Britain: A 'dark place of the earth'

By Peter Conrad

SYDNEY: British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- a man with an ego as big as the Dome, and a head as empty -- has been called many things in recent months. A fraud and a phony, or, if you like, a postmodern politico who trusts absolutely in the image he projects: hence the glazed grin, or the alternate expression of stricken empathy.

Nevertheless, no one before ever applied to Blair the wounding epithet that the novelist V.S. Naipaul has just hurled at him. Naipaul has called Blair a socialist, which, for the slick spinners who invented New Labor, must be a defamatory term.

And Naipaul broke the dread news about Blair's radicalism in a place where it was likely to cause a tizzy: he outed the government and the "full socialist revolution", which he believes it is pushing through, in an interview in Tatler. Having been slow handclapped by the recent Women's Institute conference, Blair can now look forward to being harassed by upper class types.

Naipaul, embittered and vindictive, seems to have mistaken the Prime Minister for one of the witch doctors he writes about in his essays on African potentates. He accuses Blair of creating a "cultural void", predicts that economic catastrophe will follow from his debasement of our grand institutions, and claims that "the idea of civilization in this country" has been destroyed. "Yes, yes," gabbles Naipaul, "he is in command now, holder of the black flag, the skull and crossbones."

It is revealing that Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad, should pillory Blair as a pirate. The notion is quaintly Caribbean, and it suggests an ironic reversal of roles. Naipaul, the earnest young colonial who came to Oxford on a scholarship in the Fifties, has now assumed responsibility for the imperiled ship of state and its cargo of cultural treasures; a white politician, squandering upper-middle-class credentials which were not Naipaul's birthright, is cast as the barbaric privateer.

At Blair's urging, Britain, which was synonymous for the young Naipaul with Jane Austen, Georgian architecture and a calm, soft- voiced politeness, is set to become what Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness calls "one of the dark places of the earth".

Football hooligans maraud in the streets, children deal drugs, and little old ladies in tower blocks are mugged. The tabloids act as cheerleaders for what Naipaul calls an "aggressively plebeian culture".

Of course, in many ways Naipaul is right. If you grew up imagining that Britain was the quaint and comfy little island depicted by its literature, you are bound to be disillusioned when you encounter the raw, frayed, sooty reality. The colonial cringe can easily turn into post-colonial contempt. And Britain is undeniably vulgarizing itself.

Sample the depressed morale at the BBC or in any London publishing house, and the timid, compromised policies that result from this state of funk. Observe how the panicked universities race to dumb themselves down: Oxford is abandoning the study of Anglo-Saxon, which is declared to be "too difficult" for today's students.

Check out the bazooka-shaped breasts on display in the tabloids, or watch the lewd, inane offerings on British TV's Channel 5. Take note of the honors lavished on middle-brow entertainers such as Sound Of Music star Julie Andrews or veteran British comedian Norman Wisdom.

Watch Blair gossiping with hip DJ Zoe Ball, or nodding at the rambunctious Oasis Gallagher brothers. This is a government that can only justify having a Minister of Culture if his portfolio also includes sport.

Yet Naipaul is wrong to babble about the advance of socialism. The socialist experiment may have failed, but it was at least high-minded, and possessed a conscience. Socialism was ambitious to improve the quality of life for all, and to uphold the idea of community. Civilization first began to founder in Britain when Margaret Thatcher announced her disbelief in the idea of society. As she saw it, there were only self-interested families, locked inside their burglar-alarmed houses.

Civility perished, and when that happens, civilization, which depends on a shared sense of communal value and a collective responsibility for the town, city or country, cannot long survive. Blair's regime is merely a glossier and glibber continuation of Thatcher's.

My view of Naipaul's invective is colored by the fact that I write this in Sydney, as far from London's rancid streets, competitive crowds and toxic traffic as it is possible to get. Down here, the civic sense has not been destroyed by a madding excess of people, nudging and jostling in an area too small to contain them all.

People step aside for you, and they smile as they do so, acknowledging the fellow-feeling that makes a society adhere. Australia is democratic and even plebeian -- somehow I can't imagine Naipaul sharing the front seat of a taxi with the driver, as local custom dictates -- but a civilization, after all, is more than a stockpile of Renaissance paintings, a season of orchestral concerts, or some other elitist diversion: it is a place where people behave in a civilized manner.

Naipaul is right to point out that Britain has rebarbarized itself, though he's wrong to think that the decline could be rectified by a change of government. Has he considered repatriation to Trinidad?

-- Guardian News Service