Blair didn't save the Labour Party: he crucified it" - Tebbitt

I thought that the most rational reaction to Tony Blair’s memoirs was that of the pranksters who have been moving copies in the bookshops to more appropriate shelves such as fiction, crime, fantasy and the like. So far I have been making do with the extracts published in the papers, but I will no doubt buy a copy in the hope that it will benefit service charities, so I have not had to make a decision on where to put it on my own library shelves. A Journey seems to be dominated by Blair’s anxiety to be seen as a great political leader who changed his country for the better. In fact it is, as I suppose all such books are to some extent, entirely about justifying himself and blaming others.

One thing we can believe absolutely is his confession to having a manipulative personality. That is showing up in the way he has been succesful in manipulation of public reaction to A Journey. The first reaction was the right one. It is a long whingeing, self-opiniated act of self justification.

Yet, over the time since it was published, opinion about it – or, more accurately, about Blair’s portrait of himself – has been changing. The blame for all that went wrong is being shifted on to poor Gordon Brown. Apparently it was not that Blair made a poor decision in going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Blair’s fantasy world, the blame falls on to the Chancellor’s shoulders for not producing the cash to provide the men and the kit to do the job. It is an idea which would have been quite foreign to Margaret Thatcher that one Minister, even the Chancellor, could simply refuse to make available the cash to finance a policy agreed by the Cabinet. Was the Cabinet never told of the problem? Or was Blair so unsure of the support of the Cabinet that he dare not raise the matter, or let his Defence Secretary do so.

Now we are being beguiled into believing that had Blair remained in office to fight the 2010 election, he might have won it. I very much doubt it. Even with the completely misdirected Conservative campaign, Cameron’s Conservatives scored 10.7 million votes. Admittedly Blair achieved 13.5 million in 1997, but that had fallen to 10.7 million by 2001 and 9.5 million in 2005. How could anyone in their right mind believe that, having lost almost 30 per cent of his original support over eight years, Blair could reverse that trend sufficiently to win a fourth term?

Even normally rational people are now buying the Blair line that the man who imported (even on official figures) three million foreigners to Britain, who presided over a vast increase in illiteracy and innumeracy, an explosive breakdown in family life, a huge extension in the powers of Brussels over Westminster, a near doubling of national debt, a lessening of social mobility, a deepening of the poverty trap, widespread restrictions on the right of free speech, a perpetual confusion between economic equality and fairness, great increases in taxation and even greater increases in state spending is some sort of political centralist.

One cannot but admire the sheer audacity with which he is now selling himself both as David Cameron’s father and the saviour of the Labour Party. Certainly Mr Cameron has been helping him over the claims of paternity, but were I a member of the Labour Party asking myself how it had come to lose the support of 36 per cent of its supporters over 13 years, I might feel that my party had been crucified rather than saved.

I may have missed something which others have found, but to me Blair’s journey has taken my country into a moral, financial, social, and military morass and charged the British people a terrible price in blood and treasure for doing so. I simply cannot buy the idea that but for Gordon Brown it would all have been all right. To me Blair is the poisonous vine that can bring forth only poisonous fruit. He has contaminated all that which he touched. His one great success has been to redistribute wealth, even from those who had less than him, into his own pocket. His journey would have been better never undertaken. Now the task of the Coalition is to painfully retrace Blair’s steps, out of the morass and back on the high ground he wilfully abandoned.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/normantebbit/100052530/tony-blair-didnt-save-the-labour-party-he-crucified-it-and-this-country/

... in pursuit of the other unspeakable"

The Skin

I don't agree with all of it but there's a lot there I do.

Blair is so committed to the triangulation and the idea that you can be a party and turn your back on your own poor base because they have nowhere else to go is just shameful. That's really what's going to hurt Labour over the long term and should be the real legacy of Blair.

(1) Blair is manipulative (but that's hardly a secret)

(2) Blair left Brown to reap the whirlwind that he'd sown; and then blamed Brown for everything that went wrong.

(3) Labour would have lost the election even if Blair had been leader. (Any incumbent would have been in trouble given the global economic crisis. And it wasn't just Labour that lost this election. This election was distinguished for the fact that no one won, and all parties lost!)

However when he gets onto policy specifics he shows himself to be his usual vile self:


'Even normally rational people are now buying the Blair line that the man who imported (even on official figures) three million foreigners to Britain, who presided over a vast increase in illiteracy and innumeracy, an explosive breakdown in family life, a huge extension in the powers of Brussels over Westminster, a near doubling of national debt, a lessening of social mobility, a deepening of the poverty trap, widespread restrictions on the right of free speech, a perpetual confusion between economic equality and fairness, great increases in taxation and even greater increases in state spending is some sort of political centralist.'


So to 'On Yer Bike' Tebbit, the main trouble with Blair is that he wasn't RW enough: that he allowed too many bloody foreigners in, not to mention being too soft on the big bogeyman the EU; spent too much on public services; went too far in the direction of economic equality; etc. And where does this idea that there was a 'vast increase in illiteracy and innumeracy' come from? There is no evidence for such a thing (there is also no evidence that Blair did much to *solve* the problems of illiteracy and innumeracy, but there was no increase in them either).

Both Blair and Tebbit are poisonous snakes, in slightly different ways - i.e. Tebbit is much worse poison even than Blair, but Tebbit is at least clearly labelled with a skull and crossbones, whereas Blair masquerades as sweet syrup.