It’s difficult to know whether it’s worse to have Blair sniping at the margins of this election or saying he’s now supportive of the Labour leadership, so toxic has he become in Labour party terms. After already doing so much damage, he now has the gall to claim: “I will do what it takes to help Miliband win”. If he could ever be trusted to do what he says, he should take his bat and ball home, find a quiet place, and shut up. But after unmistakeable efforts to destabilise the Miliband leadership in an orchestrated campaign together with his acolytes Milburn, and Hutton, this self-centred egoist now cannot resist sticking his nose into the election campaign yet again when the overwhelming majority of the Labour party just want him to go away and keep quiet. In the words of Clement Attlee to one of his party upstarts: “An extended period of silence from you would not go amiss”.
When is Blair going to have the self-insight to see that he has drastically let down the Labour party over and over again? Most notoriously he not only took this country into an illegal war in Iraq, but he did so through dodgy dossiers and calculated deception of the Cabinet, Parliament and the British people. He has never acknowledged this gravest of errors or made an apology, even though it cost 179 British lives, caused over 130,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, created 3.4 million refugees, and cost the the British taxpayer £9.6bn. This is something the British people will never forgive him for.
But that’s far from being the only Labour complaint against Blair.
- He consolidated Thatcherism in Britain by taking over her ideology, indeed extending it, hook, line and sinker.
- All the current accusations against the Tories for privatising the NHS are parried by the simple riposte: “We are only carrying through what Blair started”.
- He presided over the deregulation of finance – the regulation-lite loophole for the City – which was one of the main triggers for the financial crash in 2008-9.
- He extended the huge surge in inequality which his alter ego Mandelson sought to justify as ‘New Labour is totally relaxed about people becoming filthy rich’.
- He refused to loosen the absurd constrictions into which Thatcher had bound the trade unions.
- And he was constantly urging that Britain should enter the Eurozone, which would have been another policy disaster of huge proportions.
To cap it all, his behaviour since leaving office has been despicable. As the Quartet representative in the Middle East (presumably only at Bush’s bidding), a position for which he was utterly unsuited given his role in starting the Iraq war, he has consistently backed Israel over the two wars against Gaza. And at the personal level, his lust for money and readiness to sell himself for any ultra-wealthy buyer surpasses even Tory instincts for self-enrichment. Beware the Blairites bringing gifts!
Well said Michael. Pity that it has to be said. Unfortunately it will take many more years to recover from the Blair legacy. We now have the curse of “Progress” to snipe from the sidelines.
Agree, apart from the Progress bit; Progress was a step towards modernising the Labour Party, and boy, did it need modernising.
But Tone’s Iraq legacy lives on and will probably scrubber 2015. ‘The Mummy Returns’? On yer bike, Tony!
“he [Blair] not only took this country into an illegal war in Iraq”
But you voted for the Iraq war, Michael.
Also, refusing to learn from the earlier disaster, you voted to bomb Libya.
Libya, like Iraq, is now a failed state and ISIS hotbed.
Blair is a master of wars… he charmed millions with his gift of the gob, pretending to be a people’s saviour… he was only fooling us. Now you cannot tell him apart from the tories.
Well it was always going to happen Ed is not a great communicator to the people, he has a posh voice, he lives in a posh house, to tell the working peoples labour only does those in work, he has to talk about his parents because nothing he has done has been a struggle in fact is youth and life was pretty dam easy.
He stayed in University for most of is early life and then joined labour as a speech writer for Blair, I suspect he wrote most of the war speeches for Blair.
He then went back to America to work for sod all to get Obama elected the land of the free only as we all know your not free in any country.
And now Blair is back why is he back because he is a winner, so we have gone from New labour is dead to maybe if we get him back I can win.
The choices are simple Vote labour and get what? Vote Tory and we all know what we all get, low welfare, well that is what we had with Blair’s lot, low wages well a Min wage of £3.20 was not high wages was it, welfare cut to the bone and MP’s being given a massive 60% pay rise.
I really find it very difficult to get excited about a labour party which is now talking about getting back to 1997, when we should be saying we need to get back to 1945 the deficit was destroyed by a labour party which did so much with so little and now we are talking about a still very rich country doing so little.
I’m not sure who I will vote for at the next election but it will be for a party which sees me as a person not a number in the DWP.
I agree about labour not needing old has beens,to not back us at later general elections, When Livingstone wasn’t in the Labour Party in 2001. And didn’t support us at that general election, it didn’t make one iota of difference,as we still won with 41%’ OK I disagree with you about blair not being able to encourage people to support us this, time
I still think we. Can just win, but if we don’t, I’ll expect the Tony benn view from you lot
We lost as it wasn’t left wing enough, it was Jim Callaghams fault etc
1changimg the trade union los, we stood on 3 elections to bring them back we lost, because no one of any serious swing voting mind wants them,
2Mandelsin sId the filthy rich..aslong as they pay their tax
3 the Tories started the private side of the NHS in the 90’s labour continued it, and privatisation would wrongly imply that we were charging peole now for stuff
Preparing carrying in the Thatcher ,ideology, she won we lost, we let her win, with things like selling council homes, originally a labour idea,it worked for a while,
Regarding the EU, never heard you criticise Ken Livingstone for wanting to enter it, and he actually wanted to enter it, if the ecenomic situation was right, haven’t heard you praise UKiP for being EU sceptic before either.
Baking Isreal defending the,selves too,it must gave been because he wanted money, not he thought that the Israellis shouldn’t be bombed to death,….the Zionist, fascist, lol
Where is the labour party of 1945 , dead we are told so what was labour in 1997 when Blair stated the Class war was over, the class war has not even started yet.
New labour was the reforming of the Old Liberal party the party of the industrialist the party which saw the market as the the third way .
The real issue today is not that Blair wants to get back into politics he can if he likes because I’m not voting labour any way not this mess we have now any way.
But what will Blair be coming back to. Progress party of the rich
Labour, a bourgeois workers party premised on delivering some of the crumbs of empire to the better off sections of the working class, no longer has a raison d’etre. The empire or what was left of it, the City of London, no longer pays. It’s thirty year Thatcherite Ponzi Scam is burst. It no longer gives it merely takes and boy does it take. The cynical realists of New Labour are shameless in the paucity of their ambition: a Labour cut is better than a Tory cut they say without realising they are declaring their own irrelevance. The space for a bourgeois workers or reformist/opportunist party has disappeared. In Scotland it has been Pasoked. With Blair’s intervention the same fate awaits it in England and Wales. Yes opportunist, left populist, centrist, neo-Stalinist movements like Syriza, Podemos, the SNP, the Greens and other will arise briefly in an attempt to prop up the old but ultimately we are arriving and will arrive at the inevitable and unavoidable conclusion that if we are not to go down with the decaying capitalist ship a revolution is required.
I’ll join.
Has Ed said he’s going to repeal, thatchers trade union laws, no point criticismg Blaor, if eds no different
hahahahah John protecting his beloved.