Played three, won three. When it comes to election victories, Tony Blair's record as Labour leader was ‘perfect'. He was the man who led Labour back to power in 1997 after eighteen long years in opposition — and who again led his party to comfortable victories in 2001 and 2005. So when it comes to advice on how to win elections, surely Labour should be listening to the advice of the man who could with some justification claim to be the Jose Mourinho of British politics?
Well, er, no. It's not just that Tony Blair is damaged goods — a man who many believe should be on trial at The Hague for war crimes and certainly not giving advice to his political successors. It's also Blair's analysis of the current political climate in Britain — one which reveals a man who is laughably out of touch with what ordinary people are thinking.
Blair seems to believe that Labour moving to the left — and away from New Labour, i.e. ‘Blairite' positions — would be damaging to his party's chances at the polls. Blair was quoted in the right-wing neoliberal magazine The Economist as saying that the 2015 election could be one "in which a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result"- i.e. a Tory win.
Since the news of that interview came out, Blair sought to clarify his comments, saying that his remarks had been ‘misinterpreted' and that he did expect Labour to win — and that he fully supported current Labour leader Ed Miliband. But there's no doubting that Blair believes that Labour should be occupying what he calls ‘the centre ground' and not go back to adopting 'traditional' left-wing positions. ‘There's a huge desire in a large part of the media in this country to return British politics to a traditional Tory party fighting a traditional Labour party', he said in an interview with Progress magazine in October.
Where exactly is ‘centre ground‘ in 2015?
Blair told The Economist that he saw no evidence of the ‘centre ground' moving to the left — in fact, he said ‘you could argue that it has moved to the right, not left."
Sorry, Tony- but you‘re wrong. There has been a shift to the left, at least in relation to important economic issues. Sizeable majorities support re-nationalisation — not only of the railways (66%) but the water industry in England (71%) and the energy companies (68%). Privatisation — a flagship policy of the right in the 1980s — has never been so unpopular.
61% of people are in favour of the reintroduction of a 50p top rate of income tax. 96% of people think the British tax system should be more progressive than it currently is.
To my knowledge there hasn't been a poll yet on whether we should introduce capital punishment for corrupt bankers convicted of fraud (as they do in China) — but if there were — we can be fairly sure, given the current, anti-elitist public mood, that there'd be a sizeable percentage in favour.
Ironically, the issues where some would say that public opinion has swung to the ‘right'- have been those where Tony Blair and the Blairites take the opposite line, such as immigration, and Europe. Even here though, we could say that the traditional left (which opposes Blairism) shouldn‘t necessarily see this as public opinion moving against them — there is after all a very strong left-wing case for Britain's withdrawal from the EU — and indeed a left-wing case for sensible, non-racist immigration controls. On the EU — it's important to realise that people don't just agree with Nigel Farage, but the views of the late Tony Benn too- and indeed the Communist Party, which is just as ‘EU-sceptic' as UKIP.
Everywhere we look, the globalist, neoliberal positions adopted by Blair have become hugely unpopular. In fact, if there's one phrase which could sum up the mood of the nation as we go into 2015 it's ‘anti-Blairite'.
Liberal interventionism, anyone?
Labour broke from this policy when they failed to support the government in a crucial vote on military action against President Assad's Syrian government in August 2013. Ed Miliband and Labour listened to public opinion then — and not Blair or Blairite commentators in the elite media — who wanted military intervention against a secular government which was fighting IS. Laptop bombadiers were angry- but Miliband's stance was a sign that the party was finally moving away — albeit cautiously — from a Blairite foreign policy.
If Labour is smart it will move away from Blairism as much as it possibly can before the general election. What may have worked as an election formula in 1997, 2001 and 2005, won't work in 2015. Times have changed and the total public disillusion with the failed and discredited policies of the past is something which out-of-touch figures like Tony Blair simply don't understand.
There's another important point which needs to be made. By urging Labour not to move away from the neoliberal ‘centre ground', Blair is saying he wants Britain's two main parties to be fundamentally the same. He wants to deprive us of having a meaningful choice — of being able to vote for a major party which does offer the prospect of a publicly owned railway — or higher taxes on the wealthy — or, indeed a different kind of foreign policy. So it's not just in Labour's own interest that they ignore the man and his advice — it's the interests of democracy too.
