In 1900 a collection of British trade unionists, socialists, and other middle class intellectuals
formed a new political party; the Labour party.
Which, according to Clause 4 of the party’s constitution, was devoted to achieving socialism
through the framework of democracy.
In the mean time, Labour would look out for the every man and the people who worked for
a living.
Now, this party did well enough to overtake the Liberal party as the second largest party
in Britain in just twenty five years, but in second place she would sit for the bulk
of the 20th century.
While the party had successes at various points, the Conservative party maintained dominance
over British politics.
The 1980s and early 1990s were a particularly rough time as the Tories continually battered
Labour in elections and public opinion.
So why would the working people, who make up a majority of the population, vote against
the party who had their best interests in mind?
Because the Tories were unified with a clear message.
But on the left, not only was your vote split between various other parties, but these parties
themselves would disagree on what they believed in.
Whether it was Social Democracy or Socialism, whether to join the EU or don’t, to support
Britain’s nuclear arsenal or not, it showed the party as weak and indecisive.
The public stuck with the Conservatives, because at least they promised to keep the National
Health Service, the British people’s pride and joy.
Step in Anthony Charles Lyton Blair, a moderate Labour MP for Sedgefield.
After the Labour leader John Smith suddenly died of a heart attack in 1994, Blair put
himself up for election as party leader on a platform of moderating the party and appealing
to more than just blue collar workers, and he actually won.
One of the first things he did was organise a rewriting of the party constitution, removing
Clause 4.
Now, the Labour Party was no longer devoted to democratic socialism but instead social
democracy; market capitalism with a strong social safety net.
In the run up to the 1997 election, Labour’s campaign strategies shifted away from boring
crap about seizing the means of production and surplus value, wage slavery, capitalism
blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Shut the fuck up no-one cares.
Instead Labour focused on cheap easy sound bites that anyone could understand;
Education, Education, Education.
[Applause] More Jobs.
More nurses.
Smaller classes.
Safer streets.
Success in business.
Tough on crime.
Tough on the causes of crime.
And it worked; After spending an entire childhood in opposition, the Labour party finally caught
its big break and won a general election.
And what a victory it was.
[David Dimbleby] There it is, 10 o’clock and we say Tony Blair is to be Prime Minister
and a landslide is likely.
And this is why, Labour forty-seven percent.
The Tories have been wiped out completely in Wales and Scotland.
11 percent swing.
15 percent swing.
16 percent swing.
11 percent swing.
A swing of Fourteen and a Half It would be the biggest ever...Commons majority.
[Screaming] HERE’S TONY!
The landslide victory ensured the government could do basically whatever it wanted, and
so the many domestic reforms promised by the Labour party for decades could finally be
put in place.
These included things like…
A minimum wage.
Devolution House of Lords reform
Enshrining Human Rights into law Free heating for the elderly
Free entry to museums and galleries 24 days paid vacation for all workers
Civil partnerships and LGBT rights Maternity leave for new moth-Oh my that’s
a lot of things...
Additionally, the miserly spending of the Conservatives was fully reversed and billions
were pumped into schools and hospitals.
The National Health Service budget was increased by 200% and the education budget was doubled.
Now you may think this is all reckless spending.
It’s impossible to pay for all this.
Well you’re dead wrong, and in fact the government collected more in taxes than it
actually needed.
Outside of the UK, Blair’s government helped lead an international coalition against the
Yugoslav government, which was oppressing the Albanain minority to the point of near-genocide
in the Kosovo region.
NATO bombing of key Yugoslav targets brought an end to the conflict and the persecution
of Albanians.
British intervention in the Sierra-Leone civil war also put an end to the conflict, reasserting
government control and ending the blood diamond trade in the country.
After four years, it was time for another election; surprise surprise, another Labour
landslide.
After all, everything was on the up.
Inflation was low, crime was down by a third, children were achieving their highest results
ever in school, unemployment was at it’s lowest point in history, thousands more students
were going to university, a million pensioners and three million children had been taken
out of poverty, and the quality of the air, beaches, and drinking water was as clean as
before the industrial revolution.
Everything was going so well, until a fateful day in September 2001…
The peaceful optimism of the 1990s had been ripped out and replaced with a cold untrusting
paranoia.
American President George W. Bush said that whoever did this must be brought to justice
and outlined six countries who’s governments he believed were terrorist supporters and
therefore must be overthrown.
One of the weakest and easiest to pick off was Iraq, so Bush told Blair to come up with
an excuse to invade and destroy the authoritarian Iraqi government.
The UK’s secret intelligence unit, MI6, had found some kind of believable evidence
that maybe the Iraqi government was trying build weapons of mass destruction.
“That’s good enough for me!
Yoink!
“Look at this, LOOK AT THIS, blatant nuclear weapons programme on Iraqi soil.”
“We’re not so convinced, this isn’t a solid enough justification for attacking
Iraq…says right here you’ve used a Nicholas Cage movie as a source for some of your information.”
“Right, I totally understand what you’re saying, you’re not on board with this, I
get it, but it we’re doing it anyway.”
All over the world, millions of people turned out to protest the decision to invade Iraq.
Unlike Kosovo and Sierra Leone, this war did not have the support of the international
community.
Come the 2005 election, Labour’s vote share tanked in retaliation.
Opposers to the war flocked to the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, giving the latter their
best ever performance since becoming a third party.
In England, the Conservatives even had more votes than Labour but due to the unequal nature
of First Past the Post, ended up with 91 fewer MPs.
Despite this, Labour came away with a cheeky majority that was surprisingly big considering
he just committed a war crime.
Okay, that’s fine, this is fine, it’s still a big enough majority.
We can still do many great further domestic reforms like bagging London as the host of
the 2012 Olympic games.
[94.9 FM.
BBC London.]
“With the Summary, I’m Max Rushton.
Good morning.
The Metropolitan Police say there have been explosions in multiple locations in London.
It’s too early to say what’s caused these explosions.
There were a series of bangs on London Underground station, a number of tube stations have been
evacuated.”
On the 7th of July 2005, four Islamic terrorists detonated explosives on public transport.
Three on the London Underground and a fourth on a bus.
52 people were killed and 784 people were injured.
Some people blamed Labour’s soft stance on crime; all well-behaved criminals were
immediately released from prison after serving only half their sentence.
Even terrorists.
Others blamed immigration; Hundreds of Thousands of immigrants were moving to the UK every
year, which was exploited by Labour’s opponents as a reason for the terrorist attack; all
of the attackers were either immigrants or the children of immigrants.
The Home Office announced that over the next few years, Identity Cards would be introduced
as a way for police to keep track of criminals.
But the ID cards didn’t just apply to criminals, but to everyone.
Everyone would have to carry an ID card at all times, and many civil rights groups strongly
opposed the measure.
Each day, Labour were looking less like they were building a social democracy that worked
for all, and more like they were building an authoritarian police state.
Other laws passed allowed the government to suspend any law in an emergency for up a week,
one that allowed them to detain anyone without trial for 28 days, and one that criminalised
saying rude things over the internet.
Let’s not forget the ruthless treatment of lawbreakers as if being a criminal is some
sort of disease.
Or how they made over 4,289 things illegal since 1997, such as disturbing a pack of eggs,
impersonating a traffic warden, not asking someone to turn off your house alarm if it
goes off while you are on holiday, telling someone you closed the door of a ship when
you actually didn’t, and issuing a civil order banning a single 13 year old from using
the word “grass”.
WHO WRITES THESE LAWS?
Liberal Democrat Home Affairs Spokesman Chris Hunhe called it Legislative Diarrhoea and
Tory MP David Davis resigned in protest to fight a by-election as a political stunt to
generate a wider national debate on civil liberties.
The casualties in Iraq were mounting, the war was taking longer than expected to win,
and the American leadership weren’t actually as smart and informed as first thought.
[Donald Rumsfeld] There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns.
That is to say there are things we know thing that we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns.
Things we don’t know we don’t know.
The pressure on Blair from Labour MPs began to mount.
Confidence in his leadership abilities had been lost and so on the 27th of June 2007,
Blair resigned as Prime Minister.
He was succeeded by the Chancellor Gordon Brown, who was not terrible and polls showed
if he had called an election upon becoming PM he would have won, but he decided against
it.
Just a few months later and the world’s financial institutions would face their worst
days since the Great Depression.
Almost everything there completely wiped out.
Apple shares are just getting hammered this morning.
“No I don’t know, some fucking country in Europe took a shit”
Let’s take a look at the speed at which we are watching this market deteriorate.
At one point the market fell as if down a well.
Financials took a big beating, Lehman down almost twenty percent.
The prosperous British economy that Labour prided itself of, and relied upon to fund
their huge welfare programmes, was shattered.
Come election time in 2010, Labour were in dire trouble and wasn’t helped by Brown
dismissing people’s concerns by calling them a bigot.
[Gordon Brown] Everything, she’s just a bigoted woman.
Said she used to be Labour.
In fairness she was kind of bigoted.
But even after all this, 29% of people had enough faith in Labour to vote for them again.
And it was enough to keep any party from getting a majority.
Brown attempted to get the Liberals on his side to help form a coalition government,
but after hearing some of their proposals, negotiations were dropped.
Six days later and the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition was agreed.
The Coalition, as it is referred to in the UK, is called by some political historians
as New Labour’s fourth term.
Many of the policies in the coalition – austerity measures, NHS reform, and hosting the London
Olympics - were originally started by the outgoing Labour government.
However, many of Labour’s policies like Identity Cards and other anti-liberty laws
were repealed.
As Gordon Brown resigned as Labour leader, the shadow Environment minister Ed Miliband
was soon elected to take his place.
While Miliband tried to distance himself from Blair and Brown, he wasn’t exactly a radical
of the 1980s either.
He called himself part of “One Nation” Labour, whatever that means, but it wasn’t
enough to get voters back on their side, Especially in Scotland where the Scottish Nationalists
wiped the floor with them.
Miliband’s successor was socialist Jeremy Corbyn, who spent most of the Blair years
voting against his own party because he saw them as a betrayal of Labour’s socialist
principles.
His election as leader was seen as a death blow to New Labour, as the party began to
adopt many of the radical left policies supported by Labour in the 1980s.
With many centrist MPs being deselected or pushed out of the party, it seemed a moderate
Labour party was now long gone.
But since Labour’s catastrophic 2019 defeat, polls indicate that most people actually look
back fondly on the Blair years, and every political demographic outside of Labour members
ranks Tony Blair and the best Labour leader in decades.
[Tony Blair’s voice] After an hour or so, Gordon got up to go to the loo.
I waited downstairs.
Five minutes past.
Then ten.
Then fifteen.
Suddenly the phone went.
“Tony.
It’s Gordon here.
I am upstairs in the toilet,” he went on.
“And I can’t get out”.
In the building works the loo door had been replaced but had no handle on the inside yet.
The soundproofing in the house meant that I never heard him.
I went up to the loo.
“Withdraw from the [Labour leadership] contest or I’m leaving you in there” I said.