Archive for September, 2006

Tony Blair’s speech

Wednesday, 27 September 2006 at 9:05 am · Filed under UK, politics

Here’s an analysis of Blair’s last speech as the party leader in the Labour Party conference 26 September, 2006. I wrote it for other purposes, but it might be interesting more widely than for my own note books in even in this format so I post it here.

Blair: Responding to the situation 1. As always in party conferences there is a sequence of speeches whereby the one under our analysis is a follow-up and a response to some previous ones. Here specifically:

  • the response to Gordon Brown. In the official version the remarks about Gordon. Nevertheless the was on the picture all along.

    John Snow on the day’s Snowmail remarked: ‘Blair’s valedictory speech as leader to the Labour Party conference was a pretty good one but not so good that it in any way detracted from Gordon Brown’s performance yesterday. There have been times when Blair has been almost more than brilliant on the conference floor – today was not one of them, although it had its moments. It seemed to me that he was emotionally charged from the very beginning, he made a funny and yet risky – or is that risqué? – aside at the start of the speech. He said of his wife: “At least I don’t have to worry about her running off with the bloke next door”. This, after Cherie Blair reportedly accused Brown of lying in his speech, you could interpret what Blair said as almost substantiating that she had said it, despite her denial. Handling such a charged issue by way of a gag is a demonstration of oratorical mastery and matey finesse – of the sort one wouldn’t expect from Mr Brown.’

  • Gordon in his own speech made a point about himself being a servant and the task of politician to be such. Tony acknowledged that he is, which might be seen as support for him. And he even makes a similar point about need to be of service to the people. On the other hand, he leaves the door open.

  • On Gordon’s speech. First part of the speech: either the 10 year anniversary speech – or the speech for a divorcing couple. As in case of any good speech and especially in the case of a divorce speech one would expect a catch in the end, something would emerge. A revelation? The Hungarian PM admitted he had lied – but he still wanted the relationship between himself and his party (and later, once the speech was leaked, the people). What did Gordon do? What was the thing emerging? The moment of the “I”. Me Gordon. As in many other long and turbulent relationships what emerged was the independence of the partner. Not always there has to be one overshadowed by another, for this “I” to emerge. In this case there had.

  • Compared to this Tony was hardly mentioning Gordon. The moment of the “I” was longer in Tony’s – but this also expected in the sense that this had always been so. On the other hand, Gordon was surprising the crowd, although this was expected of him, by delivering something about his personal values and plans.

  • For Gordon Brown the religious values were quite quickly turned into socialist ones, belief held as important. But rather than putting things in God’s hands Gordon keeping the faith in the Party ground.

Blair: Responding to the situation 2. Not only to Gordon Brown, Tony Blair was responding to his critics. He was constructing the “other’s” he needed to reject to claim his own position.

  • to the critics – he talks in the end of his speech increasingly about “they” who had been thinking he had changed and related him with the Tories. ‘From the day I was elected until the day I leave, they will always try to separate us. “He’s not Labour.” “He’s a closet Tory.”‘

  • The task was to show that New Labour period (also for Gordon) had been a great moment in the history of Britain and in the history of the Labour party.

  • The enemy or the ‘other’, the position to contest, for Blair was the past. He was still responding to the situation of Tories had created. He’s responding to the Old Labour. Even now he is reinventing himself and what the party should become. He makes a virtue of change, which many see as a/his vice. It’s ok to be different now compared to ten years ago.

  • In some ways Tony Blair seems to be creating a monster that he then runs ahead of. Like running ahead of a high-speed train, he rejects also his own past, his own 1997 New Labour, his 2005 New Labour and turns his own position into the newest of the New Labour. Obviously to the party, who has been supposed to follow him this has been a tough task. However necessary some of them might see the reason for changing policies, the task of constant competition with one’s own past isn’t easy.

    One of the best rhetorical techniques in political speech is that of paradiastole – which means turning vices into virtues and vice versa. Some times whole conceptual frameworks get reversed, but this is also a tool just to legitimate policies. We can say that there are minor instances when this technique is employed and major ones.

  • One of the moments, of course, is the normative redescription of the past. This moment was to be about the looking back and praising the Blair project – as Gordon Brown had done in the first part of his speech. It went beyond. Blair was responding to his own critics of whom some claimed he was going against the grain of the Labour tradition, others claimed he was going against his own earlier policies. That’s right, he seems to argue, as Blairism of the past was not about Blairism today. (He also seems to demonstrate what would have happened had he stayed in power, what the policies would have looked like – whereas Gordon Brown makes the rhetorical move of takes it as granted that he would be the leader and sketches the future with he and ‘his team’ which included – according to my newspaper sources – his rivals.) Here past is seen as a vice, not a virtue. Thus, Blairism of 1997 was only virtuous in its context.

  • Rather than merely assuming something as a vice that he needs to turn to a virtue, Blair establishes or plays with existing conceptions, and plays out his own position – as their opposite. “They are not fighting in vain. But for this nation’s future.” This was one of the few remarks on the war in Irak – the most contested policies of the Blair government.

  • ‘Selective trust schools or city academies’ was another contested policy that Blair sought to legitimate. ‘But if, as at the academy I visited in Lewisham, good GCSE results doubled in a year, and a school once under-subscribed, now five times over-subscribed, how is that a denial of public service values? Surely it is the most vivid affirmation of them.’

  • Blair singled out two important figures for politics: the patient and the parent. He talked about the hot topic of the NHS reforms [which include public private partnerships and (semi-)privatisations] – ‘on the NHS in an independent treatment centre, in 3 months, free at the point of use, that is not damaging the NHS; it is fulfilling its purpose.’ Both Blair and Brown acknowledged the NHS as a Labour achievement and a thing that the Britons should be proud of. With the continuous critique of the NHS and the suspicions that the government will simply privatise health care, this is important.

  • One of the examples of a critiqued policy were the ID cards and the DNA database. On the latter Blair argued: ‘We were told it was a monstrous breach of liberty. But it is now matching 3,000 offences a month including last year several hundred murders, and thousands of rapes and other violent offences. Difficult reform leading to real progress in the fight against crime.’

  • He recognised ‘the fundamental dilemma: how do we reconcile liberty with security in this new world?’ These two things are commonly seen as opposites are now being related. This is one of the main dilemmas of Blair (objects of the critique he’s gained) and a cross-cutting theme in his speech.

  • Even claiming that he is not a Tory, he redescribes himself, and describes the socialist values on his side: ‘I’m a progressive. The true believer believes in social justice, in solidarity, in help for those not able to help themselves.’

    Other issues:

  • We could also look for the way in which things that appear completely incompatible with each other and also with the traditional Labour values are been related in Blair’s speech.

  • We could see the ways in which politics is seen by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, where one of the paradiastolic moments emerges. Is politics about the ‘image’? Spinning and image-building had been seen as backbones of the New Labour project of getting into power – or to put it with Blair ‘of not losing’. Brown emphasises politics as service. Blair argues that next elections should not be about image but about ’strength, judgment, weight and ideas for Britain’s future in an uncertain world’. He argues: ‘The next election won’t be about image unless we let it be.’ By this he may support Brown, or whoever else will follow him, as it is generally seen as difficult task to find someone equally charismatic as himself or the Tory counterpart David Cameron. And why would he want to deny this…

    Responses: what I found interesting was the way in which expectations were created before Blair’s speech. And after the hype everyone was analysing it (even the Finnish national daily I read this morning.). The fascinating point is the way in which the speech then did not meet the expectations in the eyes of the media. It didn’t appear as the classic speech.

    Just an hour before the whole event Blair’s speech from perhaps the 1996(?) party conference was shown on the channel (BBC Parliament) I was watching online. In comparison, Blair was low key. Is it that he really was? Is it that we could recognise the catch words in his speech: “tories no more the party of the family but a party of law and order”, “we are the party of the individual”, “new politics”, “beyond left and right”, “with opportunity must come responsibility” [sic], [on previous government:] “long on rhetoric and short on policies at work”? Whereas with the new one he we could not yet. Or was is that, because he was so focused in reinventing himself as the Blair of 2006, he did not dwell in nostalgia, as I did watching the previous speech? Did we simply want to focus on the nostalgia? Perhaps we really would have needed to hear these catch-words to let him go. In this process, we might have been able to understand why the hell it was that we were all so excited about a political change, a break from the Tory rule and – let’s face it – about Tony Blair. [I remember the feeling in Edinburgh after the landslide, when I was on an Interrail with my friend and saw the Labour double-deckers driving past and declaring the victory. Fantastic! In the same autumn I went to study in the UK. After the short honeymoon came the protests against the tuition fees, then those against the wars in Afghanistan and Irak. Ultimately, my Britain has been the Blairland that I just emigrated from and soon no longer exists.] The last words of Blair’s speech were: ‘You’re the future now. Make the most of it.’ Look, Tony, it’s a bit difficult as you just claimed it for yourself, for the new Blair, the 2006 model. Expectations matter. Irrespective of whether I would have wanted that model, irrespective of whether I know that in this kind of a speech a sensible leader projects also towards the future, I would have wanted to see you through the nostalgia and as the past.

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Hungarian riots: the Aftermath of a Crushed Fantasy

Friday, 22 September 2006 at 9:14 am · Filed under Eastern European Politics, hungary

 

The Hungarian PM Ferencs Gyurcsány admitted to the Socialist party crowds in May that he had been lying “day and night”. When the news broke out the fantasy of the democratic, economically viable Hungary was broken down. In Hungary, the response was turmoil. Political scandal and riots on the streets. The politicians had let down the people. What came to replace the fantasy of the well-off country was that of revolution.

My point here is to look what was going on. Why did he/they lie? Why did he admit it? What happened when they admitted it? And, finally, what is this “revolution” about anyway?

Even though the international community seem to have been ignorant, the country’s economy has been in a crisis for a while. Already during the summer it had been revealed that the PM and the Minister of Finance had been lying about the real state of the budget deficit, for months prior to the elections.

Yet, the revelation of the state of the Hungarian economy comes as a surprise to the larger community of EU countries, businesses and ‘the Western World’ – only a few would care about the Eastern neighbours’ perceptions on this matter. Perhaps, the actual state of the economy is surprising for me, too, I feel under-trained to take positions as my specialisation are discourses, ideals and experiences.

As all Hungarians, I also know that politicians have not really bothered to do anything about the economic situation. Neither have they really cared about the ordinary people. Election promises are promises, and these two – i.e. ‘we will fix the economy’ and ‘your life will become better over the next four years’ – have been pretty incompatible, especially in the conditions of the dominant neoliberalist discourse abroad and in Hungary.

————-

Privatisation of Hospitals: A Case to Illustrate the Situation

Let me take the example of privatisation of hospitals, to account for some context. This has been an issue in Hungary especially due to, since and around the referendum in December 2004. The turn-out in the referendum was too low to qualify but the results showed a strong opposition to privatisation. The liberal party SZDSZ supported the cause and the far-left parties and for the sake of mobilisation Fidesz, the main party on the national right, opposed it.

Everyone in Hungary knows that something has to be done about the health care system and hospitals in Hungary. Generally speaking the quality is bad and the system expensive. The nurses and young doctors are badly paid. Also it is expensive for the people using it since it is customary to give gifts (money) to your doctors and hospital nurses. There are cases where a patient has paid 100 000ft extra for a treatment and examination by a high-ranking doctor – a sum equaling a monthly salary of many Hungarians.

In September 2006 Hungarian newspapers were reporting on how things are elsewhere. They revealed that fellow EU citizens pay set fees to use the healthcare services in their countries. Indeed, this might solve some of the funding problem and the problem of corruption. However, since the unregistered, untaxed ‘gifts’ are going straight to the salaries of the doctors, first investment would be the salaries of doctors.

To put it prudely, one of the reasons behind the calls for privatisation is that if things were privatised those with money would not need to go to the very expensive and few private hospital or the ordinary ones, but would have more chances to avoid the ‘horrors’ of the Hungarian hospital. This demonstrates the logic on which many decisions are made by the political elite.

The state cannot afford to run hospitals, yet it would like to receive the tax on the real value of health services (and cut corruption…). Critical studies show how, in total, privatised health system is not any cheaper than a state-run one. Besides, if just the hospitals were privatised, who would buy them?

————–

Until now, the Socialist-Liberal government has sold the state property when it does not know how to deal with it. The privatisation of the Budapest airport is a recent example. Usually the sales produce little income. This is one of the things that Gyurcsány stressed in his speech in May: even if we sold everything that the state owns, we would not solve our current situation. There has to be large-scale reforms and long-term thinking.

This leads to the question: why did Gyurcsány admit that he had been lying? In short, he needed to legitimate large scale reforms, which would have little connection to the election promises. These promises could not be kept, was the PM’s message to the party crowd after the elections in May. Now as the recording of his speech was leaked in September, the whole country heard this.

Once the speech was leaked, Gyurcsány continued admitting what he had done but stressed that everyone in Hungary had been lying for the past 8-10 years.

Basically, Gyurcsány attempted to make it possible to carry out reforms to the economy. For this he needed to recognise that there is a problem. Instead of insisting that everything is going well, truth about the “fucked-up” state of Hungary had to be told. For this the whole culture of nationalism and deception should be reversed.

**

Why had Gyurcsány been lying? To win elections. Not a very noble cause – but for the party audience that his original speech was actually intended to.

Hungarian politics has been polarised since the late 1990s. This means that there is a strong frontier between the two political camps of the left and right. There is little contestation within each of the camps. The main objective of any political struggle is to defeat the other. In fact, the other camp is vital for the construction of the self-image of the own camp. Rejection of the others – which takes often forms of negative campaigning – offers the sense of unity.

Many of the lies, therefore, have been made to maintain the balance. Any controversies that might harm one’s own camp are undermined or rejected as the fault of the other. When this logic is the guiding principle in politics, there is no room for honesty.

The accusations by Gyurcsány that everyone has been lying were denied by the leader of the main opposition party Fidesz, former PM Viktor Orbán. Besides following the confrontational logic of polarisation Orbán sought to maintain the fantasy of the economically viable and democratic Hungary that had been so important for all the parties’ discourses.

Curiously, just before the general elections in April, Gyurcsány had a crushing victory over Orbán in a crucial TV debate, when he demonstrated how the former PM had lied and still does. Lying became an unpronounced election theme. Now the current PM himself admitted to having lied all along.

**

Everyone in Hungary knows that politicians lie. Even in the last elections many chose to vote for “the robbers against the murderers”. So far no one had admitted it.

Everyone knew that the Hungarian economy was in a bad shape. Now it became official. The country was in ruins.

The figure of ‘fantasy’ in psychoanalytic thought implies that even if everyone knows something to be a mere illusion, they want to believe in it. Fantasy brings cohesion and togetherness. When the bubble is broken, the emperor revealed to be naked and fantasy is dissolved.

The process of breaking down of a fantasy causes a lot of distress and therefore, when Gyurcsány admitted to have lied and argued that so had everyone else, he broke the bubble. He said something that had not been said before, something unsayable in those conditions. The structuring fantasy broke down.

It was replaced by another unifying fantasy: the myth of the revolution.

**

For the Hungarians and their national identity, the myth of the revolution is important. The tradition of the years 1848, 1956 and 1989 is constantly recalled in public speeches and symbols. This year the 50th anniversary of the 1956 revolution had already started. At the time disillusionment the ideal of the people’s fight against the power-holders was seen as the solution for future action and for the lacking sense of unity.

But who’s “revolution” was this? The hooligans, neo-Nazis, ordinary right-wing people and disillusioned youth on the streets were one of the “revolutionary” sides. The revolutions of 1956 and 1989 had rather been one’s of reforms, “refolutions” as some political scientists call them. Also Gyurcsány called for a new era through reforms.

His rhetoric was “revolutionary” in the sense of shaking the old patterns of thought and speech. In his speech to the party activists, he used rough language and swore. In Hungary the nation and the country have been idealised in the political rhetoric of all parties, especially prior to the elections.

Having won the elections in April 2006, in his May speech Gyurcsány referred to Hungary using the most common swearword: things in this “bloody country” (kurva ország) had to be put on track.

**

Future will show whether Gyurcsány will indeed be the one to take care of the needed reforms and what will happen in the local elections in early October. The opposition parties were already before the crisis leading in the polls.

The political strategy the PM chose was a brave one. On the other hand, his choices were limited. His was the first government to continue after the elections since the new political system was established 1990. Thus, elections had not offered any break in policy. After all, previous changes of government after the elections had caused a mini-revolution changing besides the political elites, also the policies and bureaucrats. This time, the economic situation itself caused a need for deep changes.

In the long-run, however, mere reforms, changes or a “revolution” itself cannot offer the cohesive force or a solution to the economic decay in Hungary.

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