Le “triomphe du blairisme” ? What is it, le blairisme ?

Nous-mêmes en parlons, c’est dire… Mais, pour nous faire pardonner, nous en parlons à propos de Timothy Garton-Ash et sous l’influence charmeuse de TGA ; c’est tout dire et c’est dire que nous sommes pardonnés d'avoir donné dans le piège. Cela nous donne d’autant plus d’aise pour signaler à nos lecteurs le fabuleux texte de Simon Jenkins, ce jour dans le Guardian.

Le thème de ce texte est simple : le blairisme, ça n’existe pas. C’est du thatchérisme restructuré à la technique spin d’une dialectique absolument virtualisée, utilisée par un virtuose de l’effet, d’autant plus léger, bondissant et séduisant qu’il est absolument vide de la moindre substance qui lui soit propre. Jenkins (auteur de Thatcher’s Sons) pense que Blair-Brown n’ont fait que reprendre Thatcher et la repeindre aux couleurs voyantes du progressisme moderniste, du libéralisme et de l’humanitarisme qui comprend la logique du profit et ainsi de suite. Le blairisme, faux-nez postmoderne du thatchérisme, est intellectuellement, ou plutôt “virtualistiquement”, l’enfant british de mai 68, regroupant les TGA, les Gkucksmann, les Ignatieff et tous ces intellectuels libéraux qui applaudissent les «bombardements humanitaires» (dixit Havel) du Pentagone, du Kosovo à l’Irak.

Voyons ce que nous dit Jenkins :

«Let us get one thing straight. Blairism does not exist and never has. It is all froth and miasma. It consists of throwing a packet of words such as change, community, renewal, partnership, social and reform into the air and watching them twinkle to the ground like blossom until the body politic is carpeted with sweet-smelling bloom. An -ism implies a coherent set of ideas, an ideology capable of driving a programme in a particular direction. In plumbing the shallows of Blair's ideas, even his guru, Raymond Plant, was reduced to taking refuge in Daniel Bell's End of Ideology. Like most British prime ministers — whatever they proclaim — Blair in office has taken things as he found them, tootling along until the dying fall of his departure.

»That is not to say that Britain under Blair and Gordon Brown has lacked a guiding light, but that light has been Thatcherism. This reality has been obscured by the congenital bipolarity of British politics and the bifocalism of the Westminster media, in which protocol requires that everything is expressed in terms of government and opposition. Hence Blairism cannot be Thatcherism because Blair is Labour and Margaret Thatcher Tory. For a decade British politics has, quite simply, been wrongly described.

»Blair and Brown became Thatcherites by conviction in the early 1990s and have never deserted the faith. They tore up Labour's pledges to raise income tax, restore trade union rights, renationalise utilities, keep the NHS in public hands and pursue nuclear disarmament. Blair never criticised Thatcher, indeed he adored her and boasted of her praise for him (in the Sun) before the 1997 election. Since then he regularly sought her advice on foreign policy, above all in ''hugging close'' each incumbent of the White House. He professed friendship with George Bush and has preferred the right to the left among fellow European leaders.

(…)

»A leader shows his ideological bias when faced with real choices. In Blair's case these have included whether to ally himself with Europe or America, renew Trident, pursue comprehensive as opposed to selective schools, keep the private sector out of the NHS, privatise London's tube and use consultants rather than civil servants to cure administrative evils. On each occasion Blair has opted for the prevailing Thatcherite orthodoxy inherited from John Major.

»The public sector may not have shrunk drastically under Blair, but then it did not do so under the Tories, nor has it in any other modern state. Thatcherism was never anti-statist, rather a different way of ordering the state. It is one that Blair has never renounced, nor sought to replace. To him and to Brown the path to delivery of public services lies through private money and the private sector. That is Thatcherism.

»Lexicographers will seek other definitions of Blairism. One might be the manner by which he attained power in 1993-97. This was his ''project'' to hijack the Labour party and turn it into an electoral machine for his own brand of charismatic leadership. The neutering of the unions, the humiliation of the national executive and annual conference, the rewriting of Clause Four and the concentration of power on the leader's office constituted a coup on a scale not seen since the growth of modern parties in the 19th century. The coup was brilliant, but it did not usher in ''Blairism'', rather it made Britain safe for Thatcherism for another decade. It was a project for winning power, not for using it. Blair captured Labour much as Napoleon captured the French revolution. It was his finest hour, but it was no ideological innovation.»

Mis en ligne le 25 avril 2007 à 06H22