The Guardian and others are reporting this morning that Tony Blair is to take his most active role in the Labour Party since he left office five years ago as he steps up to contribute ideas and experience to Ed Miliband’s policy review.
That Miliband is taking help should be good news, but the announcement has brought waves of predictable howls of disbelief from the Labour left and the fringes.
Miliband said last night that Blair will be giving advice on the Olympic legacy and in particular how to “maximise both its economic and its sporting legacies”.
No word on why Miliband hasn’t turned to Gordon Brown for advice. Guess he is busy writing those books on how he was right about something or other. What is certainly true though is that it marks a turn around for Miliband who has made several big shows of putting New Labour behind him. He said it marked a “coming together of the Labour tribe”. It was only May that we were reading he was finally killing off New Labour with his “five point pledge card”.
Miliband said Labour could learn three lessons from Blair: the importance of unity; the importance of evolving new ideas for new times; and the importance of winning to ensure that Labour does not allow the people whom its MPs are elected to serve are not abandoned.
Miliband also praised Blair’s role in helping the UK win the right to host the Olympics this summer. It was, said Miliband, “one of the many proud achievements of the governments that Tony led: saving the NHS, rebuilding our schools and cutting crime”.
“I want to thank Tony for what he did for our party and for our country. And I know how committed he is to Labour winning next time,” the Guardian reported.
The left’s response is predictable and depressing. They can do it all on their own without help from others and are prepared to make enemies along the way, as the recent effort to push Progress out of the party showed, as that is clearly the way to win.
It is as if taking help were some kind of failure for a party that is currently struggling to get its message across in the face of a deeply troubled coalition despite a long term lead in the polls.
The Guardian gives space to hard left broken records like Lindsey German of Stop the war/Respect to blather about war crimes and other fantasies while the likes of Owen Jones Twitter away, apparently in all seriousness, arguing that the reason Blair deserves no role is because he was an electoral failure:
Labour lost 5 million votes in its 13 years in power. 4 million went AWOL under Tony Blair. So why does it make sense to give him a role?
This argument is padded out by Mehdi Hasan who while conceding that “Yes, the former premier won three consecutive general elections – the only Labour leader to do so! – but…”. The but is that Blair didn’t really win. It was just taking him a long time to lose. He then proceeds to explain why while Blair “won”, he didn’t really.
Hasan, Jones and others, sound like conspiracy theorists. I’m guessing they have tin foil hats. Miliband has rather a lot of these supporters whose favourite console game is Final Fantasy Election. It is as David Aaronovitch says a waste of time arguing with most of these people.
And of course none of them mention how despite all of Blair’s woes when Brown took over he had the chance of five more years, but he bottled the chance to call a snap election in 2007, which polls said he would have won.
