Curly’s Corner Shop, the blog!

What will he remember of that first election in 1983?

Thursday 9th. June 1983, a general election, and an unknown barrister is elected as the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield in County Durham. Who could have foretold that 24 years later he would be remembered for leading the Labour Party to three election victories, for spin and the grin, and the Iraq war. There are plenty of other memories that some might choose to savour or forget, depending on personal tastes.

However, Charles Anthony Lynton Blair, of middle class stock, son of a judge no less, managed to transform Labour from an unelectable trades union controlled dinosaur into the party of choice; he presided over wholesale changes to the structure of the party, ridding it of it’s rabid anti-Thatcher Conservative hating fascia and replacing it with a red rose and a new slogan New Labour New Britain. Britculture had evolved, it was now socially acceptable to donate large sums of cash to a political party no longer seen as verging on the ridiculous edge of Stalinist socialism, pop idols queued to fawn at the new leader, new wealth was keen to get in on the act, the age of sleaze was supposedly dead and buried.

To Tony Blair this renaissance must seem a world away from where he came from in 1983, he probably feels the same way today!

I’m grateful to Ahmed Khan for dropping this election leaflet into the Corner Shop, it makes very interesting reading indeed, an illustrative insight to the birth of the Blair ambition. I wonder if he is ever haunted by some of his statements on that first election leaflet?

It’s first page displays the standard Labour anti-Thatcher hatred, yet years later he would embrace warm heartedly many of the principles and ideals established by Britain’s greatest post war Premier, using the economic stability created by 18 years of Conservative government as a platform for his free market policies and continuing the economic policies to reap the rewards of steady growth from which his Chancellor could syphon greater amounts of revenue for the Treasury.

However, he baulked about hospital closures and complained about the price of prescriptions (they had gone up 20p to £1.40) how things look so different now, eh?

He complains that the incompetent Tories got us into an expensive war in the Falklands which cost billions of pounds! Perhaps he did not imagine that he would have to take some momentous decisions of his own some years later, and then he complains about the growing cost of Trident missiles – oh dear, they are rather more expensive now, but just as necessary.

On the second page he provides Labour’s answers, including a National Investment Bank, but that was before he met Gordon, he promised to protect British jobs from foreign competition, and then he promised to negotiate a withdrawal from the EEC! Incredible, years ago he wanted to leave, years later he wants to hand over most of our interests to the bureaucrats in Brussels, but stay in the club!

He promised to phase out health charges, well I suppose they have gone so far in that direction (if you happen to live in Scotland), and he promised to link pensions with average earnings, what happened to that? Then he pointed out that Labour believed in a sane defence policy which included British membership of N.A.T.O. but without any nuclear arms or cruise missiles. Fascinating how power and responsibility affect the decision making process.

His address on the back page must cause him some pain when he reads it back today, the emphatic thrusting attacks on Margaret Thatcher, one of the first people he turned to for advice when he became Prime Minister, must now feel very churlish indeed to him, but that was the way of the Labour Party in the 80’s, it wasn’t his fault that that was what the local party wanted him to say!

He changed himself, he changed the Labour Party, but did he change Britain that much? I don’t think so, after the last Conservative government the basics of the nation’s economy were in fine fettle, nothing broken, nothing to fix, Thatcher’s children (as Andrew Marr has described us all) were allowed to flourish and thrive.

Blair will be remembered for making the Labour Party electable again, (he knew how to market the product, he knew how to win) but we will prefer to forget the style of “news management”, the “sexing up” of documents leading up to the Iraq war, the death of Dr. David Kelly, the ongoing cash for honours enquiry, the selling out to Brussels, the constant chipping away at liberty and freedoms after he enrolled us into G.W. Bush’s “war on terror”, the creeping intrusions into our life by bureaucrats in “Big Brother Britain” and the sordid antics of a Deputy Prime Minister who seemed unaccountable for an as yet unknown reason. Blair’s place in British political history is assured, but will it be viewed favourably in comparison to a Churchill or a Thatcher?

You can do your own “fisking” of this little document if you so wish – click the thumbnails to enlarge.