The Charge of the Blairite Brigade

Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist

Supporting neo-con military attacks in the Middle East is one of two prime articles of faith of a Blairite. The second is not considering the massive increase in the wealth gap between rich and poor to be a problem. Both tenets of faith face a fundamental challenge from the beliefs of Jeremy Corbyn and the majority of Labour Party members.

As you know, I am not a Labour Party member, and indeed as a result of the Blair years my opinion of the Labour Party is that it is a force for genuine evil.

My personal experience brought me face to face with the deliberate waging of illegal and aggressive war on a false excuse, and the complicity in a systematic programme of torture. I openly confess that it is very personal with me, because my own career, health and reputation were ruined by New Labour attacks on me when I tried to challenge the pro-torture policy.

I regarded those decent people who stayed in the Labour Party despite all this, like Jeremy Corbyn, as misguided. Should Corbyn eventually win the current power struggle, I will have been wrong on that, but not on the evil that New Labour did.

Things are coming to a head in the Labour Party as the Blairites are incredulous that Corbyn should oppose the bombing of the 600,000 population of Raqqa, in the hope of hitting 8,000 ISIS personnel carefully dispersed among them. Despite the disasters of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, the Blairites, with the full roar of the corporate media behind them, find it absolutely unacceptable that anybody should refuse to support more aggression in the Middle East.

Still more absurd is the attempt to deny the very plain truth spoken by Ken Livingstone, that the 7/7 bombers were motivated by our attack on Iraq. They plainly stated so themselves in suicide videos. I am quite genuinely astonished that we live in an atmosphere that enables denial of this very obvious causality. It really does worry me about the kind of society we have become.

This weekend, the arch-Blairites of Progress are actually colluding directly with the Tories, and I am informed from a Tory source that John Woodcock is in discussion with Michael Fallon. A number of Labour MPs who are actively colluding with the Tories are simultaneously refusing to talk to or meet with their own party members. It is my hope that they are wrong in thinking that the support of the corporate media and of the Westminster bubble is what really counts, and the wider world has no power to influence their future.

In Oldham, my man on the ground (or mostly in the pubs) tells me that it is UKIP, not Labour, who are struggling. The Blairites are hugely disappointed by this, as they were looking to the loss of Oldham as one of the excuses for a putsch. Their house journal, the Guardian, after weeks of pointless conjectures of what will happen to Corbyn if Labour lose, today hastily changes tack. Instead they are claiming that Labour is doing well only because Oldham residents know nothing of national politics and have never heard of Corbyn. The headline might as well be “Oldham People Too Ignorant to Despise Corbyn”. The Guardian is truly now beneath contempt.