On Blair
Richard over at Lenin’s Tomb pretty much summed up how I feel about the Blair roadshow rolling into town, but it’s worth reflecting on the following lines from the memoirs:
Ed Balls was of the opinion that the public wanted even more spending and were prepared for the extra tax, by reference to polls that the Treasury had – which I said was nonsense. On these issues, the public fib.
This is a really extraordinary claim. Blair’s faith in third way ideology is so overwhelming, so evangelical, so blinkered, that even when there is clear evidence that mild, mainstream social democratic thinking might be popular, it must be a lie. He’s imbibed so completely his own rhetoric, that redistribution can’t win elections, that he refuses to believe any evidence to the contrary. Those thinking about the direction Labour should go in might want to think twice before considering the wisdom of this fantacist.
Reader Comments
Yup! But is he any different from the rest of us, including you and me?
Bertrand Russell: “It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.”
“If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.”
Since his death in 1970 there has amassed a great deal of evidence in the Psychology field that suggests he was correct. Do you believe it?
Circa 1958:
Dad: daily rant about the Tory government.
Me: Dad, if the Tories are for the bosses and Labour is for the workers, and there are more of us than them, how come we’ve got a Tory government?
Pause.
Dad: Because the silly bastards vote for them!
You have a point about it being a common trait, and in a way I wouldn’t have expected anything less. But what’s more interesting is the way that he had so completely absorbed Third Way ideology, not instrumentally to win certain elections, but as the truth. The story goes that the Third Way was a way of triangulating and winning middle England, an electoral strategy, not a point of principle. This suggests somewhere along the way it metamorphosed, or, more realistically, it was always much more than that.