Thursday 13 August 2015

Tony Blair just unfriended Jeremy Corbyn - again

Really good article by Tony Blair. His time has past, Iraq will haunt him and no one will listen BUT he is surely massively right about Corbyn. For Blair and his Labour friends of a similar age it must be like reliving a nightmare. They fought all the crazies decades ago and now they are back and may take control. Here are some extracts from his Guardian article:

"The party is walking eyes shut, arms outstretched, over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks below. This is not a moment to refrain from disturbing the serenity of the walk on the basis it causes "disunity". It is a moment for a rugby tackle if that were possible….

It doesn’t matter whether you’re on the left, right or centre of the party, whether you used to support me or hate me. But please understand the danger we are in…

If Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader it won’t be a defeat like 1983 or 2015 at the next election. It will mean rout, possibly annihilation… Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t offer anything new. This is literally the most laughable of all the propositions advanced by his camp. Those of us who lived through the turmoil of the 80s know every line of this script. These are policies from the past that were rejected not because they were too principled, but because a majority of the British people thought they didn’t work. And by the way, they were rejected by electorates round the world for the same reasons…

We know where this ends. We have been here before. But this sequel will be a lot scarier than the original. So write it if you want to. Go over the edge if you want. But think about those we most care about and how to help them before you do."

See the rest of the article here.

It's still far from in the bag for Corbyn. No one can really know until the results in. But it's amazing all the same that in 5 years we've gone from the Brown/Blair era to contemplating "back to the future" Corbyn.

It seems to me at present its all part of an increasingly fragmented political scene and that makes it interesting.

 

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