Tony Blair won’t return to Parliament on the Labour benches. Happy New Year!
The man on the right is a representative of the ABC (Anybody But Corbyn) brigade. Does anybody seriously want a return to his kind of politics?
Tony Blair will not be rejoining the Parliamentary Labour Party in the near – or far – future, and it has nothing to do with Jeremy Corbyn.
The simple fact is: He would be a liability to Labour’s electoral chances.
Time has moved on since 1997; New Labour had its day and haemorrhaged followers in the process – nearly five million voters abandoned the party during the 13 years it was in office.
The electorate got sick of the silly policy of “triangulation” – adopting the ideas of the party’s political opponents, most particularly the Tories – that pushed Labour to the right wing of politics alongside the Tories and left it with no policies of its own.
The late, great Tony Benn had an excellent analogy that sums up the situation. He said some politicians are like signposts. They point in the direction they want to travel and say, “This is the way we must go!” And they are constant. Others are like weathercocks; they lick their fingers, find out which direction the political winds are blowing and follow.
Triangulation demanded that all Labour politicians became weathercocks. As a result, the party ended up wasting time, chasing other people’s policies like (to stretch the analogy) a headless chicken.
This is not the time for Labour to be chasing other parties’ policies. They don’t have any that are worth taking, in any case.
This is the time for Labour to return to its roots and stand up for everybody in the UK; be the ‘One Nation’ party the Conservatives claimed to be but weren’t – and do it right.
There is no place for Tony Blair in such an organisation.
Tony Blair will not return to the House of Commons while Jeremy Corbyn is in charge of Labour, the party leader has said.
Mr Corbyn said “nuanced differences of opinion” would prevent the former prime minister’s return to Parliamentary politics inside Labour, which he led to three successive general election victories between 1997 and 2005.
This summer Mr Corbyn backed a motion declaring his predecessor guilty of “contempt” following the release of the Chilcot Report, while Mr Blair was later reported to be mulling a comeback because he considered the Islington North MP a “nutter”.
Source: Jeremy Corbyn says Tony Blair will not return to House of Commons while he leads Labour
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They just need to convince mps to promote labour policies because on tv the ‘moderate’ Labour still won’t put forward Labour policies seeming to be going in their own political direction ie that of Blairite policies
We should not refer to them as MODERATES when they are behaving like opponents to what we the majority of members want. That is being anti democratic and RIGHT WING. That is anti Labour
And yet there are still people in the Labour Party who want Blair to come back as they think he’d win another General Election! They’re living in the past and haven’t realised how much the country has changed since he was PM.
To be honest I would vote for anybody that I thought could depose the Tories, even a Labour party led by Tony Blair. Anything would be better than what we’ve got now. As things stand I will be voting Labour during a general election that Labour has no chance of winning which is dispiriting.
No, you’ll be voting Labour during an election that Labour has every chance of winning – IF people like yourself only bother to speak up for the party in a positive way.
Paul you misjudge the mood of ordinary folks, people are crying out for GENUINE CHANGE. The desire is for a fairer more equitable and peaceful world. Labour with it’s 10 point policies can deliver that.
Look how post WW2 Labour revolutionised living standards for all and that was after the battering of our infrastructure and the expense of rearming for defence. Tackling the banks and Tax evasion is the key to a successful economy. At present the banks and financiers are sucking the money out of circulation by driving a debt based economy. They get wildly rich at the expense of us all leaving nothing for adequate public finance. We can end that.
Blair came to power with the anthem things can only get better, we are still waiting.
They did get better, for a while.
Unfortunately, Blair did a lot of things that ended up making things worse – mostly ‘triangulating’ on Tory policies – that eventually encouraged people to vote the Conservatives back into office. From there, matters became much worse, much more quickly.
Thing is, Mike, Blair couldn’t have done anything without the support of the parliamentary party. Labour MPs that allowed Blair to behave in the way that he did and pursue the policies that he did are culpable in everything that happened during the New Labour years and most did support him, although Jeremy Corbyn along with several much more significant and accomplished Labour figures, e.g., the late Robin Cook whose funeral Blair was to busy holidaying to be bothered to attend.
So you agree that those New Labour MPs – many of whom were ‘pre-approved’ Blairites who were parachuted into safe constituencies against the will of the local party members – should be deselected and replaced with supporters of real Labour values. I’m glad of that.
No.
You are putting words in my mouth which I never said.
I am 100% against any kind of Stalinist purge or witch hunt. I doubt that some kind of illusory purification of the Labour party, where one group temporarily in the ascendant displaces another, would do anything to improve Labour’s electoral chances. Quite the opposite in fact. When I hear such nonsense spoken of I think back to Nelson Mandela’s ideas concerning reconciliation which prevented bloodbath and economic disaster befalling South Africa: after suffering twenty-seven years of prison and even more years of abuse once freed Mandela advocated peace, forgiveness and reconciliation over civil war, vengeance and vindictiveness which prevented his country from becoming a one-party dictatorship and failed state like neighbouring Zimbabwe.
This “us and them” rhetoric is divisive, self-defeating and damaging to uncommitted voters flirting with the idea of voting Labour in 2020. No party that appears at war with itself or a rabble has ever won a British election. The fall of the Blairite wing of the party and rise of Jeremy Corbyn seems to have blinded ecstatic and enthusiastic supporters to the fact that the left and centre-left actually hover on the brink of immense disaster and may well end up eclipsed for a generation which, sadly, is precisely what I believe that the future holds for us.
When did Blair intimate that he was considering becoming an MP again?
Last month: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/11/24/oh-bloody-hell-heres-tony-blair/
Labour should fearlessly stand for what is best for the people of the UK, and that, amongst other things such as re-nationalisation, means advocating a re-think on Brexit.