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The Daily Stirrer

Blair's Journey by Ian R Thorpe.
Tony Blair's memoir of his political career, A Journey, is a must read for fans of another politician whose ambition and lust for power far outstrips his ability and experience. Solipsistic and self regarding, Tony Blair takes us through how he saved the Labour party and led it to power, how he charmed the traditionally conservative middle classes, how he spoke to the traditional Labour voters and earned their loyalty and support for his Thatcherite policies and how he saved British businness from economic catastrophe. Strangely he does not mention how he untimately betrayed all those groups.

Just Say Grace
by Esther S.
2009-12-30
CREATIVE COMMONS: Attribute, non commercial, no derivs.
KEYWORDS: children, child abuse, protection, injustice, political correctness, politically correct, authority, authoritarian, courts, law

On being elected to parliament in 1983, young Blair, then bright eyed rather than swivel eyed was passionate in his support of reaffirming the Labour party's committment to nationalisation and public ownership of the industrial base: More experienced Labour voices were arguing for reinterpreting that die - hard socialist committment but for Tony Balir there was no question of watering down the founding principle. There must be no curb on trade union power and the privatisations of state enterprise enacted by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government should be reversed. When the Conservatives cut income tax to 40%, Blair was one of a group of Labour MPs demanding it be increased to 60%.

Such idealism, as Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, was useless without power.

At that time Blair was building his power base in the core Labour constituencies of the industrial North and Midlands. These are the places where, at election time, it is said the majority would vote for a dog turd if somebody stuck a Labour rosette on it. A few years in Parliament pushing this kind of agenda saw Blair established as one of the rising stars of the Labour left. Nobody can be sure when the all - consuming ambition kicked it or if it was allways there, the real driving force behind the veneer of socialist idealism. Blair certainly does not talk abour such things in his book, nor does he was much time on abstract reflection beyond references to his one on one relationship with God and how it influenced many of his decisions.

The most striking stylistic feature is the frequency with which he uses the first person singular, other than that we get few clues as to the nature of the inner man.

On the first stage of his journey from left to right that was to take him to the leadership of his party, as well as leaving behind the central philosophy of the Labour movement Blair had also abandoned nuclear disarmament and subscribed to the idea of EU federalism. As Labour's employment spokesman in opposition, he declared the Thatcher government's loathed laws restricting trade union power should stay in place when his party was next elected. He also embraced the notion that privatisation of state owned industries was the only way to save the economy.

Unlike Neil Kinnock, John Smith, leaders before him, and his rival Brown, Blair saw himself as not as a class warrior fighting for the cause of equality and the emancipation of the working classes but as classless and and freed from that archaic notion of occupying a 'place in society.' In that he was ahead of his party, the working classes had been emancipated by two world wars and the reforming governments that followed them ut old Labour was still fghting the class war. Like De Tocqueville, Blair was mesmerised by the United States when he visited, particularly by the way Bill Clinton used the personality cult that had formed around him to influence public opinion..

On becoming leader of his party and rebranding it New Labour Blair began to refer to "the project." The project that was New Labour dared not speak its neo - con name, but its true Leaders understood that success in gaining power could lie only in capturing the centre right, the core constituency of the Conservative Party. Old Labour figures like Gordon Brown and John Prescott were only grudgingly accomodated in Blair's team for the sake of expediency - the party still needed the dog turd vote. The new team grasped the "electoral necessity of bourgeois ascendancy" but were playing a different game than traditional Labour politics, now political principle was irrelevant, power for its own sake was the goal and the end, advancement of 'the agenda' always justified the means.

Labour had been founded as the party of workers, New Labour was the party of the managerial class. The language of New Labour became managerial, that peculiar jargon that resembles Orwellian Newspeak in all but its verbosity. Managerialists never say, "We need to change the system," when they can say "As a matter of urgency we must look at the feasibility of re-engineering our business process." Words were twisted around, stood on their heads, pulled inside out and stripped on all meaning. The trivial was infused with a totally spurious importance, what was truly of import was trivialised. Blair himself had become unashamedly rightwing, espousing the nuclear deterrent and telling a police conference that "if we dare not speak the language of punishment then we deny the real world".

A Journey, as a memoir is at its self-regarding best in recounting how Blair re-engineered the Labour party policy making process so the National Executive could never again undermine its leader, as it had Gaitskell, Wilson and Callaghan. Where previous prime ministers had struggled to bend a monolithic party to their will, Blair set out to smash it. He made the office of Prime Miniser more Presidential (a style which it is widely rumoured did not impress Queen Elizabeth) He turned the 19th-century Labour movement into a 21st-century political machine, puffed up with candyfloss vacuities such as "traditional values in a changed world". Blair's appetite for cliche is still insatiable. Most importantly he made, as the party of spin and presentation Labour electable.

Needless to say, little of this is in Blair's book, though he does let slip a tribute to Thatcher's "character, leadership and intelligence" in smashing the unions. One reason must be that, while Blair understood Thatcherism's potency, he was blind to its shortcomings. He grasped the essence of his creed but could not see how to take it forward.

For thirty years, since Harold Wilson's government in of 1964 - 70 the boundary boundary between the public and private sectors had progressively blurred. On taking the highest office British politcs can offer in 1997 Blair noted that Thatcher's public sector was "largely unreformed" and that had its archtects from the 1945 Labour government returned they would have felt entirely at home. Yet despite having set about turning his office into a hub of centralized power Blair did nothing to effect change in the most bloated and expensive area of the public sector, the National Health Service. He was cowed by the civil service mandarins and contented himself with tinkering around the edges, allowing private enterprise to profit from providing services outsourced by hospitals and health authorities but doing nothing to change the things that were fundamentally wrong, the too cosy relationship between medicine's professional bodies and the drug companies, the empire building culture of the bureaucracy and the focus on politcally correct policy making rather that the delivery of essential care.

New Labour with Blair as Prime Minister and Brown in charge of finance tipped unprecedented quantities of money into the pockets of public servants, public contractors, and suppliers yet the quality of Britain's schools, hospitals and social services deteriorated. This failure was masked by a box ticking culture and an obsession with targets and statistics. Supported by platoons of consultants from McKinsey (slogan, "if it can be measaured, it can be managed.") New Labour's ministers produced for media disemination streams of statistics showing that everything was hunky dory, in the words of the campaign song "Things Can Only Get Better."

The point both McKinsey and New Labour missed is that the art of management lies in being able to deal with the unpredictable and that which cannot be measured. It is very well talking about planning and being proactive but when things that could not possibly be planned for happen one an only react or panic. When the dotcom bubble burst in 1999 derailing the government's economic strategy Blair and Brown panicked, pumping money into the economy to start another bubble driven by personal debt, the bubble that imploded in 2007.

By this point Blair had elevated himself to the status of world statesman, leaving the day to day running of government in the incapable hands of Gordon Brown, the architect of the economic madness that was to undermine the British economy and the New Labour project. Blair blames much of this failure on Brown, but much of the responsibility rests on his shoulders. He was aware of Gordon Brown's strengths and weaknesses. It has long been a failing of Labour Prime Miniters that they cite the "special relationship" with the USA to attach themselves to American Presidents in order to support the delusion that Britain is still a major world power when they should be at home minding the shop. Tony Blair made this mistake twice, with Bill Clinton and George W Bush, thus he holds the record for getting us involved in more wars that any previous Prime Minister.

There is no point blaming Gordon Brown for his downfall as he does in his self aggrandizing account of what he calls his 'journey', Tony Blair was his own nemesis, his vanity, personal ambition and solipsism wrought his downfall. It is a sign of the times that instead of being put out to grass like old warhorses once were he has now involved himself in another doomed project, having found a niche for himself in the 'one - world, one - culture' movement of the international elite. While the ideal of the people of all nations joining hands and singing Kumbaya thus creating a utopian oligarchy sounds fine in theory, all it shows it that its proponents, self regarding and self obsessed members of a privileged academic, financial, business and old-money' elite and their willing lackeys recently raised from poltics and bureaucracy really understand very little about human nature.

Labour's Loony Spending Scheme Cripples NHSThe nation was given a laugh when David Laws, treaury minister for the incoming conservative / lib dem coalition government revealed his Labour predecessor had left a note saying There is no money. it does not seem so funny now as the true extent of Labours financial profligacy is being discovered. The private finance contracts some NHS Health Trusts were tied into are crippling local hospital trusts financially.

The Politics Of Fear And PanicFear and panic certainly seem to be gaining ground as the weapon with which the political and business elite intend to control us and force us to comply with their fiendish schemes.

The Necessity Of Curbing State SpendingThe left, already laughable styling themselves "the opposition" even as Labour splits into tiny factions including the "old left" the traditional party of the working class, the people with traditional Labour values who recognise there are no magical solution, the "progressive left", the kind of people my colleague Ian Thorpe refers to as The Politically Correct Thought Police, who are currently working themselves into a frenzy about
Imposing Orthodoxy By Stealth: Big Brother And Your Shopping HabitsSubtle influences are at work to change the way you shop and thus the way you live. Is this manipulation driven purely by the profit motive or are more sinister motives involved?

Populist AuthoritarianismThe Labour Party may talk of socialism but their Nanny State tyle of ovErbearing governmental control freakery rather than protecting the weak according to the political philosophy of John Locke seeks to suppress individualism and impose uniformity by spreading fear and panic. This approach achieves equality by making all weak and dependent. Unfortunately it debilitates the nation.

The Gordon Truman ShowPower may well corrupt but it certainly removes those who hold it from reality. So as Gordon Brown squats in Downing Street hoping that a bizarre sequence of events following the indecisive election will lead to him staying on as Prime Minister in a hung parliament one cannot help but think The Gordon Show is turning into a Truman Show type movie fantasy. Humour, satire
Lord Of The Blair Rings, (Emily, Tony and Precious)Power corrupts maybe but it certainly removes those who hold it from reality. Tony Blair sits and schemes through his last days in office, hoping to find a way to hold on to his precious, the ring of office held by every Prime Minister or First Lord Of The Treasury to give the office its proper title. One cannot help but think power has warped Blair's mind so much he thinks he is the living embodiment of a character in a fantasy fiction. Humour, satire

Change Can Be Unfair To EverybodyIt cannot only be me and my colleagues here at The Daily Stirrer who are fed up of hearing about change and fairness in this election. Campaigning has been more Presidential in style than ever before with attention focused on the party leaders and in particular on the televised debates. This is bad for democracy of course because The British Constitution (and we do have on American visitors though it is not contained in single document) requires that we elect Members of Parliament per Constituency to represent all the people of the constituency and not that we vote according to which of the party leaders is the prettiest, has the most vacuous catchphrases or parades the prettiest wife on his.
Fit To Gossipronic isn't it that not so long ago when unemployment was much lower than it is now but was a cause for alarm nonetheless, the government was pushing to get people declared disabled so they could go on incapacity benefit and off the jobless figures. Now they want to get people off incapacity and registered as unemployed because jobseekers allowance costs less than incapacity benefit...
The Fiscal NightmarePolitical conservatives and libertarians in the USA are aware of the problem but here in the UK with less than three weeks to go until the General Election that will decide who governs the country for the next four or five years only the Liberal Democrats and representatives of...
No Real Jobs In The New EconomyGordon Brown's Labour government and the failing Obama administration in the USA, feeling power slipping through their fingers, are trying to lull people into a false sense of security with claims the 'green' and the 'digital' economies will restore prosperity. This as a blatant lie, nobody needs a PhD in economics or Social Science to understand that the "new economy" of green businesses and digital commerce will destroy not create real jobs...
Authoritarian Box Ticking Culture.Among the things that have alienated people from the Labour party apart from generakl incompetence, is their arrogant and patronising conviction the public are resady to believe anything the government tells them so long as it is dressed up in statistics and delivered by some fresh faced, smooth talking Labour spinmeister. It is very like the authoritarian regime of Orwell's 1984

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Updated : Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:01:08 GMT

Greece given tough bailout terms
Eurozone ministers set tough conditions for a bailout deal for Greece, as Greek unions plan a 48-hour strike in protest against cuts.
Publ.Date : Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:16:53 GMT

Murder suspect found dead in cell
A lodger accused of murdering his landlady and her mother in Southport is found hanged in prison.
Publ.Date : Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:29:46 GMT

VIDEO: How does quantitative easing work?
How the Bank of England pumps money into the economy
Publ.Date : Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:47:57 GMT

Be realistic on budgets, MoD told
The Ministry of Defence may be "over-optimistic" about how much its military equipment budget is under control, an influential group of MPs says.
Publ.Date : Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:39:18 GMT

Cannabis users double crash risk
Drivers who use cannabis before driving double their chances of causing a collision, research suggests.
Publ.Date : Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:51:32 GMT

England hit by more snow and ice
Severe weather warnings for ice and snow are in place across much of England, after the second significant snowfall in less than a week.
Publ.Date : Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:42:01 GMT

Sainsbury's relaxes freeze advice
Sainsbury's is removing advice to freeze food "on day of purchase" from its labels and informing customers it can be done up until the use-by date.
Publ.Date : Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:40:20 GMT

Steve Jobs' FBI files made public
The FBI releases its files on Apple founder Steve Jobs, revealing a man who commanded respect but was questioned on his honesty and morality.
Publ.Date : Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:42:52 GMT

US 'sobriety' tests for Londoners
Problem drinkers in London are to be given American-style sobriety tests aimed at keeping them away from alcohol.
Publ.Date : Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:03:33 GMT

China's exports and imports fall
China's exports and imports fell in January, raising fresh concerns about the impact of a global economic slowdown on its economy.
Publ.Date : Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:39:44 GMT

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