How long will Tony Blair last?

[eleny]

A friend and I were chatting tonight. She said - two months. What's your guess?

And after he steps down, will Bush have an ally in Great Britain? Do you think there's a chance that their people will force Great Britain to pull out of Iraq?

[BrklynLiberal]

1. I could not understand how he, himself was re-elected after losing

so much of his majority in Parliament.

[evermind]

4. Well, there was no leadership election - he was just still the

leader of the (reduced majority) Labour party.. It's not like the US system where you have an elected President. The UK head of state is actually the monarch. The Prime Minister is just a Member of Parliament who is chosen as the leader by his party - more like a Senate leader or Congress leader, I suppose. Once chosen, he remains leader until there's a challenge (there's no term limit on the leadership of a party). If they want to get rid of him, Labour will have to hold a leadership contest.

He still has a lot of support amongst Labour MPs (astonishingly - shows what slimy toadying politicians they are).

The only hope is that either

1) he becomes so unpopular that the wider Labour party force a leadership contest. Then we probably get Brown, and find out what his foreign policy would look like. Currently little known, since he rarely speaks about it. (He did recently say he would have gone to war in Iraq just like Tony, but that was during an election, and he really had to say it or look like he was knifing Blair in the back.

Or 2) with the parliamentary majority down to about 66, a group of 34 labour MPs could inflict a defeat on the government. And there are around 40-60 who are disenchanted enough to do it. Except that on most votes where they might oppose Blair, probably the Tory party (the 2nd largest) would vote with Blair.

By far the majority of the policies announced after bLiar's recent election win are quite in line with the Thatcherite economic and foreign policies that the Conservatives have been pushing for the last 25 years (not least in their slavish obedience to the US in matters of foreign policy) which shows how far he has taken the party to the right since the days of the 1980's when Labour supported unilateral nuclear disarmament and were broadly antagonistic to US foreign policy.

There's an interesting article about Blair and "New Labour", written around the time when Blair came into power ('97) about how a significant portion of his first cabinet were alumni of a transatlantic project called "BAP" - the British American Project for the Successor Generation, set up during the Reagan years, and funded by some RW org (that I think even had ties to WACL!)

From that perspective, it can look like Blair was set up by the US to change the direction of the Labour party in its favour - a poodle indeed!

The article's at (and please excuse the URL - it's not their article ;-) ) http://www.bilderberg.org/bap.htm#Tom

[Gloria]

2. There are stories in the British press that speculate that the

problems with the EU will allow him to stay in office for a LONGER rather than a shorter time.....ARGHHHHHHHHH!

[1932]

6. It will be better for the world if he stays in longer & holds EU together

That RW'er Chirac is fucking it up, probably intentionally.

Did you read the NY Times's article on Wednesday about Chirac? d'Estaing blames Chirac for the referendum loss, but the New York Times, pro-neoliberals that they are, tried to undermine d'Estaing's credibility.

Anyway, doesn't anyone like what Blair's doing to fight poverty in the UK and in the rest of the world?

[babylonsister]

3. I'm thinking the G8 conference will not go well in Scotland; that,

coupled with the protesters and Live8 concerts going on (that would be happening on July 2nd) doesn't bode well either. :evilgrin:

[four more wars]

5. You have to remember that Labour are the Democrats of the UK

The Conservative party were in power from 1978 to 1997 and they had Margret Thatcher and then John Major as Prime Minister (Major is now on the board of directors at the Carlyle group along with Poppy bush)

Despite Iraq, Labour are still a far better choice than the conservatives, a fact hammered home in the recent elections. The UK is far more left leaning than the US.

During the recent election the Conservatives ran a poster campaign saying 'Vote Blair get Brown' in reference to a supposed pact between Blair and Brown (the UK chancellor of the exchequer) in 1995 where Brown allowed Blair to run un-opposed for the leadership of the party in return for Brown getting the Chancellorship and Blair standing down for Brown at the beginning of the third Labour term of office.

The Tories had to drop the campaign after polls showed it was actually increasing the Labour share of the vote!! In the UK it's far more a case of voting for a party, and accepting that parties leader than in the US where you vote for a President and accept that persons party.

Also on domestic issues, despite Iraq, the Labour party has massivly increased public spending on the NHS, the Police, in Education and all the time while drinving down inflation from 15%+ under the Conservatives to a record sustained low.

No one is prepared to return to the Right wing Conservative policies on this one issue, although there was a substantial Labour bleed to the Liberal Democrats in the recent election, but far too many people realised that the Labour campaign (which esssentially said, either vote for us or return to the right wing Tories) was correct and that it was not acceptable to risk returning to the bad old Conservative days because Tony Blair personally thought he could influence US policies by joining an unjust war.

Put it this way, Imagine it was Clinton that took the US to Iraq, would you vote for George Bush to remove him?

[Hippo_Tron]

7. I think they are talking about replacing him within the party

[evermind]

8. Well, I dunno if you could still describe Labour as left wing

in British political terms. They seem to have taken on many of the characteristics of the Tories under thatcher: privatisation, slavish to US foreign policy, draconian police-state type "anti-terrorism" legal measures...

Seems to me the Lib Dems are the only mainstream political party with any viable claim to the left any more..

[julianer]

9. I don't think the Lib Dems want

want to be seen as left wing.

Vince Cable, LD shadow chancellor says, 'there is absolutely no future for us as a left of Labour party'.

We need a new left party, uniting the far left, the left of Labour and the many thousands of independent socialists and anti-capitalists.

And guess what we've already got one:

www.respectcoalition.org

We need it to pull the debate back to the left - get rid of Labour's ability to triangulate us out of the picture. I also support efforts inside the Labour party (I joined in 1975, left in 1995) to reclaim some sort of party democracy and get rid of these awful neo-conservatives running the party.

If you are fed up with Bliar and want to get Labour back as a working class party then join Respect.

[evermind]

10. Well, much as I admire George Galloway, and would like to see a ruling

Respect party, realistically they have about as much chance as Ralph Nader has of becoming president ;-)

Perhaps the best strategy is to push for proportional representation?

IMHO the lib-dems are de facto to the left of Labour, regardless of how they might like to be seen - not because they have shifted their position, but because Labour have moved so far to the right.

[julianer]

13. Of course Respect

hasn't a chance of winning a general election, but unless we want Labour to carry on marching to the right we need to give them something to worry about from the left.

If they know that they could lose 10-15% of the vote to Respect in some constituencies they will be less likely to ignore the working class.

Post Blair I expect to see some leftishness from Brown but nothing to worry the paymasters.

If however Respect continues to grow then it will be the natural home for the coming generations of radicals and Labour is going to cement itself in the centre right.

[1932]

11. I don't think that characterization is fair.

Privatization

The privatization in which they have engaged is very limited.

For example, the London Underground "privatization" is a very limited contract to provide services over a period of a few years and is not a sale of anything physical.

The fact is that in the UK, getting the private sector involved in some services (that are not monopolizable) is an effective way to (1) ensure that the Tories can't cause misery by cutting funding for valuable services which help the middle class form and thrive in the future -- ie, the Tories are not going to cut hospital funds in the future when the private sector is a partner in the delivery of health care (in a non-monopolizable manner), and (2) ensure that the public is getting good services in a price-competitive environment.

And the government in the UK still believes that easily-monopolizable services should not be privatized and that competition needs to be preserved. The way they feel about the economy is the same way very liberal Americans like George Stiglitz feel about, for example, third world development. Stiglitz says that the problem with privatization isn't privatization (he's says the very rare example of a gov't running private industry effectively is the South Korean and Taiwanese (IIRC) steel industry) it's that it's done in a way that allows one private company to monopolize the service and to charge monopoly prices. I'll add that there a few industries which can't be competitve, like rail-lines, so it makes sense that they're not private. He also says that the problem is when government sell off their assets to themselves and their friends, which is what the Tories did with the rail tracks and trains, and it's what Labour has not even been misleadingly accused of doing.

Slavish to American Foreign Policy

I think that ignores a number of facts. Nowhere outside of Iraq have the British done anything remotely helpful to the American neoliberal project. In Iraq, the first thing they did after marching into Basra was to turn over the political operation to the functional Shiite structure that was in place. The US was FURIOUS that the British didn't take political control of Basra. The British said they had no choice. This was a war to remove Hussein and turn the government over to Iraqis and as soon as it was clear that the Iraqis were capable of governing themselves, they turned over political control -- which was imediately.

Draconian police-state proposals

Nothing happening in Britain today comes remotely close to the way the Tories treated the IRA. The laws that were passed and the application of those laws agains N.I. Catholics -- that was draconian. The only stories I've heard that come remotely close are about British citizens returing from Gitmo, getting interviewed, and being released from custody for lack of evidense. (And the laws are still on the books from the IRA days that could allow the British to hold them almost indefinitely even without evidence.)


Labour has a long list of policies that give them the right to claim the title liberal and progressive. My favorite are the baby bonds. The baby bonds and Labour's education policies (including the tuition program) are going to ensure that the UK has a strong middle and working class and will be able to offeset the political power of the super-wealthy in a way never seen before in the UK.

[evermind]

12. The fact remains that they have moved a long way towards

Thatcherism from the Labour party of the 80's.

Besides privatisation, there's the Private Finance Initiatives, internal markets within the NHS, etc.

They have not reformed a single major Tory policy on industry and the economy that I know of - including the legal stranglehold that the Tories created on the trades union movement.

On foreign policy, there has not been the merest whimper of criticism of the US from any official source. They have supported (and probably provided venues for) the unofficial US foreign prison system and CIA "rendering", and supported the official US propaganda on the threat of Islamic terrorism. Regards Basra, that seems to me merely a case of different means in support of the same goal.

Regards the police-state that Britain is fast becoming - the latest tranche of Labour proposals included demolishing habeas corpus and the right to a jury trial. They have been moderated by the Lords, but the proposals were clear enough in their intent. Next on the menu: compulsory ID cards.

Outside of rhetoric designed to distance the parties, there's not much to choose in real terms between Blairism and Thatcherism - that's how I see it, anyway.

I wouldn't claim to be particularly well informed on all these issues, I'll admit, but I have seen how the political landscape has shifted over the last 10 or so years.