Dodgy Dossier Redux: Blair Fabricates Weapon Of Mass Distraction
Every paragraph of Blair's climate paper is its own tapestry of rhetorical intricacy. But tug on a line and the whole thing unravels.
This week, the former UK Prime Minister tried his hand at sorting out climate change. His poorly timed policy paper raises far more questions than it answers.
Like so many former statesmen who've successfully evaded The Hague, Tony Blair never quite goes away, does he? This time, Marks & Spencer's answer to Machiavelli has weighed in on what Britain and the world should do about climate change, and in the process he's managed to annoy just about everyone. Everyone, that is, except for people who think Shell V-Power Unleaded should be pumped directly into the water supply. But more on those guys later.
Delivered on Tuesday via his think-tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), the report "The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change", was a confused morass of technocratic postulating on subjects ranging from carbon dioxide removal to nuclear fusion—subjects about which the authors clearly have only a passing familiarity. All told, the paper was what you might expect from the braintrust of the world's best-known connoisseur of fabricated intelligence. Nothing, frankly, to get in a fizz about.
But on Wednesday, the media headlines starting popping up, with outlets from the BBC to the Telegraph claiming Blair had pronounced that net zero was "doomed to fail". This came as quite a surprise to those who had read the report, because it doesn't say that. It also came as a surprise to the government, which had already been psyched up for a thrashing in local elections on Thursday, and now had to contend with a fresh attack on one of their flagship policies from a guy who current Prime Minister Keir Starmer idolises, both in word and in deed.
So incensed was Downing Street by the report ("Tony fucked up"; "he has completely lost his touch") that they managed to get the TBI to "backtrack" by saying that they did, in fact, support net zero—which they had never claimed they didn't. But the volatile combination of media hyperbole + crap policy paper + truly awful timing had, many pundits concluded, already done its damage.
And that's a shame. Because, if anything, all the brouhaha has detracted from how fascinatingly terrible the report really is.
