Bluemerle

The people's party...where have I heard that before?
By Robert Harris
(Filed: 25/06/2002)


Sitting at my desk last week, preparing to write a column about the Black Rod affair, I found myself leafing through Ian Kershaw's massive biography of Adolf Hitler.

Something had stirred in my mind - something to do with Tony Blair's assertion that his officials had made all those phone calls without his knowledge. What was it?

Ah yes. Here it was. Page 529. A speech made in 1934 by the chief civil servant at the German ministry of agriculture, trying to explain to his colleagues how they should cope with the country's charismatic new leader: "Everyone with opportunity to observe it knows that the Fuhrer can only with great difficulty order from above everything that he intends to carry out sooner or later.

"On the contrary, until now everyone has best worked in his place in the new Germany if, so to speak, he works towards the Fuhrer."

Professor Kershaw believes this phrase is crucial to understanding what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Ambitious officials fell over one another to "work towards the Fuhrer", trying to give the Boss what he wanted before he even asked for it, and in this way the whole sophisticated system of Prussian government, far from acting as a brake on Hitler (as most observers had expected) became an accelerator.

This Black Rod business struck me as a tiny illustration of the same phenomenon. Mr Blair really, truly didn't know what was going on: his people were simply "working towards the Fuhrer". And so the incident, trivial in itself, fitted INTO phpbb_a pattern.

Again and again under New Labour, one has felt that the entire government machine has been energised to project the man in Number 10, and that half-baked bits of thinking (on-the-spot fines for offenders, docking child benefit from the parents of truants) have been served up as policy mainly because they sound the sort of thing The Leader might like.

In the end I didn't write it, because - well, one has to be careful with these Hitler analogies. But then I opened the papers at the weekend and there, blow me, was Sir Richard Packer - by a neat coincidence, until two years ago, the senior civil servant at the British Ministry of Agriculture - saying more or less the same thing ("Top mandarin: Blair circle acts like the Third Reich").

Downing Street has naturally dismissed Sir Richard's observations as "colourful" and "out of date" - a curiously limp denial, one might think ("Oh yes, we used to do all that Hitler stuff until around 2000, but then we decided to stop"). But still: when a bureaucrat as experienced as a former permanent secretary starts making these comparisons, they merit, at the very least, a second glance.

There is, for a start, the language of New Labour, in particular its strident, almost totalitarian emphasis on "the people", with which it alone seems to claim some mystical union. "We have won support from all walks of life, all classes of people," declared Tony Blair on election day 1997. "We are now today the people's party, the party of all the people." This echoed his earlier assertion, that Labour was "the political wing of the British people".

Compare this to Hitler's definition of his party: "To be national can only mean to be behind your people, and to be socialist can only be to stand up for the right of your people . . . Not purely nationalist or socialist, bourgeois or proletarian . . . the party is a movement which is . . . toiling and working for the existence of the people." He could almost have been addressing the Labour Party conference.

Naturally, when a leader comes to power who views himself and his party in such messianic terms, he poses a problem for a traditional bureaucracy, attuned to dealing with orthodox cabinet and parliamentary government.

"It is true they've shaken up departments and there's a lot more power in the centre," Sir Richard told the BBC at the weekend. "In one respect, it did remind me of the Third Reich, where there were overlapping responsibilities and nobody quite knew where responsibility lay.

"There are groups at the centre with the Prime Minister's ear and I rather think that, from those out on the periphery, it seems as though, if something goes wrong, departmental responsibility is clear, but if something goes right, they read in the newspaper that it was all the Prime Minister's idea."

Bureaucratic life in a Fuhrer-state, in other words, is a kind of jungle, in which special advisers, "delivery units", "blue skies thinkers", assorted cronies, ministers and the poor bloody infantry of the Civil Service compete with one another for the ear of the all-powerful Leader.

Hitler never called a cabinet meeting after his first couple of years in office, never consulted the Reichstag except to have it rubber-stamp his policies, and increasingly left it to backroom officials - most notably his party secretary, "the Brown Eminence", Martin Bormann - to issue orders in his name.

Heaven forbid that one should seek to draw too close an analogy here, but one does sometimes get the uncomfortable feeling that Britain isn't being run in quite the way that it once was.

Some fairly flabbergasting policies - for example, the recent suggestion that almost everyone, from traffic wardens to kitchen inspectors, should have access to our telephone and internet records - are floated and then withdrawn, almost, it seems, on a whim.

Perhaps I am imagining it, but possibly a whiff of this chaos may be starting to leak out of Whitehall and waft across the country, and that, when we talk about the Government's crisis over "spin", it is really this that is the problem.

In which case Sir Richard's comparison of the Blair Government with the Third Reich - absurd though it may be at first viewing - is actually one of the shrewder analyses of our current ruling Volkspartei.

jp

Frightening, where was it originaly published?

Biscuitman

Before the June election somebody wrote INTO phpbb_the local paper comparing Blair and his henchman to Hitler and his mob... Prescot= Goerring, Mandelson = Goebbels etc...
I sent a reply under a nome de plume objecting that the writer was being unkind to the nazis because atleast Hitler got the trains to run on time.

Kicked off an almighty row that raged for days... umpteen letters of disgust, somebody else replied that it was Mussolini that got the trains to run on time etc etc.

Big fun AND kept the message Blair=Hitler on the pages for nearly a week.

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