9/11 – remembering what unites the West
This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter for Reaction subscribers.
How quickly the assumptions of a decadent political culture or complacent government can be upended.
On Friday morning the head of MI5 Ken McCallum recalled the 9/11 attacks, in an interview to mark the 20th anniversary of that terrible day. Talking to the BBC he described watching the scene on television as the second plane flew into the Twin Towers in New York. McCallum was then working on Northern Ireland security. A colleague working with him said as the plane hit: “Osama Bin Laden”. And then said, presciently: “I guess we all know what we’re doing for the next 10 years of our lives.” And so it proved.
In September 2001, before the attack, politics had seemed set, almost languid in character, following the fraught aftermath of the US election the previous November. George Bush had settled into the White House and was pursuing an overwhelmingly domestic agenda dubbed “compassionate conservatism”, a term his supporters had used in his time as Governor of Texas and during the campaign against the windy Democrat Al Gore.
Plenty went wrong in the 1990s, not least in Rwanda. Nonetheless, the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and al-Qaeda’s operation on American soil, seemed like easy years, harbingers of a new order that would be sustained as far as the eye could see.
In Britain, the atmosphere was pretty placid, political scandals aside. New Labour had earlier in 2001 won its second landslide general election victory, promising to leave the Thatcherite economic reforms while spending more on public services and having Tony Blair emote on demand. There was widespread agreement that the pathetic, ridiculed Conservatives would not be back in power any time soon, if ever. Politics, and the battle for power, happened then not between competing parties but within a single governing party, New Labour. There was no room for an opposition party because within the government was an opposition led by Gordon Brown, then the Chancellor.
Brown was convinced to an almost maniacal extent that Tony Blair had usurped his rightful inheritance and stolen the premiership. This seemed mad to some of us at the time. Why, as the then Blairite MP and sensible person, Brian Wilson put it, did Brown assume the leadership of the Labour party was his by entitlement rather than something won by open competition? I always thought the answer lay in Brown’s childhood, when as a child of the manse he was always the brightest boy in class and then at university the most popular. Winning was what he was used to. The experience of almost losing his eyesight as a young man gave him an understandable sense of impatience to get on with life and his mission.
Whatever the explanation, Blair and Brown were giant figures so dominant, and their competition was such a fascinating tussle, that between them they blotted out everything else at Westminster. It seemed it would in one form or another go on forever, although nothing ever does.
The chilling events of 9/11 changed it all, setting in motion a transformation of politics via a branching of history.
In the US, compassionate conservative George Bush became a foreign policy President defined by robust interventions and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Those wars created a decisive breach with mainstream Europe too, an ending of the Cold War era assumption that European governments would, mostly, go along with American policy, not only because the US paid the bills but because they had shared interests and values.
In the UK, it set in motion the process of Tony Blair’s destruction and the ruination of New Labour. Opposition to the Iraq war in Scotland galvanised the moribund Nationalists who began to erode and then finally destroy Labour’s powerbase. Now, Labour in Britain with no bank of Scottish seats will struggle to win a majority.
All the main assumptions of the late 1990s and early 2000s about the future direction of politics turned out to be wrong. New Labour did not represent a decisive shift, reestablishing Labour as the natural party of government, centrist and broad enough in its appeal to lock out the Conservatives. Gordon Brown handed over Labour to Ed Miliband. Miliband opened the door to Corbynism. The Conservatives are back in power with a majority of 80, a dispensation regarded as the stuff of Daily Telegraph op-ed page fantasy in 2001. When Boris Johnson was writing op-eds for the Daily Telegraph.
Incidentally, an assumption has developed that this new settlement, the Boris era, will now go on forever. It won’t. Decades and history don’t work out that way, as 9/11 demonstrated.
In this newsletter, I would normally have a jolly section here on what I’m reading or listening to, but the truth is latterly this week it’s been hard to focus on anything other than memories of 9/11 and the sacrifices and mistakes made in the aftermath.
For Engelsberg Ideas, a site the Reaction team helps produce, I’ve just recorded a podcast on the condition of the West, twenty years since 9/11, with a transatlantic panel of leading historians and brilliant experts gathered together. We recorded it in person, and on Friday evening (I’m writing this then) we’ll have a drink in a spirit of fellowship and Western co-operation.
On the podcast – I’ll send the link to Reaction subscribers next week – we talked a lot about what divides the West right now, whether they are the strategic challenges that flow from the attitudes of the Biden White House, or confusion on how to handle China, or arguments about dealing with the threat of the next wave of terrorism.
But I came away from that transatlantic conversation struck more by the sense of common feeling among Europeans and Americans, a sympathy and a connection, a familial shared commitment to democracy and a free society, that I thought had been eroded beyond rescue. It’s still there when people get together, I’m glad to say. Our Swedish host has just put on some jazz (the great American art form) and we’ll all drink something French, and talk, and argue, and laugh, as friends and colleagues, as Westerners.
America marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday morning, US time, in a series of ceremonies. Like many in Britain, when that moment comes I’ll pause to think about American friends, about the victims of the attack and about the bravery of those who tried to rescue them.
Have a good weekend.
Iain Martin,
Editor and Publisher,
Reaction