Smooth-transitiongate

"...voters stay at home, party members resign or give up working for [Labour], and constituency Labour parties have become hollowed-out shells [...] Party members look on aghast at the antics of the small cliques around Blair and Brown vying for power [...] Decision-making is centralised, with policies handed down from on high that bear no relation to [...] the real world..." ^{John McDonnell/Guardian}

New Labour and Blair are in real political trouble. One only has to look at John Prescott, stripped of his portfolio of responsibilities (if he ever fulfilled them anyway) but still in place as a token figurehead, with public money being poured into keeping him in Jags, trollops and pizzas and presumbably kept close to the Prime Minister where he can do little damage. It's not hard to see the ever-fraying thread Blair is hanging on by.

Yesterday, in a softball interview with the BBC's Andrew Marr, and against the backdrop of 50 Labour MPs calling for an end to Blair's reign, Gordon Brown laid into his Faustian partner to call repeatedly for his 'stable and orderly transition' (a phrase the FT counted being mentioned 10 times) which he believes is owed him under their Granita blood-pact. I also counted around 17 mentions of 'security/terrorism' and many references to the wonders of globalisation.

At one point Brown mentioned 'security without an assault on civil liberties' (note 'civil liberties' ; in the Blair/Brown partitioned reality, liberty only exists as a directive sanctimoniously bestowed from the wonders of government or as an annoying series of trivial artifacts that can eventually be stamped out when technology catches up or the political circumstances allow), presumbably as an attack on Blair's police state. But this is an insulting lie and way too late in the day for Brown to opportunistically claim, as he now feverishly clammers for power, that it's all down to Blair.

If Brown really believes that then he would not have supported the government over the ID slave grid, nor voted for 90 day internment and a host of other political police-state measures. Instead he's chosen to support them so as not to rock the boat and mess up his grab for power later, where he can then sit back and say it was someone else's fault (same with Iraq). In any event, this idea of 'not attacking civil liberties' is directly contradicted by Brown's grandstanding ID-slave grid vote speech advocating unprecidented tyranny anyway.

More generally, Brown seems to be talking about security as a means to embarrass Blair over the recent prisoners scandal with Charles Clarke, but it's also fair to interpret Brown's words as representing the identical underlying doctrine as Blair himself.

Blair and Brown's case for government seem the same: the guano pile of forced globalisation and the Clash of Civilizations come first... everything else must be built on that prospectus, and with a gaggle of sycophantic worthless coward MPs who will actually vote for such perverted rubbish as the ID slave grid, it's hardly a surprise that the entire menu of Labour's worthless indulgent 'reforms', cooked up for no other reason than they can be, are only guaranteed to make the UK vomit.

A desperately hungry Gordon also admitted he has enjoyed various discusions about the smooth transition with Blair and very nervously admitted that he knew the details of the reshuffle before it was announced. He also seemed to refuse to rule out a nuclear strike on Iran.

One might well expect an ambitious Brown to be a strong advocate of his own coronation especially with Labour in massive trouble, but when we also frequently suffer many other Labour MPs seriously talking about this 'smooth and orderly transition', as if that appalling proposition is one the country should just fawningly accept, you can sense a lot of Labour itself is just as detached from reality.

And perhaps that is no surprise, as New Labour didn't begin and end with Blair, Brown and Mandelson. It is those Labour members who have accepted it, promoted it, Labour MPs who have voted for its policies 'handed down from on high that bear no relation to the problems of the real world' which are equally as culpable. And that's something Britain should never forget as it reflects on those who have voted for ID cards, wars, interment, choking statism and a host of fanatical indulgent rubbish.

The work of transforming the UK into their own miserable image of a compromised third-world police state of uneducated drunks, gambling addicts and iris-scanned Murdoch-reading proles, waving flags for the next 'progressive' war, is not the achievement of Blair and Brown alone, a point described last year by Tony Benn.

Years more of Blair would be unthinkable, yet similarly, the smooth and orderly coronation of Gordon Brown is an attack on democracy itself (or what remains of it) and may well guarantee Labour is even more hated than it is now.

If Labour overall had any guts and morals it would be getting signatures for the smooth and orderly impeachment of Blair over Iraq, not for a smooth and orderly transition to coronate the next appalling arrogant joker from New Labour's pack of cards who has a longstanding deal with Blair for just that, and who seems to be openly promising even more humiliating tyranny, appalling flag-waving oppression and out-of-touch grandstanding for the British people than Blair himself.

elections council elections UK elections local elections New Labour Tony Blair reshuffle Gordon Brown smooth transition orderly transition