Tagged with Blairism

What’s love got to do with it? A brief rejoinder to Peter Hyman

Whats-Love-Got-to-Do-With-ItThe Labour right and the Labour left never was one of the great romances. Ever since the couple plighted their troths on 15 February 1906, theirs has always been the very exemplar of loveless marriage.

Little wonder that both partners have been guilty of flirtation – and sometimes adulterous couplings – at repeated intervals, for more than a century.

The right walked out to shack up with the Tories in 1931, and decided to live on its own in 1981, when I guess it ‘needed some space’, as the saying goes. More recently, it has repeatedly been hitting on the Lib Dems. Continue reading →

The Blairite formula is no longer working

Tony Blair and rupert murdochIn 1994 Blair took over the Labour party and made it safe for British capitalism. Which is why so many top companies and banks were content to contribute large sums to the party in order to hedge their bets – they gained whichever party won the elections. Up till now they have dominated the Labour party for the last 20 years. Blair’s abiding legacy, apart from the Iraq war, was to abandon the fundamental principles of the party and to assimilate it instead to the Thatcherite ideology of ‘let the markets rule and the State get out of the way’. When Mrs. Thatcher was later asked what was her greatest achievement, she replied without hesitation: ‘New Labour’. And the Daily Telegraph six months into Blair’s premiership published a half-page photo of Blair standing in front of a large picture of Thatcher in No.10 with the inscription underneath: ‘To Thatcher, a son’. By accommodating the ruling corporate class the Blairites used the Labour party as their avenue to power, and it’s hardly surprising now that they are in such a state of denial and disbelief at their abrupt fall from power over the last month. Continue reading →

British democracy requires a Corbyn victory

440px-Jeremy_CorbynYesterday marked a turning point in the Labour leadership battle.

Neither of the trade unions with a leaning towards the Blairite wing of the party backed Liz Kendall. Community announced that they were backing Yvette Cooper, and Usdaw announced that they were backing Andy Burnham. This follows Kendall’s relatively poor performance in gaining nominations from the parliamentary Labour party, indicating that the reach of the party’s right wing is surprisingly weak.

It is of course wrong to describe Kendall as a “Tory”, and the jibes about “Blairite Taliban” were ill-advised. The party is a broad church, and the strand of liberalism which Kendall represents has a long tradition within the party. As I have written before, it is wrong to compare Blairism with Conservatism. Continue reading →

A response to “I didn’t leave the Labour Party, the Labour Party left me”

Jack Monroe changing partiesI write this, not as a response to Jack Monroe, who announced that she’d left the Labour Party to join the Greens this week, but as a response to the many hundreds of good, socialists activists who have left the Labour Party over the years. It’s not meant as a rebuke, but merely to ask some important questions about their reasoning and our strategy as socialists. Whilst it’s understandable that people who consider themselves socialists have constant battles with their conscience about leaving the Labour Party, we must be careful of the mantra:

I didn’t leave the Labour Party, the Labour Party left me”

Continue reading →

Was Blair the ideological child of Thatcher?

To steal a joke from the late John Sullivan, Tony Blair’s tribute to Baroness Thatcher sounds like a eulogy to John the Baptist from Jesus. However, while it may be difficult for some on the left to accept, particularly those of us who ten years ago were fulminating against the crime of Blair’s war on Iraq, there is a massive difference between these two former Prime Ministers.

Frankly put, Thatcher left Britain a worse, meaner and more dysfunctional society than when she took power; in  contrast Blair made life better for most working people in Britain. The myth that Blairism was a continuation of Thatcherism is not entirely without foundation, but it is also highly misleading. Continue reading →