Tony Blair

The union bosses are getting touchy, and are now issuing orders to the Labour party.

Union boss Len McCluskey demanded the sacking of three Blairite members of the shadow cabinet yesterday as Labour’s biggest paymaster sought to impose his far left policies.

The boss of Unite threatened Labour with the loss of millions of pounds of donations unless Mr Miliband purges moderates and lurches to the left.

Mr McCluskey also boasted that he has stitched up the selection of candidates within the Labour Party – a process that has enraged more moderate Labour figures.  Read more »

Michael Gove is on a mission…to improve British education standards and getting in his way as usual are the teacher unions. He calls them “the enemies of promise“.

Exactly 75 years ago the great English writer and thinker, Cyril Connolly, published his most famous book –  The Enemies Of Promise. Connolly’s work explores the ways in which the talented individuals of his time were prevented from achieving their full potential.

It’s time someone produced an update. Because there are millions of talented young people  being denied the opportunity to succeed as they deserve. Far too many are having their potential thwarted by a new set of Enemies Of Promise.

The new Enemies Of Promise are a set of politically motivated individuals who have been actively trying to prevent millions of our poorest children getting the education they need.

All too familiar…same problem here.  Read more »

The left wing hate Margaret Thatcher. Here is just a small insight into why:

Given the venom with which Labour supporters attack the former PM, you’d think that when their party finally came to power in 1997, it reversed every one of her hateful policies. In fact, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown guarded the Thatcher legacy as lovingly as if she’d been a grocer’s daughter born and bred in Islington. Her successors kept the privatisation and kept at bay the trade unions.

This makes me suspicious. If Labour can live with Margaret Thatcher’s policies, what is it about her that they find so unacceptable?

When I say the left hate Margaret Thatcher I really do mean hate… it is deep seated, here are the two reasons they hate her the most.  Read more »

TV3 only scratched the surface when it busted David Shearer copying Barack Obama, in his state of the nation speech.

The Labour Party in NZ is so bereft of ideas it’s now blatantly pinching its ideas and its narrative from overseas.

For instance, Shearer blatantly ripped off Labour UK’s apprentices policy. He’s openly floated Obama’s procurement policy, and now David Shearer’s discovered a new ‘personally’ authored description of what he’s labelling ‘Forgotten New Zealanders’.  He repeated it many times in his weekend speech.

A catchy line.  Pity this is also stolen from Ed Milliband and part of an ongoing Labour campaign in Britain which was launched last year.

Read more »

Something that fascinates me is that politicians always talk about their political heroes being people of principle, like Reagan and Thatcher, yet most of them seem to have no principles that I can discern. They don’t stand for anything much, and that is very disappointing.

Ever since the “third way” infected politics world wide we have seen a focus on strategy and narrative rather than principles and conviction.

Tony Blair, the multi millionaire ex-Labour PM of the UK is a typical socialist. He doesn’t want to put his hand in his pocket and pay his way:

Last year jet-setting former Prime Minister Tony Blair trousered an eye-watering £20 million from his foreign interests advising the likes of JP Morgan and the authoritarian Kazakhstan government. He is even sniffing round a £70 billion deal involving the Qatari royal family in the hope of taking home a slice of the pie. Surely the man who introduced the minimum wage to these shores can afford to put his millions where his mouth is and pay his interns?

The Office of Tony Blair runs an internship programme promising “valuable experience in a high profile and fast moving work environment”. The scheme runs for three months and it very much looks like a real, if temporary, job. Just how much is Tony coughing up for the lucky candidates? Merely a few quid a day for lunch and a bus ticket – the position in the multi-millionaire’s office is expenses only. Those who can’t afford to work unpaid are swiftly told where to go.

ᔥ The Telegraph

Tony Blair is “worried” that the UK will leave the EU. Good…anything that worries him can’t be too bad, he f*cked the United Kingdom economy by giving bludgers way too much.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he is “deeply worried” that Britain will leave the European Union via a referendum.

Mr Blair also told a German newspaper that the UK’s exit from the EU could be sparked by too much power being transferred to Brussels.

David Cameron said in July that it was a “perfectly honourable position” to call for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU – something polls show a majority of British people would vote to reject – but has resisted pulling the country out of his own accord because of fears it would harm UK interests.

Mr Blair told Die Zeit it was clear that the ongoing eurozone debt crisis would lead to a “powerful political change of the EU”, adding: “And on this point, I am deeply worried that Britain could decide by referendum to leave the whole process.”

“If more competences are transferred to the EU, then its democratic legitimacy must be built up too,” he added. “Britain must play a strong role in this. Because we need a balance between European institutions and the nation states.

“If this is done wrongly, we could create a political crisis that could become just as a big as the euro crisis. People will not go along with the abolishment of the nation state.”

ᔥ BBC

Tony Blair’s henchman Peter Mandelson rips unions a new one…a good lesson for the unions here too…especially the last 20 seconds.

Lord Mandelson has warned against intolerance and divisiveness within the Labour Party, following attacks on Progress – the Labour organisation that aims to promote more progressive policies.

“The trade unions need to rethink and remake themselves for a new century”, the former Labour cabinet minister told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.

ᔥ The Telegraph

Ken Livingstone criticised Labour leader Ed Milliband for “carrying the discredited old Blairite wing with him”.

Keen students of United Kingdom politics know that the only way Labour could win after 18 years in opposition was to have Tony Blair take them to the right. So Red Ken wants them to go back to their old unelectable ways.

ᔥ Brian Edwards blog

Brian Edwards has struck a dilemma…one I am sure is playing out throughout the remaining base of the Labour party:

I find myself wondering whether I want to be bothered with the Labour Party any more. Increasingly, it seems to me, the Greens reflect the philosophical and moral values to which I subscribe more accurately than the Labour Party whose philosophical and moral values are now so ill-defined as to be beyond definition.

I’m a socialist at heart and, whatever it is, New Zealand Labour is not a socialist party. It wasn’t just Rogernomics that scotched that idea; Tony Blair’s ‘third way’, a significant influence on the Fifth Labour Government, was really just a watered down version of Douglas’s ‘trickle-down’ economics. The ‘third way’ was, by definition, a ‘middle-way’, neither one thing nor the other and ill-suited to political idealism of any stripe – a Clayton’s political philosophy.

Oh dear it appears that Brian has had a crisis of confidence:

I’ve done reasonably well in life. I’m not rich but, at 74, I’m what you might call ‘reasonably comfortably off’. In the process, I’ve paid a hell of a lot of tax. And I don’t mind. I’m a firm believer in progressive taxation – ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,’ as Marx  so neatly put it. You can call that Communism or Socialism or pure Christianity.  It doesn’t really matter. What matters is the core principle that the strong should support the weak. So it’s good that Labour’s new leader is at least intent on keeping a Capital Gains Tax as Labour policy. The earnings of the rich should be taxed to support the poor.

But I’m not comfortable with Mr Shearer’s reported intention to move the party ‘to the centre’. It’s a misnomer for one thing. Labour is already in the centre. It has already lost its working-class constituency. Any move ‘to the centre’ will merely be, as the share-brokers say, ‘a technical correction’, not as extreme as in ‘84 but a move to the right nonetheless.

What Labour politics now seem to be about is finding ‘sellable’ policies and a ‘sellable’ leader in order to regain power. (For National read ‘retain power’.) What Green politics seem to be about is persuading people to come across to policies not obviously or immediately founded in self-interest, but in the long-term interests of all of us and (there’s no avoiding it) of the planet. No doubt they’d like to be in government too. But it doesn’t seem to be their primary motivation.

So I find myself wondering…

Oh I am sure Russel Norman is ecstatic with glee at the prospect of Brian’s pearls of socialist wisdom.