No, Blair – Wokeness Didn’t Cost Labour the Elections, You Did

The recriminations from last week’s elections continue. Unindicted war criminal Tony Blair crawled out from whichever stone he’s been hiding under since leaving office to give his tuppence worth on the reasons Labour did so badly. The headline from one of the papers says that he blames ‘wokeness’ and warns that Labour could ‘cease to exist’. Well, many people are saying the latter. And one of the reasons for its poor performance and disengagement with the working class isn’t ‘wokeness’, the new term that’s overtaken ‘political correctness’ to describe anti-racism, feminism, and an attitude against forms of prejudice, but Blair himself.

Let’s start with an obvious issue that united people across the political spectrum. Blair launched an illegal war against Iraq as part of George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’. Saddam Hussein was supposed to have aided Osama bin Laden. He hadn’t, but Blair put pressure on the intelligence services and falsified evidence – he ‘sexed up’ the ‘dodgy dossier’ – to show that Hussein had. Hussein was a monster who butchered his own people, but he hadn’t moved out of Iraq since his failed invasion of Kuwait. Experts on the Middle East said that there he was regarded as a joke. The real reason for Bush and Blair’s invasion was partly to defend Israel, because Hussein occasionally funnelled aid to the Palestinians whenever he felt like it, but mostly to grab the Iraqi oil reserves. They’re the biggest in the Middle East outside Saudi Arabia. They also wanted to steal Iraqi state enterprises, while the Neocons were keen on turning the country into the low-tax, free trade state they wanted to create in America. The result has been chaos, sectarian bloodshed, war crimes, and the destruction of the Iraqi economy and secular society.

Despite the loud backing of hacks from the Groaniad, millions of ordinary Brits knew better. Two million people, including one of the priests at my local church, marched in protest. Blair shrugged it off and the invasion went ahead. It was contrary to international law, and there have been abortive efforts to have Blair and Bush arrested for their crimes and tried in the Hague. The Tory party opposed the war, as did the Spectator. I think in many cases this was just simple opportunism and opposition for the sake of being seen to oppose, as when they’re actually in power, there doesn’t seem to be a war the Tories don’t like. But some Tories, to be fair, were serious. The right-wing journalist Peter Hitchens honestly despises the ‘Blair creature’ for the way he sent our courageous young men and women to their deaths for no reason. People chanted ‘Blair lied, people died’. Absolutely. But somehow he’s being treated as some kind of respectable statesman.

And it was Blair who started the British working class’ disillusionment with Labour. He was far more interested in capturing Tory votes and those of swing voters. Under him, the party became pro-private enterprise, including the privatisation of the NHS, and continued Thatcher’s dismantlement of the welfare state. It was Blair who introduced the ‘work capability tests’ for the disabled and continued Thatcher’s programme of making the process of claiming unemployment benefit as humiliating and degrading as possible in order to deter people from signing on. But he retained the party’s commitment to anti-racism and feminism as some kind of vestige of the party’s liberalism. The result has been that large sections of the White working class felt that they were being deliberately ignored and abandoned in favour of Blacks and ethnic minorities. This is the constituency that then voted for UKIP, and which I dare say has now gone over to supporting Boris Johnson’s Tories.

As far as ‘wokeness’ goes, yes, the shrill, intolerant anti-racism and feminism is off-putting. I am definitely no fan of Black Lives Matter, but it has immense support amongst British Blacks and Asians because of the deprivation of certain parts of those communities. Labour BAME supporters also felt abandoned because of Starmer’s tepid, offhand support for it, and his protection of those credibly accused of racist bullying. They started leaving the party as well.

The Labour party did badly at the elections not because of the lingering influence of Jeremy Corbyn, but because of Blair’s abandonment of the White working class, and Starmer’s contemptuous attitude towards the party’s non-White supporters.

Labour may well be on the verge of ceasing to exist, but it won’t start winning in England again unless to rejects Blairism and returns to proper, traditional Labour values and policies.

Counterpunch on George Galloway’s Documentary on Tony Blair

Counterpunch on Thursday put up an interesting article by David Swanson discussing the release of a documentary by George Galloway about Tony Blair, and arguing that the film’s subject qualified for the title of worst human being alive. The film’s entitled Blair’s Killing$, and shows just how nasty the Islington Generalissimo is. Swanson states that Blair faces some stiff competition, and that, as an American, he feels the title of Worst Person Alive ought to go to someone on his side of the Atlantic. Like Donald Trump, the Cheneys and Rupert Murdoch. Quite apart from the leading role the US is playing in exporting the threat of nuclear Armageddon, start wars and causing climate change.

He notes that Blair has done to the Labour party what Clinton did to the Democrats. He imported the anti-working and lower middle class policies which Jeremy Corbyn is trying to undo, and Shrillary is trying to bury forever. He states that Blair did to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq what Clinton, Bush and Obama have done. But while these have gone off and retired, Blair has carried on in his role as global warmonger. He also makes the point that Blair forced into these wars a nation with a far greater opposition to starting them than America. As a result, he can’t leave the house without a protest gathering. And from starting wars, Blair moved right into promoting corporate corruption and promoting wars. He states that from now on, future prime ministers can rest assured that they can make themselves stinking rich by following the demands of their foreign and corporate paymasters.

He then goes on to describe the contents of Galloway’s film. This is, as he says, ugly. This shows how Blair gave Murdoch monopoly control of the media in return for his papers’ support; accepted bribes from Bernie Ecclestone, the racing mogul, sold British warplanes to Indonesia to carry on its genocide in East Timor, and air traffic systems to Tanzania, which doesn’t even have an air force. He also shut down an investigation into corruption and Saudi Arabia, as well as privatising schools and hospitals. Post-prime minister, Blair also accepts millions from JP Morgan Chase, Petro Saudi and other big businesses for getting them connections with other rich, powerful people. He also hires himself out to a number of dictators in Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Egypt and Libya. He stopped Colonel Gadaffi’s victims from suing him, but did nothing to prevent Hillary bombing and killing the dictator.

But what really clinches him as worst person in the world is the fact that he got the job as Middle East Peace Envoy, before being sacked when people realised it wasn’t a joke.

See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/18/worst-human-being-alive-tony-blair/

The article has a trailer for the film. I’m not a fan of George Galloway nor the Respect Party. Galloway was too friendly towards Saddam Hussein. There’s that notorious clip of him telling the dictator he saluted his ‘indefatigability’ and so on. But I don’t think he took oil barrels from Hussein, as alleged. But Galloway was right about Blair and the Middle East, and right about Palestine. He’s also not an anti-Semite. Mahmoud Mazher, the fake sheikh, tried to entrap him into saying something vile in support of the Holocaust. Galloway recognised Mazher from his bodyguard, a seven-foot tall bruiser nicknamed ‘Jaws’ because of his gold teeth and similarity to the Bond villain. Galloway refused to be drawn, and instead stated very firmly that the Holocaust was a crime against humanity. He’s an anti-Zionist, but not an anti-Semite. This upset Mazher, who went off minus a story.

The documentary does look interesting, though I’m afraid it’s one of those things you might have to order. Among the talking heads featured is Stephen Fry. Again, I’m not a fan, but here he does make a very good point. He says that when you meet him Blair is very charming, but this hides the fact that he’s a complete b*stard. This is true. Blair did have a smooth charm, rather like Clinton, and so smarmed his way into power. And the result of this has been the legacy of war, corporate corruption, power and death that this film exposes.