Westminstenders: The only way forward is up.

[placemats]

A new thread as the other one is getting full. I'm enjoying the post election discussion. Every view is listened to and welcomed.

Brexit is happening, but what kind of Brexit will it be?

New leaderships for both Labour and the LibDems.

Most importantly, will Britain be Great in 2024?

Been here a very long time and stalk frequently. Never posted in the last two years.
I have logged in to ask how everyone reminiscing about Blair has forgotten the wars he took us to? Those soldiers didn’t matter? How about no one talks about how Hitler had a lot of people behind him? Or a few other more recent dictators around the world?
Is that what Labour has to do to be electable again? Reminisce about a war criminal? Sorry to have to highlight this even after all this time, but this is the time of images, pictures, sound bites. Is Blair the picture you want as the picture of electability?
Labour fucked up. Lib Dem fucked up. Time to move on, not move bloody back!
Guess it is easier to forget so long as hundreds of thousands that died in those wars were not British. So long as the never-ending suffering of millions of displaced in those wars is invisible to us on our island. This is exactly how Tories have won this election, the last one and the Brexit referendum: liberals live in happy, safe bubbles.

This is a good article on facts rather than guesswork about the GE result.

Two facts: Labour's decline in the 'heartlands' has been slow and persistent.
Labour's Vote is quite middle class; Conservative Vote quite working class - this has also been happening for a while.

I also saw a table somewhere about how young people were leaving those small towns, leaving an increasingly ageing population. But I lost it!

Article: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/five-crucially-important-but-frequently-ignored-facts-about-the-2019-election-labour-conservatives-brexit-corbyn-johnson

Is Blair the picture you want as the picture of electability?

By the time of the next election in 2024, Blair will have been the only Labour leader to win a majority in exactly 50 years. Whatever problems one might have with him, he is the image of Labour electability. That’s just a fact.

You know, if you want to see a Blair legacy in action, look at the Conservatives.

They saw Blair and remodelled themselves.

First off the block was Michael Portillo, who completely the-positioned his image with the intention of changing the 'style' of the Tories (more social liberalism) and positioning himself as a Blair-style Leader.

The biography re-positioning him was written by Michael Gove.

Poor Michael lost his seat, so we had to wait for the Gove-Cameron-Johnson group. Especially Cameron.

And it was electorally successful.

Things have moved on, and Johnson now seemed to be working in populism.

But the point is this: it always strikes me as bizarre that the Left demonises Blair - rather than a rational and quite cold appraisal of positives and negatives - whilst there is (or was) basically an electorally successful tribute act keeping them out of power.

It's nuts.

Most damagingly, the demonisation of Blair and Brown has never allowed us to put the lie to bed that it was the banks that caused the financial crash.

It's crazy.

Of course we're not reminiscing happily about the Iraq War and Blair's part in it. I don't think the fact that Blair was able to be elected was linked to him taking us in to an illegal war.

Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister. Then he took us into the war and wasn't elected again.

Obviously the pure Corbyn, courting the IRA and Hammas, losing 2 elections in a row, and still hanging about to smooth the next coronation for Momentum is someone to aspire to.

But, hey, let's only learn lessons from some parts of the past.

Why do I still feel that Blair and Blairites are today's Labour Party's enemy?

If cendrillon says something, we should really listen to it.
I think I didn’t get my point across.
Just as we cannot explain how Blair/Brown didn’t bring about the financial crisis, we cannot explain, using three word slogans, how Blair is a war criminal but was highly electable and we elected him TWICE and then displaced him because we finally realised he was a full-on war criminal maurauding as a Labour leader, who is on constant citizen’s arrest risk.

And oh yeah! Just like Hitler in 1933, Blair banned all other political parties in 1997. A dictator. Exactly the same as Hitler!

The war was Blair’s undoing and I’ve seen a few posts saying they’d like Blair without the war-monger part. But it goes without saying really, for everyone on this thread I suspect.

Can you see how we cannot separate the images anymore? As for ‘demonising’ Blair, I am quite happy to see that my point about majority of us liberals living in a bubble is not too far off the mark. He really IS a demon for the role he played in those wars.

Actually he won THREE times.

For a kick off, I don't think demon is useful language.

Blairite has been a dirty word for Labour for a while. Look where they are though. In the ditch.

tobee
Oh ffs. There are enough parallels between Hitler and Tony Blair if you are standing in an about-to-be-bombed marketplace of Afghanistan/Pakistan.

Abloom
I've actually just re-read your post - and it's not my imagination: it makes no sense.

You seem to be berating people here for not castigating Blair.
You imply that people here might wish some Blair-type qualities be imported into the Labour Party.
You then accuse people here of some correlation between Blair-approval and Hitler-veneration.
You then seem to imply that positive assessments of Blair are responsible for the recent GE losses.

I'm not sure we're inhabiting the same space and time.

It's exciting that our parallel universes have temporarily crossed but I have to tell you that here - in this one - positive assessments of Blair, let alone modelling policy style or presentation on Blair is far from the order of the day in the Labour Party.

However, as in your universe, Labour is still being defeated in GEs.

That last is a shame. ☹️

I think the main thing is the three word slogan part. People can't be bothered to think any further than that. It's complicated. And people don't want complicated. It's difficult and often boring. Like Brexit. But people would rather think it's easy. And oven ready and all that lying shit.

With Tony Blair I wanted to hug him when he first came to power. And by the end I wanted to kick his bum. And I left the party before the war, because he wasn't doing anything real about education.

The only point I am trying to say is that all of you are trying to revive an image which is soaked in blood and I can see how you can separate parts of it and discard them, but I can also see how that will not work because you are in this bubble where everything can be analysed and postmortemed. It’s just that, post-mortem reports are usually long. They cannot be summarised in three word slogans that seem to be working now.
For Blair, that slogan will always be ‘War Criminal at large’ (that is technically four words but hey ho).

Midnight.

A magic place.

A threshold.

What strange animals will unfold from the night and curl upon our thread?

Well Blair isn't going to be leader or indeed Prime Minister again. That is the past.

As I say, the fact that he was astute enough to win elections, doesn't have any bearing on him involving himself in the Iraq War.

thecat
I am not trying to berate anyone. I am just feeling exasperated as to how, even after the last week, we are still not reaslising his image matters. We are not in the times of analysis thecat. We are in the times of buses, slogans, fridges, and a funny-looking bloke (our current PM) hanging by a rope. This is where we are. Use Blair extremely cautiously and very sparingly.
tobee, at 00:00 has explained that point.

This is the excuse for the current labour leadership failing totally dismally. To a completely immoral leader of the Tories. Blair.

You may as well say "ooh no, we don't want Corbyn to win a landslide! Because then he'll have to be involved in an illegal war!"

Madness

Blair is useful in understanding how left the electorate can bear and / or win with a landslide. Not Corbyn left but towards the centre. Other factors of course, but it looks like Labour won’t overcome this position due to the backing of major donors.

Where did Labour get their money in the Blair years? Same or different

thecat you can say all the harsh words you want, but you really need to start seeing things with other people’s eyes or the left (of which I am a life-long supporter) will never win. Left need to work on their image. Jo Swinson wasn’t it. Neither was Corbyn. You want to win the game? You need to play the game.

Oh ffs. There are enough parallels between Hitler and Tony Blair

Please tell me you do stand-up. You’d be an absolute natural!