By MICHAEL BLACKBURN.

POLITICAL LIFE SEEMS to be a series of avoidable misjudgements. Blair’s decision to take Britain into the Iraq War, the decision by the Labour Party to allow their leader to be chosen by all and sundry who coughed up three quid, Cameron’s decision to chance everything on a referendum, all resulted in a deluge of unintended consequences and all were avoidable.

Many of us in Britain are still confused as to why Blair decided to join in the Iraq campaign. We knew that the 45 minutes threat from Saddam was fake. We knew the claim Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was most likely untrue. How much better if Blair had relinquished his desire for a legacy and focused on his job of looking after the interests of his country.

The final years of Gordon Brown’s career were a series of misjudgements – the selling off of a chunk of Britain’s gold at knock-down prices, his out of control public spending, his encouragement of the banks’ recklessness with his boasted “light touch regulation”, his commitment to the Private Finance Initiative, which has seen the NHS indebted by £2 billion a year for decades, and so on. Again, Brown had such a high opinion of himself as an economic genius that he couldn’t resist meddling so he could go down in history as the man who abolished boom and bust.

We can also include New Labour’s misjudgement on using immigration as a means of social engineering. As we now know, they deliberately encouraged this to change British culture and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”. Well, that backfired on them big-time, didn’t it? A more cautious, less-ideologically-driven approach may have prevented their usual supporters feeling alienated.

AS FOR THE Labour Party’s decision about voting procedures, this will be remembered as an example of fixing something that wasn’t broke, and thus breaking it. The party has now rendered itself unelectable and is engaged in a comic frenzy of self harm, with its parliamentary wing at odds with its supporters, as well as a leader who (at the moment anyway) shows no sign of relinquishing power.

Cameron has destroyed his own political career with the single act of calling a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.

Cameron has destroyed his own political career with the single act of calling a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. He need not have done so, just as he need not have allowed the Scottish referendum to go ahead. The success of the Union side in the latter no doubt gave him confidence he would secure a Remain vote in the former. In both cases he took a chance. With the EU referendum he’s done the country an unintended service, of course, and he’s achieved the position of being on both the right and wrong side of history at the same time.

The unintended consequences of misjudgements can roll on for years years. In the case of Britain’s membership of the European Union, 43 years to be exact. That’s 43 years of deeper entanglement in the European project, increasing loss of control over whole areas of policy and a growing sense of alienation among the electorate. When Ted Heath took us in and signed away our sovereignty, knowing full well what he was doing, and prepared to lie to the British people as he did so, he couldn’t have foreseen that the electorate would eventually turn round and say we want out.

My confirmed belief is that 80% of all problems globally are caused by politicians because they are addicted to interfering. They can’t leave anything alone. They think they can make the world a better place and be remembered for their great deeds. It doesn’t happen as often as they’d like. We’d all be better served if they settled for just keeping things ticking over, followed by personal oblivion.

As they say up north, if in doubt, do nowt.

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Currente Calamo columnist, poet, writer and lecturer Michael Blackburn lives in Lincolnshire . From 2005–2008 he was the Royal Literary Fund fellow at the University of Lincoln where he now teaches English Literature and Creative Writing. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies over the years, including Being Alive (Bloodaxe) and Something Happens, Sometimes Here (Five Leaves Press). His most recent collection is Spyglass Over The Lagoon. A selection of his Fortnightly Currente Calamo columns, Sucks To Your Revolution: Annoying The Politically Correct (US), is available as a Kindle ebook.