Notice To Blairite/Starmeroids 1
Greatest Achievement
“Our greatest achievement was Tony Blair.”
Thus spake reviled ex Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to a gathering of her oily 1950s throw back acolytes at the now infamous gathering at the Botleigh Grange Hotel in 2002.
Jones goes on to itemise the ways in which Populists have lost ground against Elitists (for my use of the term “populist”, see Left/Right vs Populist/Elitist) during and since the Thatcher/Blair years. It is a chilling read which should focus the attention of any aspiring Populist.
As an example, he points out how opinion polls run in 2013 found that 75% of voters supported the idea of government setting gas and electric prices, 70% supported renationalisation of energy, and 66% supported bringing the Post Office and British Rail back into public ownership. What is chilling about this is that, in this democracy of ours, there is no real political voice for these voters. As one might expect, they are completely ignored by Conservatives, but even most Labour MPs are too timid to air such views. So, in a nutshell, this means that our democratic leadership and its “loyal” opposition are completely out of step with the wishes of the majority of the body public.
Of course not, and much of the failure resides with the “drain stream” media which, owned by corporate interests, unsurprisingly, supports corporate interests – to the exclusion of all else. And they do so with such vicious enthusiasm that most aspiring Populist politicians are cowed into keeping their heads well below the parapets.
But are there any Populist politicians left in British politics? Jones points out that after the Labour victory of 1997, 1 in 25 MPs had previously been private consultants and lobbyists. In the election of 2010, this figure jumped to 1 in 8. Over 25% of MPs were business people (over 41% of Tory MPs). Meanwhile, MPs with public sector experience dropped dramatically. In 1997 17% of MPs had been teachers; in 2010 only 5%. In 1997 15.8% had been manual workers; this dropped to 4% in 2010.
We are in the throes of government of the Populists by the Elitists for the Elitists, but, for the most part, are too dumb to wake up to this.
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Notice To Blairite/Starmeroids 2
Revolving Doors
“Revolving Doors”
Part 2 of our look at Owen Jones’ excellent book – “The Establishment”
Jones is unsparing in his detail on the rise of the phenomenon of “revolving doors” – the process by which politicians move into the more lucrative private sector whilst ambitious aspirants in the private sector take a shot at “public service”.
Not least of these is his take on the scandal associated with MPs expenses. It wasn’t just a few miscreants, it was an entire culture as the constant to-ing and fro-ing between elected office and private “consultancy” blurred the distinctions. Jones hits upon the renowned shampoo commercial showing some simpering woman claiming she deserves good shampoo “because she’s worth it”. All the to-ing and fro-ing created a desperate longing among similarly simpering MPs for the copious rewards and incentives of the good old private sector, causing them to whinge timorously “because I’m worth it”. They could see their cousins and contemporaries making money hand over fist as corporate short-termism exported jobs and production to third world countries awash with unprotected and desperate labour. You could sense MPs weeping as private sector executives creamed the bonuses that this “fiscal wisdom” earned them.
But “expenses” was/is only the tip of the iceberg.
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Political parties “are no longer thriving political movements, full of grassroots activists who can hold politicians to account.” Instead of “democratic movements rooted in communities, these hollowed-out parties are husks.”
Nowadays, to get ahead in the Labour Party, just as much as in the Conservative, you have to be wealthy and well connected. Without connections to “special advisers and ministers”, you can’t be “fast-tracked”. A profound distancing from the Party roots has taken place since “New Labour” lay down and accepted the changed political landscape fashioned by Thatcherdom and found friends and backers in the corporate world. The fact that these friends and backers could switch allegiances to “New Labour” so easily should have sent up screaming warning signals to all concerned, but most people were simply so relieved to be rid of Thatcher herself and her oily ilk that they couldn’t bear to look more closely.
In point of fact, any jackass should have been able to win the ’97 election, especially on a neo-Thatcher platform, and indeed, a grinning ninny, unencumbered by principle or economic sensibility and espousing “joined up” thinking, did.
But the rot really set in as political/private revolving doors began to spin at an ever increasing rate. In the middle of Blair’s administration, “46% of the top fifty publicly traded firms in the UK had a member of the British political elite as either a director or a major shareholder.” In isolation this figure may seem meaningless, but it was “higher than for any other of the 47 other nations investigated, with the next-ranked developed nation being Italy at just 16% of such businesses.” Only Berlusconi could compete with the Blair regime, but even he could come nowhere near the corporate buy-in orchestrated by “New Labour”.
“because I’m worth it”
So the legacy left by Blair and co was an untouched Tory landscape of bloated rewards for politicians looking for nothing other than to “better themselves”. His supposed successor David Miliband was an undoubted leader in this regard. By the time he stood down as MP, it transpires that hardly any of his North Eastern constituents had ever laid eyes on him or been consulted in any way. Instead, he was busy building his “portfolio”. £75k for 15 days as a non-exec director at Sunderland FC; £14k for an evening with tax legals Cameron McKenna LLP; £14k for a speech at Global Arc wealth managers; £18k for 2 days at Oxford Analytica; £100k for 4 days at energy investor VantagePoint; £65k for attending 1 event courtesy of United Arab Emirates, and so on.
Patricia Hewitt – former Health Secretary – got £300/hour as special advisor to Alliance Boots; £55k for advising private hospital merchant Cinven; in the region of £75k each for directorships at BUPA and BT. Jones reminds us of the Sunday Times sting that caught Hewitt, Geoff Hoon, and Stephen Byers agreeing to “lobby for cash” to the tune of £5k a day. And “all three backed policies that benefited wealthy individuals and corporate interests, …..and stood to benefit personally from those policies.”
Alan Milburn, also a former Health Secretary, got £30k/year for advising private healthcare monger Bridgepoint Capital; £30k/year for advising Lloyds Pharmacy; £25k for assisting to boost the “healthy” aspects of Pepsico products, and so on.
David Blunkett got £50k/year as “Social Responsibility Advisor” to, of all corporate creatures, News International.
That former commie Peter Mandelson, not to be outdone, wets his beak as a consultant to the likes of Lazard International, Coca Cola, Lloyds Bank, BP, BetFair (sic), rain forest destroyer Asia Pulp & Paper, and dictators in Egypt and Kazakhstan.
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grinning ninnydom
And of course, the grinning ninny himself, Blair, also advises Kazakhstani dictators for the modest outlay of £13 million a year. He also got £1m from Kuwaiti dictators and £2.5m from renowned humanitarian bankers JP Morgan, while the charming Mrs Blair established a private investment vehicle for the purposes of setting up 100 private health care centres throughout the UK.
Many feel that what got us dragged into the Iraq war was the grinning ninny’s helplessly hypnotic exposure to the unspeakable wealth of the Bush dynasty. He was so gob-smacked by all the joys that such wealth can bring (they even gave him his own golf cart!) that he was ready, at any cost to the nation, to buy into whatever christian fundamentalist wars it took to clamber on board the gravy train.
It goes on and on and on. This used to be the preserve of Tory grandees – directorships and consultancies in the corporate sectors coming out their ears whilst concurrently supposedly serving as MPs. But no longer. Our own “champions of socialism”, our standard bearers for the working people are not just in the queue – they are jostling and elbowing their way to the very front – even in “opposition”.
It has become so rife and standard and in-your-face that no Drain Stream commentators express any alarm or wave any flags. And the “new” grinning ninnies, Cameron and Osborne, and their baying mob of “because-I’m-worth-its” carry on the tradition by burying their snouts ever deeper into the multiplicity of troughs available, including side syphonings to uncountable offshore accounts, and if anybody does comment, they simply say, “Well, Labour did it….”
“Our greatest achievement was Tony Blair.” Thus spake reviled ex Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to a gathering of her oily 1950s throw back acolytes at the now infamous gathering at the Botleigh Grange Hotel in 2002.
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Notice To Blairite/Starmeroids 3
“Think Tanks”
Propaganda Units
So, you thought a “think tank” is a bunch of brainy academic people gathered together to apply their enormous combined brain power to sort out arrays of human problems.
Little did you know that the bulk of them are, in fact, corporate propaganda units peopled by blinkered fundamentalists of various persuasions committed to distorting perceptions of political and economic reality to whatever end their corporate paymasters might wish.
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Milton Friedman, infamous economic dogmatist known for his eagerness to interfere in and experiment with third world economies, opined that “…only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change”.
This meant of course, that crises could and should be manufactured in order to precipitate changes already “prepped” and ready to go. Egging on his equally infamous friend Henry “Out of my righteous and murderous way” Kissinger, the pair of them masterminded governmental collapses, assassinations, mass executions, and dictatorial takeovers. The divine right of the all-knowing gods they presumed themselves to be gave them unhindered license then to impose their crude monetary policies – to the further detriment of the world’s poor.
But that’s another story. 
prep school
Where was this “prepping” taking place? It was all happening in the renowned “think tanks” very much in place at the time. These were lavishly funded by corporate interests which, with psychopathic intensity, were slavishly pursuing their “bottom lines” (see Bottom Liners) to the total exclusion of all else. With tax deductible corporate cash pouring into their coffers, these “think tanks” were more than ready to serve those corporate interests to the best of their abilities.
Staffed and led by an ill-begotten assortment of snouts (see We The Grunts), these tanks were not the hotbed of informed discussion and careful research that their names implied.
They were and still are, pure and simple, propaganda units.
Chief among these was the “Centre for Policy Studies”, a grotesque menagerie or rabid fundamentalists set up by Thatcher and her side-kick Keith Joseph. Sounding very much like a home for intelligent debate, it was in fact nothing more than a lobbying machine. Like the “Adam Smith Institute”, it masqueraded as source of neutral academic reasoning such that it’s opinions (that’s all they were) could be presented by corporate mass media as logical outcomes of painstaking studies.
The corporate “drain stream” media’s enthusiasm for doing this was the other instrumental element to the paradigmatic shift of opinion ushered in by Thatcher/Reagan. Supported at every turn by the likes of the “Institute of Economic Affairs”, the “Freedom Association”, the “European Foundation”, and the truly obscene “Taxpayers’ Alliance”, and touted throughout the mass media as the voices of reason, these two idiot world leaders led an unprecedented assault on the common good.
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humanity’s last hope
It was bad enough for the world economy that these two clowns had all the airplay they needed to extol the virtues of their blinkered corporate policies. But they also trundled into power at the very point of humanity’s last hope for a concerted effort to deflect some of the worst excesses of planetary degradation.
That part of the educated first world which wasn’t relentlessly pursuing personal wealth to the exclusion of all else knew this was our last chance. As Thatcher/Reagan set about dismantling economic safeguards and initiating corporate profit-generating wars and “defence” mechanisms, the respective national debts (interest upon which you and I are paying) rose astronomically and credit booms fuelled the “feel good factor” as we accelerated our way past the point of no return and into oblivion.
But, as Thatcher has so often trumpeted, the political/economic landscape had changed sufficiently for incoming “left-ish” governments to find that they were too uncourageous and too dumb to try to turn anything around. Instead, they went along with the “reasoning” of these shoddy “think tanks”.
Instead of exposing the tanks as the propaganda units they are and establishing proper think tanks which might usefully look into some of the issues of the day, “New Labour” simply lay down, let the status quo roll over them, and pocketed the proceeds.
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“Our greatest achievement was Tony Blair.” Thus spake reviled ex Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to a gathering of her oily 1950s throw back acolytes at the now infamous gathering at the Botleigh Grange Hotel in 2002.
Like David Owen before him, Blair set the stage for further Tory ascendancies.
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