Tony Blair: brings Labor Party back from dead, now finds himself with head in crapper (Tony, what a mighty fall, dear boy)

1. Moth in the Flames of War: The Fall of Tony Blair -- by Chris Floyd

1. Staggering to the Exit

It may look and feel like a farce right now, but one day some future Shakespeare might write it as a tragedy: the fall of a powerful, popular leader broken on the wheel of war.

For make no mistake: if not for the criminal folly of the Iraq invasion, British Prime Minister Tony Blair would not have been unceremoniously shoved toward the exit last week by his own party, including some of his fiercest loyalists. The man who once commanded one of the largest majorities in the history of the ancient British Parliament, who won three successive national elections and appeared to have sealed his party's hold on power for decades to come, has seen his stature and authority eaten away by the hubris that led him to join George W. Bush's duplicitous, disastrous Babylonian Conquest.

With the Labour Party sinking in the polls - now almost 10 points behind the once-decimated and still despised Conservatives - several Labour MPs broke into open revolt last week, resigning from the government and forcing Blair to announce that he will definitely leave office in the next few months, probably May at the latest, more than three years before the next national election. But after a few days on the back foot, the prime minister's remaining partisans then launched a rearguard maneuver to savage Blair's obvious successor, his longtime political partner - and deadly rival - Gordon Brown, the UK Chancellor. Brown has been accused of everything from "traitorous disloyalty" to "psychological problems" by Blairites flocking to the national press. As the unseemly sniping rages on, it seems that Blair is seeking, consciously or unconsciously, to perform one last act of tragic hubris: bringing the party down with him as he falls.

Of course, Blair had promised long ago not to serve out a full third term; indeed, that was how he won a third term in the first place. His promise before the May 2005 election to step down afterwards convinced enough distrustful voters to "hold your nose and vote Labour" - as the famous campaign theme voiced by the Guardian's Polly Toynbee put it - and keep out the dread Tories one more time. (Another popular, if unofficial, theme was "Vote Blair, Get Brown.") But once safely back in 10 Downing Street - albeit with a greatly reduced parliamentary majority, having shed millions of voters and more than 200,000 dues-paying party members from the pre-Iraq days - Blair showed little inclination to leave. He spoke of long-term projects and reforms that he "had to see through" - including that pesky business of "establishing democracy" in Iraq. It was obvious that he intended to stick around for years, mostly likely until just before the next election.

But month by month, Blair's support continued to bleed away. Not even the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London or this year's Heathrow bomb plot scare gave him one of those "rally around the leader" bounces that have served Bush so well. And Blair's insistence that Britain's eager participation in the rape of Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the rise in Islamic extremism struck most people as either a cynical sham or evidence of his growing disconnection from reality.

Meanwhile, the Tories, after years of internal strife and a series of leaders who combined the charisma of Michael Dukakis with the savvy of Dan Quayle, finally emerged from the wilderness with a new leader - ironically, a virtual clone of the young Blair: David Cameron, a bland, vague, TV-friendly Eton-Cambridge toff repackaged as a "regular guy," a man of the people (the middle-class people, of course). Too young to be associated with the hated Thatcher years, and quick to steal the trappings of Blair's own technocratic centrism, Cameron made Conservatives seem safe - and potentially electable - again. His emergence accelerated Labour's long, slow slide in the polls, until last week's panic point was reached, triggering the rebellion and Blair's hastened departure.

2. The Fatal Flaw

But did it have to end this way? Did it have to end at all? Without Iraq, it is likely that Blair would now be contemplating the possibility of a fourth term, or else turning over the keys of a sleek, purring political machine to Brown in 2010 for yet another resounding Labour victory. Instead, the most successful political leader of his generation - not just in Britain, but in the world - now has an approval rating in Richard Nixon territory, deeply distrusted by almost 80 percent of the electorate. Charges of sleaze, corruption and rampant cronyism that once ricocheted harmlessly off Blair's designer threads now cling and fester with a growing stench.

All of this trouble stems from Iraq. But in Blair's case, "Iraq" covers a multitude of sins; it stands for the whole range of complicities and humiliations that comprise his relationship to Bush in the "War on Terror" - a stance that Blair likes to call "standing shoulder to shoulder with America" but which might be described more accurately as "tagging along behind on a tight leash." There has been virtually no action Bush has taken under the rubric of his Terror War that Blair has not supported - either with his full-throated assent, as in the Iraq invasion, the gutting of civil liberties, the wild fearmongering, and the cold-blooded refusal to intervene or even criticize Israel's brutal pulverization of Lebanon, or else by significant silence, as with the use of Britain's airfields for Bush's gulag renditions, or the secret CIA prisons dotted around Europe, or Bush's embrace of torture.

So wedded is Blair to Bush's policies that he's now led his country into what many say is rapidly becoming Britain's Vietnam - not the Iraqi quagmire, which is increasingly regarded here as an irretrievable failure, but the "good war" in Afghanistan, where Blair has hurled an underprepared, undermanned expeditionary force into the violent chaos spawned by Bush's callous neglect of the broken country in favor of his Iraq adventure.

The new British force, part of a NATO effort to make up for the paucity of American troops, was told it would be helping reconstruction efforts, winning "hearts and minds" with the kind of practical, hands-on aid that the Americans have largely ignored in favor of blunderbuss military strikes on suspected terrorists and running secret CIA prisons in hunkered-down fortresses. Instead, the Brits have run into full-blown combat - the "most intensive fighting the UK military has seen since the Korean War," said one commander - with the resurgent Taliban. They have also been saddled by the Americans with the thankless job of eradicating the opium crops - the sole livelihood for most rural Afghans. But thanks to the lack of American financial support - some 70 percent of which never benefits the locals but is instead "contingent upon the recipient spending it on American stuff, including especially American-made armaments, " as Ann Jones notes in a devastating report in the San Francisco Chronicle - there is nothing to offer the Afghan farmers in exchange for giving up the poppy, except a life of grinding poverty.

British forces have lost 27 men in Afghanistan in the last six weeks - almost a quarter of the total 117 lost during three years in Iraq. Soldiers report a lack of ammunition, armor and air cover. At times the Taliban has been able to keep British outposts under siege for days. A top aide to the commander of the UK forces in the pivotal Helmand province has resigned from the army, citing the "pointless" and "grotesquely clumsy" policy that is "just making things worse," The Times reports. "We said we'd be different from the Americans who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them," said Capt. Leo Docherty of the Scots Guards. "All those people whose homes have been destroyed and sons killed are going to turn against the British. It's a pretty clear equation - if people are losing homes and poppy fields, they will go and fight. I certainly would."

Docherty's assessment was confirmed last week in a damning report by Senlis, a thinktank funded by international charities. "Prioritizing military-based security, the United States' and United Kingdom's focus on counterterrorism initiatives and militaristic responses to Afghanistan's opium crisis has undermined the local and international development community's ability to respond to Afghanistan's many poverty-related challenges," the organization said. ""By focusing aid funds away from development and poverty relief, failed counter-narcotics policies have hijacked the international community's nation-building efforts ... the [US-UK] poppy eradication policies are fuelling violence and insecurity."

In London, controversies flare over charges of "deliberate deception" by the Blair government over the true nature of the mission - or else its incredible incompetence in not realizing the true situation on the ground before going in. The echoes of Iraq could not be clearer. And here we come back to square one. Blair's witting complicity in the Bush faction's secret campaign to manipulate America and Britain into an unnecessary war of aggression against Iraq - fully documented by the Downing Street Memos, the smoking guns of the Anglo-American conspiracy for war - is at the heart of his loss of credibility and authority in Britain. These lies - and most Britons are quicker than the majority of Americans to call the Bush-Blair deceptions by their true name - have been the engine of his self-destruction.

But Blair's tragic flaw was evident from his first days in office. He has always been eager for Britain to retain a leading role in world affairs, despite the shrivelling of its empire. "Punching above our weight," he likes to call it: an apt phrase, for to Blair, national greatness is obviously synonymous with military action - one of the traits he shares with Bush, along with an unshakeable belief in his own righteousness as a fervent Christian. Britain's military forces have been in action somewhere around the world throughout Blair's tenure: Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and, most notably, against Serbia, in that other American-led coalition that unilaterally attacked a nation without UN Security Council sanction.

Like Bush, Blair is a man in love with war - or rather, with the idea of war, for he, like Bush, has never seen combat. The idea that greatness can be measured in blood and iron - that one can somehow prove one's manhood and historical standing by sending other people to kill and die - is the tragic flaw that has drawn Blair to America's wars like a moth to flame.

He could have been remembered as the man who saved his nation from the brutal social ravages of Margaret Thatcher's soulless, hard-right extremism. Instead he will be known forever as the lying lapdog of George W. Bush. Tragedy is a harsh taskmaster indeed.

(Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the political blog, Empire Burlesque. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com)


2. After New Labour – from Lenin’s Tomb (leninology.blogspot.com)

Having returned from his Great Statesman voyage to the Middle East, where he embraced the repellent Olmert , Blair has had to face to the near-certain knowledge that he is going before he wants to. He now knows for sure that he is not only less popular than Thatcher at her lowest ebb , but even less popular than Bush is in America, with a 66% disapproval rating . The rats continue to flee that vessel, termite-ridden, water-logged and coming apart at the seams. I don't know if Claire Short counts as a rat, but she has announced that she is standing down and will not be a Labour candidate at the next election. To be honest, I don't really trust Claire Short, but the case she makes is interesting, and rather similar to the one soft left Labour dissidents made at the last election: a serious punishment for the Labour Party and a diminution in its votes and seats to the extent of having a hung parliament would produce new policies from Labour. Short hopes that a wave of electoral reform will ensue and increase representation of the smaller parties. This isn't going to work and it isn't going to happen, but for a Labour MP to openly admit what many appear to have been thinking for some time is indicative of the depth of the crisis. Indeed, Short gets to the root of the problem: there is no discussion and the current leadership contest is going to be largely about personalities.

Those who remain aboard are either mutinous or are trying desperately to shore up the pop-eyed captain. Harriet Harman, the MP who enacted New Labour's vindictive cuts to single mother benefits and who co-drafted the government's statement that the invasion of Iraq would be legal, is now fretting that foreign policy has destroyed the electorate's trust in the government. She proposes a healthy "debate" at the Labour Party conference, which is rather sweet but too late. You've killed hundreds of thousands on the basis of lies: the time for debate was before that. Now is the time for show-trials and executions.

Besides which, New Labour is doing its best to avoid a real debate, as it usually does. Manchester's New Labour council has voted to ban a peace camp planned by Military Families Against the War during the Labour conference there: the families intend to defy the council . It is, of course, extremely important that as many people are there to support them as possible, and you can add that to the million and one other reasons you want to give New Labour the most punishing conference season it has had for years.

Of course, it's one thing to get Blair out. As we all know, his replacement is going to be a neoconservative Bush flunky and a rampant privatiser at home. The inequality and misery of Britain will increase, local councils enchained to these PFI schemes will become more and more indebted,the wars will continue to sap the Treasury, and the economy - well, that will be perfectly super because despite the fact that the ILO figures show an increase in unemployment to 1.7 million, the government's own figures for those claiming benefits (which it promised in 1997 it would not use) have declined. So, we won't notice a recession because all the government has to do is eliminate benefits, means-test everyone off the system, and the unemployment rate will be zero.

So it's not good enough to get rid of Blair, even if it will be a pleasurable start. Crucially, the unions will have to stop sitting on their complacent arses and act. On this matter, of some significance will be the upcoming Organising for Fighting Unions Conference, which has recently been supported by the striking firefighters in Merseyside , and is already backed by the RMT , as well as the general-secretaries of the PCS and UCU and John McDonnell MP . Why is this important? I suppose because there have been a number of fightbacks by the unions on crucial issues, which have frustrated the government on its various neoliberal initiatives. On cuts, the FBU and the UCU have fought the government. On pensions, the PCS and Unison have fought. On privatisation, the RMT have fought. Now, NHS workers are fighting privatisation. Unions and community activists have worked together in several towns and cities to deliver some hammering defeats to New Labour's attempt to privatise council housing. On the 'war on terror', trade union activists and leaders have been crucial in assisting and organising opposition. And yet, these fightbacks have usually been fragmentary, unsustained and have often led to only partial victories or sell-outs or losses. It isn't right to say that this is only because of the well-paid union bureacrats holding things back: there as an entire tradition of grassroots, rank and file militancy that needs to be rediscovered and reinvented. If union leaders are caught between the competing pressures of the demands of the workers they represent on the one hand and the need to make nice to the boss on the other, then it makes no sense to say it's a sell-out every time a strike ends with a shitty deal. It is the strength of working class self-organisation that is being tested in a strike, not the diplomatic skills of the leader or shop steward.

There is a real problem with union membership which, although it has been more resilient than in some countries, still saw a 27.1% decline in overall representation between 1990 and 2003. As the RMT has shown , a combative strategy can not only win gains for workers, but actually lead to dramatic increases in union membership. Many people won't see a point in becoming a union member if it doesn't appear to be doing anything to fight for their interests.

Rebuilding militancy in the unions will have to go hand in hand with realigning British politics. The Labour Party may find a way to shore up its shattering electoral base, but its days as a party capable of delivering reforms are over. We need an entirely new politics, and while electoral reform may make it easier for smaller parties to be represented, it can also provide deceptive gains that don't necessarily reflect long term potential. There is no legislative short-cut to grassroots activism and building in local communities (which, though it pains me to say it, involves such banal drudgery as standing in the middle of a street on a Saturday with leaflets or petitions or whatever, trying to talk to people and make connections and recruit). In short, we need to build Respect as the militant left-wing party that can represent the interests of working people in this country, and show solidarity with those of other countries. We need to build links between it and the unions too.

Getting rid of Blair isn't enough, and neither is relying on parliamentary tinkering or voting for - Lord save us - the Liberal Democrats. Only our own actions will bring about the changes that we need to see.