Thursday 13 August 2015

Can Blair ever match Thatcher....for being hated by the Left?





Tony Blair is trying, without much chance of success, to stop Jeremy Corbyn being elected as leader of the Labour party.


(I never did get round to registering to vote as it happens...)

In an article in the Gaurdian, he makes a plea for sanity to a whipped up tribe of lefties. His article is very 'meh', of note is that he even feels he has to start it with 'even if you hate me....'

But the comments, wow they are amazing. The level of vitriol is outstanding. Blair had a checkered time as PM but his worst legacy was to let Brown have the keys when he left.

The Left now hate him, indeed, it had me wondering. Can he achieve the impossible and be hated as much as 'Fatcher' with every evil in the world his fault. I would never have believed that anyone else could be lifted to that level. Perhaps like Iran, where the US is the Great Satan and others can only attain 'Little Satan' status.

An  strange turn of events though. I am glad I am not a lefty, all that confected hate and angst must be very trying to live with.

23 comments:

Bill Quango MP said...

I read a really good counterfactual.
The best ones hinge on a small event that has a big impact.

This one suggested that Blair never lied to Brown over diner. Instead,he agreed to a leadership race. Which, as we know from actual history and the performances of Mr Smooth and the Lumpen Troll, he would have won.

That opens up a scenario where Brown is Chancellor, but then moved to foreign secretary when his grumpiness becomes too much for Blair.
Who is having much more success in persuading the Labour party and the UK to join the Euro.

And to keep the EU onside and willing to allow the UK in on favourable terms, Blair resists getting involved with Iraq. Beyond sending support and rear area troops through the UN.

In the euphoria of becoming true Europeans and the collapse of the Tories in irrelevance, Blair wins his 3rd term comfortably.

And serves on winning his 4th term as the most loved labour leader of all time, standing down in 2011 just escaping blame for the euro crisis which devasted the UK.

Bank of Popadopolus said...

Cameron is heading for the same space as Blair occupies.
Cameron has won one and a half elections. And it looks likely, if he stood, he would win another substantial victory against the civil war labour party and a defeated UKIP post EU referendum.

Yet the party does not like him. They tolerate him. As long as he wins.
He is likely to sign up UK troops for Syria before the end of this parliament. And that cannot end well.

dearieme said...

It's not just The Left that loathes the wee twat, CU - so do I. And I'm none too keen on Cameron either.

Brown is a subject suitable for a new Shakespeare - able chap utterly corroded by the acid of frustrated ambition. Whereas Blair and Cameron wouldn't even provide material for an episode of a soap opera.

Anonymous said...

@CU,
We are all glad you are not a lefty too!

Visceral said...

BoP: "Cameron is heading for the same space as Blair occupies."

Vapid, corporitist-facist*, corrupt, media focus group led (from a self selecting opinion pool), self interested, treasonous scrote who should be hung for high treason you mean?




(*used primarily in the non perjorative sense)

Jan said...

Cameron is not in the same league as Bliar. TB has the gall to call himself a socialist when every thing he ever did was more Tory than the Tories. He continues to strut on the world stage when if he had any morals at all he would be in a corner begging for forgiveness. On the score for psychopathy traits I would posit he would score very highly. He does not see anything he did as wrong so has no hope of redemption. The pity is so many people suffered and continue to do so while he continues to amass his millions.

Dick the Prick said...

@ Dearime - the Shakespearean thing has already been done - I'd suggest pouring yourself a drink of your choice and sitting back for about45 minutes to enjoy the finest blogging I think i've ever read - certainly not suitable for work - not sure it's suitable for anything, really:

http://bastardoldholborn.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/saga-of-gordon-ruiner-by-stanislav.html#.VcyECHFVhKI

The level of hatred the left have for Blair is beyond all rational thought. I kinda feel bored, if anything, that if that's the best a vaguely centre left party can achieve then it's mainly a mixture of tedium and predictability.

I don't think the right could ever hate Cameron as much as he doesn't seem to be attacking his base so much - he tickles our clitoris occassionaly or our frenulums with his little trinkets and he knows we can't vote for the other guy whereas Blair & Brown kinda hated their base - the Gillian Duffy thing was just the soundbite that encapsulated their contempt.

When I used to do Tory stuff I was really good chums with my Labour oppo and I had about 30 members and hangers on and he had 12 maximum yet his meetings always took about 2 or 3 hours longer than mine - I really haven't got the time to have 8 items discussed before we even get to the agenda - geez, we never had AOB on agendas as the last item was usually 'now fuck off home'.

Glad you'r not a lefty too CU - where would it end?

Blue Eyes said...

CU you are a model of clear-thinking rightyism. However not all of your fellow travellers are as measured. There is quite a lot of hatred and self-loathing on the right, too.

What has happened to David Davis? I think the Tories and the more general right dodged a bullet there. A clear coherent populist. Remind you of anyone? Surefire election loser.

What the antimoderates on all sides forget is that under most electoral systems you have to be in office if you want to get anything done.

andrew said...

BE

Sometimes it is more rewarding to just sit back and moan.
Power means you have to do something.

On TB, the man lied to the country, led us into a war on a false prospectus that he knew was false at the time. many uk citizens died and tens of thousands of iraqis died.
It isn't just the left that hate him, most of the entire uk does.
For good reason imo.

Jer said...

The vanity and self delusion of Tony Blair is amazing.

"Even _if_ you hate me"...


Demetrius said...

Were not Blair and Corbyn both keen fans of the famous pop group Kosygin And The Commissars?

My3rdHolidayName said...

The real issue here is not the 'right' or 'left' -edness of any particular candidate in any party. Its about the takeover of the political space from political arguement by corporate interests. This is why all the main characters seem 'vanilla' and merge into a centerist goo; there is no social imperative or personal belief being annunciated, only safe, focus-groupy, mish mash.

The corporatist agenda is wholly corrosive to every party in the body politic and indeed to the country itself.

Those who support UKIP and Farage should be perfectly understanding of the impetus to elect Corbyn, its the same thing. In fact, I would conjecture that until these two groupings can find common ground neither will advance. Indeed when these two forces joined in Greece it presented a real problem to those most Uber of international merchantilists - the Germans.
This soft Tory, middling-Labour managerial stylee handed down from INSEAD/ENA/Harvard/OxBridge is really a we-know-best attitude largely funded by corporations.

CityUnslicker said...

Nice comment there my 3rd holiday name.

Something in that, but still, it is the SHEER IRONY that the left hate Blair - who stood for nothing and Thatcher - who stood for things just as much as each other.

There is no pleasing some people.

In my day job I am a director of a large law firm. We never to anything radical, I am about as radical as it gets and rarely do they listen to me except for shits and giggles. Anyone of the partners who espouses truly radical ideas get a P45 pdq. And so they should, this firm and others in various guises have been around for a hundred years plus and made successive owners very very rich indeed. Anyone who comes along and suggests wholesale change (uinless say, the code of laws rapidaly changed i.e. a big external shock) is foolish. You coudl call this corpratism, other may call it real capitalism, others complacent - each has a case to make. But it does work.

The reason for this segue is that the same is true of politics. Yes, I know there were better solutions to the 2008 crash; indeed, the writers here we some of the few to predict it (3x over at least.....). But they were risky, the Tories were likely to muddle throught with just the right amount of managerialism to get us through it. Weird Ed wanted to be more radical, no votes there. Corbyn has some interesting ideas, all very radical, there are no votes in that. Only when people get very desperate (i.e. like in Greece where the mainstream was so corrupt they had already bankrupted the Country) do they vote for a Syriza type alternative only to be dismayed to find that does not work either.

So the extremists in democracy always live to be disappointed. The funny thing witht he left is there bete noir is a centrist, not an extremist!

DtP said...

Judging by the election results - is there something about mis-directed lefty hatred - they're so scatter gun and disparate that sooner rather than later they start shooting themselves?

All the pollsters and recent history have been informing us that the Tories' bete noir is Europe - Europe lost '97 and Europe is what we've been fighting over ever since. Whilst that's certainly true to some degree, all the post election analysis of Ukip's 4.5 million votes show that punters voted Tory when they thought Labour could win - Ukip's votes came from Labour strongholds. Everyone likes a laugh but, yer know, let's not take the piss. The Tory vote held because having an existential crisis in public is problematic.

Not wanting to sound revisionist but it was Black Wednesday that fucked it - Europe was a thing but loss of confidence was the overiding meme. Europe discussion was just the circle jerk to ensure no-one got the blame.

Some of the chaps on here have mentioned that they hate Cameron - maybe so. Chances are they do - still gonna vote Tory though. Perhaps the Tory Party is able to be seen as corporatist because it doesn't experiment with open fucking season on electing its leaders.

I think the gist of my wibble is - thank fuck i'm not a lefty!

It is immensly democratic though unlike the car crash of Labour's WTF election - OMG and ROFL etc - they really are tools :-)

dearieme said...

DtheP: alas, our tastes in blogging differ.

Anyway, Broon. You'll have noticed that again and again he claimed to have learnt To Care from his parents, the minister and his wife. It's only recently that I learnt that the old couple were - wait for it - Conservatives.

Anonymous said...

"all that confected hate and angst must be very trying to live with"

Not at all, natural human instinct to hate someone or something. Remember Genghis Khan: "A man needs a horse to love, a women to ride, and an enemy to hate" - or words to that effect.

There's still plenty of hate in the UK - it's just carefully channeled towards racists, sexists, homophobes and paedophiles. A lot of effort goes into that channeling.

Blue Eyes said...

I don't exactly know what people mean when they complain about "corporatism". Do they mean the caricature Big Business seen in film and TV drama? If the government was being run by them would we have onerous Elfin' Safety laws and green crap? Surely if the awful profiteers were in charge we'd have children down the mines, asbestos in our teabags and one giant vertically-integrated turtle.

People elect gooey centrists because they don't vote for something which is likely to kill their domestic finances. The 2015 election was an absolute classic UK election: they saw that the economy was beginning to recover and that Ed Miliband would screw it up. Only simpletons like me and ND saw that; all the experts were too clever by half.

I still don't think that Corbyn will do it. I hope I am wrong, but even if not, the others have proved themselves so weak that they cannot possibly hope for a recovery in time for the election, assuming no economic cock-ups by the Tories, or accidentally leaving the EU.

Burnham keeps repeating the Milimanifesto as if he recites it in a norther accent everyone will vote for it. Cooper has been trying to sneak through the middle.

TONY BLAIR IS RIGHT!

As I said above, if you want to bring stuff in then you have to be in office. Fatcha was all soft and centrist to start with. She probably didn't mean to be as radical with her economic policy in the early years, but was buggered if she was going to admit it had failed (which at the start it did).

Electro-Kevin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Electro-Kevin said...

"Thank God I'm not a Lefty."

I wish I was. I'd be happy because we get a lot of Leftist policies in Britain regardless of which party rules.

Blair wasn't a red Tory. He brought a brand of socialist, anti-establishmentarianism and did a lot of extremely un-conservative constitutional wrecking. I don't hate him for destabilising Iraq - I hate him for destabilising Britain.

I hate him for reconciling socialism with capitalism and turning the Tories into Blairists too - and now the red and the blue team battle it out around the centre line in self indulgent and self serving gamesmanship and whogivesastuffwhathappenstothecountry? because party is all that counts to these sociopaths.

The capitalists have even bought into Blairism, permanently. Rather than treating the disease that socialism has afflicted so many of our people with they have instead become addicted to the state subsidised replacement of them while the BBC goes on to blame the old (among them the generation that saved this country) for all our ills.

Above all I hate Blair because he hated me and my people first.

David Cameron hates us too.

Dick the Prick said...

@Dearieme - 2008 seems like a lifetime ago. I read the Guardian website and its commentards with genuine concern - I remember what it feels like to be so furious. Blogging can be art sometimes, as our noble hosts profess with regular aplomb.

CityUnslicker said...

Dick - in the city all the same mistakes are being made alread. 2008, indeed a lifetime ago.

DtP said...

Hence Osborne being the imbecile that he is. What was the scrapping of maintenance grants for poor kids if not spite? I cling on to the Tory Party with my finger-tips but sometimes I feel like letting go. I think his coronation is out of the question no matter how big he builds his walls.

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