Is it just me or isn’t there something quite amusing about the Guardian’s opinion pages today?
Who exactly are “some of our folk” whom Tony Blair accused last week of forming an alliance with the Tory party? Asks a bewildered Paul Foot.
Jonathan Freedland replies:Here comes that queasy feeling. I don’t like it, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair keep telling me it’s wrong – but it’s getting harder to stop. When the Tories speak about Iraq I find myself nodding along in agreement.
Of course Freedland doesn’t like idea that the anti-war left are now de facto in alliance with the Tories:
To say all this, according to Mandelson and Blair, puts me in cahoots with the Tories – but that seems a bit rich. They accuse the anti-war movement of forming an alliance with the Conservatives when it was just a year ago that Blair teamed up with Iain Duncan Smith to forge a genuine, parliamentary alliance to ensure the vote for war passed in a wary House of Commons.
Bit of difference though isn’t there between forming an alliance with Tories in support of a Labour government and teaming up with the enemy against that government?
But reading the next para is Freedland really denying the charge at all?
Those who remain convinced this war was a mistake – and whose conviction is made heavier and graver by events like those in Karbala and Baghdad yesterday – may have to become equally pragmatic in their choice of partners. Blair and Straw did not mind teaming up with IDS and George Bush then, and we might have to be just as inclusive now.
Right thats a bit clearer then. Inclusive and pragmatic – gotchya.
Some of us have argued that the politics of many Stoppers – Iraq is nothing to do with us mate, who are we to start meddling around with Arab traditions, you can’t seriously think you turn Afghanistan into a democracy can you? Open up a can of worms tendency has always been conservative through and through.
Perhaps we should start using the capital C now though?
