It is reported today that Tony Blair does not understand the Corbyn and Sanders phenomenon.
Of course he does not, for three reasons.
First, Blair has always wanted to be loved. He really can't understand why he isn't.
Second, he is so much the problem he will never see attempts to find a solution, let alone find one.
Third, neoliberals think there is only one revealed truth. Anything else is incomprehensible. This is the strength of that belief system. It is why it can, for example, take over almost all university economics departments and exclude all other thinking without seeing any apparent dichotomy in proposing economuc freedom and denying the freedom to express contrary opinion at the same time. And that is why recent gagging of charities and academics seems perfectly acceptable to neoliberal politicians. Tony would not see the problem with that either, I am sure.
The problem for Tony Blair then is that his own dogma means that he cannot understand why he does not understand. And that may be insurmountable.
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I think you’re right about Blair’s state of mind and failures of understanding; but I do not doubt his judgment about the British electorate.
That would only change if the Parliamentary Labour Party’s most effective communicators campaigned wholeheartedly against their own financial interests and the Neoliberal agenda; and even that would have no effect without a fundamental change in the electorate’s engagement with mass media.
The latter is happening, over a generational timescale: but it’s giving us an atomised web of closed communities consuming news feeds that pander to their prejudices.
The mass media, of course, will remain as they are; or strive to be more so. I do not dismiss them entirely, as they have become far more effective since ‘The Sun wot won it’ and ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ – as anyone in a wheelchair can tell you.
So we return to the Labour Party, and Blair’s enduring legacy in politics: they can and will campaign effectively for anything that gets them non-executive directorships and the approval of the Daily Mail.
The reform starts there; and in all probability it will end there.
I was also shocked by his latest article which only goes to show how far he has fallen in moral values since 1997. He now worships a different altar and it is not democracy!
“…how far he has fallen in moral values since 1997. He now worships a different altar and it is not democracy!”
The altar is that of Mammon. I’ve been collecting Blair’s activities over the last year: new readers start here and work backwards –
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/02/an-apology/comment-page-7/#comment-580188
The big picture is of a most unpleasant individual hitching his rickety wagon to anything that looks like power. His convoluted business dealings are completely opaque.
Fortunately, Blair and his cronies were only political men (and a few women) of their time – but thankfully not NOW.
Some of their politics and morals have been so discredited by the passing of time and the shocking results of their ill thought through actions. Which is probably why now when they speak it more often than not has the opposite result of what they intended (blowback seems a suitable term).
So in a perverse sort of way, perhaps the occasional senile ramblings of semi-retired, ex-political power players now converted to seeking personal wealth from private sources – can be just the sort of reminder that the British public need that never again should we trust the snake oil salesmen that went before.
Blair is now, happily, an irrelevance. He might not like being one but he is. This is another example of hubris and how people disbelieve in a world that no longer reflects their projections.
After the mighty achievement of helping this country become a one party state he now sees signs of fissures emerging and can’t cope with it. The psychologist Oliver James coined the the term ‘Blatcher’ to reflect the way Blair pulled the Labour Party into the neo-lib world.
The system is crumbling in all sorts of ways-I expect the next ten/twenty years to be messy-although messy is better than social upheaval
My main issue with Blair is lack of repentance over Iraq. One of my best friends Prof Ghanim Putrus is an Iraqi Christian from Mosul. He was absolutely adamant that the invasion would be a disaster and would distabelise Iraq. He said that Saddam hated these so called terrorists far more than Bush and would be far more effective in dealing with them. I left the Labour party after the invasion.
I’m not sure even in his worst nightmares he thought it would be as bad as it has actually turned out to be.
It is interesting also what Noam Chomsky says of Sanders. He says that he describes himself as a Socialist but his policies are really that of the “New Deal” and are virtually indistinguishable from that of Dwight D. Eisenhower a centerist Republican. Shows how far the US has move to the right over the past 50 years.
Will 2017 be a year of a Donald and Boris special relationship as US president and UK Prime Minister? Time to bring back Spitting Image?
I agree with Chomsky on policies
Hard to recall how enlighted Eisenhower was – in some ways (not all)
Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech – where he warns Americans about he emerging ‘military industrial complex’ is brilliant.
http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY
Agreed
The real irony here is that Tony Blair was the great crusader for an ideology free politics of “what works is what matters, and what matters is what works”, while completely failing to recognise that “what works is what matters, and what matters is what works” is itself an ideology – the ideology of a technocrat, whose own “technical” responses were actually formed and supported by the “hidden ideology” of neo-liberalism, which, like the “hidden curriculum” in education, actually pervades the body politic – I would say like a virus, ie destructive and parasitical, though its proponents would say like the lymphatic fluid in a body, i.e nourishing and sustaining.
Richard has frequently proclaimed his bias, and the impossibility of being objective: that is inseparable from the human condition; we all carry baggage of bias on our backs, the task being to recognise this, and a) fight against it and b) compensate for it, as far as we can and even c) use it, as bowls-players do, to get the bowl to curve just enough to hit the jack.
Naive ideologues, such as Blair, will always be puzzled by events which do not conform to their bias, exactly because, not recognising their own bias and entirely failing to recognise their own ideology, they have cast aside the most valuable weapon in their armoury.
For an ideology is an interpretive tool for shaping the chaos of random phenomena – political, social, natural, whatever – that bombard us every moment of our lives, allowing us to “make sense” of those phenomena. This really is, as physiologists have shown, the way our sense perceptions work – how we “see” and “hear”, for example, with the brain shaping them into a comprehensible pattern, which is sometimes “wrong” (as optical illusions demonstrate.
Our task is to both use our ideological bias as a tool in this way AND constantly check it against the facts, adapting our ideology accordingly. Poor Tony is stuck in the first part of this process, and has not yet progressed to the “fact checking/moderating” mode.
If he had, he would surely not be supporting Fascist dictators, such as Egypt’s appalling Al Sisi (Morsi may not have been to the West’s taste, as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but he DID win election fairly) and providing propaganda advice and support to the Leader of one of those dreadful “Stans” (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan – I forget which), with an appalling human rights record. (Entirely concur with Keith Fletcher on this – the stench of money is repulsive.)
But that’s what happens when you cleave to the ideology of “what works is what matters, and what matters is what works” – you lose ALL true critical faculty, which is swallowed up in a mere (crude, not genuine) accounting exercise of “does it pay?” and “bottom line”.
NO wonder Tony cannot understand what Mark would surely now understand, adapting his words against religion (with which, as a practising Christian, I do not, of course concur, while fully accepting Marx’s assessment of actual, concrete conditions, which were true then, and are true again now).
Marx famously said: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”, and the Sanders/Corby phenomenon is “the sigh of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world, soul of soulless conditions”. Of course Tony cannot understand this!
I wonder for how long you will be able to say this and I will be allowed to publish it
I suspect that we will get a ‘repentance’ from Blair in old age when all sources of further power play are not possible and the reality of mortality can no longer be denied. They all do it and we’ll here it then when it is far too late.
We must remember that Blair ‘converted’ to Catholicism so he considers himself as a ‘Christian’ farcical as might appear-perhaps he is as Christian as the Borgias-perhaps Corbyn and Sanders are Savanarolas for him!
Simon, I have written on Blair’s “conversion” (a word I truly HATE with reference to Christians who change denomination from their birth denomination to Roman Catholicism, as Blair did) from his Anglo-Catholicism to Roman Catholicism.
Here’s the man who mocked the “theological quibblings” of different Socialist sects (a fair observation, I have to admit), and eschewed “ideology” in favour of “what matters is what works”, who then decides to leave Canterbury and go over to Rome (even though for Anglo-Catholics such as Blair, and myself, except for acceptance of Papal supremacy, there’s hardly a fag paper’s difference between the two stances)
So, ideology DOES matter (for Christianity is, of course, an ideology), including relatively minor differences in stance and beliefs.
And to crown it all, Blair suggested he could not do this while PM, because there is a constitution bar on Roman Catholics becoming PM!!!
Rubbish! The ONLY such bar is on heirs to the throne, who must give up their right to accession on becoming RC (as did Freddie Windsor, Princess Michael of Kent’s son, on marrying an RC & becoming RC).
No, Blair’s refusal was both cowardly (“mustn’t frighten the horses!!) and calculating – for to have done such a thing while in office would have been to admit that overt ideology DOES matter, as does intellectual and conscientious dissent.
I regard his behaviour here as absolutely despicable: had he either remained Anglican OR openly become Roman Catholic while still PM, I would have respected him in this matter – but to skulk off, and do it offstage, and hope no one noticed – contemptible!
Blair should be tried for war crimes at the international court in the Hague. He was a Bush puppet in an illegal war, period. Even the attorney general at the time told him it was illegal, but changed his mind.( one wonders what was under the blanket for him to change direction !) And to top it all became a peace envoy for the middle east, what a joke, unfortunately it’s not funny.
Blair – a master of deception trying his skills again.
Blair always struck me as a cynic.
He has no faith in the better side of people. He would rather pander to our more selfish side and be seen as a champion of that than appeal to the better side that resides in many of us.
Like many in New Labour, he stopped believing in people when he felt that people no longer believed in the Labour party. It is not clear who abandoned who.
His wealth insulates him from the truth – as money does for many these days. And the truth is that free markets and the their supposed wisdom have been tried and found not to have worked.
“Third, neoliberals think there is only one revealed truth. Anything else is incomprehensible. This is the strength of that belief system.”
Chris Hedges and John Ralston Saul discussing “Neoliberalsm as Utpoianism”. This discussion made so much sense when I first watched it. It crystalized my own somewhat confused thoughts and feelings and confirmed my suspicion that Neoliberalism is an ideology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgLyJp573Jo&list=PLc5LJ5vTzXNhJjBewULtHZzPvW9xGTyFd&index=12