YESTERDAY Prime Minister Blair was insisting that he can push through his right wing capitalist ‘reform programme’ despite suffering a double defeat at the hands of Labour MPs over new, anti-free speech, religious laws on Tuesday.
The two defeats prove that Blair and his whips have not only lost control over Labour MPs, they can no longer even make obvious calculations about the number of pro-socialist MPs in the Labour parliamentary ranks, likely to vote against their government.
Up to 20 Labour MPs were allowed to miss the two votes, to campaign at the Dunfermline and Fyfe by-election, while Blair himself was absent from the chamber when the second House of Lords amendment was carried by a majority of one.
While Blair was insisting that he would ‘push’ through his plans to establish an education market, and major cuts in the Welfare State, as well as identity cards, the Tories were reminding him that the only way that this will be done is by the Tories voting with him against as many as 100 Labour, anti-government MPs.
All round the House of Commons the Blairites are losing their grip on the situation.
This was proven by the latest parliamentary apology by ex-Board of Trade Minister and ex-Transport Secretary Stephen Byers, once a favourite to succeed Blair as Prime Minister.
Yesterday he made his second statement to the House of Commons about an ‘untruth’ he told to the House of Commons Transport Select Committee concerning the winding up of Railtrack.
This time he ‘apologised unreservedly’ for a ‘factually inaccurate’ statement to MPs about Railtrack, after the House of Commons standards committee on Tuesday had charitably found that while he had told an ‘untruth’, he was not guilty of lying.
Yesterday Byers commented: ‘The committee recognised that, whilst in my personal statement of the 17th October I had accepted that I gave a factually inaccurate answer, they concluded that I should have apologised unreservedly for having done so.
In their report on Tuesday, MPs on the standards and privileges committee were extraordinarily lenient with the errant Blairite. They said that Byers was not guilty of ‘contempt’ of Parliament, despite being untruthful.
However, the committee was forced to admit that the ex-Cabinet minister almost misled, ie told another untruth to Parliament, while he was apologising for the original untruth.
‘Mr Byers was unwise to try and devise retrospectively an explanation for his inaccurate answer,’ says the report. We also believe that, in his personal statement, he came close to repeating the error for which he had apologised.’ That is he was dangerously close to being a serial teller of untruths.
Byers believed that he could spin his way round any problem. Blair however, has been brought down to earth with a bang by Tuesday’s defeats.
He now knows that he is going to have to rely on the Tory party to force through his right wing programme. The Tories are only too willing to oblige, and see this tactic as the way to split the Labour party and form a Tory led national government, before going to the country in a general election.
The trade unions must not allow this farce to run its course. They must take action to bring down the Blair government, and replace it with a workers government that will carry out socialist policies.
This is the only way to deal with the Blair, Byers gang.