Republican News · Thursday 31 January 2002

The politics of emptiness

BY PAUL O'CONNOR

Did Fianna Fáil really believe the Irish people would never cop on to the Great Election Fraud? Did Tony Blair think the memory of the British public so short that by the time the Iraqi war was over they would have forgotten why it was fought?

Where did it all go wrong? Little over a year ago, Bertie Ahern became the first Taoiseach to be re-elected in over 30 years. He was the most popular political leader since opinion polls began. Now, he can't even watch his beloved sports without getting booed. Last weekend, he was forced to deny there were murmurings against his leadership in the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party.

When a leader of Fianna Fáil denies his leadership is under threat, you can almost hear the knives being sharpened on the backbenches. Nobody is predicting a heave in the near future, but the unthinkable has been thought. Bertie is rapidly becoming a lame-duck leader, and he cannot afford many more mistakes.

In each case, a leader who had previously been outstandingly popular has seen his position drastically weakened by a breakdown in trust by the public. Most of Bertie Ahern's problems can be traced back to the manifesto with which Fianna Fáil won the general election in 2002. The public have not forgotten Charlie McCreevy's promises during the campaign that there were no cutbacks planned - at a time when the Department of Finance was already making plans to roll back spending. They know the government cannot be held accountable for the international economic downturn - although it can be blamed for its failure to invest in public services and infrastructure during the boom times. But what really infuriates them is the cynicism of a government that lied its way into power on the back of promises it knew it could not keep, which promised the boom would continue forever while its own officials were planning which public services to slash. Bertie Ahern and Fianna Fáil have lost the trust of the Irish people. It is difficult to see how they can ever regain it.

For Tony Blair, his nemesis has been the war on Iraq - or rather his presentation of the case for war. The British public, and the world, was assured that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a clear and present danger to the West. Three months into the occupation of Iraq, no such weapons have been found. The logical conclusion is that no such weapons existed in the first place. Blair all but admitted as much in his speech to the US Congress. Either the British government was guilty of a monumental error in going to war when no cause of war existed, or they deliberately exaggerated the evidence of WMDs to justify an invasion already decided upon for other reasons. Public opinion appears to have settled on the latter interpretation of events, and trust in Tony Blair's government has collapsed.

The similarities in the fortunes of Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair are not accidental. The approach of both leaders to politics and government has a great deal in common. Bertie is known to have few close friends or associates in the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party. His inner circle is composed of unelected advisors and the 'Drumcondra Mafia' - friends and party workers from his own constituency. Tony Blair, likewise, has always been respected rather than loved by a Labour Party that saw him as an electoral asset, but feared he was shifting it too far to the right. Like Ahern, his intimates tend to be advisors and spin-doctors rather than parliamentarians.

New Labour is notorious for its addiction to spin, but more political advisors and media consultants are employed by the Taoiseach than by the British Prime Minister. Both leaders are more concerned with power than with principle, with the perception of their governments in the media and among the public than with their actual performance. It is just that New Labour's main man is more polished, more expert in the nuances of spin, than the inarticulate Bertie.

Both Blair and Ahern are leaders without an ideology, and glory in the fact. Here it is Fianna Fáil that leads the field; long before New Labour ditched socialism and declared that conviction, principle and ideology belonged to the past, Fianna Fáil had mastered the art of being all things to all men (and women), and creating a political organisation dedicated to nothing but the continuation of its own power. Ahern and Blair are both Grand Masters of the politics of emptiness.

Doubtless this kind of politics has its advantages. Principles are a hindrance to naked ambition. It is a quicker route to power to promise everybody what they want than to attempt to persuade them to share your beliefs. And if instead of delivering genuine improvements in people's lives you can use the media to create an impression of effective and caring government, hell, doesn't it save a lot of effort?

But in the end, this is building on sand. Deft manipulation of the media can confuse people for a while, but all the spin in the world will not substitute for the lack of delivery. While the warm haze of the Celtic Tiger hung around it, Fianna Fáil might have passed for a successful government; now the haze is stripped away, everyone can see them for the blundering, terminally incompetent pack of chancers they really are.

Success breeds arrogance, and arrogance leads to mistakes. Did Fianna Fáil really believe the Irish people would never cop on to the Great Election Fraud? Did Tony Blair think the memory of the British public so short that by the time the Iraqi war was over they would have forgotten why it was fought?

More importantly, the kind of pragmatic, post-ideological politics practised by Ahern and Blair is deeply corrosive of democracy. It promotes cynicism and disillusion with politics, so that fewer are likely to vote or join a political party, and it shifts power from elected representatives to faceless advisors and spin-doctors. It promotes a politics of management rather than participation - one in which the object is to manage the people in the interests of the holders of power and the maintenance of the status quo, rather than to represent their views and build a better society.

That is why the fallout of the Iraqi war, and the way in which it has shown up the limits of New Labour, is important. Should Bertie Ahern be taken out by one of his ambitious lieutenants in the course of the next year or so, it will only be one more squabble in the sordid annals of Fianna Fáil. We will have lost a grubby fixer whose only qualifications for office were a quota of low cunning and a surface affability.

But Tony Blair is different. His New Labour is the most striking example of a previously left-wing party abandoning principle for pragmatism and transforming itself into a post-ideological organisation in which presentation substitutes for performance, spin for substance, media-manipulation for policy.

The breakdown of trust in Blair's leadership underlines the bankruptcy of such "pragmatic" politics on the international stage, just as the breakdown of trust in the 26-County government underlines the bankruptcy of our home-grown gombeenism. Both illustrate the truth of the old adage - too often forgotten - that you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Spin is no substitute for performance. The politics of management are no substitute for the politics of conviction.