The March of Freedom.

I'll just start by mentioning my surprise today when, on Sky television I saw the often anonymous and unspectacular (except for the shoes) Teresa May of the British Conservative party being given a chance to make a case against Cannabis as a 'C class' (ie. minor, unmeriting legal action for users) drug. She did a bad job, as did the interviewer in examining her, but the striking thing was that she was there questioning whether the Blair Government hadn't made a big, big mistake in previously declassifying the drug. The Blair government? Mistakes? Shsssssshh!

My point is that for the first time in a long time it felt that we might have the decency to engage in democracy in the UK.

Returning to the May interview, it was noticeable that she was allowed to criticise the Home Secretary (and former Home Secretary) without being made to 'win' the argument over Cannabis-as-a-danger-to-society first, or being browbeaten with a barrage of 'I used it and I'm fine even though I used to be middle class and now I live on benefits in a broken down semi' type personal testimonies.

To me this felt like freedom, as it appears that finally journalists might be considering that good compos mentis people might not automatically approve of Blair, so that it would not be necessary to subject them to the third degree 'normalcy' test before they criticise him or his representatives. In fact, I think even the Blair-Brown heavyweigtitis virus may be losing its potency (another Sky journalist thought that Brown was laughing at Blair as he floundered while trying to fend off a hostile question at a recent photo-op they took together.)

Strangely enough, what seems to underlie this change of heart is the wake-up that we've experienced over Sinn Fein IRA. I think that Blair's dynamic 'Good Friday agreement dash' in the early part of his reign, and his post-modern declarations that Britain was a young country, were designed, and had the effect of, putting people's critical faculties to rest. His other half (certainly their tiff seems like a lover's one) Brown played out similar tactics in the economic sphere with his rhetoric of 'prudence'.


In reexamining Adams and co. we reexamine Blair and co (shame on Blair that there should be this connection; long may the reexamination continue, and let's kick Adams all the way into the Atlantic Ocean and Blair from his office). There's a lot to reexamine. I look at journalists today and I get a sense they no longer like the Blair government very much. For neo-Conservative Thatcherites like me the Blair government has always been a sham and a shambles, though apparently a functioning one, but I did consider that Blair was right about Iraq, which goes to show that his belief that he can act as a statesman has reality at some level. The trouble is it's a level of absurd hubris and self-regard, as he and his minions thought that very little existed that couldn't be spun into something else.

It's surely a fact that very many socialists are fantasists, and there are also very many fantasists in today's Britain, so there was a very good match going there for a while. But the fantasy fragments and the centre cannot hold, and the terrible truth for the Blairites, and the BBC, and the neo-socialists (those fantasists who held their noses while Blair got entrenched through spin) is that only those with the facts of life straight stay standing.

Looking into the Ireland issue recently have been Mark Steyn and Simon Jenkins. I mentioned their articles earlier as differing about apportioning blame for the appeasement of Irish terrorism between the US backers and apologisers for Sinn Fein (sometimes at the highest levels) and the British ones. Curiously enough there can be no argument that Blair and Clinton between them could resolve the Jenkins/Steyn argument- since they united in this policy, as Gerard Baker points out in an article selected by Real Clear Politics where he illustrates what a fine writer he is, and with what good sense.