A most unusual email this afternoon from a very senior Labour figure indeed, whose path mine happens to have crossed from time to time.
I am very bad for letting the Great Unwashed into the secret that Tony Blair and John Smith despised each other, indeed so badly that Blair had been planning to leave Parliament until Smith died. But my real crime is to suggest that, in the event of a war against Iran, we should stop pretending to have Armed Forces of our own, and instead conscript our least accomplished 16-year-old boys directly into the Israeli Defence Force. Apparently, “if the wrong people read that, then it will happen.”
I have had a telephone conversation with this correspondent, and I can assure you that no humour was intended. Recent and ongoing events have begun to reveal just how central Israel has always been to New Labour, and above all to the funding of New Labour. This was not, and is not, about Israeli interference in Britain. Rather, it was, and is, about using Britain as a lever in favour of hardline opinion in Israel, regardless of the views of the people who actually live there. And the means of doing this has been, and remains, cold, hard cash.
Even as much as (and, indeed, closely connected to) the roots of New Labour on the sectarian, Marxist, Labour-hating Left, this is the great untold story of British politics over the last twenty years, a story still being played out across what are now all three New Labour parties.
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If you don't tell us who this person is, nobody will believe you.
ReplyDeleteAre you seriously suggesting that anyone thinks that anyone in the British government would advocate conscripting 16-year-old boys into the IDF?
I mean, really? Really?
I'd never get another story from that person or from any of the rest of them. Why should I?
ReplyDeleteAfter the Iraq War, why be surprised by anything? Prolonged detention without charge, ID cards, control orders... In fact, think of almost ANYTHING from the Blair-Brown years and tell me that you could have made it up 15 years ago.
My very highly-placed source indeed is adamant that this idea would be taken up if read by "the wrong people", as are several others who have been in touch today, on both sides of the Atlantic. The people who read this blog might be few in number, but it seems that they more than make up for it in other ways. I am truly taken aback.