Tony Blair in The Times today

[oviraptor21]

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/4955e1e4-88d3-11ec-a837-0153f5f4adaf?shareToken=94c076de44190bb4e85a3885618c9f80

I assume he is going to cite the third way again, but Blair comes down firmly on the side of the author JK Rowling. “They [voters] don’t want a situation where women can’t talk about being women. I have this conversation quite often with Labour people and I know their inclination is to walk round this issue, but I am telling you to go right into it and resolve it in a way that makes it absolutely clear where you stand. That is how to shut down the Tories on it.”

Long article but about 4/5 of the way down.

@Tanith

Leo's the same age as my own son and I'm not surprised to read his comment. I hear it in the same tone that DS would use: more of a caution to protect his dad than because he actually believes it himself.

That's how I read it, too.

I have said this before, but during the run up to May 1st 1997, the Labour Party working fucking hard to find out what people wanted. Every tier of the party, right down to every ward member, pounded the streets talking to people. Community groups grew up from that in the most disadvantaged wards. The money thrown at us by Europe was used to actually help. People started to believe that Politicians cared about what they wanted.

Labour in power was fucking amazing for those of us in disadvantaged wards. Go argue all you like about wars and weapons, but go talk to the people who were lifted up, who had more money than they had ever had. Who had family centres they could access, childcare, secure jobs for the first time in a generation. Kids whose parents had never been able to find work, who were headed for the same, had a future to look forward to.

That is what I want again. Identity politics is for those advantaged enough not to be worried about where the next meal is coming from. To watch this buffoonery laughed off as politics, from both sides. Get your heads out of the arses of the chattering classes or the fucking student lobby, go talk to real people. Talk to the people your policies will mostly affect. If people think the Labour Party of Blair and Brown was born out of the middle class, they can think again. It took hard work, and that is missing these days. Sitting on fucking twitter is not going to inform politicians of what the voters really think and need from a political party.

Anyway, I have always admired Tony Blair and used to fancy the pants off Gordon Brown, for some reason he ticked all my boxes. Maybe times have moved on, maybe I am just old fashioned.

@Slothtoes

WTF is the purpose of politics if not getting elected and effecting change? It’s not a parlour game (or shouldn’t be). Blair at least has a sense of urgency about it for Labour. Rightly.

Exactly.

It's like Labour's thinking, particularly in some corners, is: we don't care about actually getting elected and making any change in this country, as long as a few people think we are the absolute bestest at being 'of the Left'.

@Tanith

Leo's the same age as my own son and I'm not surprised to read his comment. I hear it in the same tone that DS would use: more of a caution to protect his dad than because he actually believes it himself.

I also read it like this. Not that people should put feelings above facts, but it's a fact that many are and to keep this in mind while proceeding with caution.

New Labour did do a lot of good before the WMD fiasco ballsed it all up. Blair set the tone for getting away with lying to the electorate and parliament and subsequent governments have run with it!
Remember the expenses scandal and Labour trying to squash disclosure of MPs expenses?
Just because they conducted themselves more professionally in public, it's a mistake to think they weren't as self serving as the current bunch.

@nauticant Yes, but applying Leo's advice would basically put you into the position of Starmer and make you a coward on the subject by trying to stay out of it. I'm glad Tony spoke up.

@Slothtoes

We have to get away from this childish idea that feelings matter more than facts. They just don’t. In the very many situations where we can’t have both, then we need to vote for relatively more responsible politicians who are relatively more likely to go with facts.

I know I won’t always like that as a voter because we all have feelings, but the alternative of only dealing in feelings (and telling lies) is a very well-trodden path to corruption and chaos.

If we’re going to go down the feelings road why not take women’s feelings into account?

Politicians don’t (even) have to take women’s feelings into account. Fact is women and girls are more at risk and at disadvantage than men in vulnerable situations (like mixed sex toilets).

We’re not going to convince a lot of MPs not to be sexist if that’s who they are. We just need to be able to convince some of them by appealing to their rational, socially responsible side and by working with them on this one issue on which we can agree.

Labour in power was fucking amazing for those of us in disadvantaged wards. Go argue all you like about wars and weapons, but go talk to the people who were lifted up, who had more money than they had ever had. Who had family centres they could access, childcare, secure jobs for the first time in a generation. Kids whose parents had never been able to find work, who were headed for the same, had a future to look forward to.

Blair was certainly successful, wasn't he... in his attack on some of the most disadvantaged in the country. The very fact people totally ignore that disadvantaged group - and what Blair did to them, is evidence of this.

I understand that sadly many people don't care about the disadvantaged, but when it's coming from people who post praise of Blair's apparent support for the vulnerable... Seriously?

And it wasn't just the disabled he attacked. A pp is absolutely right about his contempt for the working class.

A few fake PR schemes on hock that did nothing but make matters worse longer term doesn't compensate. Likewise Gordon Brown.

Helping the vulnerable. How did their housing policies do that? It was quite the opposite in fact. Continuing Right to buy, cutting housing benefit at a time of an expanding population, so increased demand for housing (and when many private landlords already wouldn't let to tenants on benefits), and pushing the scheme that Blair and his family profiteered from to the tune of millions (Buy to Let).

If you don't care about the disadvantaged, poor, and vulnerable, that is your right in a free democratic society (however much others might find your views morally repugnant). But can't people at least try to be honest about it. Perhaps too much to ask?

The toxic legacy of Blair (and Brown) is, like a pp says, what brings us to the sorry state of affairs the country is in today.

If we’re going to go down the feelings road why not take women’s feelings into account?

All feelings are feely, but some feelings are feelier than others.

@JustSpeculation

If we’re going to go down the feelings road why not take women’s feelings into account?

All feelings are feely, but some feelings are feelier than others.

True dat.

I speak from my own experience.
Everybody votes for themselves as they are entitled to do.

Mmn. Blair has no integrity or inner convictions on anything at all, his success was always to say and gesture at whatever would get votes (and then once in, you do whatever the hell you like). He means that Labour are (rightly) hurling away their chances of re election when the goal is gaping wide, and he advises them to say things that will make voters vote for them.

He would see actually acting on those words as something totally different. For my money, he's the architect of the mess we stand in, the behaviour now normalised in government, the era of the professional politician. He does at least still get the concept that votes have to be won, but this is purely about 'how do you best manipulate people to put you in power so you can then do what you want to do'.

Liz Truss seems to be the one remaining grown up in the whole of Westminster.

@Slothtoes

And I’m sick of Labour being this useless introspective movement and not acting as an effective opposition. They have squandered years of more pain on the country by acting like total bystanders or just looking in the opposite direction to what is going on. That has especially hurt the most vulnerable people dependent on the UK having a functioning welfare state and an accessible cost of living. Nobody expects the Tories to give a fuck about them, we know they don’t. That’s like a law of nature. That’s why I am so furious with Labour (and the Lib Dems) abandoning the middle ground and setting off on these decadent fools’ errands of seeking idealogical purity when they could have been trying to urgently make people’s actual lives better and more stable.

Yes all of this, the Cons are acting as they always do, its Labour who have let us down. I miss the Blair years, they felt optimistic unlike now. Good on him for speaking out.

Successive governments have contributed to ((and totally failed to tackle) the housing crisis. We can’t keep blaming Labour for that. They left power 12 years ago. Thatcher started the housing issues with deregulation of banking and mortgages and bringing in right to buy. New Labour carried on fanning the flames unfortunately.
The housing crisis is a generalised political failure- exactly like climate change is. We need all the political parties to be acting on it together now.

Arch Catholic Blair is anti trans and in the Times... colour me unsurprised. He's been a known GC since he refused to sign the Labour anti-tran pledge. It must be great to have a lying waromger with the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands in your corner.

Well done @DisgustedofManchester, show em how it's done, the grand hyperbole.

We are not anti-trans, as you have been told countless times, but hey ho, we will just have to continue reminding you

@DisgustedofManchester

Arch Catholic Blair is anti trans and in the Times... colour me unsurprised. He's been a known GC since he refused to sign the Labour anti-tran pledge. It must be great to have a lying waromger with the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands in your corner.

Great demonstration of how feelings matter so much more than facts, Disgusted. Feelings/beliefs about the Times, feelings/beliefs about Catholicism — and what Labour's anti-trans pledge was, I don't know.

So typical of the black-and-white thinking inherent in the purity spirals that Corbyn and Momentum brought into the Labour Party. When faced with all the shades of grey, Corbyn went into a state of paralysis. He'd spent his entire life as an MP indulging himself with purity politics and voting against his own party. There's absolutely no point in being pure of thought if that means you are never in power, and that was what Kinnock, Blair and Brown understood.

@Slothtoes

Successive governments have contributed to ((and totally failed to tackle) the housing crisis. We can’t keep blaming Labour for that. They left power 12 years ago. Thatcher started the housing issues with deregulation of banking and mortgages and bringing in right to buy. New Labour carried on fanning the flames unfortunately. The housing crisis is a generalised political failure- exactly like climate change is. We need all the political parties to be acting on it together now.

I agree. All are to blame. And yes we do need all to act together on this.

Apologies again for continuing the off-topic discussion (although there is a tenous link in that the public health housing and homelessness emergency affects many people - including both trans people and those who are GC).

@DisgustedofManchester

Arch Catholic Blair is anti trans and in the Times... colour me unsurprised. He's been a known GC since he refused to sign the Labour anti-tran pledge. It must be great to have a lying waromger with the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands in your corner.

Yeah yeah yeah, antiabortionfarrightsponsoredallnunshamstereatingandotherstufftoo.....

have some more cake.

He's been a known GC since he refused to sign the Labour anti-tran pledge.

Labour had an anti-tran pledge? And not signing it marks you out as GC? I thought the accusations was that people who know what a woman is are GC and considered anti-trans.

@lovelyweathertoday

He's been a known GC since he refused to sign the Labour anti-tran pledge.

Labour had an anti-tran pledge? And not signing it marks you out as GC? I thought the accusations was that people who know what a woman is are GC and considered anti-trans.

I think at this point it's rather Witchtrials in which anyone suspected is going to be proved whatever the mob would like them to be proved. There'll be a signature or a suspicious mole or they won't drown properly when thrown in a pond, or there'll be a familiar, or someone will have seen them talking to Goodie Posie by light of witchfire, and witnesses to say they looked sideways at a cow which died five years later yada yada yada.

Blair fan here too (ducks for cover). Every time he speaks out now, I think what a great speaker he is, particularly on Brexit and I think 'thank god, there's a grown up in the room'. (No, I don't agree with him on everything but I think we do forget what a good politician he was and what a charismatic speaker he is.)

I read the whole article last night and didn't think he said what he said about the trans right row because of the damage it's doing to Labour but because he genuinely thinks it's all bonkers*.

And I also thought that Leo's words about prioritising feelings - and of course, men's feelings is what he means - over facts is what's got us into this mess in the first place. I hope Tony Blair doesn't listen to his son on this!

*Which it is.

By the way, I am now getting called 'right wing' on Twitter as an insult by TRAs because the left have let women down so badly on this issue. I would never vote Tory and it does pain me that they seem to be the only party who are being sensible on the conflict between women's rights and trans rights.

We need the left to sort itself out and quickly.

I think Blair made an awful mistake with Iraq and I find it really hard to forgive him for that. However, I do think he speaks a lot of sense and that he was the best PM that we've had in my lifetime. Fundamentally flawed, yes, but he also achieved a great deal.

I heard Gordon Brown speaking about Afghanistan the other day, and I think he too was a real force for good. I wish that he had been in the PM role for longer, but I do think the Blair/Brown partnership delivered a great deal for the UK.

The calibre of politicians since then has not been the same on either side of the house.