November 17, 1999

Tony Blair:
The Future’s Blight

THE MESSIAH

I am worried. I think that my Great And Dear Leader, Tony Blair, may be slowly going mad. In a speech to the Labour Party conference on 25 September he even had to reassure his followers that he is "only flesh and blood in the end." Most of us know this about ourselves already, and assume others do not need to be told, but not Mr. Blair. He is now so sure of his intrinsic, or divine, rightness that his opponents, any of his opponents, are at heart evil and should be dealt with accordingly. If you think that it is of no concern to you because you are not British, then think again. The man wants global leadership.

DON'T LAUGH, YOU'RE NEXT

In his speech to the Labour Party conference Mr. Blair laid out a chilling prophecy:

"For the 21st century will not be about the battle between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism."

Could you be part of the "forces of conservatism"? Do you shoot, go to a Fundamentalist church, appreciate the beauty of a Latin mass or feel a lump in your throat when you see your flag go past? Be prepared for the onslaught of the forces of progress, for that is what the twenty-first century is about for some of our most powerful men.

Emmanuel Goldstein is the pseudonym of a political drifter on the fringes of English classical liberal and Euro-sceptic activity. He is a former member of the Labour Party, who knows Blair and some of his closest buddies better than they realise, yet. He has a challenging job in the real world, working for a profit-making private company and not sponging off the taxpayer in politics, journalism or the civil service. "Airstrip One," appears Wednesdays at Antiwar.com.

Archived Columns

Tony Blair: The Future’s Blight
11/17/99

Why the Second World War will always be popular in Britain
11/10/99

A Peace of Paper
11/3/99

The Old Fight of New Labour
10/21/99

A MODEL NATION

Do not think that this will be limited to the subjects of the United Kingdom. He wants to make us "a model 21st century nation." That’s right, we will be the model, you will be the clay. As he puts it:

"New Labour, confident at having modernised itself, [is] now the new progressive force in British politics which can modernise the nation, sweep away those forces of conservatism to set the people free."

There we are, yesterday the party, then the nation: you do not have to be intuitive to see where this leads.

THE AMERICAN DIMENSION

To make it clear that the USA will be included in his plan, he says "there is no choice between Europe and America." The idea that America can escape the pull of the New World Order is to Mr. Blair unthinkable. Mr. Blair will make sure that America plays its part. "Britain has the potential to be the bridge between Europe and America." For a man who hates the very concept of national (rather than economic) interests, he makes the strange statement that "Britain is stronger with the US today because we are strong in Europe." So you know whose interests you will be called to defend.

THE GREAT KOSOVO LIE

Mr. Blair is at his best on Kosovo of course. The fact that no mass graves have been discovered and that Serbs and Gypsies are being murdered at the fastest rate since the Holocaust does not stop him. For the truth does not matter to Mr. Blair. I will reproduce his demented rant on Kosovo in its entirety, to show just how far truth is a stranger to this demented half-wit:

"And wouldn’t Clem Attlee and Ernie Bevin [two Labour ministers in the 1940s] have applauded when in Kosovo, faced with racial genocide in Europe for the first time since they fought fascism in the Second World War, it was Britain and this Government that helped defeat it and set one million people free back to their homeland?"

Which people are being set back to their homeland? The Albanians who were forced into Tirana due to the bombings? Or the Serbs being forced into Belgrade due to the racial murders?

VICHY BRITAIN

A cornerpiece of Tony Blair’s policy is a gradual surrender of our sovereignty to Europe. Not that he says this openly. "I pose this simple question: is our destiny with Europe or not?" Well we do happen to be a little over twenty miles away from it, and on that level, the question is nonsense. It is on another level that he raises the question: do we want to surrender our ability to make decisions independently of Europe? As the British like the idea of having democratic control over their own affairs, he falsely portrays it as "an economic union in which 50 percent of our trade is done, on which millions of British jobs depend."

THE INDEPENDENT NATION STATE –
ANOTHER CONSERVATIVE FORCE

In George Orwell's 1984, the Party said "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery" – to which Mr. Blair can add, "Sovereignty is Interdependence." If you want to see a real exercise in Orwellian "double speak," read this: "What threatens the nation-state today is not change, but the refusal to change in a world opening up, becoming ever more interdependent." That’s right, the nation state is threatened, by refusing to lose its sovereignty! If Tony Blair was not so intellectually lazy, I could almost believe that he was going mad.

TRADE GOODS NOT SOVEREIGNTY

Leaving aside the deliberate lies in this speech, the very concept that you can only trade with a country if you lose your freedom is equivalent to the attitude of Japan before Commodore Perry. It makes no sense: if I buy from WalMart I don’t have to become their slave. So if I buy from France and sell to Germany, they don’t have to tell me to take up imperial measures and raise tariffs against American products.

FROM HIS OWN MOUTH

In his speech on he laid out his stall domestically as well, and the goods are shoddy and dangerous. He starts out with a typically messianic phrase: "Today at the frontier of the new Millennium" – which is a surprise to those who think that the Second Coming did not start when he attained power. He then states that he will "make it a century of progressive politics after one dominated by Conservatives." Those of us who thought that internationalism and the welfare state are not conservative are presumably wrong. This must be one of the most historically illiterate leaders the world has known.

ONE PARTY RULE

The domestic ambitions of Mr. Blair are a useful measure of the man. They are simple, to steamroller all domestic opposition.

"100 years in existence, 22 in power, we have never, ever won a full second term. That is our unfinished business. Let us now finish it and with it finish the Tory Party’s chances of doing as much damage in the next century as they’ve done in this one."

Britain must avoid the inconvenience of another party holding power, or in Mr. Blair’s terms "doing damage."

THE PIQUE OF OPPOSITION

To make quite certain that you are in no doubt of what he thinks he quotes a "letter I got last week from a man who said did I know the Tories had been listening to Britain. They can’t have been listening too hard, he said. They’re still here." Even a month after he made that disgusting speech this "joke" still gives me a chill. It may be perfectly acceptable for the idiots who write these letters to make these fatuous points, but it is not acceptable from the idiots who receive them.

I AM RADICAL, THEY ARE EXTREME

Another theme that runs through his speech is that "the more useless they [the Opposition] get, the more extreme they get." So not only are they not fit to govern, but they are extreme. But what is extreme? The idea that terrorists and gangsters should give up their guns before release from prison and going into government is extreme. The idea an independent country should control its own currency is extreme. Most of all, the idea that taxes should be lower is extreme. The type of leader who thinks that liberty and parliamentary democracy are "extreme" is not the type of leader one really wants to have global influence.

IF ONLY

Like President Clinton, Mr. Blair enjoys manufacturing straw men to destroy as his enemies. However, just as President Clinton is accusing the imperialists in the Republican Party of being isolationist, and, perhaps, waking the latent isolationism of the American populace, Mr. Blair could be in danger of doing the same with the British people. Like the lawyers defending Louise Woodward he may give the British people a false choice between his argument and the unthinkable, and find that the jury choose the unthinkable. Let us hope so. It may be true that if we left the European Union "Britain would no longer [sic] play a determining part in the future of the continent to which we belong." However, Europe would also stop playing a determining part in the future of an island to which it neither belongs or is welcome, and that is a true prize.

ENEMIES LIST

I will not labour too long on the rest of this name calling, except to give a further glance into this all-powerful man’s state of mind. His list of domestic enemies also includes:

  • Scottish nationalism – socialist nationalists being "just the forces of conservatism by another name."
  • Welsh nationalism
  • IRA terrorists
  • Opponents and victims of IRA terror
  • Left-wing Labour Party members
  • Teachers who belong to Trade Unions
  • Patients at private hospitals
  • Libertarians
  • Civil Liberties groups
  • Cynics
  • The establishment
  • The nostalgic
  • "Those who just can't be bothered."

It is in fact hard to find anyone on the planet who is not against Mr. Blair’s Brave New World.

THE ART OF THE SMEAR

Of course if we do not agree to Mr. Blair’s totalitarian vision we condemn ourselves to perpetual outer darkness. The fact that the Conservatives are adamantly against leaving the European Union does not seem to bother this dishonest man. He will condemn the global free traders of the right as followers of "narrow-minded isolationism" – while saying that confining ourselves to the white man’s club of the European Union is somehow outward looking!

THE POWER OF A LIE

The dishonesty does not end with his portrayal of his opponents’ aims, but also with the results of these fictional aims. "But what is certain is that we would not be a power." Not so fast Mr. Blair, a "power" in equity is an entity with some ability of independent action. As a (failed) lawyer, Mr. Blair should remember this. Remaining in the European Union as it continues to become a state is the only way to ensure that Britain is no longer a power. If we lose our independent decision-making ability, we are not a power; it is as simple as that. The fact is that Costa Rica would have a greater right to call itself a power than Britain. He says, "the nation-state is changing," but forgets that this is not the case outside Europe.

THE MENTAL ILLNESS

Anyone who disagrees with this scandalous lie is a "Europhobe" – a new mental disease to be sure – who has not made their own reasoned decision but who has been "blindfold and dulled by the incessant propaganda." In the 1950s and early 1960s, some American commentators saw Conservatism less as a philosophy and more as a mental disorder, and Mr. Blair is nostalgic for those times. A lot more becomes possible to a man who truly believes that his opponents have a mental disease. Rules are bent; laws are broken and lives are ruined. Opponents feel the cruel lash of a lazy mind. The mania that all his opponents are evil and deluded is set for a wider stage than merely the domestic one.

GUILTY

In case you are wondering, you are not just mentally ill but also guilty of the most heinous crimes, purely for opposing the Clinton-Blair agenda. "The forces of conservatism allied to racism are why one of the heroes of the 20th Century, Martin Luther King, is dead." That, dear reader, is you – you probably were not yet born, but that is why you must be suppressed. "It's why another [hero], Nelson Mandela, spent the best years of his life in a cell the size of a bed." That also is you, although you spent your life on a different continent. He also mentions an English racist murder and says that those forces of conservatism "still keep opposing progress and justice." All this because they oppose the minimum wage. I am not joking, read the speech.

THE FORCES OF SOCIALISM

If the forces of conservatism are responsible for two deaths and an imprisonment, what about the force that opposed them? The forces of Socialism, Mr. Blair’s forces, are responsible for millions of deaths. Hitler was a national socialist, Stalin was a scientific Socialist, Mao was a Socialist with Chinese characteristics and Pol Pot was a "true" socialist. If there is no qualitative difference between those who oppose the minimum wage and those who shot Martin Luther King, then it follows that there is no difference between those who describe themselves as "democratic Socialists" or any other type. There would also be no difference between the various types of internationalists who want to overturn the system of sovereign states, whether in the 1930s, 1950s or now. The forces of Socialism are what gave us the Gulag and the gas chambers. Mr. Blair makes no apology for supporting them.

SOME TRUTH AT LAST

But Mr. Blair has stumbled, unintentionally, on the truth "I’ve been compared to Hitler, Mussolini and Milosevic," he confesses, but doesn’t say that most of this is from his own party, and not meant as insult. I would replace Milosevic with Stalin as Milosevic tolerates opposition. He goes on to say that "maybe they think I should be indicted for war crimes" – well quite.

THE FASCIST MANTLE

The basic idea of fascism, that individuals are mere instruments of the State is present throughout this disgraceful speech. Tony Blair has described the Labour Party as "the political arm of the British people." Those opposed are simply not British:

"And it is us, the new radicals, the Labour Party modernised, that must undertake this historic mission. To liberate Britain from the old class divisions, old structures, old prejudices, old ways of working and of doing things, that will not do in this world of change."

Your opposition, your refusal to attach yourself like a braindead limpet to all that is "new" just "will not do." This worryingly Mussolini-like man ends his speech: "Party and nation joined in the same cause for the same purpose: to set our people free."

THE FUTURE BELONGS TO HIM

As if secretly wanting the sobriquet of a Hitler or a Mussolini, Mr. Blair then claims that "the foundations of a New Britain are being laid," which leads the less prudish of us boggled. Later, in his peculiarly verb-less prose he says:

"And all around us the challenge of change. These forces of change driving the future:

"Don’t stop at national boundaries.

"Don’t respect tradition.

"They wait for no-one and no nation.

"They are universal."

That’s right, the idea that a country may not wish to change for it’s own sake, may wish to modify this or that change to maintain the social fabric or the concept of justice is folly. The "forces of change" are "universal." What a miserable vision: democracy, liberty and justice could some day be out of date "traditions." The idea of a country or an individual shaping their own life in the surrounding world is ducking the "challenge," the ultimate "Conservative" folly.

THE MULTICULTURAL MUSH

They are those who have the temerity to oppose Mr. Blair. Those who hold "the old prejudices, where foreign means bad," rather than the new prejudices where British means bad, are opponents who must be liquidated. "Where multiculturalism is not something to celebrate, but a left-wing conspiracy to destroy their way of life." Well it is – multiculturalism will destroy our way of life, a left-wing elite is consciously promoting it, so by definition it is a left-wing conspiracy to destroy our way of life. The ability to see the difference between tolerance and the relativist value-free mush of multiculturalism is not yet a crime. The whole foreign policy mess that we are in now has been the logical consequence of multiculturalism, where all are equal and none are tolerated

A THIRD RATE MIND FOR A THIRD WORLD REGIME

Mr. Blair makes great play of being a man with moral purpose, but this very moral purpose is dangerous. For a man who is so sure of himself that no dissent is to be tolerated is a man whose morals has traditionally only been acceptable in the undeveloped world. It was often said of Mr. Blair’s party, the socialist Labour Party, that it would make Britain into a Third World country. Well, with his intellectual laziness, his self-confidence born of privilege and his intolerance of either borders or dissent, we have a dictator on a truly Third World scale.

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