Regards, Ivan (who voted UKIP today)
Posted on 06/10/2004 3:34:35 PM PDT by MadIvan
“DON’T vote Labour, it’ll only encourage him.” That, I put to Tony Blair, was what many former supporters would be thinking. He had the grace to laugh but, to my surprise, did little to try to contradict me. He shrugged and said this was what happened to prime ministers in their second term.
We were talking on the 07.42 to Birmingham en route to his last campaigning stop. I pressed on. They think you were wrong about the weapons, wrong about the United Nations, and many voters are furious that there’s been no apologies or resignations. Again, there was no attempt to counter this. They’ll have to ask themselves, he declared, whether the world’s a safer place with or without Saddam. I had a sense of a man who’s prepared for his fate and is frankly not all that bothered. He was in reflective mood. Reflecting on the shooting of the BBC team in Saudia Arabia — further evidence, as he saw it, of the rightness of the War on Terror. He reflected, too, on Ronald Reagan’s death the night before. Look, he declared, at how differently he is regarded now from how he was seen when in office. The implication was clear. Like Reagan, he believes, that history will be his true and fairest judge. The electorate will come round in the end.
THE more I reflected on the idea that Blair was a latter-day Reagan the more extraordinary I found it. This was the Tony Blair who, when Reagan was President, was a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; the man who told The Guardian when he first ran for Parliament in 1982 that the “older generation . . . has not yet awoken to the real nature of the threat, the ‘warfare of the end game’.” This was the man who laughed along with CND’s spoof Gone with the Wind poster. Reagan was portrayed as Clark Gable carrying Margaret (Vivien Leigh) Thatcher away from the mushroom cloud of a nuclear weapon in “The film to end all films . . . She promised to follow him to the end of the earth. He promised to organise it”. Listen now to what Blair says about Reagan: “His statesmanlike pursuit of more stable relations with the Soviet Union helped bring about the end of the Cold War. He will be greatly missed by his many friends and admirers on this side of the Atlantic.” Listen to his deputy John Prescott who made a few Labour MPs splutter when as Blair’s stand-in at PMQs he declared that President Reegun (we knew what he meant) had made “a contribution to world peace”. When you watch Reagan’s funeral in Washington’s National Cathedral don’t mistake Blair’s presence as just observing the usual courtesies. Blair believes that, just like him and George W. Bush now, Reagan and Thatcher were unpopular but right. Put it to him that that’s not what he used to think and he simply and disarmingly says “But I was wrong”. He now believes that it’s his critics who have “not yet awoken to the real nature of the threat, the ‘warfare of the end game’.”
ONE other telling sign of the way the Prime Minister’s mind is turning is his choice of reading matter. He’s studying the history of appeasement as set out in Martin Gilbert’s Descent into Barbarism. Do you know, he’s told friends, that Neville Chamberlain actually proposed a symbolic act of disarmament to reassure the Nazis?!
WANDERING round Birmingham market chatting to potential voters I realised that we have become as picky at voting as we are at shopping. Just as we no longer automatically think of M&S when we need a shirt, we no longer think only of the Big Two parties when it comes to voting. What’s more, we know how to use our vote to different effect in different elections which is why Sunday’s results for the European Parliament will be so different from today’s results for who runs our towns, schools and roads. I was struck by how many have decided that politics is something they don’t need to buy into at all. Where once non-voters apologised or lied about their intentions, they now boast about them. It is those of us who are interested who end up saying sorry for bothering them with the small and inconvenient matter of exercising their right to decide who controls their lives. There’s been a shift in the sense of shame. And that is shameful.
AS A Brummie butcher declared he’d be switching to UKIP as he agreed with “that Kilroy-Silk” I marvelled at how the BBC has, inadvertently I might add, shaped these elections. What if the corporation had never dismissed him? On such decisions does political history turn.
Regards, Ivan (who voted UKIP today)
Ping!
You think he, in his heart, still believes in Eurocentralism?
He might cut and run from it, given the right election "result."
How's it looking for the UKIP?
Regards, Ivan
Well Reagan did made the great political migration from left to right best described by Churchill (Paraphrase) If your not a liberal at 20 you have not heart if you not a conservative at 40 you have no brains
Tony Blair does seem to be making that political migration
Where do they stand on the issues apart from the EU and immigration?
PS: As an aside my mother recently told me that my old judo sparring partner is now a BNP councilor in Kirklees.
Regards, NVA
What a heartening article! Thanks, FRiend.
Yes, good to see you around again. We missed you -- where you been, Ivan?
These two nations have made sweeping changes in the world. It remains to be seen whether Bush and Blair will complete the work that lies before them.
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