I hope that all the enthusiasts for the "free" schools policy, the Conservative Party's only one in 2010, are terribly pleased that it is endorsed by Tony Blair in today's Times. But then, like Andrew Lansley's abandoned health policy and like so many other things besides, it was in fact devised by Blair and by David Miliband. They just couldn't get these things past Gordon Brown, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband.
Blair won two General Elections that any Labour Leader would have won and a third at which any viable Opposition would have beaten him. In that last case, he lost Labour 100 seats that anyone else would have kept against the laughable rump of the Tories in 2005, his only ever contribution to the outcome of a General Election.
But no one is allowed to point this out. Hence the headless chicken reaction to the statements of the obvious by Rowan Williams. He has reminded the universally Blairite media that they did not get what they wanted and what they specifically instructed the mere voters to give them: a Cameron overall majority leading to a Cabinet with James Purnell restored to No Work and Hardly Any Pensions, with Andrew Adonis at Education, and with places for Peter Mandelson and Alan Milburn (and also for Stephen Byers, before his bit of trouble), all of which had been publicly announced months before the Election, and none of which would have resulted in any withdrawal of the Labour Whip in the Lords where they would all have sat, since the Leader of the "Opposition" would have been David Miliband, who would also have been an attendee at a Cameron Cabinet and bound by its collective responsibility, as would Tony Blair have been without his even having to have been a member of either House.
Ed Miliband should seize this opportunity and agree wholeheartedly with Dr Williams, thereby breaking once and for all with this wretched little junta as surely as with the closely connected one that we have instead, which, as he rightly points out, is not merely wrong but illegitimate, hence its enthusiastic endorsement by its real head, and now would-be directly "elected President of Europe", Tony Blair.
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You know perfectly well how much you annoy all the right people by pointing this sort of thing out. Keep it up, you are not the last person who remembers how Cameron openly promised Cabinet places to Blair's closest allies when he expected a majority. You are just the last person who still says so in comments on CCHQ's favourite blogs.
ReplyDeleteBetween them the Tories and the Lib Dems got more than half the vote. But neither of their manifestoes was the Orange Book that Cameron and Clegg got down off the shelf and turned into the Coalition Agreement. Nobody voted for that, they have staged a coup. Rowan Williams as a Member of Parliament is absolutely right to point that out and as a jobbing hack so are you. Keep up the fight.