So many people so desperately wanted Kinnock to beat Thatcher. So much so that it blinded many of them to the fact that he was spectacularly useless. His first problem was that he was incoherent … Kinnock was on a mission to make Labour business-friendly, while retaining its working-class base. ibid.
Blair and New Labour thrive on pessimism … The antidote to pessimism is the understanding that we do make a difference. Blair didn’t scrap the Poll Tax – we did. New Labour didn’t end apartheid – we did. What keeps campaigners going is not a naïve faith that one sugary day we can make the world a better place, but the knowledge that defying authority already makes the world a better place. ibid.
He’s painted by some as a man obsessed with money. Since leaving Number 10 his critics claim the former PM has cashed in on his image. The Blair Rich Project, Channel 5 2016
Has his pursuit of power and money cast a shadow over his reputation? ibid.
10 houses and 27 flats … Blair secured a 4.6 million advance on his autobiography. ibid.
Just as the London bombs in the summer of 2005 were Blair bombs, the inevitable consequence of his government’s lawless attack on Iraq, so the potential bombs in the summer of 2007 are Brown’s bombs.
Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor as prime minister, has been an unerring supporter of the unprovoked bloodbath whose victims now equal those of the Rwandan genocide, according to the American scientist who led the 2006 Johns Hopkins School of Public Health survey of civilian dead in Iraq. While Tony Blair sought to discredit this study, British government scientists secretly praised it as tried and tested and an underestimation of mortality. The under-estimation was 655,000 men, women and children. That is now approaching a million. It is the crime of the century.
In his first day’s address outside 10 Downing Street and subsequently to Parliament, Brown paid not even lip service to those who would be alive today had his government and it was his government as much as Blair’s [that] joined Bush in a slaughter justified with demonstrable lies. He said nothing, not a word.
He said nothing about the added thousands of Iraqi children whose deaths from preventable disease have doubled since the invasion, caused by the wilful destruction of sanitation and water purification plants. He said nothing about hospital patients who die every day for want of equipment as basic as a syringe. He said nothing about the greatest refugee flight since the Palestinians’ Naqba. He said nothing about his government’s defeat in Afghanistan, and how the British army and its Nato allies are killing civilians, including whole families. Typically, on 29 June, British forces called in air strikes on a village, reportedly bombing to death 45 innocent people almost as many as the number bombed to death in London in July 2005. Compare the reaction, or rather the silence. They were only Muslims. And Muslims are the world’s most numerous victims of a terrorism whose main sources are Washington, Tel Aviv and London.
And he said nothing about his government’s role in Afghanistan’s restoration as the world’s biggest source of opium, a direct result of the invasion of 2001. Any dealer on the streets of Glasgow will have the stuff, straight from warlords paid off by the CIA and in whose name British soldiers are killing and dying pointlessly.
He said nothing about stopping any of this. Not a word. Not a hint ... The paymaster of the greatest British foreign policy disaster of the modern era, Brown could not even speak its name, let alone meet the military families that waited to speak to him. Three British soldiers were killed on his first day.
Has there been anything like the tsunami of unction that has engulfed the departure of Blair and the elevation of Brown? Yes, there has. Think back a decade. Blair, wrote Hugo Young of the Guardian, wants to create a world none of us has known, where the laws of political gravity are overturned, one where ideology has surrendered entirely to values. The new chancellor, effused the Observer, would announce the most radical welfare Budget since the Second World War.
The values were fake and so was the new deal. One media-managed stunt followed another as Brown delighted the stock market and comforted the very rich and celebrated the empire, and ignored the longing of the British electorate for a restoration of public services so badly damaged by Margaret Thatcher. One of the first decisions by Harriet Harman, Blair’s first social security secretary and a declared feminist, was to abolish the single parents welfare premium and benefit, in spite of her pledge to the House of Commons that Labour opposed these impoverishing Tory-inspired cuts. Today, Harman is Brown’s deputy party leader and, like all of the new faces around the cabinet table with plans to heal old wounds (the Guardian), she voted for an invasion that has destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of women.
Some feminism.
And when Blair finally left, those MPs who stood and gave him a standing ovation finally certified parliament as a place of minimal consequence to British democracy. The courtiers who reported this disgrace with Richard Dimbleby royal-occasion reverence are flecked with the blood spilled by the second-rate actor and first-rate criminal. They now scramble for the latest police press release. That the profane absurdity of the going of Blair and the silence and compliance of Brown political twins regardless of their schoolboy spats may well have provoked the attacks on London and Glasgow is of no interest. While the crime of the century endures, there almost certainly will be others.
Shame. John Pilger, article July 2007, ‘The London Bombs Also Belong to the New Prime Minister’
How contrite their former heroes now seem. On 17 May, the Leader of the House of Commons, Harriet Harman, who is alleged to have spent £10,000 of taxpayers’ money on ‘media training’, called on MPs to ‘rebuild cross-party trust’. The unintended irony of her words recalls one of her first acts as social security secretary more than a decade ago – cutting the benefits of single mothers. This was spun and reported as if there was a ‘revolt’ among Labour backbenchers, which was false. None of Blair’s new female MPs, who had been elected ‘to end male-dominated, Conservative policies’, spoke up against this attack on the poorest of poor women. All voted for it.
The same was true of the lawless attack on Iraq in 2003, behind which the cross-party Establishment and the political media rallied. Andrew Marr stood in Downing Street and excitedly told BBC viewers that Blair had ‘said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right.’ When Blair’s army finally retreated from Basra in May, it left behind, according to scholarly estimates, more than a million people dead, a majority of stricken, sick children, a contaminated water supply, a crippled energy grid and four million refugees.
As for the ‘celebrating’ Iraqis, the vast majority, say Whitehall’s own surveys, want the invader out. And when Blair finally departed the House of Commons, MPs gave him a standing ovation – they who had refused to hold a vote on his criminal invasion or even to set up an inquiry into its lies, which almost three-quarters of the British population wanted.
Such venality goes far beyond the greed of the uppity Hazel Blears.
‘Normalising the unthinkable’, Edward Herman’s phrase from his essay ‘The Banality of Evil’, about the division of labour in state crime, is applicable here. On 18 May, the Guardian devoted the top of one page to a report headlined, ‘Blair awarded $1m prize for international relations work’. This prize, announced in Israel soon after the Gaza massacre, was for his ‘cultural and social impact on the world’. You looked in vain for evidence of a spoof or some recognition of the truth. Instead, there was his ‘optimism about the chance of bringing peace’ and his work ‘designed to forge peace’.
This was the same Blair who committed the same crime – deliberately planning the invasion of a country, ‘the supreme international crime’ – for which the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg after proof of his guilt was located in German cabinet documents. Last February, Britain’s ‘Justice’ Secretary, Jack Straw, blocked publication of crucial cabinet minutes from March 2003 about the planning of the invasion of Iraq, even though the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has ordered their release. For Blair, the unthinkable is both normalised and celebrated.
‘How our corrupt MPs are playing into the hands of extremists’, said the cover of last week’s New Statesman. But is not their support for the epic crime in Iraq already extremism? And for the murderous imperial adventure in Afghanistan? And for the government’s collusion with torture?
It is as if our public language has finally become Orwellian. Using totalitarian laws approved by a majority of MPs, the police have set up secretive units to combat democratic dissent they call ‘extremism’. Their de facto partners are ‘security’ journalists, a recent breed of state or ‘lobby’ propagandist. On 9 April, the BBC’s Newsnight promoted the guilt of 12 ‘terrorists’ arrested in a contrived media drama orchestrated by the Prime Minister himself. All were later released without charge.
Something is changing in Britain that gives cause for optimism. The British people have probably never been more politically aware and prepared to clear out decrepit myths and other rubbish while stepping angrily over the babbling brook of bullshit. John Pilger, article May 2009, ‘Britain: The Depth of Corruption’
Today, voters watch Brown give billions of public money to casino banks while demanding nothing in return, having once hailed their practices as an inspiration ‘for the whole economy’. At the recent meeting of G20 leaders in London, Brown distinguished himself by opposing, and killing, a modest Franco-German proposal for a limit on bonuses and penalties for companies that broke it. The gap between rich and poor in Britain is now the widest since 1968. John Pilger, article The New Statesman, ‘For Many Britons the Party Game is Over’