Nature Abhors Tony Blair

Ben Wildsmith

My teeth itch every time I hear Tony Blair piping up on world affairs and it’s extraordinary how widespread that sentiment is amongst people of all political persuasions.

His latest pronouncement arrived this morning when he instructed us all to rejoin the EU within ten years. Cheers Tone, we’ll let you know, but if we do, rest assured it won’t be because of anything you’ve said.

The political space that Blair once occupied has shrunk dramatically in recent years, not least because of the discredit he brought to it.

Centrism, not long ago, was touted as a permanent mode of UK governance that would straddle political parties and usher in an era of grown-up stability. That notion died in the ashes of the Iraq war and our growing realisation that ‘Third Way’ economics had facilitated the rout of UK business and local government by faceless, global corporations.

Not only were we mowing down foreigners who lived near oil fields, our complaints were met with patronising smiles and tuts from a political class that increasingly sounded like self-help gurus with a sideline in mass murder.

The backlash, of course, arrived with Brexit – an irrational spasm of self-harm and vandalism born of a very real sense that our ways of life were being rationalised into predictable components of a machine.

There’s a reason why Nigel Farage dresses up like Patrick McGoohan in ‘The Prisoner’…

So, the centre has become distrusted. Keir Starmer’s failure as PM lay in misunderstanding the times. What was pitched to please nearly everybody in 1997 pleases hardly anybody now. Facing both ways and trusting media skills to cover any contradictions looks like cheap hucksterism to an electorate that has tried to find the lady too many times. Either tell us what you believe in and see if we agree or sod off.

Belief-free politics is, it turns out, not the sensible, managerial option at all. It is the refuge of dangerously vacant self-obsessives whose ethical plasticity can justify illegal wars and genocides abroad whilst shrugging benignly at the economic desperation of many at home.

USP

Andy Burnham’s political positioning is far from clear. He’s aware that Starmer’s attempts to mollify Reform voters went down like a veggie burger concession at a rodeo.

His USP is to appear as if he’s arrived at the centre ground of politics from the left, sporting actual principles and some kind of track record in implementing them. He seems sincere in that to me – time will tell – but he’s still leading a Labour Party that is riddled with Mandelson acolytes, lobbyists for Israel, and connections to private healthcare. They will all be biding their time for the honeymoon period to wear off.

Labour’s loss of credibility as a party of the left has created a strange vacuum. The Greens are trying to fill it in England, whilst Plaid Cymru and the SNP attempt the same thing here and in Scotland.

The trouble here is that none of those parties were formed for that purpose. The Greens are supposed to be a voice for the environment, whilst Plaid and the SNP (once nicknamed the Tartan Tories) are civic nationalists. At some point there will be a reckoning between the traditional supporters of these parties and those who voted for the closest thing to what they wish the Labour Party still was.

Restore Britain

As an illustration of how bent out of shape our politics has become, the only party urging caution regarding a war with Russia is Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain.

Leaving aside the substantive arguments about this for the moment, it is farcical that the left of UK politics no longer contains a conduit for people who view war as the ultimate human tragedy.

There is a moral imperative to interrogate this direction of travel, not only in terms of morality, but of practicality. As things stand, the drums are echoing around an empty space that encompasses the whole of our politics bar the extreme right. That is a dangerous state of affairs.

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