In response to Tony Blair’s speech in launching the ‘Respect Agenda’.
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The important thing about debating ASB, and the measures we are proposing, is not to debate it at the crude level of ‘tough’ or ‘not tough’; populist or not. But, instead, to regard it as a genuine intellectual debate about the nature of liberty in a modern developed society such as our own. I welcome the fact the Director of Liberty is making a speech today on the same subject. There is a serious argument against what we are doing and it is right at the centre of political debate with both Opposition Parties joining forces to dismiss what we’re doing.
A “genuine intellectual debate about the nature of liberty in a modern developed society�, eh? Okay, Tony; I’m game if you are but I will say if that your track record to date is anything to go by this is going to be a rather tougher proposition for you than I think you expect.
But I want to explain why I think this argument, serious though it is, is wrong and out of date.
I presume here that you’re referring to Shami Chakrabarti’s speech on what she terms “Asbomania� in addition to comments from the opposition parties, in which case I’d best include at least some of these comments against which we can begin to assess your own arguments.
In a press conference this morning, the Prime Minister described a radical extension of summary powers to police and local authorities. We now understand this to involve powers to evict council tenants and board up private homes for a period of three months.
Many of the Government’s policies and initiatives, from marching louts to cash points to sin bins and baby ASBOs, may have been drafted on Westminster beer mats by ambitious advisers. But they reveal an underlying philosophy nonetheless - that the presumption of innocence is too cumbersome.
What of the kids with ADHD or Tourettes who are banned from swearing and set up for inevitable failure? The suicidal woman banned from bridges? What of the mentally ill and the homeless banned from begging under pain of criminal sanction?
Should this behaviour be regulated by the law, let alone mediated by police, local authority and court intervention? The reality of asbomania in 2006 is a new mutant strain of criminal law.
In 1998, ASBOs may have looked like a last chance for offenders to avoid the criminal conviction. Today they appear to provide a short cut into it.
Up to December of 2003, 42% of all ASBOs were breached with 55% of breaches resulting in custody. This suggests that like the traditional criminal justice system, ASBOs are very good at achieving what has never been this Government’s stated objective- namely, higher levels of incarceration.
No one could contend that an ASBO has never been properly or proportionately framed against an offender. But the Prime Minister must consider the many ways in which the innocent and the vulnerable may be swept up with the guilty. With the move to summary, arbitrary and loosely defined community justice, anti-social behaviour laws have to date been at best neutral and at worst positively damaging.
Shami Chakrabarti – Director of Liberty
The real respect agenda must include long-term solutions to the causes of social breakdown, not just short-term sanctions and punishment.
“The real respect agenda must be based on optimism about the ability of people and communities to create civilised lives for themselves, rather than a pessimistic view of human nature.
David Cameron – Leader, Conservative Party
Making communities safer and helping families is an enormous challenge.
It cannot be achieved with this government’s usual mishmash of gimmicks and spin.
Mark Oaten, Home Affairs Spokesman, Liberal Democrats
Okay. Well I think we can disregard the Liberal Democrats ‘contribution’ to the debate so far on the grounds that its mere political rhetoric with no substantive intellectual content, but both Shami Chakrabarti and David Cameron appear to be putting forward substantive arguments which require rather more in the way of respect than merely dismissing them as ‘wrong and out of date’. I will however, put forward my own arguments and leave the reader to judge them and the views quoted above against those of Tony Blair.
Let us start from two propositions we all agree with. An innocent person should be protected from wrongful accusation. The public at large should be protected from crime.
Ah. Hang on a second. Two propositions we all agree on. Sorry, but that’s not quite the case. There are certainly two propositions here and, in principle they are things that most reasonable people would agree on but they are also two very different propositions, both in principle and in practice.
An innocent person should indeed be ‘protected’ from wrongful accusation, where possible, but more importantly, they should be protected from wrongful conviction. That is the foundation of our criminal justice system, one that is expressed in terms of two clear principles, the ‘presumption of innocence’ and the burden of proof ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.
One cannot – absolutely - protect the innocent from wrongful accusation; mistakes happen, people are wrongly identified, evidence is inaccurately interpreted by investigators and, occasionally, people are falsely accused for wholly malicious and vexatious reasons. Hence, the necessity of these clear and unequivocal safeguards, safeguards whose role is to ensure that justice is done and that those who may have been wrongly accused of criminal behaviour are (hopefully) acquitted.
These are not the only principles that play a crucial role in this process; there are others such as trial by jury, habeas corpus, the right to a fair trial, the right to legal representation and the right not to self-incriminate – most of which, I might remind you, you and your government have tried to curb or limit at one time or another – but when it comes to the moral and ethical principles that underpin the British Justice System, the presumption of innocence and the high burden of proof demanded of the prosecution are widely thought the two most important and sacrosanct of all principles.
Move to the matter of what I presume you consider the ‘right’ of the public at large to be protected from crime, that’s a rather different matter.
The presumption of innocence is widely held to be something a citizen possesses by right; and as rights go is usually thought absolute, or as near absolute as makes no difference. At least that’s been the prevailing view in liberal democracies since the Enlightenment and is often considered to by one of those rights that is derived from the principle of ‘natural law’
The matter of protection from crime is not so much a right as contractual obligation within the social contract between the citizen and the state, one based on the premise that the citizen grants to the state the sole and exclusive right to the legitimate use of force in return for the state’s protection. At best, it is a qualified ‘right’ under which citizens both share in the duty to protect themselves from crime – for example by implementing security measures to prevent the theft of property – and, nominally at least, retain the right to protect themselves should the state fail in its obligations.
Against this basic concept is balanced the right of the citizen to liberty, to be able to pursue their interests free from the interference of the state provided that such interests do not unduly interfere with or impinge upon the rights of their fellow citizens. This is a concept that even the most authoritarian of English political philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, concede in arguing that the sole and absolute business of the ‘Leviathan’ (the state) is to prevent the illegitimate use of force (violence) by the populace but, crucially, it should refrain from interfering in all other matters.
In that respect, while the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty is an absolute right, the right to protection from crime is merely a qualified right, the exact parameters of which are subject to negotiation under the nominal terms of the social contract – one is indisputable, the other debatable and subject to limitations.
Until we began the new crime measures of recent years, these two principles existed in a very simple theoretical construct of the criminal justice system. The police would charge the accused of whatever crime, that was appropriate. The CPS would prosecute. A magistrates court or judge and jury would decide guilt.
Why do I say theoretical? I say this because spitting at an old lady on her way to the shops is and has always been a crime; graffiti is a crime and always has been. Petty vandalism, the same. Having money on you that is from drug dealing, likewise. Most assaults, believe it or not, do not involve physical injury. But they are crimes and very threatening to the victim. Serious financial fraud or being engaged in organised criminal conspiracies are crimes and very serious ones.
In theory, in each case the police charge, the prosecutor prosecutes and the court decides.
One cannot argue with the description, given here, of the basis of the Criminal Justice System. It is a system which may not be perfect in execution but it is one that, by and large, has served us well for a number of centuries. Perhaps the only arguable point is that made about ‘having money on you that is from drug dealing’; the mere fact of having money on you is no crime, it’s the means by which that money is obtained that is unlawful – if, indeed, it is proven beyond all reasonable doubt that is how that money was obtained.
In theory there is no need therefore to change these criminal law processes. Except that, in practice, its not what happens. In practice, the person who spits at the old lady is not prosecuted because to do so takes many police hours, much resource and if all of that is overcome, the outcome is a fine. The result is the police do not think it worth it; and so it doesn’t happen.
In practice, to prove that person X with £10,000 on them in cash in the middle of the city at 2am got this money through specific acts of drug dealing is too hard. You may know it. But how do you prove it? So it doesn’t happen.
In practice, the months and years of a court process, with a jury utterly bemused and the legal aid bills rising - spending is very unevenly distributed between case types, with over 50% of legal aid for crown court cases spent on 1 per cent of cases - to prove serious financial fraud or conspiracy means they rarely happen and if they do, often collapse.
I thought you said you wanted a ‘genuine intellectual debate’?
Your argument here is based entirely on expediency.
If the police are failing to prosecute cases due to the bureaucracy involved in bringing them to court and a lack of resources to cope with that bureaucracy than the answer is surely to reduce the amount of bureaucracy within the system and provide more resources. The answer to this ‘problem’ is simply better resources Police and prosecution services that are more efficient in managing cases within a streamlined and less bureaucratic system, not changes in the fundamental principles of the criminal justice system. As an arch-managerialist I would have thought that right up your street but obviously I was mistaken.
How does one prove that a person carrying £10,000 in cash at 2am obtained that money from drug dealing? With evidence, of course, the same way you prove guilt in any other case.
And as far as complex cases taking ‘months and years of court process’ go, first aren’t we taking here about ‘respect’ and anti-social behaviour not complex business fraud, and second where is the evidence to support your contention. Yes, there have been a very small number of highly complex serious fraud cases which have collapsed, in the main due to deficiencies in evidence and prosecution case management not failure in the jury system and, in any case, the last figure I saw showed that since the inception of the Serious Fraud Office, the conviction rate in serious fraud cases had risen from around 60% to near 85% - not perfect admittedly but then no system is and conceivably some of those 15% that the SFO failed to convict were wrongfully accused anyway.
There is no genuine intellectual debate here, merely a desire to change the rules of the game because it fails to deliver the result you want in every single case, and that is not justice that is conviction by fiat.
The theory is basically treating Britain as if it were in the 19th or early 20th centuries. The practice however takes place in a post-war, modern, culturally and socially diverse, globalised society and economy at the beginning of the 21st century. The old civic and family bonds have been loosened. The scale, organisation, nature of modern crime makes the traditional processes simply too cumbersome, too remote from reality to be effective.
The result is that whatever the theory behind the two principles - protection of the accused, protection of the public - in practice the second has not been realised.
Since the self-reinforcing bonds of traditional community life do not exist in the same way, we need a radical new approach if we are to restore the liberty of the law-abiding citizen. My view is very clear: their freedom to be safe from fear has to come first. Yes, in theory, that is what is supposed to happen through the traditional court processes. In practice it doesn’t. We are fighting 21st crime with 19th century methods.
The real choice, the choice on the street, is not between a criminal law process that protects the accused and one that doesn’t; it is between a criminal law process that puts protection of the accused in all circumstances above and before that of protecting the public.
No, that is categorically not the choice. There is no legitimate trade off between those rights that protect the innocent from wrongful conviction – there we go with the ‘wrongful accusation’ business again – and those processes which seek to protect the public. The former is, morally and ethically, as near an absolute right as it is possible to envisage, the latter a matter of trade-offs between state authority and personal liberty.
In a civilised society, and particularly in a liberal democracy, the fundamental principles of the presumption of innocence and an evidentiary burden that demands proof beyond reasonable doubt are non-negotiable. A Criminal Justice System that proceeds on the basis of the presumption of guilt and which permits conviction on the basis of hearsay, conjecture and speculation is the hallmark of a totalitarian state; of a state in which the absolute rule of law is held to be paramount even over the principle of justice. It is, purely and simply, a state of tyranny.
A few years ago, we began to change this. The Proceeds of Crime Act gave the police the power to seize the cash of suspected drug dealers. ASB law imposed FPN fines, instant on-the-spot (usually down at the police station, in fact). ASBOs came into being where general behaviour not specific individual offences was criminalised.
This has, bluntly reversed the burden of proof. The person who spits at the old lady is given an £80 fine. If they want to challenge it, they have to appeal. The suspected drug dealer loses the cash. He has to come to court and show how he got it lawfully.
I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave some moments ago.
Now, as I shall say later, we want to take these powers further. Today I focus on ASB. Shortly we will do the same on serious and organised crime.
But the principle is the same. To get on top of 21st century crime, we need to accept that what works in practice is a measure of summary power with right of appeal, alongside the traditional court process.
Anything else is the theory, loved by much of the political and legal establishment but utterly useless to the ordinary citizen on the street.
So there we have it. A love of justice and of liberty, in the opinion of Tony Blair, is the sole and exclusive province of the ‘political and legal establishment’ and of no value to the ordinary citizen.
What utter rubbish. What an expression of utter contempt for your fellow citizens. What an abject betrayal of the fundamental principles upon which the Labour Party was founded just a little over a century ago.
Backing this up, has to be new ways of policing such crime. This is why CSOs are so vital in support of warranted officers and the SOCA is such an important innovation in fighting organised crime.
And the next stage of this will be to focus on the few ‘problem families’ from which so much of the disorder comes. Again traditional thinking will have to be overthrown if we are to get to grips with practical reality.
All of this, in the end, however, comes down to how we view our obligations to each other in the society we live in.
Respect is a way of describing the very possibility of life in a community. It is about the consideration that others are due. It is about the duty I have to respect the rights that you hold dear. And vice-versa. It is about our reciprocal belonging to a society, the covenant that we have with one another.
More grandly, it is the answer to the most fundamental question of all in politics which is: how do we live together? From the theorists of the Roman state to its fullest expression in Hobbes’s Leviathan, the central question of political theory was just this: how do we ensure order? And what are the respective roles of individuals, communities and the state?
So that’s your answer, Tony.
To fight 21st Century criminality we need to replace a 19th Century Criminal Justice System with 17th Century authoritarian political philosophy, with an abject and utterly pessimistic view of the human race which views us first, as potential criminals and second as human beings with hopes, aspirations, moral and ethical character and the capacity to cooperate and collaborate to achieve greater things.
This is your new social order, your new ‘culture of respect’ – mere submission to the new Leviathan.
Political theory did not stop at Thomas Hobbes, nor did it reach its fullest expression during the English Civil War. Philosophers did not cease to consider and contemplate the respective roles of individuals, communities and the state in the 17th Century.
Need I rattle off a list of names to remind you of what followed; Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mill, Bentham, Paine, Jefferson, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Vico, Berkeley, Kant, Diderot, Hegel, Marx and so on, and so on.
Hobbes is barely the beginning of modern political theory and philosophy, not its ultimate end, yet it would appear that more than 300 years of philosophical thought and debate, the majority of it occupied by considerations liberty and the relationship between the individual and the state are merely scrubbed from consideration.
And for what?
For the sake of tackling a small and seeming intractable social underclass that gets in the way of personal sense of what is the right kind of social order.
When Aneurin Bevan noted that a reactionary is:
A man walking backwards with his face to the future.
Did he even think that such a man would become leader of the Labour Party?
Legal stricture will never be enough. Respect cannot, in the end, be conjured through legislation. Government can provide resources and powers. It can do its best to ensure that wrong-doing is detected, that its powers against offenders are suitable, that its systems are expeditious and its enforcement strong. And the British system, like others, in the modern world, has not been good enough against these standards.
But, ultimately, the change has to come from within the community, from individuals exercising a sense of responsibility. Rights have to be paired with responsibilities.
Of course the overwhelming majority of people understand this intuitively and have no trouble living side by side with their neighbour. Indeed, in some vital ways, we are more respectful as a society than we once were.
Try telling ethnic minorities in this country that there was more respect fifty years ago. Try telling that to women who wanted to pursue a career but who were expected to stay at home. A few weeks ago the first civil partnerships began. Why not ask gay men and lesbians if they want to go back to the 1950s?
But it is sometimes said that, as we get more prosperous and as deference declines, respect for authority is bound to fall away. It is sometimes posed as if it were a choice: an ordered and hierarchical society based on knowing your place or a meritocracy at the price of social disorder.
Indeed, a modern market economy needs the attributes of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit. These qualities thrive best when we can be critical of authority, when people can make the most of themselves without feeling constrained by their background. This is precisely the ideal of the open society that we value.
All of this is true. But to help communities in the modern world, restore respect, these changes in lifestyle need to be accompanied by a new settlement between people, a new modus vivendi. We need to bear in mind RH Tawney’s words, which simultaneously show us the way forward and that these questions are not new; “what we have been witnessing”, he said, “is the breakdown of society on the basis of rights divorced from obligations”.
Much of the above is simple rhetoric, but if there is a key phrase in that passage, it is Blair’s use of the term ‘modus vivendi’ – an accommodation between disputing parties, an informal and temporary arrangement that permits life to go on, even though there remains disagreement on values and principles.
But modus vivendi implies a negotiated accommodation, not one imposed by a single party and enforced with the full weight of law. ASBOs and summary justice are not mechanisms by which one fosters respect in society but a means of cowing the populace into submission.
There is no modus vivendi here, there is only Leviathan.
So I am not today re-starting the search for the golden age. We are not looking to go back to anything. We have left behind an era in which we refused to respect people because of who they were. The only reason to withhold respect is because of what people do.
I’ll leave you, the reader, to interpret that last statement as you think fit. You may well have guessed by now what my interpretation is
Anti-social behaviour is not evidence of a flawed moral sensibility in the British people. On the contrary, the need to act comes from the pressing moral urgency of the people.
It took me a while to figure out what this actually meant as it’s expressed so incoherently but what I think Blair is trying to make here is a fair wretched ‘bad apples’ argument and lay claim to the idea that he is merely expressing the moral will of the British people in putting forward these measures.
If that is true then while anti-social behaviour may not be evidence of a flawed moral sensibility in the British people, the support Blair claims for summary justice and the diminution of civil liberties most certain is – should it indeed exist.
As Benjamin Franklin pointed noted:
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security
You can safely ignore much of what follows, it being merely the usual catalogue of ‘achievements’ that politicians reel out as a matter of course when launching new policies.
Perhaps the only point of note, for being laughable more than anything else, is Blair’s apparent pride in reporting that;
Three years ago, one in five people thought there was a high level of anti-social behaviour in their area. Now that is down to one in six.
So a full 3% of those surveyed feel better about life in their neighbourhood, thanks to Tony Blair’s crack down on anti-social behaviour, than they did three years ago. One hesitates to point out that the usual margin of error quoted, by polling agencies, for such surveys is +/-3%, rendering that particular statement statistically meaningless.
Anyway, feel free to skip ahead if you like, the next bit is crushingly boring.
We have made significant progress over the past 8 years on crime and anti-social behaviour. Crime reached a peak in the mid 1990s and since we came to power there have been substantial falls in crime: Overall crime is down by 35%; Domestic Burglary is down by 53% and vehicle theft is down by 46%.
Over the past few years, Courts have issued 6497 Anti-social Behaviour Orders; over 500 Crack Houses have been closed and 800 dispersal orders have been issued.
Over 170,000 Penalty Notices for Disorder have now been issued and 13,000 Acceptable Behaviour Contracts have been agreed.
Each of these powers was contested at the time. But it is now clear that they are working. Reports of vandalism and noisy neighbours have all been going down since 2001. Three years ago, one in five people thought there was a high level of anti-social behaviour in their area. Now that is down to one in six.
As well as summary powers, there are innovations in the Court system which seek to close this gap such as the Liverpool Justice Centre and we want to see more of these, but so long as a gap exists between the real experiences of communities and the efficacy of the criminal justice system, we will need powerful out-of-court tools. There is no other way of providing people with the confidence and reassurance they deserve that their problems will be addressed.
Today’s action plan will show how we intend to develop pre-court powers further to bring about a fundamental shift to give people control of their communities so that they can begin to re-build the bonds of community for a modern age.
We will take action to extend and enhance key programmes such as neighbourhood management and wardens; we will provide communities with redress to their local authority to ensure that their concerns are acted upon and we will reinforce our commitment to introduce neighbourhood policing in every community over the next two years. Some areas already benefit from these schemes and people in those areas tell me what a difference they make to their lives.
We will make it easier to address anti-social behaviour, sometimes without needing to go to court. Penalty Notices for Disorder, which can be issued on the street, will be raised from £80 to £100. Conditional cautioning will be extended, with funding for ten areas to pioneer ways of making offenders do unpaid work, to show the community that they are paying something back. And it is why we are consulting on a proposal for a new power to close down properties which are a constant focus for anti-social behaviour.
Freedom, however, is not just about the absence of restraint. It is also about the presence of resources.
The case for the Respect Action Plan contains both concepts of liberty. It does seek to ensure that wrongdoing is punished. But that is not all it does. The strategy in the plan has two elements: both to deter bad behaviour and to invest in good behaviour.
This is what makes the case for action against anti-social behaviour a progressive cause. Poverty and exclusion from the material norms of a prosperous society provide fertile ground for crime. Anti-social behaviour is more common in poor areas. Richard Sennett has written persuasively about the way the basic courtesies diminish with increasing material inequalities. The social capital literature also provides a large body of data to show that respect and trust are less evident in areas of high deprivation.
Throughout government, we are seeking to change the conditions of poverty in which criminal activity often flourishes. Sure Start, Neighbourhood Renewal, the New Deal for Communities, to name but three - these are all programmes in which we are doing our best on our side of the bargain.
In the case of young people, we tend to focus on what they are doing during school hours. But what they do with their spare time is really important too. Surveys show having more activities for teenagers to do is a critical issue for both young people and their parents.
Getting involved in the right kind of positive activities at the right age- for example, competitive sport or projects to help others in local communities - are important for all young people. But they can turn the lives around of teenagers who are at a difficult point in their lives, or who might get in trouble.
That’s why we’ve placed so much emphasis on getting more teenagers involved. Last summer’s Youth Green Paper proposed Youth Opportunity Funds, where young people themselves will decide what kind of activities will be supported in their local area. We’ve announced that we’re making additional funding available over the next two years for that - £500,000 for an average local authority.
And as part of our radical vision for schools which are at the heart of their communities, our Extended Schools programme will provide an exciting range of activities for young people all year round - from eight in the morning to six in the evening.”
In the Action plan we have placed a strong emphasis on expanding the role of sport and activities for young people. We will seek to take forward the recommendation by the Russell Commission to boost the number of young people volunteering by over a million over the next five years, as the Chancellor has set out.
So the Respect Action plan has a balance between enforcement measures and prevention.
It also stresses support for parents. We will focus, in particular, on teenage parents and give them stronger incentives to attend parenting classes and education.
Chaotic families lack the basic infrastructure of order. Not all parents find the task easy. The usual barriers against a teenager falling into low-level crime are often absent. Often young men lack role models. Drug addiction leads directly into criminal markets.
There are a small number of families who are out of control and in crisis. It is those families whose children are roaming the streets and disrupting the classrooms. We have to help those parents and their children.
We will base our approach on successful schemes such as those in Dundee and Bristol. We will establish at least 50 schemes across the country by the end of the year. They will combine supervision and sanctions with a project worker, to provide intensive help for those families who are facing multiple problems.
But the support comes with a tough message. If parents of children who are involved in anti-social behaviour refuse to take up the offer of help, then parenting orders will be made available to a wider range of agencies.
You can read the next bit, it’s quite revealing.
So, these are the principles on which this plan is based: a duty and a responsibility on the citizen to respect the rights of others; a duty on the state to protect the vulnerable from significant harm and a duty to uphold the rule of law in a system that is efficient and fair.
This is not a debate between those who value liberty and those who don’t. Critics need to answer the following question: if the criminal justice system was failing people, as it clearly was, what ought we to have done? To do nothing is one option. But surely it is to do better by the British people to devise relevant powers, limited by the right of appeal, to ensure that communities do not have to live with unacceptable levels of fear and intimidation.
But Tony, it is about liberty. And justice. And about your view of what it is to be human.
By citing Thomas Hobbes as authority for you views on political and social order, you reveal your view of humanity as being:
a condition of war of everyone against everyone.
Or perhaps you would prefer Hobbes’ most famous statement on the human condition:
No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short
Either way it is a view rooted in the deepest pessimism as to the nature of human beings, so pessimistic, in fact, that one might well imagine that the Enlightenment had never happened.
No liberal democracy can countenance the tyranny of a minority in any of its communities. We, as government, will discharge our duties. We will attempt to create the conditions in which respect can flourish. I believe in the innate decency of the British people and I believe that, together, we will eradicate the scourge of anti-social behaviour and restore Respect to the communities of Britain.
But what if that minority whose tyranny no liberal democracy can countenance is the government? Is not Leviathan the very antithesis of liberal democracy and democratic values?
As Franklin D Roosevelt pointedly commented:
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group
Even such a group as the political elite of Westminster Village.
The last word I will leave here to a genuine socialist, Aneurin Bevan, and quote his description of Neville Chamberlain:
He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind. He does not have to struggle… with the crowded pulsations of a fecund imagination. On the contrary he is almost devoid of imagination.
Which seems to me to be, in addition, as apt a description of Tony Blair as any I’ve ever come across.
