Blair stood down yesterday, driven out of power by the Iraqi insurgency and the British workers’ determination to defend their welfare state.
The disorientated Blair went out to the cheers of his constituency faithful, after revealing despite all of his internationalist pretensions that he is just another scurvy little Englander, with pretensions.
Sounding more like Edward the Confessor and discarding his Henry V mode, he revealed that all the while God had been by his side.
He said: ‘Actually I’ve been lucky and very blessed. And this country is a blessed nation.’
Adding a touch of Alf Garnett he continued: ‘The British are special – the world knows it, in our innermost thoughts we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth.’
This is ‘blessed’ Blair who has been leading god’s own people to do god’s work, slaughtering up to 650,000 Iraqis.
He, however apologised, but to the British people only. ‘I give my thanks to you, the British people, for the times that I have succeeded – and my apologies for the times I have fallen short.’
To the people of Yugoslavia and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan there was nothing, they are obviously not part of God’s chosen, and got their just deserts.
His departure was synchronised with that of his Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. He did Blair’s dirty work in the trade unions organising against the FBU and organising to end final salary pensions. He announced his resignation at a meeting of his local Labour Party in Hull.
Earlier, Gordon Brown paid tribute to Blair’s leadership, praising ‘his unique achievement over 10 years and the unique leadership he had given to the party, Britain and the world’.
Blunkett, Milburn, Clarke, Reid, Blair and Prescott have now departed, driven out by the actions of the workers of the world. They are due to be followed by Hewitt, and Jowell.
The Blair government is broken, with only one of its main central team left in the cabinet, Gordon Brown the Chancellor, the man who is to be premier.
Brown was Blair’s number 2. He was the man who took over the PFI from the Tory Party to allow big business to build private hospitals to be leased to the NHS, making huge profits in the process. He also pioneered giving all power over interest rates to the bankers, and sought to eliminate hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs. He specialised in the lightest possible regulation of industry and the lightest possible taxation of the rich. This was coupled with wage increases for millions of workers that were well below even the official inflation rate, amounting to huge wage cuts.
Brown is now going to group around himself all the second rank of Blairite leaders, such as Hain, Miliband, Alan Johnson, Hilary Benn and his own camp followers to push these policies forward.
This is going to bring the Brown government into full scale conflict with the trade unions and millions of workers, regardless of all of the attempts that the TUC will make to shield him from the anger of the working class.
In fact the masses of workers will be so encouraged by the collapse of ‘blessed’ Blair, that they will not wait for Brown to be declared premier. They will start pursuing Brown and his policies at once, from the NHS to the civil service, to demand living wage increases and the cancelling of all public sector redundancies.
The News Line calls upon workers to join the WRP and build up the new and revolutionary leadership that is so necessary inside the trade unions.
Central to the massive confrontations that are on hand is the organisation of a general strike to bring down the Brown government and bring in a workers government.
The job of a workers government will be to expropriate the bourgeoisie and put an end to British capitalism by carrying out socialist policies and by withdrawing all British troops from Iraq, the Middle East, the Gulf, and central Asia.
A workers government will break with the US ruling class and publish all of the secret agreements between capitalist Britain and the US, as part of its policy of supporting the workers of the world against imperialism in support of world socialism.