TONY Blair yesterday took advantage of the refusal of his political rivals, such as his policy co-thinker Gordon Brown and the trade unions, to demand his immediate resignation, when he refused to name the date when he will stand down as PM.
Earlier, Brown said that he would support Blair’s decision whatever that might be, while on Wednesday ‘left’ union leader Tony Woodley said that the trade unions were ‘watching and waiting’, they were definitely not acting as Blair’s nemesis.
Blair was on a visit to a London school with the minister he described as his ‘one friend’, Education Secretary and ex-CWU trade union leader Alan Johnson. Johnson thinks the Labour Party should split from the trade unions, and is Blair’s choice to succeed him.
Blair’s decision not to quit for at least a year will give Johnson the time to mount a campaign.
In his remarks Blair could not hold back from showing his loathing for the trade unions. He said: ‘The next party conference in a couple of weeks will be my last party conference as party leader, the next TUC next week will be my last TUC probably to the relief of both of us.’
Blair’s statement was full of the primacy of country over party.
He started with an apology. ‘The first thing I’d like to do is to apologise actually, on behalf of the Labour Party for the last week, which, with everything that’s been going on back here and in the world, has not been our finest hour, to be frank.’
We beg to differ. The truth is that getting rid of the butcher of Iraq, the supporter of the Israeli attack on the Lebanon and the leader who is helping to starve the Palestinians will be the finest hour of the Labour Party and the majority of the people of this country.
He continued that ‘it’s the interests of the country that come first and we move on.’
He intends to carry on with the same policies abroad and at home that have created havoc for the working class and unprecedented suffering for the people of the Middle East.
He added ominously about his resignation date: ‘But I am not going to set a precise date now. I don’t think that this is right. I will do that at a future date and I will do it in the interests of the country depending on the circumstances of the time.’
He warned: ‘I think it’s important for the Labour Party to understand, and I think the majority of people in the party do understand, that it’s the public that comes first and it’s the country that matters . . .
‘So we should just bear that in mind in the way we conduct ourselves in the time to come.’
There is no doubt that this is a warning.
As far as he is concerned, the country is primary to party. But Britain is a capitalist country run by a rapacious capitalist class in a permanent war with the working class and its trade unions at home and the anti-imperialist people of the world.
He has been careful to say that this will not be his last Labour Party conference, and that when he quits as PM, he will not be resigning as an MP.
Big struggles are emerging inside the Labour Party and the trade unions. Blair and his supporters are quite capable of putting the interests of the capitalists (the country) before the interests of the working class to the point of doing a Ramsay Macdonald.
Macdonald was the Labour PM who, in 1931 after the Wall Street collapse, put the interests of the capitalist country first and crossed the floor of the House of Commons to form a national government with the Tories that cut the dole and every working class benefit that it could.
Blair is made of the same stuff.
This is why the seven million members of the trade unions must insist that the TUC at its Congress next week, demands that both Blair and Brown resign, and spells out that the only Labour government that will be financed by the trade unions is a workers’ government that carries out socialist policies at home and abroad.
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