of. We have never had to. Could that help to explain why Blair has gone to war so often?
The experience of battle gave confidence to preceding generations of leaders. Whatever Winston Churchill’s merits as a military strategist, his service record helped to qualify him for the offices he held in both world wars. Most prime ministers up to Margaret Thatcher had been servicemen. During the Falklands war she lamented having to make decisions without having commanded in the field. But at least she had lived through the second world war and viewed Argentina through that spectrum. She saw the invaders as fascist and bad.
Such simplicities helped decision making. Churchill had always got to the bottom line, too. In 1940 Britain destroyed the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir (even though the French had been our allies until days before) to prevent it falling into Nazi hands. When in 1943 Fitzroy Maclean tried to explain the complexities of Yugoslav politics, Churchill cut him off to say that Britain would back Tito purely because he was best at killing Germans.
To men of Churchill’s generation, grand rhetorical sweeps across the globe and across history came naturally. In the days of empire an understanding of the Middle East was a part of basic education. That did not prevent Britain from making mistakes, or at least from taking decisions whose consequences we live with still in Palestine and Iraq.
Today’s generation, despite being well travelled, is not internationally well versed. The easiest way for politicians to climb the ladder is by producing pamphlets on domestic social policy. Under the British system ministers are selected mainly from that small pool of talent, the Commons. They may be appointed to departments of which they have no previous experience. When I became defence secretary I referred to the Bosnian Serb leader as Karajan, when I should have said Karadzic. After that I fell back on Thatcherite simplicities. The Bosnian Serb commanders were murdering bastards and we had to stop them.
Once in post ministers have little opportunity to rectify their ignorance because their time is taken up with managerial functions. Sir Keith Joseph, the great Tory intellectual, used to lament, even 20 years ago, that no politician or civil servant read books. I doubt whether Blair has had a moment to study tomes on the Middle East. Maybe even if he had developed a detailed understanding of the Sunni/Shi’ite conflict it would be of little help. Nonetheless, although some of his pronouncements on foreign policy have been forceful and brave, I do not recall one that could be called profound.
Perhaps it makes no difference. The Americans have a different system from ours and appoint experts to head their government departments. For example, Donald Rumsfeld has a lifetime’s experience of defence. It has prevented neither mayhem in Iraq nor the emergence of theocratic Iran as a regional superpower. In any case the foreign policy errors of our generation will probably look no worse (and perhaps better) than Munich 1938 or Suez 1956.
Muslim disaffection at home affects Britons more directly than the plight of Iraq or our fear of Iran. Last year we discovered that some young Britons will commit suicide bombings. Opinion polls suggest that about 7% of British Muslims believe that such violence can sometimes be justified. More than a third think the Jewish community in Britain is a legitimate target.
Nothing in my generation’s liberal upbringing (and little in our history since the Jacobites) has equipped us to deal with an enemy within. We believe in reason, compromise and secularism. In his understandable confusion over the domestic threat, Blair has see-sawed from multiculturalism to authoritarianism. Gordon Brown has lately taken up the union flag. They are a long way from knowing the answers.
It seems that after all my generation will be tested. The spoilt brats born in the 1950s have lived a charmed life. The challenge that they must now rise to may be less dangerous than that faced by their parents. But it is much more complex.
