Why the Labour Party Hates Tony Blair
Or large swathes of that party at the very least. I dare say, if you asked them, a lot of Labour party types would point towards the Iraq War and the shameless toadying to the repellent George W. Bush as the reason for their hatred of the man in question. And while I do think that there is a lot of validity for hating Blair because of that carnage he helped to unleash in the Middle East, I can't help but feel that a lot of the rage against Blair within his party was muted in, say, 2005, when the party was looking for him to take them to an unprecedented third victory at the polls despite being a crucial part of the drive toward Baghdad. Yeah, people in his party might be concerned by Iraq, but I think there is another, deeper reason why just the mention of his name at the party conference by the incumbent leader leads so many of their number to boo. And it's this - they hate the fact that Blair was so successful.
Of course, no party truly dislikes a leader just because they can win elections for them - after all, that's what they're in the political game for. I doubt Thatcher would have been tolerated by her party for as long as she was without that proven track record of getting voters to put their "x" in the right box on election day. John Major certainly wouldn't have survived for any length of time whatsoever had he not been able to deliver that spectacular surprise election victory in 1992. The problem with Blair isn't that he won; its what he had to do in order to win.
Don't get me wrong, Blair was a statist. But he certainly wasn't a socialist, and I'd struggle to really class him as a social democrat. He was probably marginally to the right of Ted Heath - a former Tory PM. Yet I think there was a reason why he was like that. It is because that is precisely what he had to do to win. And he was right; a left wing Labour party struggles at the polls. The only time they triumphed as truly socialist was in 1945; in the elections immediately after that, they struggled to stay ahead as the true nature of their radical statist agenda was clear for all to see. The post-war consensus is a double-edged sword - people may not have been willing for the radical grab of economic power by the government to be rolled back, but likewise they did not want to see it expanded.
Which is why, in the period between 1951 and 1997 which saw any number if Labour leaders, only one triumphed at the national polls - Harold Wilson. As a power-hungry self-publicist willing to compromise pretty much anything to get himself into No. 10, Wilson was very much the prototype Blair. Wilson may have started as a socialist, but he governed as a lacklustre social democrat who was willing to manipulate the whole devaluation crisis so it worked, as much as possible, in his favour rather than for the people he was elected to govern. And to this day, you can still come across people in the party he used to lead who hate him for his willingness to compromise. But like Blair, he got it, and he understood that Labour does not win elections as, well, Labour. The next Labour leader to properly understand that was Blair - hence, as a matter of symbolism rather meaningful policy, his war against Clause IV.
There can be no doubt that Blair was an election winner (even if he did have that awkward tendency, owing to our strange electoral system, to win well on a minority of those who voted), but he could only do so by, at the very least, making Labour into something other than Labour - hence New Labour. Because, fundamentally, the people don't vote in sufficient quantities for traditional/old Labour. And Blair was the person who brought this into sharp relief. He was the person who showed that if you want to win big in this country, you cannot be (or at least sound like) a social democrat - and that it is a sin to be a socialist, at least in electoral terms.
And that's why so many members of his own party hate him. He is living, breathing proof that there is no progressive majority in this country, and that for Labour to win it requires what is, for them, ugly compromise. He is a bit like how an Archbishop of Canterbury would be for the Church of England who drastically increases church attendance but only by saying "y'know that belief in God thing? It's optional".
So those who believe they have got their party back with the Miliband Minor leadership will soon learn the same lesson that those who believe that Brown's ascendancy to the leadership restored their party to them - yeah, your guy's in charge, but he brings with him the power - or perhaps even the responsibility - to lose elections. Of course, at some point there will be a leader who gets it and - without any rehabilitation of their spiritual forebears Wilson or Blair - the Labour party will beat the Conservative party at a General Election by being, well, a more fashionable (for reasons that defy understanding) version of that Conservative party.
In short, Labour hates their most successful leader because he demonstrated to them across a whole decade that they can only win at the ballot box if they are not Labour.
posted by The Nameless Libertarian @ 9:12 am
5 Comments
5 Comments:
I did this little bit of research some time ago.
http://wp.me/p1KI1-ftL
"It took 33 years to find a Blair"
I'm always surprised that the Labour party hadn't worked this out for themselves before they rid themselves of their most electorally successful leader EVER.
A minority of Labour Party members - a real minority do not like Tony Blair because he proved to win elections you must sit in the centre of politics. Both Labour & Tory have demonstrated that if you shift to the right or left the public will reject you.
A good post, but there is something more that has to be taken into account: the left hates success generally. In a sort of masochistic way they like being the underdogs. In the 'eighties Millwall football fans were 'over the moon' because every one hated them. being liked lowers their sense of self-worth.
of course, they want to be at the forefront of change and yearn for the change to come their way without effort. To be successful requires focus coupled with an objective viewpoint, rather than just inspired words.
The left continually dreams of a popular uprising because it means they will be voted in without having to work to get votes (they presume an uprising will be in their favour) and thus Blair's and to some degree Wilson's successes were not what they want to see. They want jam without having to gather the fruit, add sugar and do whatever else jam-makers do. They want 'the people' to spontaneously elevate them by some strange process where the public suddenly don't care about success any more.
So it's easy to hate what you don't want to do or even what you are prepared to do. Britain does not, despite the efforts of some over the last 60 years, to actually like socialism because it remains suspicious of people who hate success and want to restrict it.
To embrace Blair means they got it wrong so often in the past, and they aren't ready to do that.
Blair and Brown were both heroic cunts. It's very fair to say that, whilst giving up on socialism, they remained statist to the core. They still used regulation, and big business gained from the stifled competition rather than loost out. The number of arguments I've had with Labour friends who've bemoaned "free markets" and "capitalism", and every time I say that BECAUSE I'm economically liberal I don't defend the record of state capitalism of the previous government. They were cunts towards everyone in short.
On the theme of Iraq, I actually think that much of the core Labour vote either agreed or didn't care. Some people were mystified as to why they were so hellbent on attacking civil liberties. Partly because of a total failure to believe in individual liberty and belief that they, the good guys need power (a holdover from Old Labour that outlived the socialism).
But also, because things like 42 days, for example, went down well with the sort of people I see here and who doubtless live in other Labour strongholds, the racist socialists. They are all for a massive welfare state so long as it benefits "deserving" people, such as themsselves. They hate the coalition. And they cheered on the things we bemoaned because the Labour dog-whistle was that anti-liberties measures would only affect pakis, not them.
So it was basically for economic reasons that they became unpopular, because they supported state capitalism rather than socialism or the kind of liberalism that might actually benefit working-class people, such as the cut in income tax for low earners that has been brought in by the coalition and will hopefully lead to the raising of the threshold to 10k.
It was also because Blair was from a priviliged background, and I often heard it said that they didn't understand how people like us lived because none of them were working-class, although some actually were (Hazel Blears for example) without ceasing to be utter cunts for that reason).
Also, in addition to old-school socialists, there are left-liberals who (in broad-brush terms) breathed a sigh of relief when Blair won in 1997 and 2001, defected to the Lib Dems over Iraq, were swayed by Cleggmania, and are anti-coalition to various degrees. They are an interesting set because some just hate Tories and think all is forgiven, others may support Labour but want Miliband to have a better civil liberties record than Blair or Brown did.
Labour act as though they were entitled to support and we should all just fucking well obey them. And some of this constituency resents being handled in such a way, as they are by many Labourites. This is why watching Miliband's struggles to win a majority are interesting. I don't think he will win on his current platform of basically "not being the government".
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