Obsolete

Thursday, September 10, 2015

The road to Jeremy redux.

Flying Rodent has, as so often, expressed it best. If back in 2006, say around the time that Tony Blair was ignoring widespread calls to help push for a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, insistent as he was that the IDF be allowed to further "degrade" a wide swathe of Lebanon, someone had said that 9 years later Jeremy Corbyn would be Labour party leader, you would have laughed. Then laughed some more. Then after distracting this obviously confused individual by pointing in the opposite direction, you would have ran away as quickly as your legs could carry you. The Labour party, led by a serial rebel utterly opposed to liberal interventionism and pretty much everything else New Labour had done? If it wasn't so outlandishly unrealistic as to be almost unimaginable, your first thought would surely be along the lines of what on earth did Labour as a whole do to reach such a position.

Jeremy Corbyn hasn't won yet. He might not win. Who knows, perhaps all the reported missing ballots are part of a last ditch conspiracy at the upper echelons of the party to try to swing it in the direction of the "electable" as opposed to the completely "unelectable". I wouldn't be totally shocked if, despite everything, Andy Burnham manages to grab the leadership on the basis of second or third preferences.

That senior figures seem to be attempting to come to terms with a Corbyn leadership does nonetheless suggest they too expect Corbyn to be declared the winner on Saturday morning. They presumably have some sort of inkling from both the ballots sent in weeks ago and from the online voting system of how the race has shaken out, and acceptance rather than anger now appears to be the emotion setting in. Everyone must accept the result and the mandate given to the new leader, said Liz Kendall today, all but admitting her failure to make headway in the contest.

Trying to put yourself back in the mindset of 2006 as a whole is difficult. I'm sure my 2006 self would have some harsh words for its 2015 version: join the Labour party, even as a registered member? And worse yet, to end up putting Kendall, the most Blairite candidate of the four as first choice, despite not agreeing with half of what she says? Never mind what's happened for Corbyn to be the likely winner, what happened to you?

I changed. I changed because the political surroundings have changed. Labour, meanwhile, has for the most part stood still. Ed Miliband did his best, but he wasn't the right man at the right time. If Miliband served a purpose, it was to paper over the cracks that were there if only more people had wanted to see them. He was just left enough to keep most Labour sympathisers on board, but wasn't right enough to properly enthuse those within the party who were embittered, rightly or wrongly, by first Blair in their eyes being "forced" out, and then Ed's victory over David. Liz Kendall in her speech said there wasn't a proper debate in the 2010 leadership contest because of the Ed-David rivalry, and wasn't afterwards because of wanting to be loyal to the new leader. This is only half true: plenty of those on the right of the party, some overtly, others more stealthily, made clear their antipathy towards Ed and his style repeatedly. There was a "crisis" nearly every summer. The party didn't get rid of Ed, because Labour tends not to get rid of its leaders, but it was obvious that some inside it weren't pulling their weight. Looking back now it's difficult to see how Labour could possibly have won the election, yet if some of those senior figures had made more of an effort, it might not have been such a crushing one. The Tories could have been denied their majority for a start.

Liz Kendall has been good enough to admit, if a little grudgingly, that she was perhaps a little too "blunt" in the aftermath of the election in her diagnosis of why the party lost. Nearer the reality is that some on her wing of the party regarded the defeat as a relief, because it proved them right. Ed Miliband was a loser, his policies were neither one thing nor the other, Labour can only win by triangulating. Anyone thinking otherwise is an idiot. They could be, perhaps are, right. You don't however deal with your upset and bitterly disappointed supporters' depression by crowing about how right you are after such a defeat, by continuing to lecture them on their foolishness, and agreeing wholesale with the analysis of the victorious opponents. That was the first mistake.

The second was, as now pretty much everyone accepts, the welfare vote. Refusing to oppose a bill that as the IFS has just confirmed again will mean those currently eligible for tax credits and other benefits will lose on average £750 a year was suicidal. Forget Osborne's trap, imaginary or not, these are working people having money taken from them to, according to preference, pay to close the deficit caused by the necessity of bailing out the banks, or to allow those with estates worth up to £1 million pass them on entirely tax free. If Labour will not defend the very people it was brought into existence to represent, then those people will find someone who will. With no one else on offer, they decided on Jeremy Corbyn.

In truth these were only the catalysts for what's happened over the past two months. As discussed previously, as long as a political party continues to win and appeal to a big enough slice of the electorate, it can do almost as it feels. Tony Blair proved that, as have the Tories. What you can't do is create a fissure as large as the Iraq war did, continue to rub your supporters' nose in it by doing the opposite of their first instincts, such as with academies, NHS privatisation, civil liberties and so on, and then still lose. To do so once can be forgiven; when it happens again, and the same people carry on with their self-serving, fatuous missives on how right they are and how wrong everyone else has been, you're inviting a rebellion.

Far too late it seems that Liz Kendall and some of the others on the right of the party have partially realised their mistakes. In her speech she contradicts herself repeatedly, can't quite bring herself to admit that if not she personally then some of her biggest supporters only made things worse, but there's the recognition that for all the complaining of how she was caricatured (unfairly) as a Tory, there are good, decent reasons why many of those who have voted Corbyn believe Labour has abandoned its principles. If Corbyn wins, the victory needs to be respected, the people who have joined the party must be engaged with and listened to, the debate started by the campaign must continue, and the fight must now be taken to the Tories.

The problem with that is if as expected Corbyn becomes leader, the fight against him by the Tories and the press will begin in earnest. Thought you'd already seen every piece of dirt that could possibly be used against him? Don't believe it for a second. Every prime minister's questions will include reference to Jez's friends in Hamas and Hezbollah, how he wants to nationalise Marks and Spencer, hand our nuclear weapons straight over to Putin, and reanimate the corpse of Bob Crow. This will only be amplified by just how many within Labour and on the left have denounced Corbyn as a Marxist loon, more pally with Islamists and tyrants than our actual allies. Kendall and others call for the result to be respected, almost for Corbyn to be supported, and then say they couldn't possibly serve under him. When Corbyn has rebelled hundreds of times he perhaps can't expect loyalty in return, and yet what chance does he have if the other leadership contenders, think of them what you like, refuse to do the bare minimum?

Deep down, I think we all know that Corbyn cannot possibly win an election. Everything that was against Ed is against Jeremy doubly so. Then again, no one and I really do mean no one said he could win, let alone would win. No one knows anything. As Janan Ganesh wrote in the FT yesterday, George Osborne might be a strategist, but he has yet to prove he can lead. Against Osborne, the odds change. No one knows what's going to happen next week, let alone in 5 years. Corbyn cannot possibly be as divisive a leader as he has been a candidate; he will reach out across the party, and will appeal in a way that the other three candidates could not. Nothing is set in stone.

Moreover, this rupture had to happen for the good of the Labour party. The debates that Kendall talked about in her speech need to take place, and they would not have done if either Burnham or Cooper had walked to victory as expected. One side, either the left or the right, had to recognise it had things wrong. I would have rather that Kendall had accepted earlier in the campaign what she has now and adjusted her message accordingly, giving her more of a chance, as I still maintain she is the most electable of all the candidates. Corbyn will nevertheless do, as he will have much the same effect. Labour has to decide what it is for in a rapidly changing world, where work seems ever more insecure for ever more people, but also where empathy, solidarity and support for collective policies seems to erode with each passing year. The challenge is not to return to the failures of the past, whether they be the ones of Labour in the 80s, 90s or 2000s, but to bring forward a politics that maintains the party's values in the face of opposition from all sides. Whoever is appointed on Saturday, I can't say I envy them.

Labels: Blairites, election 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leadership contest 2015, Liz Kendall, politics

Share |

9/10/2015 10:25:00 pm | Permalink |

Monday, August 24, 2015

The interminable adventures of a Labour supporter, pt. 1.

There are many ways to spend a weekend. I doubt most people's idea of a good time would be going to see the former frontrunner in the Labour leadership election try his best to persuade other legendarily boring gits to vote for him, but this apparently is my life now as an official Labour supporter™. Or at least it will be until some bright spark connects my real name to this blog, where I have previously said to vote for parties other than Labour, something considered enough to bar you from being a member or supporter, even if you campaigned for the party or said to vote for them this year. With new friends, eh?

Anyway, just a few points:

1. I estimate between 150 to 200 turned up to see Andy Burnham speak and then take questions, certainly more than I expected. Jeremy Corbyn has been filling far bigger places than where we were, getting numbers in the region of 800-1200, but Burnham himself seem pleased with the turnout. Considering where I live is at the best of times devoid of anything approaching culture (the coming attraction at the local theatre is Shrek The Musical) and completely apolitical, I don't think it was bad going. I've been to stand-up gigs where the numbers could be counted on a single pair of hands, if that's a comparable metric. (Yes, yes it is).

2. The only person to mention Jeremy Corbyn was... Andy Burnham. To the point where it almost seemed as though he was the man who couldn't be named.

3. The most intriguing thing Burnham said by far was that if he'd resigned from the shadow cabinet over the welfare bill, he expects he'd probably still be the frontrunner. And indeed, he's almost certainly right to think so. He didn't however because he's never broken the Labour whip, loyalty to the party being far more important than taking personal advantage. Unity is strength, he repeated, a number of times. Apart from being just a word away from one of the key slogans of Ingsoc from 1984, it seemed on a number of levels to be a truly odd line to take and regard as a plus point. There's nothing wrong with resigning over a point of principle, especially when the politics behind the line being pushed are so utterly wrongheaded. Moreover, if Burnham had resigned and gained accolades for doing so, much of the ridiculously damaging in-fighting that has since been conducted over the rise of Corbyn would have been avoided. It seemed like a false line, precisely what the rival campaigns of Cooper and Kendall have accused him repeatedly of adopting.

4. Regardless, Burnham was more impressive than I expected him to be. Yes, he's obviously had a lot of practice in delivering his short speech and in answering questions put to him, but he did so with admirable fluency, taking three questions at a time and answering them in turn, without resorting to cliches, platitudes or padding out his responses. His only real annoying tick was in referring to Cameron and pals more than once as "the Bullingdon boys", which apart from being increasingly old and a bit rich from a Cambridge graduate, hasn't really posed said "Bullingdon boys" much trouble with the voters, has it? Should he come through on second preferences, I'm less concerned than before that he will just be Ed Miliband Mk2.

5. I wasn't though in the slightest bit convinced. On the surface, there's much to like about Burnham: his manifesto is the most detailed apart from Corbyn's, has a good line in creating a National Health and Care Service, funded through a care levy, and behind Kendall would be the candidate the Tories most fear. He seems to be a Thoroughly Good Bloke, certainly less weird or geeky than that loser MIliband, something we're informed voters respect greatly, despite also much liking politicians who are complete dicks.

What he lacks is that ruthlessness Ed did occasionally show; the point I felt like making, but didn't, both because it was more of a statement than a question and although this blog hides it, I'm far more shy and retiring than you might imagine, was that if he had resigned over the welfare vote and hadn't joined in with the others in the aftermath of the election in the accepting everything the Tories, Blairites and right-wing press said about why Labour lost, he might already have it in the bag. He answered a question about conviction from someone who was clearly leaning towards Corbyn by saying that we should look at his role in the Hillsborough inquiry as to how he will challenge vested interests and the right people. This would mean more if it hadn't taken the 20th anniversary memorial at Anfield to spark his determination; the passing of time meant there was little real opposition to taking another look, the Sun having repeatedly tried by that point to apologise, if the police and state were yet to.

Labour needs, deserves better than someone who only acts once the time is right, who only moves once others have done so. Burnham seems the compromise, and despite the party needing to come to a compromise once the leader is elected, doing so over the leader isn't the answer. That said, I would now like to see Liz Kendall speak and answer questions in person, although she seems to have abandoned the pretence of doing much other than TV and radio appearances and calling individual members, for obvious reasons.

6. The only entryist in evidence was a Tory councillor who for reasons known only to himself decided to gatecrash the event and prove he had an even more pathetic existence than the rest of us. His question, when he could have easily made everyone uncomfortable by asking about the deficit or Corbyn, was to ask Burnham why Tony Blair lied over Iraq. Yes, really.

Labels: Andy Burnham, Blairites, election 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leadership contest 2015, Liz Kendall, politics, Yvette Cooper

Share |

8/24/2015 09:25:00 pm | Permalink |

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

"Self-improvement is masturbation. Now, self-destruction?"

(Yeah, I can quote Fight Club as well. Oh, and incidentally Liz Kendall's campaign did get round to emailing me today.)

Of all the ill-judged and misguided interventions in the Labour leadership contest, David Miliband's is without question the most tone deaf. He name checks both Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt, two of the figures who have most helped push party members towards Corbyn with their intemperate outbursts, repeats the nonsense that Labour lost because his brother retreated from the true Blairite way, and then advises that Britain could become an effective one party Conservative state. Well yes, it certainly could if whoever becomes leader follows the D Miliband path of reform, reform, reform. It's either reform or Conservatism, folks, it's simple as that.

Except of course it isn't. To portray Jeremy Corbyn's platform as pure nostalgia, the failed policies of the past, a wholehearted return to the 80s is a caricature and no more comforting for it. Whether you like the idea or not, the Corbyn proposal for people's quantitative easing offers an alternative to austerity that none of the other candidates have come close to matching. Miliband responds to the retaliatory accusations that the other three merely want to reheat what worked in the 90s by claiming nothing could be further the truth, only to produce a list of policies, or rather "ideas" almost indistinguishable from the ones that became increasingly less popular in each successive election. Only the references to secular stagnation and a low-carbon European energy future mask what is an incredibly familiar programme, complete with the same old euphemisms. What else is the reference to "combat humanitarian catastrophe where it occurs" other than a call for more liberal interventionism? Miliband is clearly referring to Syria, rather forgetting that it was our invoking of the responsibility to protect in Libya that has had just a big an impact on the numbers seeking asylum as anything else.

If there's one message that each of the successive figures from the past have wanted to drill into the newly signed up supporters, affiliates and members, it's that Labour has to be a party of government, not protest. And yet the irony is that Jeremy Corbyn has been by the far the most leader-like of all the candidates. He's declined to respond in kind to all the various insults both he and his supporters have received, has repeatedly set out in detail exactly what his policies would entail, in complete difference to the other three, and when confronted with the accusations of being acquainted with antisemites has given straight answers, if not at the first time of asking.

The contrast with Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, who have spent the past day fighting like two tomcats in a sack could not be more stark. Cooper, having seemingly let all the various transfers of allegiance from the those on the right of the party go to her head, demanded that Burnham withdraw both because he clearly can't be trusted to properly oppose Corbyn and only she can possibly win. Considering Cooper's strategy from the outset was to say almost nothing in the slightest bit challenging and in the end triumph on the basis of second preference votes, her extremely late in the day conversion to attacking Corbyn head on is just a little rich. Besides, regardless of Burnham's similar lack of anything remotely approaching conviction, the next leader will need to work not just with the various factions within the party but also with those who have been enthused by Corbyn. To regard him and those who've supported him as beyond the pale completely, as Cooper and Liz Kendall apparently do just isn't going to work. Corbyn probably won't want a shadow cabinet position, but there's no reason why he couldn't play a similar role to the one say Jon Cruddas does currently. He certainly couldn't do any worse, as the latest batch of risible research commissioned by Cruddas shows. Prospectors, pioneers and settlers, fuck me sideways.

As the man formerly known as Anton Vowl tweeted, if we didn't know it before, there are an awful lot of arseholes in the Labour party. Arseholes with remarkably thin skins, it should be added. Some of the same people who have gone around shouting about Marxists, Hezbollah and Hamas lovers, or simply called anyone thinking of voting for Corbyn idiots or in need of a heart transplant are it turns out really quite hurt when they're called Tories by anonymous people on the internet. Liz Kendall took to moaning about this at the weekend, and repeated her message today. To be fair, Kendall has not herself been one of those going around insulting people, even if those who are or at least were supporting her were in the vanguard of doing so. Calling those on the right of the party Tories is not helpful, but nor is it as Kendall claims, an "enormous strategic mistake". An enormous strategic mistake is to carry on acting like spoilt children, spitting out dummies when things don't go your way. For Yvette Cooper's campaign to repeatedly play the sexist card when Burnham's has as far as we know simply been stating the facts as we know them, that she can't win, is exceptionally low politics.

It's also indicative of the hole the "mainstream" of the party has dug itself into. Their hope was to have a simple, straightforward contest where all the candidates agreed with the Tory and right-wing media consensus on why Labour lost, elect whoever emerged on top and go from there. This fell apart not with Corbyn's entry into the contest, but when Harriet Harman declared the party would not oppose the government's welfare bill. Everything that has happened since has its root in that unbelievably damaging capitulation, an act of self-harm from a party leadership that claims it has to be in power in order to protect the vulnerable.

Any doubts about Corbyn, and they are many and myriad, have been overlooked both because of those making them, whether they be the Decents that ignore the realities of the Middle East and cheer lead for Israel regardless of how it acts and who have been making the same hysterical arguments for years, the ex-party figures that have simply lost any influence they once had, or down to how the other three candidates are just so woefully lacking in every regard. Rather than accept they might have made any mistakes, their reaction has been to turn on each other, to the point where it looks as though regardless of who wins, the first task will be to rebuild trust and relationships that should never have broken down in the first place. Rather than welcome new members the major response has been to treat them with suspicion if not outright contempt. Rather than work with whoever the new leader is, many have said they will refuse to serve under one person or another, while others are plotting practically in the open.

The reason the Conservatives as a party have barely bothered to comment on the woe of their rival is they don't need to. Labour's self-destruction these past few weeks has been completely unnecessary and all the more damaging for it. Nothing makes a party look less electable or serious than the recriminations that probably haven't as much as started yet. Absolutely nothing I've seen or heard, regardless of all the entreaties and pleas has made me alter my view that the party needs either Jeremy Corbyn or Liz Kendall to win, if only so that all the bad blood can be purged in one go, however it is that turns out. If it means a split in the party, frankly so be it. The quicker the left gets itself organised the better. This didn't have to happen, but now that it has it might as well come to a conclusive end. Voting for either Cooper or Burnham is only going to prolong the agony.

Labels: Andy Burnham, Blairites, election 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leadership contest 2015, Liz Kendall, politics, Yvette Cooper

Share |

8/18/2015 11:15:00 pm | Permalink |

Thursday, August 13, 2015

The road to Jeremy.

"There is something fascinating about watching a party wrestle with its soul." So goes Tony Blair's explanation as to why Jeremy Corbyn's campaign has "sparked interest". What Blair really thinks is far clearer: this isn't just people rubbernecking, who don't want to look at an accident but can't find the willpower not to, but the actions of those whose first instinct is to reach for their smartphone and "join in". To Blair and the still true believing Blairites, Corbyn doesn't so much as offer creative destruction, but just destruction: everything they achieved is under threat. To them, the reason Labour lost the last two elections is because Gordon and Ed abandoned their "values", didn't remain that "radical centre". Everything else that's happened since Blair stepped down is irrelevant.

As has already been pointed out approximately 392 million times, the lack of self-awareness is quite extraordinary. It doesn't seem to occur to Blair that perhaps, just perhaps, the decisions he took while leader might have something to do with Labour's predicament now. For argument's sake, let's dispense with the Iraq war, the way you can only push a party around for so long by arguing the only way to win is through triangulation, with the constant taking on of your own backbenchers, and accept the Blair argument that while not perfect, he left the party in a good shape.

The fact is he didn't. The TB-GBs, the infighting, the broken promises, they left a party that while never united in its history, and has as the left is wont to do, often accused its leaders of selling out, substantially weakened. Moreover, Blair and Brown had dominated the party for so long that once the pair themselves were out of the way, it left the crop of leadership candidates we saw in 2010 to pick up the pieces. The Blairites had always thought themselves far more talented than they were in actuality, as could not be more evidenced by Hazel Blears and John Reid to name but the two most egregious examples. Not that Brown's acolytes were much better on the whole, but give me Ed Balls over almost any of the now vastly diminished gang of Blair groupies any day. Brown's election or rather ascension was swiftly followed by the spitting out of the dummy by such leading lights as James Purnell, now of course of the BBC. Fact was that Labour was doomed by the crash, anyway; how different things might have been had Brown had the courage to call that early election, and ignore the polls suggesting he would only scrape back in.

This process was then repeated following Ed Miliband's election. It was David's birthright! Ed stabbed him in the back! Ed's a hopeless loser! And who knows, maybe, just maybe a David Miliband-led party would have performed slightly better. Rather than wait for a second opportunity though, or hell, even stop sulking and do his darnedest to help his brother out, Dave fucked off to New York, and with him went the Blairites' last realistic hope. Leaving who? Chuka Umunna, who couldn't so much as handle the slightest amount of press intrusion that Ed dealt with and fought back against from the start? Liz Kendall, who bless her is trying but hasn't worked out you can't just deliver insults and lectures and expect a depressed yet still hopeful party will snap back into line? Rachel Reeves, who makes Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson look interesting, and in any case has now hitched her wagon to the Burnham train? Speaking of whom, isn't it indicative that excluding Corbyn, the two other candidates either ran previously and came second from last, or are the partner of someone also rejected? Isn't that perhaps an insight into just why someone as unelectable, as backwards, as old school as Corbyn has reached the parts they haven't?

No, it's not their fault. At the very heart of the modern Labour party is a contradiction: it claims to be the people's party, to represent those from all walks of life, and yet when those very same people decide they would like to vote for the next leader, the reaction is one of horror and paranoia. It surely ought to occur that only a tiny number of the 121,000 who have registered as supporters can be Trots or Tories, and that for a party that lost so badly to have signed up that number in such a short space of time, not to include those who've done so through their union, is something really quite special. To end up with an electorate of over 600,000 gives the lie to the idea that mass party membership isn't possible in the 21st century. It ought to be embraced, celebrated. The number will without doubt fall back significantly, but it still means that a huge number of people in this country are looking to the Labour party, not to any other organisation, grouplet or flash in the pan activist group to lead the opposition to the Conservatives.

And yet to Blair and indeed the other three candidates this feat apparently equals annihilation. It would of course be wrong to extrapolate from the mass sign up that the country at large is crying out for an alternative; if it were, more would have voted for Ed. It hardly though suggests Labour is anywhere near finished, unless that is Labour itself it is out of pure spite. The situation reminds of fans of a band that stop liking their previously favourite group once it hits the mainstream, regardless of whether or not they adapted themselves to do so. When Labour had the 400,000 or so members it did at the height of Blairism, that was great, fantastic. When they sign up to vote Corbyn, although that again is to surmise, the sky is about to fall.

As is no doubt clear by my fluttering of eyelashes in the direction of Kendall, I'm not Corbyn's biggest fan. There's nothing spectacularly wrong with any of his policies, but then neither is there anything spectacularly right with them, or rather there's no reason why they should be priorities. I quite like the idea of renationalising the railways by taking them back into state control as the current franchises expire, but when like it or not money is so tight should it be a leading pledge? The same goes for abolishing tuition fees, which again is a wonderful, progressive policy, just one that perplexes me by how it continues to be proposed when we know just how screwed any party will be that fails to live up to the promise. Compare them though with what's on offer from the other three, with only Kendall offering substantially anything different, and nearly always for the worse, and it's little wonder why a left-wing party has decided that if it's going to lose, it might as well lose by being genuinely left-wing. Why carry on waltzing into George Osborne's bear traps if it won't alter the end result?

This is to fall into the belief that Corbyn is completely unelectable, admittedly. A lot can happen in 5 years, and Blair's line in his article that the public would turn on the party for its self-indulgence is nonsense. A Corbyn led Labour party would be many things, but not providing active opposition is hardly something it could be accused of. The obsession with being a party of government at all times, when Labour cannot be a party of government unless the Tories lose their slight majority for 5 years is completely bizarre. There is not the slightest recognition that Labour's victory in 2005 with 35% of the vote was no more sustainable than Tories' win with 36% this time will be. Ed Miliband won more votes in England than Blair did in 2005, it should be pointed out.

The last roll of the dice it seems is to Yvette Cooper. Liz Kendall is too far behind, Andy Burnham can't be trusted as far as he can be thrown, so it falls to the candidate that has said the least, has the least personality and hoped to swing it on the basis of 2nd choice votes from Corbyn supporters to carry the banner of the sensible. Considering just how boring David Cameron is, in some ways Cooper would certainly be a worthy competitor: if that's what the British public likes most about their leaders at this point in history, then carry on. According to the Graun though the next leader must take on "the desiccated condition of the Labour establishment", the same Labour establishment that Cooper has finally embraced with her attack on Corbyn. I can't help but think that either Burnham or Kendall would be more capable of that task, of "harnessing young people's passion", and am frankly bemused by the sudden upswing in support for someone who has always seemed up to now an also-ran, achieving high office without ever having done anything to distinguish themselves. Which might just have something to do with it.

In any case, you suspect it's all been left too late. Rather than try and engage Corbyn supporters as soon as it became clear he was making headway, the approach has been to either insult him or them, or hope that by sort of agreeing with him while also sort of not that everyone would see how radical and sensible they were at the same time. As ought to have been lesson from the Lib Dem collapse, from the nigh on 4 million votes for UKIP, it doesn't work like that anymore. Nor are they going to take of notice of those who claim that political parochialism is a result of the crash, rather than the foreign policy disasters supported by the same people who keep on saying no you can't, and who then go on to quote the Hamas charter as to why Jeremy Corbyn while not personally an anti-semite, does stand in close proximity to them. A Corbyn leadership might not last long, it probably won't trouble the Tories in the slightest, but Labour had better started getting used to the idea sharpish. Hell, it could even look at precisely how it got here, take some responsibility, and make the best of it.

Yeah, right.

Labels: Blairites, election 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leadership contest 2015, Liz Kendall, politics, Tony Blair

Share |

8/13/2015 10:41:00 pm | Permalink |

Monday, February 03, 2014

The Gove legacy juggernaut.

There's an awful of lot of wood being missed due to all the trees in the way over the sacking of Sally Morgan from her position as chair of Ofsted. First off, it's a rare government that doesn't ensure its supporters are ensconced in suitable position at the major quangos. Second, despite the claims this is just the latest in a series of non-Tories being defenestrated in favour of true blues, the evidence is far from clear cut. Third, the idea that the chair of Ofsted is in any sense as important as that of the chief inspector of schools in nonsense. Drawing far less attention last week was chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw's complaint that Michael Gove's minions were lining up to attack Ofsted as a whole, even if he later declared himself satisfied with Gove's insistence he was not behind the briefings.

The real issue of importance here that has been somewhat if not entirely lost is that it's just the latest sign of the Tories both looking for some sort of legacy should they be only a one-term government, and their continuing shift to the right. When they first came in, the Tories were keen to give jobs to Blairites, obviously those that could be trusted to come up with policies that were compatible were their own ideas, but Labour politicians all the same. None have exactly fared brilliantly: both Alan Milburn and Frank Field have seen their respective reports all but ignored, while those other luvvies on quangos such as Liz Forgan and Suzi Leather, both loathed by the Daily Mail, have lost their jobs. Not that they're keen on Forgan's replacement, Peter Bazalgette, the man we have to thank for giving us Big Brother, either. One man the Tories haven't managed to dislodge is Ed Richards from Ofcom, probably only thanks to the emergence of the phone hacking scandal and how Cameron had once seemed ready to get rid of the regulator the Murdoch papers loathed so intensely.

Gove it shouldn't be forgotten was the ultimate Tory Blair groupie. Once the Tories seemed to want to take all the lessons from Blair's memoir and act upon them; now they're happy to throw one of Blair's enforcers out after a mere three years in place. You do also have to wonder if the reasoning might have been even more prosaic: it must have been embarrassing for Morgan to often be on Newsnight's party political panel alongside Danny Finkelstein, the recently ennobled pal of George Osborne.

Frankly then, who knows whether Morgan's unceremonious dumping was a request from Number 10 or the work of Gove. One suspects it was the latter, if only because Gove seems determined that his works will be despaired over for years to come. Apparently completely unconcerned over the highly public failings of a couple of his pet free schools project, he seems to just want as many in place in time for the election lest he find himself on the opposition benches. Hence why Ofsted is in the firing line, and why those who he previously wooed are now dispensable in case they object to his plans. Breaking down the "Berlin Wall" between private and public? Exactly how many private schools have unqualified teachers working in them, one wonders? Gove's prescription is more testing, more making schools like prisons and more partisanship for the sake of it. Anyone who stands in the way is destined to get run down by his out of control juggernaut, regardless of who they are.

Labels: Blairites, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, education, Michael Gove, Ofsted, politics, Sally Morgan

Share |

2/03/2014 07:04:00 pm | Permalink |

Monday, August 13, 2012

Reality bites.

Well, the less said about the closing ceremony the better, yes? There are after all enough innate contradictions in Jessie J's Price Tag dirge without her arriving to sing it in the back of a Rolls-Royce, in surroundings which confirm that err, yes, it really is all about the money.

Musical apocalypse aside, even a hardened pessimist such as myself has to admit the last two and a bit weeks have been both a success and thoroughly enjoyable. Despite the media's overwhelming positivity though, the Graun's poll on whether it was all worth it is hardly as conclusive as portrayed; 55% compared to 35% thinking it was is a percentage that will soon fall if, as expected the Olympics hasn't done as much for the economy as the coalition insisted it would. The far from universal euphoria will soon fizzle out (And check also the depressing numbers that, while supporting multiculturalism, still think that immigrants don't bring anything positive).

Some of the waste involved has been obscene, none more so than the ridiculous levels of security. According to the police up until Friday they had made a grand total of just less than 250 arrests, the vast majority of which were for ticket touting. Would a minister now like to remind us just why there was a need to put missile silos on the top of blocks of flats, or indeed why we had to have the Zil lanes that went almost completely unused? There was also no need whatsoever to close off vast swathes of land surrounding the areas where the events where being held, but such were the restrictions we were told were necessary.

As should now be obvious, the only thing the Olympics is really about is the sport. If they provide something resembling a legacy to deprived parts of London then that's a bonus. Instead, apart from the left over buildings and arenas, the one other likely to remain is yet another poxy unneeded shopping mall. Much of the responsibility for this does have to be levelled at the Blairites who convinced themselves the Olympics was just what London needed, and whom inevitably fell completely for the commercialisation of everything. Remember Tessa Jowell introducing the horrid logo, informing us all that this was a "iconic brand"? Everything followed on from there, and if we needed any further confirmation then the "VISA party" to mark the closing of the Beijing Olympics provided it.

Considering those involved in the planning then, that everything went almost entirely smoothly barring a few minor hiccups to begin with was a bonus. A successful games wasn't enough though, 65 medals for "Team GB" or not. Heaven forfend that everything built specially for the games should then be handed over to local communities to enjoy and run, as that would just be a waste. Hence the early sale of the Olympic village to the Qataris, and more is likely to follow. When David Cameron sets a ludicrous target of bringing in £1bn in investment, he sets himself up to fail. Everyone enjoys a change for a couple of weeks, being in a different city that bends over backwards to welcome the foreign guests and athletes, and then they move on to the next one. This is what the modern Olympics is about, as Sydney, Athens and Beijing have demonstrated. Rather than indulging in fantasies, we could have been realistic. For all the excitement and achievements of all and sundry, it's now back to earth with a bump. Still, hows about Jess Ennis, Mo Farah and Usain Bolt, eh?

Labels: Blairites, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, cynicism, London, London 2012, Olympics, politics, sport, Tessa Jowell

Share |

8/13/2012 12:44:00 pm | Permalink |

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Facing up to the same old reality.

There appears to be a quarterly cycle in how the media report the progress of Labour under Ed Miliband. With the exception, predictably, of the Graun and Mirror, Ed's conference speech was almost universally derided by the press. Business itself, ignoring the always open mouth of Digby "the biggest bore in the world" Jones, was strangely muted in response, perhaps realising that a change was in the air. So it has come to pass: having accused Miliband of being anti-business for daring to suggest that some firms act akin to vampire squids, David Cameron and Nick Clegg have since leapt on to remarkably similar territory. Cameron's proposal that shareholder votes on executive remuneration be binding might not amount to much when hardly any ultimately reject what the boards propose to pay themselves, but it's reminiscent of the old tactic, much used by both the Tories and Labour of stealing policies first floated by the Liberal Democrats. Having first proposed them, the third party duly received none of the credit once they'd been nicked.

Now it's poor Ed that's left murmuring of how the older boys have pinched his toys. The vast majority of the media, having dismissed the idea that our politicians would ever dream of suggesting that the last 30 years of neo-liberal capitalism might not have in the long run benefited society as a whole, has also not changed its tune. Just as Miliband should be recognised as having succeeded in pushing the debate towards the left, as he also did (somewhat) through his championing of the still undefined "squeezed middle", we're once again going through the beginning of the month questioning of whether he's up to the job. He's not connecting with the voters, he's not capitalising on the coalition's official policy of destroying the economy, he's making typos in his tweets, and, most seriously of all, he's just not very attractive. The only pandas the public deem lovable are those behind railings in Edinburgh Zoo; the one leading the Labour party is simply unelectable.

It really is incredibly lazy, tiresome stuff, but it's what we've come to expect from the right-wing press. The tabloids have always tried to tear apart opposition Labour leaders; Tony Blair was the exception, and he was given a soft ride only due to how hopeless it had been decided John Major was. More to the point, Miliband still has incorrigible Blairites on his back, convinced that if only Brown had been overthrown the party would still be in power, or failing that miracle, are also unshakeable in their belief that if Ed hadn't shafted his brother Labour would now be 20 points ahead in the opinion polls. Their remedy, or at least the remedy of Dan Hodges, to do the Blairites generally a major disservice by suggesting his views are the same as theirs, is to be to the right of the coalition on everything: more hawkish on the deficit, harsher on welfare recipients, even more vicious on law and order. Hell, go the whole way: string up a banker or two and then, to balance it out, carpet bomb a sink estate. Try to follow that, David Cameron.

We should then be concerned when Hodges, albeit guardedly, welcomes anything Miliband announces. With the media having placed today's speech from Ed in almost the same "make or break" category as that of a football manager threatened with the sack, his big new direction on the deficit to be set out, it was always likely to be a damp squib. Labour's policy on the deficit, so critiqued and ridiculed by those who think it's the party's unreliability on the economy that is preventing them from making a significant breakthrough against the coalition, is difficult precisely because it depends on exactly how successful the government is in bringing it down. Osborne is now reducing it less quickly than Alistair Darling projected he would, and a double-dip recession will only exacerbate the differences. All Miliband has done today when you boil the speech down to its bare bones is admit that there will still be a deficit whoever wins the 2015 election.

Despite Hodges' tempered enthusiasm, this hasn't altered actual policy one jot. Yes, he's admitted that there won't be the money to return to "social democracy v2" as Peter Kellner has described it, but there's also no real detail on where further cuts might have to be made. The Miliband and Balls approach of criticising cuts while not explaining what they would do differently will then continue, the same one so bemoaned by those convinced it means the party has no chance of winning in 2015. At the same time, for those of us who don't think the public will still be entirely monomanical about the deficit come the next election, there was very little here to encourage us that Miliband can build on his initial push against unreformed capitalism. He talks as leaders must about fairness but only uses the word equality with in on the front of it, and that's to describe how the last government failed to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Some of the policies he did suggest could turn out to be harmful: quarterly reporting by businesses may encourage short-termism, but it also provides an insight into those that are failing due to poor management. Why also should it only be the over-75s that must be placed on the lowest tariffs by energy firms, and how indeed would that work in practice? The very policy that would make a huge difference, the living wage, was the one that he skirted around.

Thankfully, contrary to popular belief, Miliband still has plenty of time to get all of this right. David Cameron's EU treaty veto fiasco showed that barring a calamity, such as war with Iran, the coalition is bound together far more strongly than many of us believed. Should there be another recession, the idea that this is all Labour's fault will wear ever more thin. With three years still to go, as long as Ed continues to raise his game (ugh), the prevailing attitude towards him and at the same time Cameron and Osborne will begin to shift. Perhaps with time these media-led wobbles might then be reduced to mere yearly occurrences.

Labels: Blairites, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Labour, politics

Share |

1/10/2012 05:26:00 pm | Permalink |

Monday, January 17, 2011

Thatcherism, Blairism, Blameronism?

There's something seriously odd about the Conservative half of this government. British politics ever since the breakdown of the post-war, nominally social democratic, one nation consensus has been dominated by two all but interlocking personalities and philosophies: Thatcherism and Blairism, to the extent that both overwhelmed their successors. If the pattern is to continue, then Cameron has to start setting out his own related, but still distinct brand of governance.

While it isn't so strange that Cameron has shown no signs of beginning to do so, what is unique is that he's so clearly wedded to continuing and building on the public service reforms started by Blair and in their view, frustrated by "vested interests", for which read trade unions, never the public sector workers which make up those organisations, and Gordon Brown. Even taking into account the seven year gap between Thatcher and Blair, it would have been electoral and political suicide for him to openly state his allegiance to her methods of doing things. Cameron today did the diametric opposite: he name-checked Blair twice, said he had read his "intriguing" memoir and made clear the lesson he had drawn was that he needed to act both quickly and forcefully in pushing through reform.

To be sure, this isn't the first time it's been apparent just how closely the Cameron set has been following the Blairite book of politics. The child benefit cut was arguably an attempt at playing the party off to the benefit of the leader, although one which was flawed. Michael Gove has also long made clear his, as far as we know, unrequited lust for Blair. Never before though has Cameron been so completely transparent in where his inspiration and influence is coming from, not from past Conservative heroes, but from the most successful "Labour" leader of all time, at least in terms of winning elections. His entire speech today could have conceivably been given by Blair at any point during his first term; while it lacks his trademark verb-less sentences and other ticks, it makes up for it in the sheer belief which to the cynical looks like rank insincerity and to seemingly everyone else as evidence of the passion it requires to change obdurate and unyielding bureaucracies. He even uses the term globalisation to describe the pressures facing the British economy, a neologism which has somewhat fallen out of favour over the last few years.

Cameron's trick to define him and the coalition as different is to compare and contrast the approaches of the last Conservative and Labour governments, without doing so terribly accurately. He stereotypes Thatcher and Major as introducing choice and competition to public services without respecting their ethos, while Blair and Brown overemphasised the state and relied on bureaucracy and targets for their improvements. Naturally this leaves Cameron to insert his pet "big society" into the middle, a concept now so voluminous as to encompass private sector providers of healthcare within it. This is nothing more than cover for the extension of Blairite policies without New Labour's way of measuring their effectiveness - the targets which in healthcare the coalition has already gone some way towards abolishing. New initiatives meanwhile, such as Gove's oxymoronic English baccalaureate, have been imposed with the same level of contempt and lack of warning which characterised the worst Blairite interventions in policy.

The key difference is that Blair's reforms took place as spending was inexorably rising - now Cameron is proposing to do even more just as austerity bites, indeed even claiming that he will be focused on getting more for less in our public services. That old impossibility is already becoming a reality in those NHS trusts which are banning operations they can't afford to perform, something that goes unmentioned underneath the rhetoric of liberation for the workers and competition for the companies who have long wanted to get a slice of the NHS pie. Cameron's evidence of how everyone wants this is just as weak as Blair's ever was: it's not exactly surprising that high-performing schools have signed up for the increased freedoms of the academy system when it was originally designed to turned failing schools around, nor is it overwhelming that so many GPs have already organised themselves into consortia when if they don't the government will do it for them in a couple of years' time.

Also missing, even if Cameron refers to the coalition six times, is any real mention of the Liberal Democrats. Vince Cable referred to some of the proposed reforms in his unofficial interview with the Telegraph "as a kind of Maoist revolution ... they haven't thought them through ... [W]e should be putting a brake on it." Even if there aren't immediate signs of more mass mutinies such as the one over tuition fees in the offing, it's clear the party has far less electoral authority than the Conservatives with which to introduce such dramatic reforms; their manifesto was vague or opposed across the board to such measures. Nothing however quite equals the chutzpah of Cameron, trying to avoid recognising the coalition has broken their promise on top-down reorganisations of the health service, claiming that turning commissioning over to GPs is in fact a reform from the bottom-up. It was enough to wonder whether he had been given verbal diarrhoea due to a doctor somewhere similarly confusing which end to put the suppository in.

There is one thing that Cameron and his cohort of Blair fanciers haven't factored in, just as Blair himself didn't, and that's the public themselves. No amount of persuasion is going to convince some that these reforms are about people's lives, rather than the ideology or theory, and should they go as wrong as Iraq did then the fallout will be even more far reaching. It took seven years before Blair's certainty, messianic tendencies and ever more ridiculous rhetorical flights of fancy began to bring him down. Cameron seems prepared to emulate just those mistakes in record time.

Labels: Blairites, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, David Cameron, Michael Gove, NHS, politics, the new Blairites

Share |

1/17/2011 10:46:00 pm | Permalink |

Monday, October 11, 2010

Jonathan Powell and the Machiavellian memoirs.

With the political coffee table already buckling under the weight of New Labour memoirs, the market all but saturated even before Gordon Brown and his few allies add to the all but unreadable pile, it's little wonder that the hangers-on and those behind the scenes are already embellishing their accounts with additional asides and analysis in a probably futile attempt to stand them out from the crowd. With Jonathan Powell, former chief adviser to Tony Blair, having already written a worthy if almost certainly little sold account of the Northern Ireland peace talks, his wheeze has been to cast a Machiavellian eye over his time spent in and around Downing Street.

Blair, unsurprisingly, comes out of this test well, his only real failing being that he wasn't as ruthless as Machiavelli advised when it came to dealing with a potential rival. It wasn't weakness on his part, Powell believes, merely a refusal to deal harshly with an old friend. The rival by contrast, despite his achievement in eventually forcing the prince to abdicate, was weak on exactly the things he needed to be strong on. As an addition to the analysis from figures associated with the last government as to why the party lost the election, it's certainly both more interesting and based in reality than Blair's own view that Brown lost thanks to his abandonment of "New Labour values". It is however just as lacking: while Powell recognises that the TB-GBs were far more complicated than many accounts have portrayed them, admitting that if Blair had sacked Brown he would be ridding the government of the other major talent within it and risk creating a concentrated opposition on the backbenches, even he still doesn't find that Blair and Brown, arguments and fighting aside, were better together than individually. Blair without Brown may well have in fact been brought down sooner, while Brown failed more than anything because he couldn't the party beyond New Labour, not because he repudiated its values as the Blairite thesis has it.

Away from the musing, Powell's account, especially of the last couple of years of Blair's time as prime minister strikes as being just as deluded as his master had become by that point. Having written earlier on of how Gordon Brown avoided responsibility, supposedly originating in strictness of his parents, it's interesting to note how Powell tries to blame the military for the Afghanistan deployment to Helmand in 2006, having lobbied for troops to be sent there in "strength", while poor Tony and then defence secretary John Reid were "reluctant". Powell tries to convince us that no prime minister "enjoys" going to war, in spite of media consensus, yet if Blair ever was reluctant about sending in the troops he certainly never let it show, although perhaps that's just another example of his taking Machiavellian advice on board.

Just as instructive is the reaction to General Richard Dannatt's outburst on the army's deployment in Basra, as detailed at length by Powell. To those outside the Blair circle it was little more than a statement of the obvious: that the army had took part in a war of aggression and that their presence in Basra was making things worse. He was right then and he's still right now: they had lost the city, unable to enforce order without using overwhelming force which would have been wholly counter-productive, and were simply acting as a lightning rod for insurgents. This was again though in the Powell Machiavellian analysis a signal of weakness, one which supposedly had the Mahdi army redoubling their efforts, while Nato and everyone else complained about Dannatt undermining morale. It didn't help the troops, and expanding the fallout even further, Blair and Powell both claim that such observations don't just threaten first-division army deployments, they threaten our very status as a country as we step back from putting troops in harm's way. That Powell believes military escapades define us as a nation in the 21st century is damning enough; that he doesn't know when we should either admit defeat or know when to pull back is far worse. To add to the projection, Dannatt is described without irony by Powell as being "divinely convinced of his own rightness". Completely unlike Powell's master then.

This hysterical view of the slightest criticism and its potential consequences was not just limited to Blair and Powell, but also to another adviser, Nigel Sheinwald, as the "al-Jazeera memo" trial showed when he claimed that its release would have "put lives at risk". It also extended to the belief that even when wielding such power, it was others who were so often out of line, such as the police during the "loans for peerages" scandal. Lord Levy, can you believe it, was only informed the night before that he was to be arrested the following day, while Ruth Turner was subjected to arrest in the early morning. They were, in other words, treated exactly like anyone else suspected of a serious crime would be, yet this was little short of an outrage. Worth quoting in full is Powell's view of the position the police were in:

The problem at the core of the whole fiasco was that the police had got themselves in too deep to be able to retreat with dignity. The more they dug themselves a hole, the more they were determined to turn something up.

Remind you of anyone or anything? Powell paints an image of a Blair administration that felt it was essentially above the law, yet which at the same time also saw itself as hemmed in by enemies who threatened everything regardless of their weakness or righteousness. Unable to see parallels, or rather, refusing to see them, it's difficult to come to any other conclusion than if hadn't been for the transition of power, Blair and his aides would have eventually collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. Instead, set free and remunerated for their observances, they've been able to carry on believing they were right and everyone else was wrong, challenged even less than they were then.

Labels: Blairites, books, Gordon Brown, Jonathan Powell, New Labour, politics, Tony Blair

Share |

10/11/2010 10:43:00 pm | Permalink |

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

The true meaning of Blairism.

For those still wavering over who to support for Labour leader, you could do worse than take a second to listen to the poison Peter Mandelson has been spitting about Ed Miliband:

In his most direct attack on the younger Miliband brother, the former business secretary mocked him for distancing himself from a work he produced.
"Nobody else authored the manifesto," Mandelson told Radio 4. "It was done by Gordon and Ed."
The ex-business secretary said the manifesto was designed to appeal to readers of the Guardian and "offered nothing to people worried about immigration, housing and welfare scroungers".
He described the document as "a lowest common denominator manifesto, a crowd-pleasing Guardianista manifesto that completely passed by that vast swath of the population who weren't natural Labour voters".

Mandelson at the time described the manifesto as "Blairplus", which presumably was a compliment, even though Ed Miliband quite reasonably said he didn't understand exactly what Mandelson meant. It does however say something about just how deranged the Blairites have become that they could possibly portray the dour, timid and pessimistic document produced by Ed and Gordon as anything even close to "Guardianista pleasing". While it might not have said much to those worried about immigration, housing and welfare scroungers, it did imply that crime and immigration were all but the same subject, marrying them into one section, not the most liberal-leftie pleasing of decisions, as well as not using the word liberty once, and only mentioning civil liberties to hilariously claim to be proud of their record in maintaining them (surely destroying them?).

All this time I think we've been underestimating exactly what Blairism is. While it certainly isn't as encompassing and defining a political orthodoxy as Thatcherism has become, we can't really continue to deride it as being either meaningless or not an ideology at all. Blair's recent diagnosis of why Labour lost, along with Mandelson's continued interventions to fight back against even the slightest deviation from the New Labour line show that even when it ought to be in terminal decline as it's clearly failed to change with the times it remains a distinct if small school of thought within not just Labour, but also within the Conservatives, with whom Blair and Mandelson's real support ought to be based on their views. Blairism, in short, puts the creation of wealth, or the possibility of creating it before everything else. As long as the potential was there to get incredibly rich, and this potential was open to the middle classes, everything else followed. Hence Blair's derision for how Brown introduced the 50p tax on those earning over £150,000, and also for his "identifying banks as the malfeasants" of the economic crisis, as if they somehow weren't. That's the other aspect of Blairism: ignoring what is staring you in the face. For the incredible political vision Blair is meant to have shown, he and Mandelson could also be complete dunderheads, and it's only now that just how incredibly ignorant and stupid they are is becoming clear. Should Ed Miliband or someone other than his brother become leader, we'll soon get to experience just how petulant the Blairites can be.

Labels: Blairites, Ed Miliband, Labour leadership contest 2010, Peter Mandelson, politics, the new Blairites, Tony Blair

Share |

9/21/2010 10:38:00 pm | Permalink |

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

A journey into his own eternal self-righteousness.

(Credit: Beau Bo D'Or)

If you're looking for something approaching a revelatory moment in A Journey, one of the very few to judge by the summaries and quoted extracts, it's probably in the part where Blair admits to asking Alex Ferguson what he'd do if his best player wouldn't do what he wanted him to and just did his own thing. In effect, this was the equivalent of asking himself what to do - not because Ferguson and Blair are in any way similar in style, but due to the qualities they share. Both could be described as great leaders, at being able to inspire when they need to - yet they also have substantial character flaws. Neither could ever find themselves imagining that they'd done something wrong, at least not something deadly serious; both are completely convinced of their own infallibility; and both are incredibly indulged by the media. The difference perhaps is that Ferguson has never been prepared to be overshadowed by anyone - hence why David Beckham was sent on his way. When it came to Gordon Brown, as Ferguson himself advised, it was impossible to get rid of him in a similar way as he was still going to be in the "dressing room".

Instead then, Blair's waited until now to finally give Gordon a kicking, and it really wasn't worth the wait. All we get is a repeat of the old slurs - no emotional intelligence, strange, a disaster which was foreseen yet allowed to take its course. Sort of the opposite of Iraq, in the latter instance, a "nightmare" which Blair didn't see coming and which was most certainly of his choosing. There's the nonsense as well, such as Blair's claim that it was he who thought up the independence of the Bank of England, not Brown as every other source in history has it. One wonders whether he'll later claim he was the one who came up with the "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" soundbite, another Brown creation, although one which Blair became famous for. Even the supposed shocking treachery of Brown is pretty feeble - threatening an inquiry into the loans for peerages scandal if Blair implemented the Adair Turner review on pensions. History, you suspect, might well judge Brown to be in the right on that one. The response from the Brown camp, or at least what remains of his supporters, described as being akin to a cult by Blair, which is a really quite astounding example of projection, has been remarkable in its reticence, amounting to Michael Dugher saying Blair's portrayal of Brown was unfair and unkind. If we were to believe everything else we've been told about Brown, he's probably chewing the carpet and throwing around the crockery up in Kirkcaldy in inarticulate frothing frustration as I write this.

The really, saddening, maddening, infuriating thing which his memoir most underlines is that beyond the few obviously false parts he seemingly felt he had to invent, such as his "premonition" of John Smith's death and his advice to Diana that Dodi was a wrong'un, is just how brilliant a politician Blair both was and still is. For all those now pointing out that he lost 4 million votes during his tenure as a response to his diagnosis as to why Labour lost, which I'll come to, he still won 3 elections, even if the last was just as much Brown's victory as it was Blair's. It's that this brilliant politician, had he truly been Labour, could have achieved so much in that time period, or at least so much more than he did. New Labour's real victory always has been, and remains, moving the country forward socially and ever so slightly marginally to the left politically, delivering a minimum wage and civil partnerships. If he had dedicated his energy to attempting to improve social mobility and life chances, displaying the same vigour as when he drove through public service reform and overcame all opposition to taking part in the invasion of Iraq, then much more could have been added to both his own and Labour's legacy.

The problem became, as John Harris has diagnosed, that Blair's belief in the virtues of New Labour as an ideology, if it can be regarded as such, is pathological, as well as delusional. This doesn't just drive him, as we've seen over the last few days: it also drives Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, the former most certainly pathological, as even Blair himself realised in the way he went after the BBC for getting far, far too close to the truth. Hence Labour didn't lose the election because it was tired and because New Labour itself had become outdated, it lost because Brown had actively repudiated New Labour policies. It doesn't matter that this is nonsense, and that about the only thing actively against New Labour which Brown introduced was the 50p rate of tax on those earning over £150,000, it's what's allowed Blair and the others to put the blame for the party's defeat elsewhere. It wasn't and isn't their fault; in fact, if Brown had done what Blair would have, Labour would still be in power. It's best to quote Blair himself:

Had he pursued New Labour policy the personal issue would still have made victory tough, but it wouldn’t have been impossible. Departing from New Labour made it so. Just as the 2005 election was one we were never going to lose, 2010 was one we were never going to win — once the fateful strategic decision was taken to abandon the New Labour position.”
The problem, I would say error, was in buying a package which combined deficit spending, heavy regulation, identifying banks as the malfeasants and jettisoning the reinvention of government in favour of the rehabilitation of government. The public understands the difference between the state being forced to intervene to stabilise the market and government back in fashion as a major actor in the economy.

Blair is in effect arguing that the credit crunch and the almost wholesale collapse of much of the British banking sector changed absolutely nothing, or should have changed nothing. If only Labour had continued as it had before, as if the recession never happened, adopting the Conservative stance of, if not quite doing nothing as was Labour's caricature of their policy, then doing less than they did, the voters would have given the party the benefit of the doubt. Blair is making the argument which the Conservative party even now is too scared to make openly - that it's the state which is the real problem, not the markets which so comprehensively failed to see that famous moral hazard in the bubble which they believed would just keep on growing.

Despite all his pretensions to the contrary, it's clear that he believes the Conservatives under Cameron have seized the New Labour mantra. He offers no criticism of the coalition, making not even the slightest reference to the public spending cuts which are coming, while claiming that the public got what they wanted in the coalition, something which the opinion polls are already starting to show is far from being the truth. Andrew Marr made much the same point in his interview: that Blair had always been a conservative at heart and only now is his head coming to terms with it. Not that he's necessarily from the mould which the Tories now draw from; instead he would probably seem most at home on the left of the Republican party, where his Manichean worldview on Iraq and now Iran would go down best, with al-Qaida and the Mullahs melding together into one amorphous whole which simply has to be opposed, regardless of any cost.

It's this which leads Blair to consider the ban on fox-hunting and the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act as amongst his biggest mistakes. The killing of defenceless animals for fun (sorry, I mean as tradition and sport) and a bill which makes it easier to hold governments to account are hardly incongruous choices when you realise that he still holds the Iraq war to be fully justified, for which he has accepted "responsibility" and where he has moved beyond compassion. More than that, he still wants to fight the battles of old, including five pages from Hans Blix's UN report in January 2003, documenting how Saddam wasn't co-operating with the weapons inspectors. And even though the WMD didn't exist, and therefore it makes no difference whatsoever whether or not Iraq was fully co-operating with the inspections, as he recognises as he also argues Saddam was just waiting until sanctions had been lifted to start the programmes up again, he still has absolute faith in his righteousness.

The well-publicised change in the title then, from The Journey to A Journey, doesn't just reflect a worry that using the definite article might have been construed as immodest or messianic, and if there's one thing Blair has always tried not to be, it's messianic, it's also that the journey hasn't yet finished. The direction of political trajectory is obvious, yet where it will end for Blair himself remains uncertain. There are hints of what could have been, as even now he's in Washington involved in the talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Perhaps also that reflects the greatest tragedy of all: that Blair helped relative peace to be achieved in Northern Ireland, something destined to be overshadowed by how he waged it elsewhere. And how.

Labels: A Journey, Blairites, Iraq disaster, New Labour, politics, Tony Blair

Share |

9/01/2010 10:02:00 pm | Permalink |

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The Labour leadership and the dead hand of the Blairites.

The voting papers in the Labour leadership contest are being sent out. In an unfortunate coincidence, the not especially heavy tome from Tony Blair, modestly titled A Journey, is also being distributed around the country as copies go on sale tomorrow. While it's tempting to suggest that it'll probably take less time to read Blair's memoir than it will for some in Labour's electoral college to make their decision as to who should follow in his footsteps, it's also an unwelcome further reminder as to how Blair's shadow still hangs heavy over the party.

For while it's almost as if Gordon Brown never existed, so quickly has he vanished from the public sphere, almost airbrushed out of last three years of history with only Labour as an entity itself being in governance rather than led by the man who so coveted the job, Blair still looms large, as does his extended entourage. While Brown has wisely stayed out of the leadership debate, even if it's easy to suspect he would probably be backing his supposed protege Ed Balls, the few remaining Blairite true believers have been making it all but clear whom they favour. Even Blair himself is apparently concerned with how Ed, rather than David Miliband could potentially undo all their hard work in creating the electoral juggernaut which was New Labour, leading the party as Mandelson put it into an "electoral cul-de-sac".

This is, if it really needed stating, utter nonsense. It is however instructive on at least two separate levels. Firstly, it shows the insecurity of the remaining Blairite clique. Whether they really believe they're potentially helping Miliband senior by implying that Ed would be an electoral liability or not is unclear, but it is an indication of how worried they are that anyone other than the person who doesn't even want their endorsement could well win the leadership. Moreover, to use a really obscure analogy, it's a perfect illustration of how unprepared they are to let their grip on the party go. For those who've seen the original Dawn of the Dead, the Blairite takeover of the Labour party was akin to how Peter and friends took control of the mall. In their eyes, they cleaned it out and made it viable, only now to see their creation potentially threatened just as the looters do the mall in the film. In reality, the mall itself, or the party has corrupted them and their values, blinding them to the realisation that they have become the thing which they themselves previously hated. Instead of letting the looters do what they're going to do and move on, the Blairites in this context are Stephen, who's prepared to fight against the overwhelming odds because "[we] took it - it's ours", only to die as a result.

It's not perfect by any means at entirely accurately reflecting the current battle within Labour, but it comes fairly close. Blair, Mandelson and Alastair Campbell feel as if they still own the party, such was their role in its initial success, and now when the party needs so desperately to move beyond the New Labour era they're unprepared to let even the slightest implied insult to their reign go without being answered. The reason why the current posturing from them against Ed is so ridiculous is also multi-faceted. Not just because New Labour so conspicuously failed just a few months ago to do what it was set-up to do, which was to win elections, but because the real differences between the two Miliband brothers are so slight. It's true that David stands for the continuation of much of what New Labour started - the public sector and welfare reforms, the centre-right, triangulating Blairite stance on foreign policy, civil liberties, crime etc - yet Ed's policies as stated are only slightly to the left of his elder brother's. He supports a living wage and a graduate tax, yet on much else they share all but the same platform. If anything, it's been Ed who with the exception of Diane Abbott has contributed the least amount of new intellectual thinking to the debate - David at least delivered a speech last night aimed at putting together a counter-argument to the Tories' already none too cogent "Big Society" gambit. Ed Balls and Andy Burnham meanwhile have both been putting forward alternative policies and arguments for what the party should be doing, whether it be Balls' proposal to build 100,000 new houses using the gap between the projected borrowing figures (not one incidentally I would support) or Burnham's creditable attempt to define "aspirational socialism", which deserves praise simply for being willing to use the long rejected "s" word.

In fact, perhaps the really odd thing is that the Blairites aren't backing Burnham. His ideas are by far the most radical while being in line with their thinking on the public sector. Like them, he doesn't see voting reform as a priority, and his support for the setting up of a national care service with a tax of 10% on all estates after death is one that deserves serious scrutiny. It's only perhaps with his apparent disdain for the "elites", whether affected or otherwise, and his espousal of the living wage that he falls down. What's more, he's also the most aesthetically similar to Blair, even if perhaps he doesn't have anywhere near to the same level of charisma. David Miliband, while the continuity Blairite candidate, knowing as he does where the bodies are buried, instead remains this wonkish, more than slightly nerdy character, hardly the most naturally gifted of potential leaders. Burnham is far more in the Blair mould in that respect.

Clearly, the leadership campaign has gone on for far too long, resulting in the candidates endlessly repeating themselves, and it will still be nearly a month before we know the result. While it's had little impact outside the party, as leadership contests as a whole rarely do, it has certainly energised critical thinking inside it, best epitomised by a couple of excellent posts on where the party's been and where it should go by Luke Akehurst, an ultra-Blairite now backing Ed Miliband for the leadership. His latest entry on the limits of triangulation is especially thoughtful and an indication of how those within the party are willing to learn from the mistakes of the past. This is also pertinent to the continuing interventions from Mandelson and friends, none of whom seem to be willing to recognise why Labour lost the election. It certainly wasn't because the party was too left-wing, as they seem to be implying is where Ed will move the party should he win and therefore make it unelectable. It was instead because it was collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, with Brown both unwilling and unable to move the party beyond the Blair years, instead introducing and keeping with his own triangulation strategy. It was because it produced a tired manifesto, with almost no new ideas, and no optimistic vision of what Britain would look like in 5 years' time. It was because it had gotten too comfortable in power, had become dismissive of people's concerns, regardless of whether it was on immigration or civil liberties, while David Cameron gave hints of a brighter future even if in the short term he would be delivering austerity.

The real lesson of the election should be that there are and were millions of voters crying out for a real alternative - one which they flirted with in the shape of Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, yet decided at the last minute either wasn't realistic or couldn't be elected due to the system itself. The challenge for the new Labour leader is to try to be that alternative, redefining the party, winning over lost and new potential supporters, whilst also retaining the party's traditional base. The problem is that none of them look even close to being on the level of a Nick Clegg, and that's without the millstone of Blairite support/contempt being attached to their neck.

Labels: Blairites, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Labour leadership contest 2010, New Labour, Peter Mandelson, politics

Share |

8/31/2010 09:09:00 pm | Permalink |

Obsolete

Thursday, September 10, 2015

The road to Jeremy redux.

Monday, August 24, 2015

The interminable adventures of a Labour supporter, pt. 1.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

"Self-improvement is masturbation. Now, self-destruction?"

Thursday, August 13, 2015

The road to Jeremy.

Monday, February 03, 2014

The Gove legacy juggernaut.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Reality bites.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Facing up to the same old reality.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Thatcherism, Blairism, Blameronism?

Monday, October 11, 2010

Jonathan Powell and the Machiavellian memoirs.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

The true meaning of Blairism.

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

A journey into his own eternal self-righteousness.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The Labour leadership and the dead hand of the Blairites.

About

Links

UK Blogs and Comment

Elsewhere

Junk

Last posts

Archives