How Britain Became a Beacon to the World

“I want to set an ambitious course for this country,” said Tony Blair in 1997, “To be nothing less than the model 21st century nation, a beacon to the world.”

Arguably, Sir Tony’s ambition has been realised. Britain has become a beacon to the world — but it is more of a warning than an invitation.

New Labour, Blair claimed, was a radical emancipatory force. It sought to “liberate Britain”:

… from the old class divisions, old structures, old prejudices, old ways of working and of doing things, that will not do in this world of change.

“The spirit of our age,” Blair said, on the same theme, in 2005, “Is one in which the prejudices of the past are put behind us, where our diversity is our strength.” As he said this, grooming gangs across Britain were at their peak of criminality.

To be clear at the outset, I am not suggesting that Blair has direct personality responsibility for the grooming gangs. I am not aware of evidence that he knew about the phenomenon — something that reflects darkly on the British state, of course, but that makes it hard to blame him individually. Yet the grooming gangs scandal remains an indictment of Blair’s “model 21st century nation”.

New Labour, Blair’s speechwriter Andrew Neather claimed in 2009, wanted to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date”. Neather claimed that this was something he inferred — not explicit plan. But it very much chimes with Blair’s rhetoric, which saw the 21st Century as being a “battle”:

… between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism.

They are what hold our nation back. Not just in the Conservative Party but within us, within our nation.

I don’t want to reaffirm Blair’s dichotomy here from the other side. I believe that there is such a thing as valuable progress, even if it remains contestable and impermanent. But Blair’s government was a horrifying example of how reckless and complacent “the forces of progress” can be.

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Of course, there are various examples that are applicable here. There were the experiments in regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, which appear to have been conducted under the delusion that replacing a state was comparable to governing one, and that heavily tribal and sectarian societies were comparable to those of Western Europe.

There was the vast expansion of the university system, which has been a great example of manufacturing the illusion of progress by redefining standards. “Never before has Britain had so many qualified graduates,” wrote Harry Lambert in his excellent 2019 New Statesman essay “The great university con”, “And never before have their qualifications amounted to so little.”

But the grooming gangs scandal, which has now been acknowledged in all its horrors in Baroness Casey’s audit, is the most depressing example to have manifested itself in Britain. Granted, it is also somewhat symptomatic of the pathologies of regressive attitudes. The police often failed to take young victims seriously because they were seen as low-class and licentious. But it is an indictment of the idle cosmopolitan assumption that people from around the world are largely interchangeable — that diversity, “our strength”, is clothing and cuisine-deep.

When Blair acknowledged weaknesses in multiculturalism, it was almost only when it came to religion. He would often talk about how radical Islam — which he would secularsplain as being a complete distortion of orthodox Islam — was a civilisational threat. But as Chris Bayliss explained for The Critic this year, ethnic groups can have traits that lurk beneath the surface. Pakistani men, for example, who were heavily overrepresented among perpetrators in grooming gangs, were often raised in “exceptionally tight-knit kinship network[s]”, which:

… created an inward-looking, clan-based model that prioritises group self-preservation and has an especially strong in-group/out-group differentiation.

The New Labour focus on “good relations”, meanwhile, made official in the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, affirmed the prioritising of “community cohesion” above addressing crime. Local authorities grossly, unforgivably failed to address the problem. But central government also grossly, unforgivably failed to anticipate a problem. You can blame someone for dropping a baby but you should also blame the person who tossed it to them.

Baroness Casey has condemned a culture of “blindness, ignorance and prejudice”. It seems even more grotesque that this blindness, ignorance and prejudice existed in the guise of enlightened modern cosmopolitanism. Other governments experimenting with modernity should take lessons from the appalling failures of Tony Blair’s “model 21st century nation”, where the suffering of thousands of girls was drowned out by the thunderous noise of establishment back-patting.