Scorched earth

Sometimes when I am standing at the bus stop I think that Tony Blair may turn out to have been one of the most destructive prime ministers of the last hundred years. I don’t think this only at the bus stop but I do think it with particular intensity if the bus I am waiting for is late or absent, because then I think of all that he has not done, transport, appropriate future technology, anything involving thought, energy, insight, hard decisions, rather than piffling, strutting, the easy business of killing people far away or slagging off workers in the public sector.
I do have a car in fact. It’s a car suitable for its purposes, capable, I believe, of more than a hundred and twenty miles an hour and with a fuel consumption, according to the onboard computer, of fifty one miles to the gallon. That’s one of the bad things about buses round here. It would be much cheaper to drive my car the three miles into town and back than take the bus. I know that an economist would say this is not so, but economists, like Tony Blair, don’t live in the same world as you and me. Economists are going on the total cost of the car over the period I own it, and dividing that by the journey into town, and coming out with something ridiculous like £7.20. Whereas I am not in a position to not have the car, and to have never had the car, for and only for the time I am catching the bus into town, and then to have the car again in the evening when I want to go and see You and Me and Everyone we Know at the NMFTP. Either you have a car or you don’t. And as I have one, it's cheaper to pay the fuel cost - 70 p as against £2.30 to £3.00, depending whether you get the fascist lady - and drive into town like all the rest of the twats with big credit cards and those Vauxhall Vectras with all the silver trim on the boot.
But I don’t, I catch the bus:

1. Because I can read the London Review of Books on the bus. I used to find that I spent so much time reading the LRB that I never had time to read the books it reviewed (part of this is that the reviews are often so long and so absorbing that by the time you’ve finished one you’ve more or less read the book anyway.) Now I confine the LRB to the bus. This rationing system is such that LRB-wise I am just turning the corner into this millennium, but that in itself dishes up an ironic take on recent history. Did you know for instance that the Americans first became directly involved in Afghanistan in 1979. They wanted the Russians to invade so they could knock the shit out of them. To bring this about they supported an insurrection against the régime of Hafizullah Amin. The insurrection the Americans supported was triggered by the Afghan central government’s intention that girls should be educated equally with boys. It was a fundamentalist Islamic insurrection against sex equality in education that the Americans supported.
That was a cracking idea, was it not?
And that's the kind of thing I think about in connection with Tony Blair when I am standing at the bus stop and the bus for which I am going to spend £2.30 to get to town and back (unless I get the fascist lady) fails to come.
2. Then I don’t have to park the car anywhere. (Still on reasons why I take the bus). I get off in the middle of town. I get back on again near where I happen to end up.
3. Public transport is a good thing, not only environmentally but socially. It would stop twats of both sexes in Vectras, Tigras, Volvos, BMWs, Mercedes &c retaining their totally irrational and unjustified sense of self esteem. The admiration for the modern car and metonymically for its driver is a form of pornography, a specious appetite feeding on itself, impossible to satisfy.

The reason that Tony Blair does bad things (almost exclusively) and fails to do good things (almost exclusively) is that he taps into the kind of irrational self esteem that not just the twats in cars (in a condition of almost religious exceptionalism, I am not a twat when I am in a car) suffer in excess, but into the even more turbo-charged self-esteem of “businessmen”, off-the-scale corporation bosses, major criminals, and all the other alpha people to whom Toady is a creepy-crawly groupie. Listen to him talking to Murdoch about the BBC’s coverage of New Orleans. Just how sick should any politician make you feel?
This was going to be about how Tony Blair’s withdrawal strategy from Iraq may be presenting him with some problems, but his withdrawal strategy from British politics looks simple and effective. Scorched earth. Provided it’s done thoroughly it never fails.