Down the rabbit hole with Tony

Tony Blair is so worried about Jeremy Corbyn winning the Labour leadership election that he’s speaking out against it for free. Or more exactly he’s speaking out against it in the hope that he can remain free. If Jezza wins the leadership election and then becomes Prime Minister, Tony might be swapping his smart suits for an orange jumpsuit and his cufflinks for handcuffs.

This is why Tone is keen to let anyone who will give him a hearing, which is a small and increasingly diminishing audience outside of Central Asian dictators, that he thinks that Jeremy Corbyn practises Alice in Wonderland politics. Tony knows a great deal about fantasy, having pursued Conservative politics down a rabbit hole into a topsy turvy world where he played the role of the Queen of Heartlessness, playing croquet with human lives. It takes a special kind of brass neck for a man who took his country to war on the basis of an entirely invented prospectus to decry a pacifist politician for peddling a fantasy, yet Tony now warns us that Jeremy Corbyn preaches “a parallel reality … in which reason is an irritation”. Jeremy, says Tony in all apparent sincerity, has WMDs that can reach Cirencester in forty five minutes.

Tony doesn’t look in the mirror created by a puddle of Iraqi blood, except to admire himself. Making him Middle East Peace Envoy was like putting Myra Hyndley in charge of child protection. He’s far too focused on his own self-grandisement to reflect on the effects of his actions on the little people. The truth is he probably doesn’t care that much, nowhere near as much as he cares about making money from representing Central Asian dictators.

Tony Blair has but one achievement in his life, to create a Labour party that the lying mendacious UK media could believe in, and fittingly he managed that on the back of a great lie. The great lie was that there was still a Labour party left after Tony had got his paws on it, and that it was still a party of the left. Tony transformed Labour into a party of identikit drones and android clones preaching a pastiche of Thatcher’s predatory profit taking. Tony turned politics into performance, a reality show called Britain’s Got Talons where the poor and the disabled and the migrants and the marginalised get ripped apart in the press for the entertainment of the powerful. Greed is good when you call it stakeholding, smiled Tony’s tombstone teeth, as he held the stake that he plunged into the heart of Labour’s last socialist pretensions.

It was supposedly all down to Blair that Labour won the 1997 election, but Labour sold its soul to the Pied Piper of Hammy Lies for nothing. They were so desperate to get power and privilege again that they destroyed everything that was once good about them. They turned themselves into their enemies and in so doing turned themselves into the enemies of those they claimed to represent. The common cry is Scotland is that we didn’t leave the Labour party, the Labour party left us. Tony was driving the bus, he drove our hopes and aspirations off a cliff as a sacrifice to the newspaper demons.

The truth is that an insentient sea sponge could have won that election for Labour, and in most Scottish constituencies that’s exactly what happened. By 1997 the entire UK was as fed up and sick of the Tories as Scotland had been for the previous 18 years. It wasn’t so much that Labour won spectacularly, but that the Tories lost spectacularly. Labour would have performed as well even without the Conservative con of Tony.

After 1997 the scale of the Tory defeat was such that the party was lost in the wilderness for a decade, so lost that it chose Michael Howard as leader, the only politician in the history of the universe who is more slimy than Peter Mandelson who is himself more slimy than a garden slug which has taken a swim in a vat of wallpaper paste. Naturally Labour won again. The party’s victory came despite Iraq, because the opposition was every bit as complicit and even more slimy. Triangulation ruled.

But by then it was too late to save Labour, too late to rescue the British state. The road to Scottish independence started on the road to Baghdad, it was wafted aloft by UN resolutions that were never sought. Revulsion with Thatcher was the midwife of the Scottish Parliament, and revulsion with Labour will be the midwife of independence. Jeremy Corbyn is a good man, but he’s England’s last hope, he’s not ours.

Tony claims that he’s the older statesman who has travelled the road before. We should listen to his warnings that the path is littered with boulders and there’s a cliff ahead and that Jeremy Corbyn is headed straight off it. But Jeremy Corbyn isn’t travelling Tony’s road at all. Tony’s road is a lying road, a false road, a road to deception. It’s a road that leads to a right wing party, a road that doesn’t lead where any left wing person would want to go. It’s a road off the end of a cliff for social justice, for the redistribution of wealth. It’s a road that leads to inequality and rampant casino capitalism, a privatised highway to wealth and power for the few. That’s not the road that Jezza is on.

Tony is the creator of the plastic smiles who have dominated our public life ever since he smiled at the fool Gordie over the table of a posh London restaurant and lied through his teeth to the only man in the country as vain and self regarding as he was. Gordie is as self-serving and as much of a liar as Tony is, he’s just less photogenic.

It’s their style of politics that we want to put an end to. We want our politicians to be human beings, not plastic grins without content. Jeremy Corbyn stands for all those thousands of ordinary people who want a politician for whom public service means just that, and doesn’t see it as serving himself from the public. But Tony and Gordie cast their dire warnings that any attempt to change British politics will end in failure and ignominy, and together with their friends in the press they will do their utmost to make sure that their predictions come to pass. What’s left of their shattered credibility and the credibility of the lying British media depends on it.

Donate to the Dug This blog relies on your support and donations to keep going – I need to make a living, and have bills to pay. Clicking the donate button will allow you to make a payment directly to my Paypal account. You do not need a Paypal account yourself to make a donation. You can donate as little, or as much, as you want. Many thanks.