Tony Blair concluded his speech last night with these penultimate paragraphs: “So it’s an honour to be part of it and it is an honour to be here tonight to support our Party, whose values and principles I have always believed in and always will. And to support Ed, support his leadership, support his drive to make our Party win. Leaders need support. What they usually get is ‘advice’. So Ed, you don’t need my advice but you will have my support.” Blair previously had stated categorically that “he doesn’t do tribal politics”, possibly with the same fervour and conviction with him “not doing ‘God'”, but the unfortunate truth is that the bitter wrangling between the Brownites and the Blairities exists to this day. It is hard to ignore that ‘the second coming’ or resurrection of the son of Thatcher will strike fear into humble grassroots Labour members. The notion of Blair acting as adviser to Miliband is treated with fear by many current members of the Labour Party, despite Blair apparently ‘winning three elections for Labour’. Two of these reasons are that, under Blair, we invaded Iraq, still a hugely controversial decision; furthermore, on Blair’s watch, Labour lost four million votes between 1997 and 2005, and his personal poll ratings were plummeting at the time when he did eventually relinquish office and power. The idea of Blair advising Miliband cannot be taken seriously when he is already cumulatively earning millions advising corporates such as JP Morgan. Furthermore, he has nothing offer. Blair was the future once.
As a historical allegory, Blairites wish to emphasise the ‘golden era’ of Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell, pointing out the contributions such as a minimum wage, and ‘capturing the mood of the public’ such as with the ‘People’s Princess’ and ‘I feel the hand of history upon us’ speech. Critics of Blair will tend to shrug this off as ‘Blair was a B-rate actor’, but even this criticism is too extreme. The fundamental dismissal of Blair’s contribution to politics I feel must be an ideological one. Blair represented a ‘third way’, but is in fact more like, on reflection, ‘the middle way’ which inspired Mussolini. A pathetic way of rebranding left wing politics as the ‘human face of capitalism’ has left lasting damage for Labour. Labour’s human face of capitalism is in fact Labour. It is putting the workers and employers’ needs at least as level as, or above, the need for profit. Whilst Ed might have previously called it ‘responsible capitalism’, it is more akin to the community investment form of capitalism, where competing interests of acting in the best interests of the community and the best interests of the shareholder are reconciled. It is more than an antithesis to ‘crony capitalism'; it explains why Marks and Spencer should not have been morally allowed to lay off many thousands of workers, whilst generating a substantial profit, in the name of its business model, and it explains why employers with venture capitalist influence (such as Beecroft) cannot be allowed to act unlawfully under European law of employment to hire and fire staff as they wish, providing little job security for such people.
This is fundamentally what Labour should stand for. So I offer Ed Miliband advice and support. I am not going to write an open letter, so keen of left-wing bloggers around Christmas time. I am going to advise Ed Miliband not to get caught up in the hysteria of the academics of the ‘social market’ – I should like you to embrace that one bit of Blair’s advice that is useful. That is, for Labour to go back to its roots, and to think about how it can represent the views and ambitions of people it has always seek to represent – there is no point courting the City, with their tax cut meaning that we cannot ‘afford’ a new national social care service. This means representing too workers and their Unions, including the nurses and teachers; without them this country would not have wealth (let alone profit), so they are the true ‘wealth creators’ by definition.
