The Rime of the New Labour Party

(c) boliston

Water, water, everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

[The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1797-8]

The great thing about what seems like half the country getting A-grades in their GCSEs and A-levels is that anyone having taken English literature will likely know this poem inside out. But for those who don’t, the poem is about a mariner whose voyage begins with good fortune but soon becomes troubled after he shoots an albatross flying overhead. The crew blame their captain for this turn of fate and gradually desert him, dying one by one. Eventually saved, the mariner is destined to wander the earth recounting his story.

Sound familiar?

Tony Blair was at first seen as the saviour of the Labour party, welcomed by the nation in general with open arms after promising that taxpayers would not need to open their wallets. The Iraq war (the albatross) changed this and led to activists and supporters abandoning the party in droves. He even travels the world telling his story, bringing peace to a region of the world upon which he previously brought war.

But where The Ancient Mariner had problems with water, Labour seems to keep finding scandal with oil. It’s not just conspiracy theorists that consider the Iraq war to have been more about petrol than “enduring freedom” – and now a large proportion of Brits see the taint of black gold in the clemency granted to Lockerbie bomber Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi.

This is possibly just one cynical comment too far. The driving force behind the current outrage is a number of leaked letters appearing to show Justice Secretary Jack Straw amending a prisoner transfer agreement with Libya to allow for the possibility of Megrahi’s release in return for Libya ratifying an oil and gas deal with BP. This may well be true, but Megrahi was not returned to Tripoli as a transferred prisoner to serve the remainder of his life sentence in a Libyan jail – an option that had been open for the Scottish government to consider. He was granted clemency and returned home to die a free man. If this had really been about oil, surely it could have been hidden better using the transfer agreement?

Moreover, the decision was taken by the Justice Secretary from the Scottish National Party – not a Labour minister. The SNP, remember, campaigned for independance under the slogan “It’s Scotland’s Oil” during the 1970s and this stalwart phrase of their manifesto still resonates today. Scotland has little need for Libyan oil, they are too focused on getting “theirs”. While recognising that the UK as a whole might need the stable petrol and gas supply (we can hardly trust the Russians any more),  the SNP would be the last people to do London a favour. Indeed, had there been any real pressure upon Holyrood from Westminster it would undoubtedly have floated to the surface; the SNP are hardly likely to take the flak for Labour.

So, after a dozen years in power, all ignominy is directed at Labour. It does not matter if the UK government had a hand in this decision, nor if they made the decision in return for economic concessions. The fact is that many believe they would have. And to add insult to injury, we’re not seeing evidence of the economic benefit. As the Ancient Mariner might have said:

Oil, oil everywhere,

And scandal attaches to Labour;

Oil, oil everywhere,

But still 105 pence a litre.