There never was a truer example of ‘when you’re in a hole, stop digging’. His article in the Observer this weekend is a gift to his opponents, but it does even more damage to himself. He reveals himself as increasingly deserted even his previous closest followers, an utterly broken man watching everything he stood for swept away before his eyes. He has gone from opposition to delusion, from hysteria to denial. But what is perhaps most disturbing of all is that he can’t, as he himself candidly admits, understand why the Corbyn earthquake is happening. He just blankly refuses to acknowledge the passionate resentment which he and New Labour created by laying the foundations for the financial crash of 2008-9 and making the squeezed middle and brutally punished poor pay for it, by taking Britain without any constitutional approval into an illegal was with Iraq, by introducing into politics the hated regime of spin and manipulation , by indulging now his squalid lust for money-making, and by clearly having no more overriding desire than to strut the world with Bush.
He describes his opponents as trapped “in their own hermetically sealed bubble”, when that applies exactly to himself. If what he says were really true, why has the Labour electorate swelled to over 600,000, 50% larger than he managed even at the height of his pomp when so many were glad to be rid of the Tories on 1st May 1997? Why is he so unfeeling and unapologetic about aligning the New Labour alongside the Tories in pursuit of austerity from 2010 onwards, especially since Osborne’s policy (to shrink the State) has been so dramatically unsuccessful in reducing the deficit? Why did he urge the Blairites to support the government’s welfare bill which opposed every tenet of the real Labour Party? Why did he push for privatisation of the NHS and other public services? Why did his acolyte Mandelson say “New Labour is “relaxed at people becoming filthy rich”, and proved it by letting inequality balloon to even highe heights than under Thatcher?
So after doing all those things, how does he expect Labour members and the country to treat him? After a 20-year temp;orary iruption of hi-jacking the party down a route utterly alien to its founders, in order to ingratiate himself with corporate and financial leaders on their terms, how can he imagine that anyone wants him back? He has a lot to learn, less egoism, more humility.
Delusion is a power thing, and Blair is deluded …
Blair of course remains an absolutely textbook example of the sheer mediocrity of true evil.
An excellent, lively and quite passionate piece that also captures something, (something much missing from the other analysts here,) conveys something of the angst being felt among this loose coalition; for Corbyn.
What the Blair-right seem incapable of grasping is that yes people do indeed vote in line with what’s in their wallets, but we sometimes also vote with our hearts and when that happens all bets are off.
Somebody had better return to voting and getting elected because of the feel the anger and the hearts. So far my welfare benefits not forgetting I got and won my ATOS medical, and yet I lost £47 a week in benefits because I only worked 33 years not forty which was labour idea so I did not work long enough.
As for PIP’s I really have given up on it.
Like Custer this is Blair’s last stand, we were all frightened of losing power to the Tories and remained passive throughout the Blair years, but what we actually found was that Blair and the rest were in fact the enemy within.
They have used the same Neo-Liberal language that Thatcher used, and that is why people today are confused, they know something is drastically wrong but can’t articulate it because of the indoctrination over the last forty years, once they see through the distortion and lies, the real picture opens out before them, this whole game has been the transfer of wealth and power upwards, and TTIP is the culmination of that process, once in place the corporates will have total power.
And yes, it really is that simple.
1997 was not a victory for New Labour per se; the Tories were so utterly contemptible by then that if Labour had stood aside for a coalition of the Natural Law Party, Mebyon Kernow and the Legalise Cannabis Party it would have won the same size of majority. Or bigger.
Alas the size of the win has allowed New Labour and its flag-carriers to claim that its policies had won that election and to repeat it in 2001. Dream on.
Well said.