Sir Tony Blair’s legacy is a country “run by HR” and governed by his worst ideas, Kemi Badenoch has said.
Works as a policy set to me.
Sir Tony Blair’s legacy is a country “run by HR” and governed by his worst ideas, Kemi Badenoch has said.
Works as a policy set to me.
So he had some good ideas, did he???
He had very good ideas for Blair, Inc. For the UK? Not so much.
Sorry, but this is like people still blaming Fatcher. Kemi’s party had 14 years to undo what Blair did. Not once did Kemi say “why the fuck is my honourable friend the prime minister not shutting down the Department of Media Culture and Sport”. Not once did she call May or Cameron a poopy head for not canning the Equality Act. Could have done it in 5 minutes. Simply, parliament votes to bin the law.
Like all the Conservatives, an unprincipled little bitch who got hoisted by their own petard, opting for the short term win of “heir to Blair” at just the wrong time, letting the right of the party be treated like shit, so they went off to UKIP/Reform. And now that it’s no longer sunny skies, but rains, she’s acting like she would have built the shelter.
The party needs grinding down to the atoms.
Indeed. KB was minister for equalities under little Rishi. She was, in other words, minister for communism.
In fact the Conservatives had over 75 years to undo what the Attlee Marxist-Socialist regime did turning Britain into a quasi-Communist State. Instead they affirmed it as the norm.
Learn some arithmetic
2025-75=1950. Good enough for government work.
Attlee won the 1950 election: he lost an election in October 1951, we are only in May 2026 and Labour was in government for 24 of the intervening years.
So the Tories had 51 years in which to undo what Labour had done. I would say JohnB’s arithmetic’s fine.
You’d think whilst the Tories are out of power they’d be considering how to reverse Labour policies when they return to power. But apparently, the first day after they’ve been elected it comes as a complete surprise there’s been all these years of Labour legislation & they’re thoroughly baffled.
Curious how Labour doesn’t have the same problem. Not even 2 years in government & they’ve already taken the UK back to the early 70s. At the rate they’re going they’ll manage the C18th.
People that go into Labour are much more motivated towards changing things, where the Conservatives are mostly bored moneyed, establishment boys with no idea what else to do, so go into politics. Labour people are generally far more grounded. They grew up in average places, their parents had average jobs. Jack Straw’s Dad was an insurance salesman. Margaret Beckett’s father died, and was raised by her mother who was a teacher. David Blunkett’s dad worked for the gas board. They might have the wrong diagnosis, but they do understand the desires of average people. Blair is a posh boy, but he was surrounded by so many people to guide him.
I can remember many denationalisations, permitting an alternative to the BBC monopoly, the requirement for strike ballots, the abolition of the dollar premium, the permission for schools to select pupils according to academic ability, allowing private sector builders to freely buy building materials, permitting an alternative to the BT monopoly, abolishing the limit (I think it was £150) on money you could spend on holidays abroad … , and there lots more that I cannot *instantly* recall.
Were you asleep all those years?
No, it was £50.
And my first foray into the black economy. Pay cash in London & for a moderate commission ones holiday spendies could be collected in the currency of the country, post restante, at ones PO of choice. Covered France, Spain, Italy & Portugal
So you *know* the Conservatives started the roll-back despite inheriting a civil service that believed state control was good (why otherwise would they have joined the civil service?) and was consequently opposed to each and every liberalisation.
I cannot remember ever knowingly using the “black market” (my parents who lived through WW2 viewed it as cheating at the expense of honest people) even though your example harmed no-one.
I wish I could recommend this more!
The Conservative Party leader criticised the former prime minister’s record in government in a scathing attack on his policies, including the introduction of the Human Rights Act, the Climate Change Act and constitutional changes.
She’s right, but as you say, 14 years.
Kemi was surprisingly unscathing of the Human Rights Act, the Climate Change Act, and constitutional changes when she was a government minister in a Conservative government that was proud to uphold all of the legislation she is now against.
With the poss example of Jenrick, so were all of the defectors to Reform …
Nigel is not as red in tooth and claw as I would like but, to give him his due, he’s been saying for years that we have to come out of the ECHR and for a year or two he’s been denouncing net zero. He’s also prepared to stick his neck out on the NHS.
I think that’s why the defectors to Reform were not met with any visible improvement in the polls for Reform. Though it may prove valuable in the long term (calming the nerves of markets).
The Conservatives seemed to gleefully ignore the fact that the 2019 stonking majority we gave them was their Last Chance Saloon. Born as much of revulsion at the particularly off-putting Labour leadership and frustration at the obstructionism of Tory Wets as enthusiasm for the Blond Bullshitter. They’ve had several golden opportunities since 2016 to put themselves on the good side of the British majority. Theresa May could have swept the board if she’d just left the EU and done normal 90’s Conservative things, when our country had lower taxes, lower immigration, less authoritarianism, and was amazingly a lot happier.
All Boris had to do was get Brexit done, kick Net Zero to the long grass of 2075 or something, because our economy was already fragile in 2019, and not fuck up immigration. Oops.
Which is why Nige made a mistake with this. All that “ministerial experience” crap which basically meant people like Jenrick whose total career achievements are:-
Minister of State for Immigration – failed to reduce immigration
Secretary of State for Housing – failed to increase housing
Secretary to the Treasury – failed to cut taxes
Minister of State for Health – failed to reform the NHS
He’s a smooth faced loser. He’s never gone to war and won. Never made brave, unpopular choices. He’s defecting because he sees the Conservatives are fucked. When push comes to shove, will he fight for Britain and go down a hero, or defect back to the milquetoasts?
You need people who believe in something. And sure, no-one is perfect. Nige isn’t perfect. But he made the argument in the wilderness. When Cameron was calling him a racist. And people who make the argument when everyone hates them believe in it.
Never made brave, unpopular choices. He’s defecting because he sees the Conservatives are fucked
I thought that was brave. Or, as brave as we’ve seen from a former Cabinet minister in a long time. Jenrick took an almighty risk, the establishment is locked in another Wat Tyler type struggle over their determination to replace us with the Third World’s least dynamic people. He defected to the prole side, even going out to protest the physical manifestations of replacement immigration. That kind of stuff doesn’t get you plum non-executive directorships, or a sinecure in the HoL, to say the least.
That’s a very big bet he placed on the British Glasnost holding, and Reform being more than a flavour of the month. We certainly want ambitious wind-sniffers to reach the same conclusion.
Still, it’s all a bit mental, no? We really shouldn’t have to persuade the British government that Britain shouldn’t be colonised by some of the most backwards and violent cultures known to Man.
It’s a no lose gamble. Based on everything going on, when does Jenrick get to be a minister again as a Conservative? I reckon earliest is over a decade away. And predictions for Newark at the next election are close.
I hope you are right.
Cabinet responsibility: either you do what PM decrees and the Cabinet agrees. Do you imagine Nigel’s Cabinet would be run on different rules?
Decorum doesn’t matter if the ship of state is being sailed towards rocks.
A defect of representative democracy is that most MP’s have a maximum five-year horizon. So even when they can see that the ship of state is headed for rocks, they are more concerned about their re-election than in the nation’s long-term interests.
Parties and politicians (particularly when freed from Cabinet responsibility) can and do evolve and change. [Nigel was in favour of stronger covid lockdowns. Is this now a problem?]
Being angry with politicians and their parties gets us nowhere: it’s irrational. As a right-wing pragmatist, I trust no politician or party. But I support Reform, because they are now our best bet. However, I think it would be foolish to rule out voting tactically for a Conservative candidate in a ward or constituency where Reform doesn’t stand a chance…
Nigel was in favour of stronger covid lockdowns. Is this now a problem?
No, but it was a failure of judgement. We all have those, but lockdowns were a massive test of character and nerve. And most people failed.
Yes, the Conservative party’s leaders when in power made “massive failures of judgement”, as would a Reform (or any) government. Because democratic politics often requires choosing the least harmful option, not the best option, in view of party management [in Parliament and constituencies], civil service advice, opinion polls, “events, dear boy, events” and even, possibly, the national interest…
Betrayal is written throughout politics, so I place no faith in politicians. And I vote pragmatically and tactically to keep the leftoids out…
“However, I think it would be foolish to rule out voting tactically for a Conservative candidate in a ward or constituency where Reform doesn’t stand a chance…”
Tactically voting for Tory wankers just means that you get Tory wankers delivering Tory wanker policies. They look at the results and think “everyone loves wanky Toryism”.
We never would have had a referendum if every right-winger had voted tactically for Tory wankers. The fear it brought led to the promise of a referendum to get them back.
It’s why I generally don’t vote tactically. I want the politicians to know what I want. 2017 was my exception. May is a wanker, but really couldn’t have Corbyn as PM.
Voting truthfully carries the cost of “wasting your vote” (though it’s unlikely your individual vote will be decisive, the cost collectively can probably be apportioned out between the “honest voters” as a whole) but it does convey useful information. Partly to tactical voters who at the next election might see someone who apparently had no chance is actually more popular there than previously believed. Partly to the parties themselves – in the 2000s and 2010s, UKIP votes showed Europe wasn’t going away as an issue, Green votes showed the importance of the environment, wherever the Lib Dem vote crept up into competitiveness their strategists would start looking at actually targeting the place, and so on.
I do think the topic deserves a bit of devil’s advocacy though. When the Tories were seriously vying for control of Number 10, votes for Farage showed Tory strategists they needed to get Euroskeptic voters on board if they wanted a majority. But if they are having to cut their cloth as a third or fourth party in a realigned system, their rational approach is probably more like the Lib Dems has been for the past few decades – fight your battles locally, don’t pitch yourself too close to an existing party but try and find something more distinctive. Playing copycat against a smaller party is a good way to suck up its voters but there’s much less point doing so to a larger party.
So there’s at least an argument that voting Tory in a Tory/Lab or Tory/Green or Tory/LD marginal, while national polls show the Tories are going to be lucky to come out as third party, would be a different deal than tactically voting Tory when they are in contention for office. It would help shut down the possibility of Rainbow Coalition so isn’t inherently anti-Reform, indeed Reform themselves will be deliberately putting certain seats on a minimal priority for this reason even if they stand a candidate. (Obviously this breaks down if the Tories decided to join in themselves as part of an Establishment “firewall” – but that seems unlikely, the mood music from senior Tories is that they’d rather watch a Reform minority government with a view to picking up the pieces later, and this is also their most logical survival strategy. A grand coalition against Reform would do the Tories no favours whatsoever, and they are aware of this.)
A significant Reform “spoiler” vote that contributes to the Tories losing that seat would mostly serve as a signal to Conservative Central Office just not to bother wasting resources in that constituency again for the foreseeable future. The Lib Dems seem to look at things that way, they don’t bother paying attention to who spoils their vote and try to emulate them. Nor do the Greens.
With PC and SNP/Scottish Greens doing so well, I would also be more minded to vote tactically for a unionist candidate if I was living there. Unionists in NI have lost out substantially from their habit of “honest voting” between various pro-Union factions, especially since the SDLP collapsed and SF now nabs the bulk of the Nationalist vote. That is a reminder that there is a cost to rejecting tactical voting.
The lanyards come pre-noosed for convenience, don’t they?
That’s the only second order effect they’ve ever seen. Hence the little plastic clip on said lanyards…
Oh, very good! I’ll dine out on that.
https://spectator.com/article/a-blair-revival-is-the-only-hope-for-britain/
“ Everyone else is thinking it, so I’m just going to say it: we need Tony Blair back in Downing Street. I don’t know by what mechanism and I don’t especially care. A by-election would be ideal, I suppose.”
I think the argument is, at least he got things done, but can’t the Speccie find a less objectionable example. Maybe Heinrich Himmler?
Ludicrous. His backbenchers will sink him just as they’ve sunk Starmer. To them he’s almost as much of a hate figure as Fatcher.
And he’s already done sufficient damage to this country, thank you.
His backbenchers will sink him just as they’ve sunk Starmer. To them he’s almost as much of a hate figure as Fatcher.
Were he not such an ocean-going cunt, I might almost feel sorry for him for this. He is in fact a giant among Labour leaders. He’s given Labour supporters something pretty close a totalitarian socialist state in which the entire life of the nation is harnessed for looting and feeling good about it and in which opposition has been either abolished, marginalised/tamed or criminalised.
And they hate him for what? Because they didn’t like him cosying up to Dubya?
What precisely did he achieve? He did a bunch of stuff and there’s a few good things but mostly wasted money.
Tony Blair achieved a number of things, all of them malign.
He emasculated the Met with “institutional racism” menaces, and politicised the police (and most of the rest of the public sector). Their attitude to government was not about trying to represent you, but to “rub your noses in it”, many such cases.
He imported the Clinton crime family business model to Britain. MPs getting bunged an envelope from Mohammed al Fayed was the height of Tory sleaze in the 90’s. Blair laughed at their unsophisticated bumpkin ways, and ushered in pay-to-play access to political power, at eye-watering rates, on a scale never before seen in Westminster even in the Rotten Borough days. And all perfectly legal, naturally. He even has a “foundation”. Anyway, if you’re wondering when MP’s stopped paying attention to their stupid and bigoted constituents, and started loving strange wealthy foreign men at Davos instead, Blair’s the answer.
Correct. He expressly set out to create what he called a ‘Labour Century’ and, unless we get our revolution, I reckon he’ll achieve it.
To take just one example, he’s had armies of cohorts of youngsters coming out of schools and yoonis now, for years, all of them basically Blair mini-mes. And they don’t even see it. For them it’s normal to want to dissolve your country and abase yourself before others.
The man is a genius, and there is nothing painful or distressing I would not see done to him.
I saw him a few mumfs ago on telly, talking about how, you know, you might not believe this [frown, embarrassed smile], he believes in genuine opposition and so wants to see the Tories/Reform put up a good fight.
And I was quite surprised at the extent to which it had slipped my mind what a glib, unctuous liar he is.
The legions of yoniis thing is falling apart, though, There’s no space in The Hierarchy to slot them into cushioned do-nothing authoritarian positions, so the socialist gravy boat is springing a leak.
He succeeded in enabling the Progressive takeover of the Establishment, turning Academia from places of learning into moneymaking places of indoctrination, and properly initiating the era of mass migration.
I think that’s enough to be going on with.
But note how primed the British establishment was for a Blair, how rotten the whole edifice had become. Blair hummed the right notes, but it was a song they’d all learned previously. Late 20th century Western (i.e. white) countries had won the Cold War, but elite opinionoids, who had gotten bored with all this bourgeois, industrial excess wealth business in the late 19th century, was on its own strange acid trip journey towards Godless Communism.
Marx’s bastard children, critical race, gender and environmental theories had become the cool new Inner Party beliefs for a pampered and privileged generation raised without understanding the unprecedented peace and prosperity they’d enjoyed, in the long echo of men – real men, not Milibands or Starmers – killing the fuck out of each other in WW2, was not a birthright, but an achievement.
There’s nothing in the bouquet of 20th progressive Great Ideas that hasn’t been a total disaster for actual humans. Women are not happier now, after decades of feminism being baked into public and institutional life, than they were before. But they are having fewer children, so we’re on a demographic death slide. Wheee! Multiculturalism means rape gangs, crime, and maybe your son being stabbed to death because they didn’t like his white face. And then an achingly white judge letting his murderers off with time served because their culture is unused to alcohol, and anyway, the murderers said your son was “raceest”. Doing what the eco nutters want is now translating into catastrophic harm across our economy. They can keep lying about the price of “renewables”, but bills don’t lie. Children need a comprehensive education, to correct their comprehensive educations, but they won’t get it from our Mickey Mouse yoonis. Transgender was an unmitigated omnishambles and our betters are now dexterously trying to pretend they never believed “trans women are women”. But the harm the brief, vicious Transgender fad did was real, and ongoing, in unnecessary surgeries that leave people in suicidal amounts of pain, the psychological trauma of people trying to live as the biological sex every cell in their body says you they not.
The “racial reckoning” of 2020, where white people were told they were shit because an African American opiate addict died after committing a crime, has already been semi-memory-holed? By them, I mean. But we will never forget Cambridge professors declaring “white lives don’t matter” and being promoted for it, or people sharing stickers saying “it’s ok to be white” being imprisoned. The Two Tier criminal justice.
None of the luxury beliefs resulted in luxurious outcomes, they just broke social systems that had evolved over millennia to keep us alive and unextinct. And now, the veil is torn. The trust, that kept our society more or less together after Norman invasions and in the teeth of Spanish armadas, is gone. Reading the tea leaves, some of the great and the good have recently encountered the unpleasant fact that the British armed forces are now hollowed out. Years of putting a brave face on horrible cuts have led to a comically atrophied, tiny model British Army led by optimistic liars. That can still talk a good game, but do little in the real world of actual wars where 75,000 people are a mere apertarif.
Tis sadly true, the current state of Oliver’s Army. Which I am proud of to have served with no distinction whatsoever. But while it doesn’t beg the question, it suggests it: What’s next?
We’re at or near the breaking point. You can keep on running up debt that is invisible, keep cooking the books, keep doing worthless yooni courses, having lots of people off work being paid, paying ever increasing pensions and keeping people alive longer on the NHS, and employing women in worthless government bureaucracy. But it cannot last. At a certain point, you have maxed out the credit card.
What happens at that point is some form of revolution. Hopefully someone like Mrs Thatch. Someone who fucks off the monarch, the Church of England, old grandees. And makes necessary change.
Nige is about the best hope of this. And the simple weapon is just cutting spending from these cunts. They’ll soon shut up about “white lives don’t matter” if they have to go serving fries in McDonalds instead.
Yes Steve. But you lot did nothing & let it happen. Why I despair of Brits. They allowed their country to be taken away from them.
I don’t think Oz’s at quite that state yet, but we’re getting there.
I think the long march through the institutions had won the battle for the yoonis long before Blair. There were older more conservative dons about (as well as plenty of older Marxists!) but they were retiring out. The grad students of the sixties were already well placed in the academic hierarchies by the 1990s.
Everyone else is thinking it, so I’m just going to say it: we need Tony Blair to do a funny dance while his tongue turns blue. I don’t know by what mechanism and I don’t especially care. A length of rope and a motorway bridge would be ideal, I suppose.
Pure commie talk, justifying totalitarian government:
Burnham:
“The last 40 years have given us wide inequality – that’s what’s responsible for the abandonment of the centre.”
Streeting:
“Inequality, rather than being incidental to the crises reshaping western democracies, is actually their cause.”
Although I’m a big fan of Mrs Thatcher, she didn’t get everything right. There were cases (for example, the Poll Tax) where she was right, but got overruled. Blair got most things wrong, but slowly, so the plebs didn’t take much notice. Now he may have got a few things right. Stopped clock metaphor. Maybe.
After Attlee he’s the PM who brought about the most profound changes in this country, most of which have stuck. Much of what Fatcher achieved has been washed away.
Mrs T wasn’t right about the poll tax. Or rather she was right in theory but wrong in practice. The concept of everyone paying something into the local pot and thus having a stake in what direction local taxes go in was not a bad one, its just that turning every person in the country into a personal tax payer was never going to work. The secret of the tax system is that people, by and large, pay taxes voluntarily. Because they are the sort of people who take responsibility seriously, and do as they are asked. The reason we have PAYE is precisely because you could not expect the sort of people who live paycheck to paycheck to be able to have the self discipline to put aside their taxes for an end of tax year tax return and payment cheque. If one looks at most taxes they either fall on the already responsible (business owners) or on those who own assets that they fear they may lose (property owners), and are levied in ways that often involve other professionals (solicitors/accountants etc). A poll tax was effectively trying to turn the feral underclass into responsible taxpayers who will dutifully send their monthly poll tax payment to the council by direct debit, and tell the council every time they change addresses. It was never going to work, if only 10-15% of the population actively evade a Poll Tax the sums don’t add up and everyone else has to pay more. And those who did pay see those who didn’t get away with it, and decide to do likewise. Taxes need to be collected in ways that the feral section of society struggle to avoid, which is why consumption taxes are the way to go. Far easier to ensure every business in the country collects the consumption tax than make sure every individual pays their income /local taxes. .
The Poll Tax was a bad idea. Rates worked and were simple. You own a house, you pay rates on it. You can’t make a house disappear like you can people living there.
But her party were also cunts. They never liked what she did and only supported her when she was winning. The moment she dropped the ball once, they executed her. Look at their results ever since. They’ve barely managed majorities. The only better result was Boris vs Corbyn. After he’d stood against the Brexit vote and been shown to be hanging out with Black September.
The community charge (so-called “poll tax”) would have shared the cost of services between those using the services and the national aggregation of taxpayers (so that the poor, wherever they were, were subsidised by the rich wherever they were). Great in theory, failed due to a mass misinformation campaign by Labour and a failure by the government which assumed it was obviously right to actively market it.
And this is the problem with “great in theory”, which ISTM plagues so much theoretical economics. Jim has it exactly right. You’ll never get the feckless to pay it.