"We deviated a millimetre." Yes, dear. You don't learn, do you? At least no one now has any excuse for failing to appreciate the real roots and the true character of New Labour.
Now that he is no longer anywhere near the running of anything, it is actually quite nice to know that Tony Blair is still as barking mad as ever. It is like knowing that Songs of Praise or Casualty is still on, even if you yourself would never watch it. Blair really, truly, honestly believes that Labour lost the 2010 Election because it was not sufficiently committed to privatisation, warmongering, and the persecution of the old and the sick. Bless.
What does Blair even know about winning elections? After the death of John Smith, those who seized control of the Labour Party erased the fact that the combined Labour and SDP votes had been larger than the Conservative vote both in 1983 and in 1987. Such people still deny outright that the opinion poll rating that was the 1997 result had not varied since Golden Wednesday, 16th September 1992. There were swings of 1997 proportions in the European Elections just after Smith's death, i.e., under the leadership of Margaret Beckett.
Among those of us who have been active in the Labour Party in County Durham, it is common knowledge that Blair had been about to announce his departure from Parliament at the General Election then expected to be called in 1996, but Smith's death changed his mind, at least conditional on his victory in the consequent Leadership Election. In 1992, only the most obsessive political anorak had ever even heard of Tony Blair. And that was still the case on Golden Wednesday, when the Conservative defeat, and thus the Labour "victory" by default, became a done deal. Only in 2005 did Blair finally influence a General Election result at all. Specifically, he lost Labour 100 seats that any other Labour Leader would have saved. Thus he moved from being a mere irrelevance to being a positive liability.
Meanwhile, yet another horrendous health figure for the North East. Not just in health, but across the board, those starry-eyed souls who want David Miliband "because he is a North East MP" need to ask what the hell the last North East MP to be Prime Minister ever did for us. We didn't get 1980s-style boarded up shop fronts when the banks went under. We never stopped having them, including throughout the Premiership of Tony Blair. When is anyone going to start talking about the proposals of Ed Balls on housing? Or of Andy Burnham on tax reform and on care in old age? Or of Diane Abbott on the railways, on civil liberties, and on peace? We live in hope that tonight's Channel Four News will provide such fare for people who are interested in politics, with BBC Two serving up Blair for people who are not.
Still, let him have the last word:
"Of course, I had no knowledge that John would die prematurely. Except that, in a strange way, I began to think he might... I said to (Cherie): 'If John dies, I will be leader, not Gordon. And somehow, I think this will happen. I just think it will.' Is that a premonition? Not in a strict sense; but it was strange all the same. On Saturday afternoon we went to see Schindler's List."
What a weirdo.
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Good to know that you're as still as ahistorical and politically illiterate as ever. Keep it up!
ReplyDeletePS Your last line is very funny, however
"It was common knowledged that Blair had been about to announce his departure in 1996"
ReplyDeleteStaggering, isn't it, that with all the acres of newsprint about him over the last two or three years, let alone when he was PM, that no one else from County Durham Labour party or elsewhere ever mentioned this, isn't it? Can you think of any one reason why people might not have disclosed this, say, in the last few years once he had stood down?
Todd, this is the Last Day of New Labour. We were right all along. It was all true, and it has now all been admitted from the horse's mouth. Deal with it. Except that you can't.
ReplyDeleteWindy, no one ever asks us. If they did, then there there would be no fantasy about a deal at Granita, when we all know for a fact that it was done at County Hall in Durham. Another among the practically endless examples.
The metropolitan media types who get to determine the record either just make it up, or else do so little research as to amount to the same thing.
Really? No one has ever, during the whole time Blair was PM and after, asked various people in the NE what they thought about him or what happened in the past?
ReplyDeleteThat's strange, because I could swear that John Burton was always on the TV talking about Blair, and both Anthony Seldon and John Rentoul's biographies quoted extensively from a wide range of people in the North East Labour movement.
Simply staggering that none of this has ever come our before, as I say.
On Rentoul, at least, see my previous comment. He doesn't yet seem to have turned up on Radio Four today. In hiding along with the rest of them. Today is the day when Blair finally brought it all crashing down around them.
ReplyDeleteSeldon knows what will or won't get published. And John Burton? Amounts to interviewing Blair himself. Well, he was Blair's agent. No one can deny that he was very good at it.
Everyone politically active around here knows about this. We even know who was being lined up for Sedgefield. Anyone who doesn't is manifestly not worth listening to.
Of course we don't discuss these things with London hacks. You shouldn't be discussing this on the Internet, even if the people who taught you the rules did spend the early part of the year on TV atacking the women only shortlist. On TV, how times change. But you still shouldn't be discussing these things on the Internet, you may not be a party member anymore but you will always be family unlike many party members. This is not family behaviour.
ReplyDeleteYou won't be surprised to learn that I did think of that one. But how do you beat people who don't play by the rules; who, not being family, don't know what the rules are? In other words, New Labour.
ReplyDeleteAs you yourself say, look at some of the people who have even appeared on local television, or in one case on The World At One, this year. The very people who taught me the rules no longer feel able to keep them against so ruthless and vicious an enemy, even if they did have the last laugh on the issue in question.
Honestly, some of the comments that people have tried to post on this one. The idea that there is anything that they do not know, or that anything ever happens outside London. I hate to break the news to them, but there is rather a lot, and rather a lot does.
Meanwhile, three cheers for William Hague and Christopher Myers, for pushing the shameless Blair plugs off the top spot. Hague's Revenge? Even if not intentionally.
Interesting that they cannot take issue with anything else in this post. They have to concentrate on something fairly minor because they cannot cope with the idea that they might not have known it already. Everything else that you have written here they did know already, so that cannot say anything against it.
ReplyDeleteLove that about how the only people watching at 7 will be those not interested in politics, those who are will be watching the C4 News leadership debate. Did someone say "the future not the past"?
ReplyDeleteIf I'm still awake after Newsnight and it's not a good Family Guy tonight, then I might watch the repeat. But that will be their second viewing, and they will have recorded it. Sad. Very, very, very sad.
ReplyDeleteYou cannot wait for Channel 4+1 so that you can share the moment by watching Blair when he first goes out?
ReplyDeleteWaterloo Road. New series. Truly a national event that cannot be Sky Plussed.
ReplyDeleteDavid, why are you still obsessed with Blair? I've got news for you: he's not running the country any more. Get over him!
ReplyDeleteSee today's post on Coulson.
ReplyDelete