Blair’s
destructive path
The publication of Tony
Blair’s autobiography has confirmed just how unpopular he had become. In
1997, his New Labour spin factory churned out false hope and illusion.
By the time Blair departed, mass misery and brutality were entrenched in
Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain’s public services were under fierce attack
and the economy was a wreck. As PETER TAAFFE explains, however, the most
revealing aspect of the book is its exposure of Blair’s conscious policy
to destroy the Labour Party as a vehicle for working-class struggle.
A Journey, by Tony Blair
Published by Hutchinson, 2010, £25
WRITERS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
have rarely been assailed as has Tony Blair. The reception for this book
– visceral hatred from many – indicates that he stands alongside
Margaret Thatcher, for whom he gushes enthusiasm throughout, as one of
the most reviled prime ministers of Britain. The reason for this is
spelt out in quite extraordinary detail in his book. Both Thatcher and
her ‘heir’, Blair, were in the modern era the most finished expression
of those who defended capitalism and all its barbaric features.
Two pieces in the Guardian
are fitting epitaphs for Blair. One letter writer simply stated: "Surely
Mr Blair's book should have a subtitle: A Journey – How I Led You Up the
Garden Path". Commentator Tom Clark asks us to imagine the "quintet of
goodies [that] might adorn a new pledge card if the party Blair led now
took his advice and became full-blooded New Labour, as he understands
it. 1. Get state out of banking. 2. Bomb Iran. 3. Cut taxes on pay over
£150,000. 4. Repeal Freedom of Information Act. 5. Kill foxes". One
suggested signpost for his book signing read: "This way to the crime
section"!
On the very first page, like
a puffed-up bullfrog, he expresses his utter contempt for those who
lifted him to power: "I owe the Labour Party, its members, supporters
and activists a huge debt of gratitude. I put them through a lot! They
took it". He elaborates: "My head can sometimes think conservatively on
economics and security [You can say that again! – PT]; but my heart
always beats progressive, and my soul is and always will be that of a
rebel". We know at least that Blair – after the obscenities of
Afghanistan and Iraq – really does have a ‘heart’ and even a ‘soul’!
This unconcealed contempt for the ranks of his own party is matched by
his fawning sycophancy for every reactionary capitalist leader on the
planet. George W Bush, of course, possessed qualities of "decisive
leadership", Silvio Berlusconi was his "friend", Nicolas Sarkozy was
full of "charm", etc.
The Blair-Brown team
IF THE BOOK was full of such
banalities and laced with sugary praise for one bourgeois leader after
another it would be hardly worthwhile analysing. But it is much more
than this. It details in the most brazen language the destruction of the
Labour Party as a mass workers’ party by the bourgeois elements around
Blair. There are some who have seized hold of the ‘differences’ between
Blair and Gordon Brown to actually hold out some hope that there is
still life, even for the left, within the Labour Party, that it can be
returned to a ‘social-democratic agenda’. This conclusion is entirely
erroneous.
Brown was at one with Blair
in all the ‘reforms’ – in reality, counter-reforms – both within the
Labour Party and in the policies pursued in the 13 years he shared power
with Blair. Any ‘differences’ were entirely secondary, incidental and
largely involved Brown asserting his power by seeking to keep strict
control, through the Treasury, on state expenditure. Brown may have
possessed a small ‘social-democratic’ tail, to give a small boost to
public spending, largely by ‘stealth’. But this in no way departed from
the main agenda of Blair or New Labour.
This was abundantly
demonstrated in Brown’s short tenure as prime minister when his
‘differences’ with Blair were completely ‘blurred’. He differed with
David Cameron and the current ConDem coalition not about the need for
savage cuts but on the timescale: death by a thousand cuts! In every
respect he went along with the attacks on everything that the Labour
Party traditionally stood for. Together with Blair, he created a ‘new
party’, as Tony Benn indicated at one stage – unfortunately never
drawing the conclusion that it was necessary to create the basis for a
new workers’ party.
Blair even admits: "I voted
Labour in 1983 but I never really thought that a Labour victory was the
best thing for the country and I was a Labour candidate!" Anything that
signified the assertion of working-class interests, let alone power or
control was seen as retrogressive. He writes: "I had actually used
support for the [EU] Social Chapter to drop our support for the closed
shop [the obligation in certain trades to join a designated union]". In
this one line he is at one with the bourgeois like Rupert Murdoch, who
smashed the closed shop and thereby enormously weakened the trade unions
in the print industry. Ask any print worker or a member of the National
Union of Journalists whether this was a progressive move by Murdoch,
supported by Blair.

Bourgeois entrists
THE MOST CRUCIAL aspect of
the book is the way Blair set about destroying Labour, creating a
bourgeois party in its place. Without the creation of a certain set of
unique objective conditions beforehand, Blair would not have been able
to achieve this. The work of destroying the Labour Party as a specific
workers’ party at bottom had already begun under Neil Kinnock, who was
the gateman for Blairism. The onset of neo-liberalism in the 1980s, but
particularly the collapse of Stalinism which followed, and the huge
ideological campaign in favour of capitalism, were decisive. Without
this, such an ideologically formless figure as Blair, a modern Vicar of
Bray – all things to all men and women when required – would never have
risen to power.
He is unashamed in describing
how he shuffled from one ‘boring’ Labour Party meeting to another in the
desperate quest for a seat – in the process showing the type of
carpetbagger that infested the Labour Party then and still does. ‘There
is no gratitude in politics’. Right-wing Labour Party member and head of
the General and Municipal Workers Union in the north-east, Joe Mills,
was instrumental in getting a seat for Blair at the very last moment
before the 1983 general election. There is, however, no mention of him
in the book.
There are, however,
references to Militant – now the Socialist Party – to which he oozes
hostility. This is quite fitting. His rise to prominence was linked to
the attacks on Militant in the early 1980s. As he hints in the book, he
was involved as a junior barrister in the legal action against the
Militant Editorial Board then. When Tony Benn came to the defence of
Militant, in a shared car journey with Blair, this was enough to dismiss
him as an ineffectual "idealist". Blair was, in effect, a
middle-class/bourgeois ‘entrist’ into the Labour Party.
In almost every line, his
programme for degutting the Labour Party of socialism is expressed:
"Where was our business support?" he asks about the situation in the
1980s. He wails: "By 1992 I was almost 40. I had been in opposition for
almost a decade". He then declares: "If steps were too incremental [in
changing the Labour Party], we might fail again and I would be 50…
before even getting a sight of government. What was the point of
politics if not to win power?" There is nothing wrong with power – power
for a class party, yes, that stands for decisive change in the lives of
ordinary working people – but ‘personal power’ is inimical to a real
socialist.
Blair never lets pass the
fact that ‘New Labour’ was in power for 13 years. But to what effect
from the standpoint of the mass of the working class? How did this
much-vaunted ‘power’ end? In the greatest economic bust since the 1930s,
a worsening of the position of the poor and an entrenchment of
Thatcherism, as Blair makes clear: "I even decided to own up to
supporting changes Margaret Thatcher had made. I knew the credibility of
the whole New Labour project rested on accepting that much of what she
wanted to do in the 1980s was inevitable, a consequence not of ideology
but of social and economic change". This was a complete acceptance of
the Thatcher ‘settlement’, the terminology of warfare, the class war in
this instance!
Blair presided over the
destruction of a party that at least, at the bottom, was a lever for
this kind of change and the long-term aim of ‘socialism’. This is spelt
out in graphic detail in his attempt to change the leadership, to barge
his way into the position of supreme leader, in effect, and
fundamentally alter everything upon which the Labour Party was
historically based. Childishly, Blair admits that his foreign policy –
bloody ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Iraq and Afghanistan – followed a
Saturday afternoon viewing of the film ‘Schindler’s List’. He proffers
admiration for Schindler but his and Bush’s actions in Iraq and
Afghanistan in the slaughter of the innocents was more akin to those who
Schindler tried to protect the Jews from!
Ruthless execution
HE EVEN TRIES to pretend that
he was "very non-political in my view of politics". This does not square
with his Machiavellian scheming to become leader, aided by Peter
Mandelson, his ‘consigliore’ (his word). The fact that Blair can use
terminology of this kind shows the mafia-type operation behind him. Once
leader, he quite consciously set out to eliminate any connection between
the Labour Party, its organised working-class base, and its socialist
‘aspiration’ enshrined in Clause IV. Detailed here is the manner he went
about doing this, garnering the support of former leader Neil Kinnock –
an erstwhile left – as well as his political thugs such as Alistair
Campbell.
Monstrous in its mendacity is
how Blair misinterprets the original Clause IV in Labour’s constitution.
He invokes the fact that "even Russia had embraced the market" post-1989
to underline the need to eliminate any connection with the idea of
socialism. Quite falsely, he claims: "Nobody outside the far left really
believed in Clause IV as it was written". His attempts to base this on
Labour history show his dishonesty and ignorance. In fact, the original
Clause IV, written by the Fabian Sidney Webb, was a result of the
pressure of the Russian revolution and the effect this had in Britain.
It reflected the political outlook of the most politically conscious
sections of the working class. Moreover, when Hugh Gaitskell, an earlier
prototype for Blair, also attempted to eliminate Clause IV in the 1950s,
he was defeated by an uprising of the membership of the party, led by
the trade unions.
Although in practice, it is
true, Labour governments had never carried out Clause IV – ‘the
nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy’ – party
members, working class in the main, saw the necessity for such a
programme by a Labour government in the future. The capitalists and
their agents within the labour movement were always hostile to it,
recognising that it could be a promissory note for the introduction of
socialism later.
The elimination of Clause IV
was, in effect, a defining moment in the disintegration of the Labour
Party as a distinct workers’ party at the bottom. Blair spells out that
the trade union tops, particularly those like Tom Sawyer of NUPE (later
a component part of Unison), supported Blair’s ‘modernising agenda’,
including the elimination of Clause IV itself. Sawyer had ‘evolved’ from
left to right and earlier had played a crucial role in the expulsion of
Militant supporters and other lefts from the Labour Party.
Moreover, Blair shows that
Brown and others entirely subscribed to this lurch to the right. The
essence of New Labour is spelt out by him: "No return to the old union
laws; no renationalisation of privatised utilities; no raising of the
top rate of tax; no unilateralism; no abolition of grammar schools.
There were certain clear pointers as to future social policy: a tough
line on anti-social behaviour; investment and reform of public
services".
Like a modern Bonaparte, he
declares: "The party had to know I was not bluffing. If they didn’t want
New Labour, they could get someone else. The country had to know that if
I was going to be their prime minster, I would be of the party but also
removed from it". As if recognising he goes a little too far here, a few
paragraphs later he writes: "The commitment remained. The means of
implementing it radically altered". In fact, his only commitment was
personal power for himself, the implacable defence of capitalism, and
the abandonment of any connection with the class struggle and socialism.
Whose side are you on?
IN EFFECT, AS he describes in
the latter chapters of the book, his perception was entirely different
to Labour’s historical approach in the struggle to change society. He
was an advocate of the ‘minimalist’ state as an "enabler", which is no
different to the stance of the present ConDem government. It was the
argument also deployed by Thatcher and her acolytes when she was in
power. The question is ‘enabling’ for whom? Which class, which force?
Blairism/Thatcherism and Brown stood for the state to step in when the
system is in danger, to dole out a trillion pounds to the banks to
enable them to escape from the effects of the crisis and then, having
done this, handing them back to the private sector.
Also illuminated here is the
way in which Blair consciously turned towards the capitalist media,
Murdoch in particular. He ‘likes’ Rupert! This is the man who deploys
dishonest ‘hackers’ of private phones (the News of the World and Andy
Coulson). Murdoch is the hammer of every worker fighting for his or her
rights: miners, print workers, etc.
Marxists consider that the
present state is not a ‘neutral’ factor. We stand for an entirely
different type of state which combines centralised action in owning the
means of production with democratic control – workers’ control and
management of industries taken over by the state. However, it is
preferable that where capitalism fails the state should step in, takes
action to nationalise a firm or an industry, rather than see it
destroyed. In this case of ‘state capitalism’ we demand workers’ control
and management, election of all officials, etc. This can then open up
the possibility that these sectors, which have failed under private
ownership, can be used for the benefit of working people and not the
capitalists. All the actions of Blair and New Labour had the intention
of facilitating the encroachment of the private sector – like the
present government – into the nationalised sections of the economy to
the benefit of a handful of privateers.
It is entirely false, as
Blair argues, that "the [Labour] party wanted ‘true socialism’ beloved
of the activists; the government was focused on the people". In fact,
the ‘people’ who Blair looked towards were ‘key City people’, those on
over £150,000 a year and more at the expense of the mass of working
people. His ruminations on the character of class in modern Britain –
most people are middle class or aspire to be, he says – are entirely
superficial. Ninety per cent of the people of Britain have an income
below £40,000 a year with the majority of full-time workers earning
below £26,000 per annum. This is not a princely sum and certainly not
approaching the estimated £60 million personal fortune accumulated by
Blair and his family. Kinnock is a poor relation with only an estimated
£20 million fortune!
As shallow is his
counterposing of ‘aspiration’ to socialism. He declares: "I hate class
but I love aspiration". The hoary old myth peddled by Thatcher and
swallowed by sections of the right wing of the labour movement is that
if a worker gets a ‘brass doorknocker’ and owns his own house then he
immediately abandons any idea of changing society and becomes a pillar
of the system. Where is this ‘theory of the property-owning democracy’
now when millions have been evicted or face repossession of their homes
in the US, Ireland, Spain and Britain? The next generations in Britain
have a vain hope of ever owning their own houses. All the tenets of New
Labour have been smashed in the course of this crisis. And Blair, as
well as Brown did nothing to prepare for this eventuality. Witness
Brown’s claim to have abolished the boom and bust cycle.
Equally illuminating, and
spelt out in this book, is how Blair changed the party from a vibrant,
fighting organisation – witness what was achieved in places like
Liverpool in the 1980s – into a hollow shell which marched to the
drumbeat of New Labour’s pro-capitalist policies. He even reveals how he
"changed policy" on the hoof on Northern Ireland.

Hypocrisy and war
ONE OF THE most sickening
chapters in the book is the attempt at self-justification over the
criminal role he and Bush played in relation to the Iraq war. Eulogies
are trotted out about Bush: "He was at peace with himself". Pity we
couldn’t say the same thing about Afghanistan and Iraq today.
In a rare ‘contrite’ moment,
Blair admits mistakes and misjudgements about Afghanistan: "I certainly
misjudged the depth of the failure of the Afghanistan state; the ability
of the Taliban to immerse themselves into local communities". Why? He
was at the helm of the government, presumably briefed on the history of
the country. Not just Britain, but Alexander the Great and the Russians
were incapable of the long-term occupation of Afghanistan. There was
little chance, therefore, that Britain, even in ‘alliance’ with the US,
could achieve this.
He sees the monstrosities of
Iraq as a ‘debating issue’: "The trouble with debating Iraq is that, by
and large, people have stopped listening to each other". Justifying his
and Bush’s war, he states that "one third of children in central and
southern Iraq… suffered from chronic malnutrition in 2003". Entirely
forgotten here are the earlier sanctions imposed on Iraq before the war
had begun which resulted in this catastrophe. Before this, Iraq was as
rich as Portugal or Malaysia in 1979 but by 2003 – precisely because of
the sanctions – 60% of the population was dependent on food aid.
Worse is to come a few pages
later where he disputes the number killed in Iraq. The Lancet report of
2004 claimed that Iraq had suffered 600,000 ‘excess deaths’ as a result
of the invasion. He states that ‘only’ 100,000 perished. He has agreed
to give the proceeds of this book – £5 million – to the ex-servicemen’s
association. As if this could compensate for the soldiers’ families who
suffered devastating losses or those who have died and suffered in Iraq;
four to five million Iraqis are in internal or external exile.
Blair versus Brown
IN SOME SENSES, the most
relevant part of the book for today lies in the battle between Brown and
Blair over the ‘succession’. We are informed that these ‘principled’
battles between the two centred on issues such as tuition fees,
foundation hospitals and the privatisation programme relentlessly
pursued by Blair and Brown. Interestingly, Blair makes the point that
the closest he came to being unseated as prime minister was over the
issue of tuition fees. He admits that in the 2005 general election it
"cost us several seats".
That issue was then and is
now a subject of enormous discontent. It represents the pulling up of
the ladder of educational opportunity by the generation represented by
Blair and Brown who themselves received free university education. This
‘privilege’ is now denied to the present generation of students, who
despite considerable achievements in A levels, will be shut out of
university education on the basis of the massive financial impost that
tuition fees represent for students and their families today. It is not
a dead issue and will be taken up in the education sector in the midst
of the battles over the savage cuts that loom through the ConDem
government.
On foundation hospitals,
Blair tries to picture Brown as opposed to what this represented, as
well as NHS ‘reform’ in general – that is, creeping privatisation. Some
on the left agree with Blair. By bolstering Brown’s efforts, they hope
that this will show that there is still a ‘space’ for the left within
the Labour Party! The book makes clear that Brown may have ‘demurred’ –
as did the left – but no fundamental challenge was made to Blair’s
proposals by Brown, the left or the trade unions either in the education
sector or in general. Brown was a firm advocate of the Private Finance
Initiative (PFI) and the Public-Private Partnership, especially in
London Transport. This was one of the issues that brought him into
collision with Ken Livingstone, which Blair mentions in this book.
Therefore, he did not differ fundamentally from Blair.
Brown’s opposition was mainly
a device to play to the left and force Blair out. Blair recounts how the
scandal over ‘cash for honours’, in which businessmen gave New Labour
undeclared ‘loans’ in return for nominations for peerages, was used by
Brown – through Jack Dromey on the National Executive Committee of the
Labour Party – as an attempt to force Blair to go. Brown agreed with
Blair and New Labour’s programme on privatisation but used his power at
the Treasury to extract concessions favourable to him.
There is undoubtedly an
element around Brown – represented by those like Ed Balls – who did see
an opportunity by stealth to increase public expenditure minimally under
Brown’s aegis. This was no fundamental challenge to Blair or Blairism.
The king – Blair – might be ‘dead’ but he carries on in the form of
David Miliband. Blair makes it clear in the book that David Miliband was
and is a ‘central pillar’ of the New Labour project. The anti-working
class, anti-union, anti-strike position is a central theme.
Blair deals with the
confrontation arising from the fuel protests of 2000. In September 2000,
fuel protesters gathered at petrol pumps and outside oil refineries
because of the sudden rise in petrol prices. He himself concedes that he
should have realised that "your ordinary motorist" was facing big rises
in filling a car with petrol and was in revolt. Yet he was determined to
face down these protesters, who were a "motley bunch". They were,
according to Blair, "farmers, hauliers, the self-employed and
anti-government". They were not from the "usual protesting stock; these
were what the Marxists would call the petty bourgeoisie, not that there
was anything petty or petit about them".
Here is a Labour leader who
has spent all his time courting the middle class and counterposing them
to the working class. Yet when they move to assert their rights, in
concert with workers, he vilifies them. What is more, he is prepared to
use the most threatening, if not dictatorial, tactics. He demands of the
police that they smash the protests. He says to the oil companies that
they should "sack them". Shamefully, he declared, he would like the army
to come in and, if necessary "drive your tankers and if they meet any
violence from protesters I want you [the police] to deal with them very
firmly, and if not, to let the army take care of them. They are very
good at it". A later manifestation of Thatcherism, first seen in the
miners’ strike, the print battle at Wapping, etc?
Thoroughly Tory Tony
BLAIR IS ABSOLUTELY
contemptuous of the Labour left. With faint praise, he says of Tony
Benn, for instance, that he is a "national treasure". He now has nothing
but kind words for the former firebrand Dennis Skinner. Skinner had
attacked Blair just after he had been elected in a meeting in his
constituency, virtually dismissing him correctly as a right-wing,
middle-class infiltrator. But he also declares that in later years
"Dennis was one of my best (if somewhat closet) supporters. He didn’t
like some of my policies but he liked someone who whacked the Tories".
This is a warning for those who remain in Labour’s ‘big tent’ and still
claim to stand on the left. They have been nullified and marginalised
and nothing in the current direction of New Labour indicates that this
will change.
In his concluding chapter,
Postscript, Blair indicates how far to the right he has moved. He
denounces Keynesianism – he is on the side of the unreconstructed
believers in the market. He even claims that the market did not fail in
the current crisis! Only one part, one sector, did! He is unashamed in
declaring that the state should step in, rescue capitalism and then
skedaddle. He is at one with the current ConDem government in Britain,
which he says is, in essence, a New Labour government, in attacking and
savaging the living standards of the working class.
He declares that if Labour
had pursued ‘New Labour policies’ then it would have won the last
general election. The Brown government lost the general election because
it betrayed the hopes of working-class people and came to the aid of
capitalism as Blair before him had done. This great ‘electoral genius’
Blair – in tandem with Brown – had succeeded in losing five million
Labour votes between the elections of 1997 and 2010! In contrast, the
much reviled Liverpool ‘Militants’, when they were in power between 1983
and 1987, pushed up the Labour vote to its highest ever level!
Events are now moving in the
direction of utterly undermining and discrediting capitalism and all of
those who defend it. It is necessary to prepare now for a new mass
workers’ party, which will close the chapter on New Labour and open up a
new vista for socialism in Britain and the world.