Tony Blair and the New Tories
(comments: Tony.Papard@btinternet.com)
Although this article is about the modern Labor Party in the UK, blue is chosen as the background color because, despite being dubbed ‘New Labor’, they are, in fact, the New Tory Party, indeed the New Thatcherite Party.
Tony Blair is the worst Labor leader of all time, and has committed more crimes against the labor movement than all previous Labor Prime Ministers and leaders put together.
We all know of the betrayal of Ramsay MacDonald when he went into the National Coalition Government with the Tories, of the treachery of Clem Attlee when he introduced prescription charges into the supposedly free new National Health Service, of the disgraceful speech by Hugh Gaitskell threatening to ‘fight, fight and fight again to save the Party we love’. He was, of course, referring to the democratic decision of his comrades at the 1960 Labor Party conference when they voted against the obscenity and futility of the British nuclear deterrent, which was neither British nor a deterrent, and made Britain an aircraft carrier for the United States, a target in the event of nuclear war. When the hero of the Labor left, Nye Bevan, betrayed all his beliefs by supporting the so-called British Bomb so as not to send a future British minister ‘naked into the conference chamber’ it seemed the Labor Party was full of traitors.
Then came Harold Wilson, giving the hope of another dose of Attlee style Socialism after 13 years of Tory mis-rule when he won the 1964 General Election. But it soon became clear there was not to be another sweeping extension of public ownership, as in the 1945 Labor government. All Wilson wanted to do was manage capitalism, not build Socialism, and then he backed the USA in its criminal and futile war against the Vietnamese people. The only thing he refrained from doing, to his credit, was sending British troops there to help the Americans burn men, women and children alive with napalm.
James Callaghan was no better, enraging the Unions and causing the biggest industrial unrest for decades. The bumbling Callaghan returning from abroad to a UK with rubbish piling up in the streets and a large section of the workforce on a three-day week could only muster a disastrous: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ response which directly led to the election of Margaret Thatcher, the most rightwing Prime Minister since the anti-Union war criminal and racist colonialist Winston Churchill. (Greatest Briton ever? Do the people who voted for him know anything about the man and his history, responsible for mass atrocities against civilians in the British Empire and Nazi-occupied Europe, the latter with the help of arch-war criminal Bomber Harris?)
Michael Foot, in his brief period as Labor Party leader, presided over a Party committed again to unilateralism (abandonment of the British nuclear ‘deterrent’) and to Socialist values, but the rightwing press and the Tories went to town in a character assassination, culminating in accusing him of appearing in a scruffy duffel-coat at the Remembrance service at the Cenotaph. Although a brilliant public speaker, Foot was by now well past his prime, and was not a televisual figure. He appeared as a slightly dotty old man peering thru thick spectacles beneath a wild mane of white hair – like some crazy professor from a horror film. TV and the media destroyed Michael Foot as Labor leader, and he was replaced by John Smith, a rather bland, nondescript figure who died too soon to make any sort of mark on the Party.
Neil Kinnock, another left-of-center unilateralist, soon started to betray his ideals and once again embraced the British nuclear bomb. Still he could not win a general election, and he was replaced by the man with the idiotic grin, the Islington Yuppie, the ultimate New Tory and disciple of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair.
He has succeeded where John Major, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith have all failed: Tony Blair has continued the reign of Thatcherism in Britain, and furthered the mad dreams of Margaret Thatcher herself. She could not have wished for a better Tory Prime Minister.
Just consider what he has done while in office: he has consistently extended privatization of public services, he has hounded London’s greatest Labor leader, Ken Livingstone, out of the Labor Party, he has similarly hounded the greatest Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlem, from the Cabinet, and he persists in pushing ahead with privatization of the London Underground system against all expert advice, determined to hand over the network to bankrupt companies which have already caused death and chaos on the national railways.
Everyone knows there is only one loony left, and he’s in the White House. Yet Blair is proud to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with this idiot who, having totally failed in his Afghanistan escapade to capture Bin Laden, has now turned his attentions to Saddam Hussein in order to get his greedy hands on the Iraq oilfields and distract the gullible American public from the total failure to effectively deal with the aftermath of 9/11. Why declare war on Iraq when loads of other countries have weapons of mass destruction? The biggest two ‘rogue states’ with access to these weapons are Israel and the USA, and the President of the latter didn’t even win a democratic election to that office – he lost by over half a million votes! Yet this is the man Tony Blair backs to the hilt; a Texan who shoots from the hip and is doing everything he can to create millions more potential terrorists by alienating Arabs and Muslims everywhere by his insane policies.
These are just a few of Tony Blair’s crimes against the labor movement. His basic premise at home is to subsidize inefficient private companies who are ruining our public services, underpaying their employees and paying huge dividends and salaries to shareholders and company directors, all paid for by the British taxpayer!
And who decides New Labor policy? The Labor Party Conference? No fear, this has been completely tamed and is now just a Supreme Soviet-type talking shop and rubber stamp for Tony Blair’s policies. The National Executive Committee has also been filled with New Tories, as has Blair’s Cabinet. John Prescott, once National Union of Seamen’s leader, aids and abets Blair in his Union bashing, right-wing Home Secretary Jack Straw follows in the best traditions of his Conservative predecessors, while Tory Chancellor Gordon Brown froze all public spending and taxes for the first years of New Labor’s term of office, the consequences of which we are now suffering in underfunded public services, especially a disintegrating public transport system.
All these policies were dictated by Rupert Murdoch. Tony Blair and his New Tory Party took their 1997 election manifesto straight from the editorial column of The Sun newspaper, which, not surprisingly, now backs ‘New Labor’ as the banner carrier of Thatcherism in the 21st Century.
Tony Blair’s biggest crime against the Labor Party was the liquidation of the very basis of its existence: the removal of Clause IV of the Party’s Constitution which committed all Party members to further the cause of ‘public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’ and democratic control of the same (which does not necessarily mean ‘nationalization’, it can also mean genuine publicly owned companies and cooperatives – see my article on ‘Socialism in the 21st Century'.)
He has also gradually removed all vestiges of Socialism and its symbols from the Labor Party – the workers’ implements and torch of liberty motif has been replaced with the insipid ‘red rose’, The Red Flag anthem sung at all Labor Party Conferences till Blair got in power, the Socialist terminology such as referring to fellow-members as ‘comrades’ – all this has gone. Next he'll no doubt adopt blue as the Party color in place of red. New Labor is unrecognizable as the Party set up by trade unionists and socialists inspired by the ideas of Karl Marx, Keir Hardie, Edward Carpenter and others.
In the prophetic words of The Red Flag: ‘It suits today the weak and base, whose minds are fixed on pelf and place, to cringe before the rich man’s frown and haul the sacred emblem down’.
Sadly, there seem to be few people in the Labor Party prepared to throw out these New Tories who have captured the Party and ‘keep the Red Flag flying here’. Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner, Alice Mahon and a few others are lone voices in the wilderness, whilst the majority of Socialists in the Labor Party keep their heads down afraid of rocking the boat and making Labor ‘unelectable’ once more.
The whole purpose of a principled political party is to lead and educate the electorate, not to just adopt the currently most electable policies. If New Labor want to follow that road why not reduce taxation to zero and bring back hanging? Presumably because the public services would collapse, the country would go bankrupt and totally innocent people would once more be judicially killed by the State. Yet a party of principle cannot pick and choose; it must stick to all its principles, but adapt them to current conditions. Thus market socialism instead of bureaucratic nationalizaion (see Socialism In 21st Century article).
If the Party members just seek electoral office, let them leave and join the currently most popular political party. If they want to convince the electorate of the correctness of their policies they first have to get a popular voice in the national media. A Socialist daily newspaper owned and controlled by the labor movement and the trade unions should not be an impossible task. It has to be in popular tabloid format to appeal to the working-classes who read The Sun and The Mirror and know little about real Socialism, not another middle-class liberal Independent or Guardian type broadsheet, and not the tiny circulation Stalinist Morning Star or the various Trotskyist periodicals, but a real Labor newspaper in the traditions of Reynolds News/Sunday Citizen (the old Cooperative movement Sunday newspaper) and Daily Herald (which, ironically, became The Sun).
Meanwhile, what can Socialists who retain their principles do but vote for one of the minor parties who stand no chance of being elected nationally, or do what I have done in recent general elections and vote for the most left-wing of the three major political parties, which is without doubt the Liberal Democrat Party? I shall revert to Labor only if, and when, it reverts to true Socialism.
I also regret the demise of the once great Cooperative movement and its political arm, the Cooperative Party, which has now been completely lost inside New Labor. It is impossible to find a Cooperative store in most of London, just a few branches of the Cooperative Bank and Coop Funeral Service. I long for the days when I could avoid buying capitalist goods altogether - remember the old Coop brand goods? You could watch your Coop Defiant TV sipping your Coop 99 tea, reading your Sunday Citizen in the commercial breaks, and not one penny for these products went into the pockets of capitalist shareholders!
What we need is a new Cooperative movement and Party, and the trade unions should switch their allegiance and funding to that, making sure it has enough funds to launch a successful cooperative daily newspaper.
*****
Let me take this opportunity to improve your spelling. Labour is spelt thus:’ Labour’, not as you have spelt it ‘Labor’.
“Tony Blair is the worst Labor leader of all time, and has committed more crimes against the labor movement than all previous Labor Prime Ministers and leaders put together.”
This is not true either he has much improved the Labour party. I have taken the liberty of underlining your spelling mistakes in the quote.
Dear 9104,Thanks for your email. I refer you to my Webpage article 'The British Don't Know How To Spell' at URL www.btinternet.com/~tony.papard/Spelling.htmBy the way I'm British, but I stopped using our stupid spelling when I was at college and realized Shakespeare spelt 'labour' ' l-a-b-o-r', and in the King James version of The Bible 'plough' is spelt 'p-l-o-w'. So 'American' spelling is closer to the traditional English spelling. The article above also quotes what the Oxford English Dictionary and Fowler's Modern English Usage (also published by the Oxford University Press) say about the '-or/-our' endings, and it is not favORable to the British tradition.We may disagree about this, you are perfectly entitled to spell the British way if you prefer it. I'm glad the Australian Labor Party has learnt the correct spelling. We will also have to agree to disagree about Tony Blair. I want a Socialist Labor Party, not a Tory one.Tony